Reunited

My next clear recollection of that train trip was when we came down the Columbia River Gorge on the last day into Portland.  We had been in dry and almost barren brown hills of eastern Oregon then, a few miles beyond Pendleton we were suddenly on the bank of the mighty Columbia River.

I moved to the right-hand side of the coach and gaped in awe.  I had never seen so much water in one place before.  At home in the Ozarks, especially during the drought years, I could throw a rock across the biggest river I knew about.  Now I was gazing at a mile-wide expanse of water that was headed for the Pacific Ocean.

The best was yet to come.  After a short stop at The Dalles, we were into the heart of the Columbia River Gorge.  The brown hills gave way to mountains covered with green Douglas firs and rocky cliffs over which streams tumbled in great waterfalls.

I moved back to the left side of the coach and, nose pressed firmly against the windowpane, gaped ecstatically as we passed Horsetail Falls, Bridal Veil, and Finally double-tiered Multnomah Falls.

During the final hour into Portland, I felt a kinship with old Brigham Young as I kept repeating silently to myself, “This is the place!  THIS IS THE PLACE!!!”  That train began a love affair with the Pacific Northwest that would remain steadfast during the remainder of my life, no matter how much of the rest of the world I saw.

My father had borrowed Uncle Austin’s black Plymouth sedan to come to the train station at Portland and he, holding baby Sandra, and my mother were on the platform to meet the train.

My principal memory of that reunion was the reaction of my mother.  She had left behind in Missouri a tow-headed youngster that she could kiss on the forehead but I had grown a full six inches or more during those months.  Instead of little Conrad, she was looking at a gangling youth, arms and legs hanging out of that too-small grey suit.

As I stepped down from the train, I heard my father exclaim, “There is is!” and as I turned toward them my mother stood stock still as I advanced, her mouth open in surprise.  As I came near, she finally said “Conrad?” in a questioning voice then gave me a big hug.  The top of her head came barely to my nose.

“Conrad Ross Frieze,” she said in mock severity but with delight, “I swear you have grown a foot in just seven months!  Just look at you—we are going to have to get you some new clothes!”

Shifting little Sandra, now a roly-poly one-year-old to his left arm, my father gravely shook hands with me.  He simply said “You are looking fine, boy.”

The drive to our new home was fascinating.  We crossed the long Interstate bridge over the Columbia to Vancouver.  Below on the water I saw a tugboat pulling a big raft of logs slowly downriver—just like the picture in the atlas at Bona School.  Upriver there was an honest-to-gosh sternwheeler steamer thrashing along.  My father pointed out the DuBois sawmill from the bridge where he worked.  He had taken the day off to come get me.

It was a wonderful feeling to be with the family once more.

"I went down in the river to pray, studying about that good old way"

Those years of 1935 and 1936 when I was thirteen and fourteen were very pivotal years in my young life.  Events seemed to occur at an accelerating pace.  With puberty my voice cracked then deepened so that I no long sang boy soprano at church but could handle the baritone and even some of the bass parts.

I moved up into the “big room” at Bona School into the ninth grade.  Under the tutelage of J. B. Mitchell, I was doing very well indeed.  I always liked school and was never tardy.  I was also never absent except for that time in Arcola when I had diphtheria, then a few days early in 1936 when I came down with yellow jaundice.  I guess it was a form of hepatitis.  I still remember how very sick I was.  My skin got yellow and my eyeballs turned brown for a while.  It stayed with me for the rest of my life, too.  In the Navy and afterward, when I listed childhood diseases I had, they would stamp “Yellow Jaundice” on my health record and I still am not allowed to donate blood.

My grades were always good and there was no subject that I disliked or that was hard for me.  Regardless of the subject, I was nearly always at the top of my class.  It may have been partily because Richard was also a top student and I was determined not to allow him to outdo m e.  Whatever the reason, I always felt foolish if I failed to get 100 percent on any examination.

The only other student in my class of seventeen at Bona School that came close to me was a slip of a girl, Mary Neil.  She was one of Cook Neil’s several daughters.  They lived in a shack just down the hill from the church on the west side of Bona.

I did not particularly like Mary Neil.  She had straw colored blonde hair, was not particularly pretty, and could be snippy if not downright nasty at times.  I respected her, however, because she was smart as a whip.

Almost invariably when there was a bell-down it would be Mary and me that were the last two up there.  I felt foolish on the occasions when she spelled me down.  I never heard in later years, but I expect that Mary Neil got a scholarship and went on to be a teacher.

It was in 1935 that I got baptized and joined the Bona Church.  I am not sure to this day why I did that.  I was much too young to make that decision but, at the time, with several of my contemporaries going forward and joining the church, it seemed like the thing to do.

It happened during one of the series of revival meetings held by the gentle minister I described back in Chapter 4.  Since I cannot recall his name I will call him “Brother Thompson” because that could well have been it.

I did not really feel any sudden calling but I was there one evening when Brother Thompson preached a good sermon aimed at we younger people.  There in the soft yellow light of the acetylene fixtures, Thompson’s deep voice was almost hypnotic and he could be very persuasive.  During the invitational hymn at the end, my cousin Mary Catherine, Claude Todd (the two of them later married and he is not an elder in the Bona Church), Clarence Lee King, and some others went forward.  On an impulse, I got up and went with them.

It is regrettable that no one took a picture at our baptizing the following Sunday afternoon.  It is not done in an open stream any more.  These days Bona Church as a baptism tank in the church.  In those days, however, it was done in a river or creek just as Christ was baptized two thousand years ago.  The Church of Christ believed only in total immersion and members criticized Methodists and others that simply sprinkled a little water symbolically.

Our baptizing took place in a deep pool of the branch on my Uncle Claud’s farm.  Fortunately, it was in the summer so the little creek was fairly warm.  All we boys had on clean overalls and the girls wore print dresses.  Brother Thompson was wearing the first set of waders that I ever saw.  I figured that was all right as he was already baptized and he had to be in the water the whole time.  No point in his getting his preaching suit wet either.

There was not much to it.  All the people who had come to observe lined up along the bank and we baptizes got in a line.  One by one we waded out to the preacher who was standing in waist dep water.  He positioned us sidewise in front of him, said in that solemn deep voice, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”  Then he ducked us backward under the water and raised us back up.

When I waded ashore and was congratulated by people, to tell the truth I did not feel any different.  I expect that I went right on committing my little sins and I know that the other boys did also.  About the only difference was that we were now church members and could take communion.  Sometimes we were called upon to serve communion or help take up the collection.

My ideas about religion have gone through a long evolution over the years and I do not attend any church regularly now.  I will not go into that as it could be a whole separate book.  Let it suffice to say that I firmly believe in the Creator and Almighty and I believe I am on good terms with Him.  I sort of facetiously refer to Him as “The Boss” once in a while but I am sincere and He knows that.  Whatever power it is “up” there certainly took care of Richard and me during a shooting war and He hasn’t done bad by us in peace.  I will have more to say about that later.

Saints and Sinners

Vintage blacksmith in Bakerville BC.  Bona blacksmith shop is gone.

Over beyond Mattie Whiteside’s store to the south, there once was a blacksmith shop run by the Slagle brothers.  I well remember the ring of the sledge on the anvil and the odor and sound of the forge when they heated horseshoes or plowshares.  The Slagle boys shod horses and mules and repaired the steel rims of the horse drawn wooden-wheeled farm wagon until such wagons were replaced with wagons made from old Model T Ford frames and had rubber tires.  By the early thirties the blacksmith shop was not making a living for them and it was abandoned.  I recall that in the mid-thirties the Slagle brothers for a while operated a small, open air sawmill down by the frog pond west of Grandpa’s store.  It was belt driven from an old, old steam tractor.

I recall one incident involving that old blacksmith shop.  It was 1930 or 1931 when I was nine or ten years old.  We were visiting Grandpa and Grandma one sunny afternoon and I had been at the shop watching Ben Slagle heat some horse shoes in the forge and fit them to a black horse.  There was a group of men in a storeroom at the back of the dilapidated building taking turns sipping out of a quart fruit-jar of moonshine whiskey.

1930s still

Since Bona has sometimes been called “the buckle on the Bible belt” there were not many moonshine stills in the hollows around there except for a couple that us kids stumbled across down in the cane brakes along Maze Creek.  Moonshine was easy to come by during Prohibition, however.  The men who took a nip or three now and then knew where there was an old hallow log down by the Little Sac River where they could leave a dollar bill, go fishing for a while, then come back and that dollar bill would have turned into a quart of “white lightening.”

Well, on this particular day, I do not know who all was back there as we kids were not allowed in the storeroom, but I do know that Eulas Todd was one of them and, with Eulas, one drink led to another.  I had gone back across the road to Grandpa’s store when I heard Maud Todd yelling her head off out in the road.  Now Maud was a small lady with jet black hair and a mighty temper.  She was really on the warpath.

I went outside, along with everyone else in earshot—which was a fair piece when Maud yelled—and she was stomping up and down by a black Model T roadster that had been parked in front of the blacksmith shop, yelling things like, “Look at that drunken bum!  He has passed out right here in front of God and everybody!  Come here, you kids, and just see what drinking that Devil’s brew will do to you!”

She saw me and motioned, “Come on over here, Conrad, and look at this shameful sight.  He has plat passed out!”

I tiptoed rather timorously across the road and looked in the open door of the car.  There was Eulas, all right, sprawled out across the seat dead to the world.  He did not even stir when Maud shook him and beat on his leg with a clenched fist, mad as an old wet hen.  Some spittle was drooling from one corner of his mouth and I would have thought that he was dead except that he kept on snoring.

I don’t reckon Eulas really went to hell because of his drinking, though.  He was really a good and gentle man with his kids when he was sober and I remember he taught Claude to play “Greencorn” on the banjo one time when Claude had broken a foot and was laid up with nothing to do.  Eulas never went near the church in those days, but I heard years later that he had quit carousing around, got religion, and joined the Bona Church.  He never hurt anybody that I know of and I’d reckon he made his peace with the Lord before he died at a ripe old age.

Contemporary picture of the Church at Bona

Bona Church deserves a special mention since it was—and still is—the hub of the community.  It was a white clapboard square building (since then modified by the addition of a brick front) shaded by several large spreading trees—mostly maple, but one was a big mulberry tree.  The church is a very fundamentalist Church of Christ.  The members do not hold with drinking, card playing, dancing, etc, and no musical instruments (except for the song-leader’s tuning fork) are allowed in the church.

There were no regular ministers at the Bona Church.  Services were conducted by the deacons and elders of the church except when traveling ministers came to hold revival meetings.  I would reckon they were latter-day circuit riders although they came in either Model T or Model A Ford cars instead of riding on horses.

I recall two of those traveling ministers in particular because they were so different.  There was one short and stocky red-headed man who was an old-time hellfire and damnation preachers.  When he got going good, he would wave his arms as he paced back and forth behind the lectern and his sonorous voice would fair make the acetylene light fixtures shake.  When he thundered about the sins that would take you straight to hell, he could make you cringe in your seat while you smelled Sulphur fumes and imagined the devil with his pitchfork hot on your trail.

The other preacher I recall was just the reverse.  I do not recall the names but this other fellow was tall and lanky as if he were not eating to regularly and, instead of being bombastic about sinning, he was soft-spoken, kind, and gentle.  He based his sermons on the good things in the Bible and a promise of a good life to come with Jesus—providing, of course, that you led a good life and avoided the well-marked path to perdition.  He was very persuasive, too.  At the end of an evening revival meeting when the invitation hymn was being sung, he made folks sincerely want to come forward and pledge their lives to the Lord.  He was the one that baptized me, but that was later on.

There was no choir at the Bona Church.  The congregation was the choir.  Every Sunday evening many of the congregation gathered for “singing” which served as choir practice as well as a vesper service in praise of the Lord.  It is my regret that tape recorders did not exist then because, in their small way, the Bona congregation could rival the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  Led by lanky Elmer Long, as long as they stuck to the old favorites—“The Old Rugged Cross,” “In the Garden,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown,” etc—everyone knew the tenor, bass, alto, and soprano parts and it sounded beautiful.  I shall always remember walking up the road toward Bona on a warm summer Sunday evening and hearing that music pour from the open windows along with the soft golden glow of the acetylene lights.  I do not know if they still sing that well or not since I have not been in the Bona Church for services for more than thirty years.

In 1970 I drove my grandparents home to Greenfield from a winter on Whidbey Island in the 1959 Chevrolet Impala my grandfather had bought.  I hadn’t been in Missouri since I was too young to remember.  My trip happened to coincide with Aunt Ora’s funeral which was at the Church at Bona.  My grandmother explained ahead that there wouldn’t be a piano or organ or a choir, but there were two pews of old folks who may have at one time sounded angelic to my father.  I couldn’t help but think that a piano or organ would have done a lot to keep us all in tune.