Another thing I
recall about the time in that yellow house is when I wound up with egg on my
face—literally. It was in the winter
when everything was frozen. The chickens
were watered in an old wash pan and, of course, that froze.
One Saturday after
noon, long after the episode of the itch, we were going to go to Bona. When we got ready to go I had forgotten that
I was supposed to take the hot teakettle off the kitchen stove and thaw the
water pan for the chickens. Just as we
were getting into the Hupmobile, my mother asked about it.
I ran back and got
the boiling kettle off the wood stove.
In my hurry to get going to Bona, I raced through the back yard toward
the chicken house and tripped over a big root from a maple tree. I and the tea kettle hit the frozen ground at
the same time. The lid popped off and
the scalding water splashed over my arm and one side of my face.
I probably near
raised the dead in the next county with my howling. My mother came running and, as usual, she
knew what to do. She hustled me into the
house, broke some eggs and separated the yolks, then smeared the egg white on
my face.
I felt pretty
silly walking around with that dried egg white on my face. For years I thought about that every time I
heard the expression “…and there he was with egg on his face.” Either I was not burned all that bad or else
my mother’s treatment was just right because the burns healed in a few days and
did not leave any scars. I always had a
healthy respect for water after that, but being a dumb old country boy, I kept
getting into “hot water” one way or another for the rest of my life. And sometimes got “burned.”
I researched this home remedy and found it
to be part of the training for firemen.
Absolutely my grandmother knew what she was doing. The natural collagen in the egg white helps
to heal the burn.
We lived in that
yellow house for a year or so, then Dad moved us into a big white farmhouse
about half a mile south of Bona. It was
also up a long lane from the road to Dadeville.
In fact, from the white house you could see the yellow house we had
lived in a quarter of a mile away across acouple of pastures. After we moved, a very distant shirt-tail
relative, Kaz Shouse, moved into the yellow house with his family.
The big white
house we had moved into belonged to Fred Hulston who was the Chevrolet dealer
in Ash Grove over toward Springfield. I
do not believe we lived there very long as I do not remember much about that
place as some of the others. One thing I
do remember though, was an incident about an old hunting dog named “Hoover.”
Possum hunting was
a fall pastime in the Ozark hills and a little money could be made at it. The fur dealers that came through
occasionally would pay a dollar or a dollar thirty-five or so for a good possum
hide. They were dyed and made into cheap
fur coats or coat collars.
The time for
possum hunting was in the fall after the first frosts and when the persimmons
were ripe. It was done at night when the
possums came out to climb the low persimmon trees for the fruit. Their fur was thick for the winter by
then. All that was required was a good
flashlight with which to spot the possums in the low trees.
A good possum dog
makes the hunt much more certain. The
dog would sniff out the possums and bark to let the hunters know which tree he
was in. The possum can then be shaken or
knocked out of the tree. They seldom run
when they hit the ground, but usually just curl up and play dead.
Well, old Hoover
was a real good possum dog. He was smart
enough to not go off chasing rabbits or to tree a skunk. The dog belonged to an old widow who was a
relative of ours. One time the old lady
told my father that she wanted him to have old Hoover.
When the old lady
died, Dad went to get Hoover only to find that Kaz Shouse had already taken the
dog and claimed that it had been given to him.
I do not know who was right, but I know that my father was quite peeved
about it and threatened to go over to Shouse’s and get the dog. My mother did not want to see trouble started
over an old possum dog (feuds have started over less) so she talked him out of
it.
The morning after
I had heard my father talking about it, I took little brother Rex with me and
took off across the fields. When we got
to Shouse’s I found old Hoover tied up in the alleyway between the house and
the smokehouse. With Rex at my heels, I
just marched up and started to untie the dog.
Just then one of the Shouse girls, Hazel (who later married my first
cousin Carl Frieze) saw or heard us and came out the kitchen door. She knew that her father would be pretty
riled up if I took the dog so she set about talking me out of it.
“Conrad,” she
said, “it will just cause trouble if you take that dog and you don’t want to
cause trouble now do you?”
“Well,” I stated
flatly, “my daddy says that the old lady gave Hoover to him and my daddy don’t
tell no lies. I’m agonna take him home
with me.” Meanwhile I kept pulling at
the knot in the rope.
“Now just a
minute,” Hazel said. “It is just your
dad’s word against my dad’s and you don’t know which one is right. You let them settle it.”
“Dadgummit,” I
said emphatically, “my daddy don’t lie and Kaz Shouse don’t have a very good
reputation for tellin’ the truth!” (That was true, but I had not stopped to
think that I was talking about her daddy.)
Hazel got
downright indignant about that. She
jerked the rope out of my hands and pointed across the fields at our
house. “Now that’s about enough, Conrad.”
She snapped. “You and Rex Donald just
get right along home and don’t you come near this dog again!”
Rex was already
backing away because Hazel was a pretty big girl and probably in her late teens
at the time. I stood there fuming for a
minute then, in exasperation, kicked a piece of sand rock against the smokehouse
wall hoping it would bounce and hit her accidental like—only it didn’t. My dander was up, but there was no way I
would fight a female so I turned around and marched truculently away—feeling
ashamed that I had let an old girl face me down. Later on I decided it did not matter much as
Hoover was pretty old and I think he died not long afterward.
When I was born in Wichita both of my grandmothers lived across the country in Vancouver. It was Carl and Hazel that came and stayed with my parents at first so I expect that my father had gotten over his resentment over old Hoover!