The Great Depression from the Inside

Chapter 8

Caves and Catfish

Today the acronym "NRA" means something entirely different to what it mean during the Great Depression.   It was the National Recovery Administration, a New Deal agency created to bring together industry, labor, and government to prevent cut-throat pricing and help the nation heal from the Depression.  It was one of the ingredients in FDR's alphabet soup of  agencies that included the BPA, TVA, and the WPA (which my grandfather referred to as Whistle, Piss, and Argue).  For children born in the 1920s, the Great Depression was just life. 

Back there during the mid-1930s it seemed as if the great drought and Hard Times would go on forever.  The snow that fell in winter seemed to just evaporate back into the dry air without leaving much moisture in the red soil of those Ozark hills.  During the summers the sun was brassy hot every day and the rains simply did not come.

One old fellow had a wry joke that he would tell time and again at the store.  When someone said, “Shore would like to see it rain,” the old boy would solemnly say, “Yep.  Don’t keer so much for myself but I shore would like for my boy to see some rain—he ain’t never seen any.”

There was always someone who would innocently ask, “How old is he?”

“Seven year,” the old boy would answer with a perfectly straight face.

Each spring the Ozark hill farmers kept putting their seed corn and their hopes into the dry earth.  The corn would grow stunted from the dusty oil and produce nubbins rather than ears of corn.  In good years one could sit in the stillness of the evening and actually hear the corn grow—when there was no breeze from a nearby cornfield you could hear little rustlings and an occasional tiny squeak as the corn leaves grew.  No so in those drought years.  Instead of hearing the corn grow, you could sit in the evening and hear the corn sort of crinkle as it withered.

We were fortunate that the Missouri and Arkansas hills were not really a part of the Oklahoma/Kansas Dust Bowl from which the Okies were fleeing to the promised land of California.  There was plenty of dust, especially when a farmer was working that dry ground with disc or harrow, but the hills and woodlands kept the wind down and the dust did not move around.

Oh, we got plenty of dust, especially in the summers of 1933 and 1934.  Regular dust storms would move from the west out of Kansas and Oklahoma.  At times the dust would be so bad that even at high noon the blazing sun would be a dim brassy ball overhead.

The dust coated and got into everything.  I recall that in the heat of summer when you absolutely could not sleep without having the windows wide open to catch any hint of breeze, sometimes the dust was so bad that Mother would soak extra sheets in water and hang them over the bedroom windows.  They did not keep out much of the dust and simply made more it more close and sultry in the bedroom.

We children did not mind too much.  We were young enough that, except for dim memories of better times and living in Kansas City, the drought and Hard Times were all that we knew.  It was simply our normal way of life.  I overheard Mother and Dad talking about it in the kitchen one evening after we had gone to bed.  She was bemoaning the fact that we had practically no money and that it was hard on us boys growing up like that.  My usually taciturn father made, what for hi was quite a little speech.

“Now, don’t you worry about it, Evy,” he said.  “Hard Times ain’t gonna last forever and things will get better.  You’ll see.  I voted Democrat for the first time in my life for that there nephew of old Teddy Roosevelt, and I still think he’s gonna turn the country around.  As for the boys, they ain’t missing something they don’t remember ever having.

“Them boys are all right.  We always have something to eat so they don’t go to bed hungry, and you send them off to school in clean overalls.  So what if the overalls are patched?  Everyboyd wears patched overalls—and I’d be danged if I’ll go on Relief and send ‘em to school in them brown-dyed Relief overalls.  I ain’t ever gonna take no charity even if our behinds get to hangin’ out!

“Heard a rumor at the store,” Dad went on, “that they are going to upgrade this here old country road to a farm-to-market road.  Going to grade it and put on chat with government money.  I’ll get me a job maybe on the rock crusher or a road grader.  Aint’ all that much to do on this little old forty acres and the boys are getting big enough to take care of most of it.  They say they may build new bridges, too, over the Little Sac over toward Fairplay and over Maz Creek between here and Dadeville.  Don’t know much about building bridges, but I shore can learn.

“If nothin’ comes of the road project, I aim to lease us some bottom land down by the Sac River and plant corn—corn did pretty good down there last year, all things considered.

“No you just stop fussin’ about it.  Let’s blow out the light and git to bed.  Tomorrow is another day.  The boys will be all right.  Things won’t be this way forever—you just wait and see.”

It had been a long dissertation for my normally laconic father.  I lay there in the darkness next to my snoring brother and thought about it, but not for very long.  Our combined warmth under the quilts got to me and I dropped off to sleep with a few thoughts of Hard Times, Relief, bridges, and farm-to-market roads running at random through my mind.  They were simply facts of life and nothing for a twelve-year-old to worry about.

Close Encounters

We never did get around to going back to look for old man Morgan’s grave in the daylight, but there were other weird and wonderful things to think about in the Ozarks.  One was UFOs.  The term was not coined until sometime after WWII when an airline pilot saw a flock of “flying saucers” in the Pacific Northwest, but we had some strange phenomena in the skies over those dusty old Ozark hills from time to time.

The first UFO I heard about was from Leslie Beck, son of the widow Bertha Beck who had the farm across the county road from our little place.  I was over there on day helping Leslie repair a barbed wire fence and he excitedly told me about a strange thing he had seen the day before.  He said it was something high up in the sky moving very fast.  Definitely not an airplane (in those days, airplanes flew low and slow).  He said that it was triangular in shape and was trailing smoke from each side.  Claimed it was going down toward the trees over by where Maze Creek emptied into the Little Sac River and that he chased off afoot in that direction but never did find anything.

No one, including me, paid much attention to Leslie Beck because the truth was he was kind of strange.  He read science fiction all the time and I figured that it was something he made up after reading all those pulp magazines.  Matter of fact, Leslie was “strange” enough that right after he graduated from Dadeville High in 1935 he went off his rocker real good.  Though everyone was trying to kill him, including his own mother.  Went and ground the points off all of her butcher knives so that she could stab him some night in bed.  They finally had to ship Leslie off to a funny-farm somewhere.  Fortunately, Leslie got better.  He was released from the asylum about the time we left for the Pacific Northwest in 1936 and last I heard he had settled in Colorado and made a good life for himself.

To get back to the UFOs, my Uncle Coy Tygart and his family certainly did not read science fiction and none of them wound up in a funny-farm, but they all saw the same thing one night.  The way Edna May described it to me later, it was some colored lights that were moving in and out of some big cumulus clouds just to the south of their farm.  She said that the lights were red and blue and white and that they were sort of turning around in a circle as they moved in and out of the clouds.

Missourians are naturally skeptical (that is why it is called the “Show Me” state) so no one put much stock in their story even though the whole family told the same thing.  If it had been south of their far, that would have put it somewhere over Bona and no one else reported seeing anything strange that night.

Another thing was that at the time there was a U.S. Army detachment on field maneuvers or something camped over at Stockton to the north.  I remember that because Dad took us boys over there and, being a WWI veteran, he even had dinner with them out of a field kitchen.  (I asked him if the food was good and he just laughed and said, “Not any better than when I was in the Army!”)  Dad insisted that what the Tygarts had seen was probably an Army searchlight with that unit, but the light would have been white and not red or blue.

Even though I always read quite a bit of science fiction, I did not think much more about the incident for a lot of years.  Then, some time in the late 197-s when I was traveling a lot for the Boeing Company, I stopped off on one of my trips to visit Mother and Dad and brother Dick and his wife Mary at Greenfield.  Dick drove up with Mother and Dad and picked me up at the airport at Kansas City.  Mary was home making me a good old-fashioned friend chicken dinner.

We left Kansas City an hour before sunset and drove down pat Nevada and Lamar, then east through Lockwood.  It was just twilight as we were driving along between Lockwood and Greenfield when Dick pointed to the south and said, “What the hell are those lights up there?”

I looked where Dick was pointing and there, moving slowly in and out of a big billowing cumulus cloud, were three lights—one red, one blue-gree, and one white—and they were revolving slowly around one another.

Richard and I were, by then, both well-qualified as aerial observers.  Since the beginning of WWII, we had both spent our careers in aviation—he as a Navy air controlman and I as a flight test engineer for the Boeing Company.  We both by then were holders of commercial pilot’s licenses.

Why we did not stop and get out of the car to look closely at the phenomena and maybe photograph it I do not know.  Whatever it was we agreed that it could not be an airplane or a helicopter even though the lights were roughly the right color.  It was too dark to see the craft itself.  For the lights to be revolving like that, a helicopter would have to be hovering and slowly turning around and around and then you would not see all three lights at the same time.  Furthermore, the lights were too far apart to be running lights.

The strange lights eventually disappeared into the cloud.  We shrugged and drove on to Mary’s fried chicken dinner.  We did not say anything more about it probably because neither of us had any desire to be known as one of those nuts who see UFOs and little green men.

I did not think much more about “the Lockwood UFOs” until a few years later when I read about the same kind of lights being seen at several locations in the southeastern United States, then I suddenly remembered the tale the Tygarts had told back in 1935.  They had described exactly the same thing that we saw that evening in the 1970s.

What was it?  I do not know, but being a long-time science fiction fan, I sure wish that it had landed nearby and some strange little men or something had gotten out.

I did see a different kind of UFO one tie in the 1960s down over the mouth of the Columbia River near the Long Beach Peninsula and even got a photograph of that one which no one could explain even under a microscope.  It was just a strange dark blob near a cloud and it vanished without a sound just before I took a second picture which shows only the same cloud formation.

The Piedmont UFO case of 1973 sounds similar to what my father and his brother experienced and perhaps even the Tygarts four decades before. 
http://www.mufon.com/piedmont-mo-case---1973.html
As recently as June 2016 there have been sightings over Missouri, although non so closely describe what my father saw in the '70s.
http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxlmo.html

Hunting Possums and Ghosts

One of our pastimes in the fall in the Ozark hills—and sometimes a profitable one—was to go possum hunting.  After the first frosts of the year the persimmons got ripe and the possums would be out at night fattening up for their winter hibernation.  Their fur would be at its thickest and glossiest.  The itinerant fur dealers that came through periodically would pay maybe a dollar and a half for a good possum hide.

I recall very clearly one possum hunt that Richard and I went on probably the fall of 1935.  It was a cold, crisp, clear night.  A less than half moon was just rising.  We were carrying a flashlight and the little twenty-two Remington.  Pup, of course, was right at our heels.  We took off cross country through Bertha Beck’s farm and over toward Maze Creek to the west where Richard said he knew about a good stand of persimmon trees.

As I may have mentioned before, possums love ripe persimmons.  The persimmon trees do not grow very tall or very large so the idea was to find a fat old possum munching away in a persimmon tree where he would be easy prey.  A good possum dog, like old Hoover would have been, would range out ahead of you and would sit down and bark when he found a possum in a tree.

Pup went ranging out ahead of us all right, but squirrel hunter though he was, he was not a possum dog.  After a while we heard him barking up ahead to tell us he had something treed.  We headed that way and found him barking at a brush pile.  We could not smell any skunk odor so we shook the brush pile for him and, sure enough, out popped a rabbit and ol’ Pup took off after it.  Richard was disgusted and scathingly said, “See, lamebrain.  I told you that Pup is nothing but a biscuit hound.  All he knows how to do is eat, crap, and run rabbits!”

There was not much use in my arguing the point so we went on to the persimmon grove, moving silently through the starlit night.  Before very long Richard put out his hand and whispered, “There!  There’s one right up there in that tree!”

Sure enough, about ten feet off the ground there was the silhouette of a fat possum perched on a branch.  Richard shined the flashlight on him and his beady little eyes glowed in the dark like amber coals.  I was carrying the rifle.  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll shoot him.”

“No, nipple-noggin,” Richard snorted, “don’t do that.  A bullet hole will ruin the hide!  We got to climb up there and shake him out of the tree.  When he hits the ground, he’ll just curl up and play dead.  Goi on—climb up there and shake him down.”

The memory of that ill-fated star skunk was all too fresh and I drew back.  “Horeseapples!  YOU climb up there and shake the s.o.b. down!  I ain’t gonna do your dirty work like I did with that dang skunk that time!”

My brother snorted derisively and growled, “You fraidy-cat!  That old possum ain’t gonna hurt you ‘less you let him bite you!  All right—hold the light and I’ll go up there and get him.  If he don’t play dead when he hits the ground, grab him by the tail before he gets away.”

At the phrase “grab him by the tail” I remembered that skunk again and was suddenly ready to go up and shake the tree but Dick had already swung himself onto the lower branch.  When he was opposite the possum he shook the little tree and kicked at the animal with his foot.  Pretty soon the possum lost his grip and fell to the ground where he promptlyl curled up into a ball.  Richard dropped nimbly out of the tree.  “Well, knothead, grab him by the tail and kill him!”

I got the possum by his rat-like hairless tail and picked it up.  It was quite heavy and remained curled up in a ball.  I was used to killing rabbits by holding them by the back legs and whacking them on the neck with the side of my hand but I could not get the possum’s head straightened out and it was evident that it was stronger than any rabbit.

“It won’t straighten out.  How the heck am I supposed to kill it?”

Richard grinned.  “You was sure behind the door when they passed out brains!  Everybody knows the only way to kill a possum is to pull on his tail!”

“Shoot—I’m holding him by the tail.  No way is that going to kill him.”

Richard’s white teeth flashed in the dim starlight.  He was enjoying giving me a lesson.  “Here, flea brain—give him to me.  I’ll show you how to kill a possum pulling his tail.”

He took the curled up animal by the tail in one hand and reached for the twenty-two with the other.  Then he pounded the possum on the frozen ground until he got the head loose from the forepaws and got its chin on the ground.  Placing the little rifle barrel across the back of the possum’s neck, he stood on the rifle barrel with a foot on each side and pulled upward on the tail.  There was a crack when the neck broke and the animal went limp.  “See,” he said triumphantly, “nuthin’ to it!”

We walked on through the dark countryside under familiar stars without finding any more possums until we were nearing Maze Creek.  Pausing on the bank of the stream, Richard pointed to a rocky promontory at the top of a low bluff on the far side of the creek.  “Did you know that there bluff over there is haunted?”

“Horsehocky, you know dang well there ain’t no such thing as ghosts!”

“That’s what you think, bird brain,” he said maliciously.  “That there bluff, at least the big old boulder up there, is haunted.  Ask anyone.  Years ago, old man Morgan owned this whole little valley here along Maze Creek.  That’s why they call it North Morgan township—named it after him.

“Thing is, Morgan didn’t want to lose his land so, when he died, he left instructions that he was to be buried up there right behind that big old boulder overlooking the creek.  They did that and now, every time there is a full moon in October, old man Morgan’s ghost comes up out of that shallow grave and stands there on that boulder looking out over the valley.”

I did not really believe in ghosts but I could feel the hair prickle on the nape of my neck as I nervously looked at the newly-risen half-moon in the east.  “Bullshit!”

“No, no bull,” Richard said solemnly, “I can prove it.  You know that ‘simple-minded’ white haired old fellow over at Cane Hill?”

“Sure.  He just babbles and doesn’t make any sense when you talk to him, but he was born that way.”

“That’s what you think,” Richard said.  “He was as sane and normal as anybody until he was about twenty years old.  Had coal black hair.  Well, him and a bunch of other young fellows were talking about old man Morgan’s ghost one night in October when there was a full moon.

“His name is Cal Coombs.  He didn’t believe in ghosts like you say you don’t and he said there was nothing to it.  The rest of them made hi bet that he couldn’t go up there and spend the rest of the night on that boulder.  Cal bet them and they took him up there just about this time of the night.  They let him have a kerosene lantern and a double-barrel shotgun.

“After Cal was settled down up there on the boulder, the rest of them went over to the old Blankenship place that is deserted now and waited with a jug of moonshine.  Along about midnight—which is when Morgan’s ghost is supposed to come out and stand up there moaning—they heard that shotgun go off.

“They took off right away and ran up there.  They found poor Cal laying on the ground smashed and the shotgun had both barrels discharged.  Cal was senseless so they carried him back to the Blankenship house.  Next morning his black hair was snow white and nuthin’ he said made any sense.  When they asked him what happened, he just babbled at them like he still does to this day.”

The familiar night suddenly seemed ominous.  I was not going to fall for one of Richard’s tall tales, however.  “Horseapples.  I don’t believe a word of it!  Ain’t no such thing as ghosts!  You ever seen old man Morgan’s grave?”

“We—ell—no,” Richard admitted, “but it’s up there.”

I must have been feeling unusually brave.  “Okay,” I said and started toward the creek swinging the carcass of the possum, “let’s go up there and have a looksee while we are here.”

He held back.  I think that his tale had sent gooseflesh up his own spine.  “Be better if we came back in the daylight,” he said.

“Now who’s chicken,” I jeered.  “Got the flashlight, ain’t you—and the moon ain’t half full.  You skeered?”

He could not let me face him down so of course he scrambled u the low bluff to the large boulder at the top.  There was a level clearing beyond it.  I stood looking around in the dim moonlight.  “Where’s the grave, huh?”

Richard played the yellow beam of the flashlight over the brown grass, leaves, and weeds.  “There—over there by the bushes.  There’s a sunk in place.  That’s gotta be it.”

We walked over and knelt down.  There was undeniably a shallow depression about six feet long and two feet wide.  There was no grave marker or stone of any kind.  The hair on the back of my neck was prickling again.  I was determined not to show any fear but my voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, “How deep you reckon they buried him?”

Before Richard could answer, we both froze and went wide-eyed in apprehension when there was a sudden rustling in the bushes bordering the small clearing.  Someone or something was coming!

I had a sudden urge to urinate or defecate or maybe do both at once.  I still had the possum by the tail in one hand and the little rifle in the other, but I could not even lift it.  Richard swung the flashlight beam around at the bushes.  To our immense relief, Pup popped out of the underbrush.  He trotted over to us, tongue hanging out, and plopped down, his rabbit chase finally over.

By mutual and unspoken agreement, we decided then and there to come back sometime in the daylight to explore old man Morgan’s grave, if that was what we had found.  With Pup trailing meekly at our heels, we made our way down the bluff and back across the creek.

Once back on more familiar territory, our bravado began to return.  Richard had another ghost story for me. “Y’know,” he said as we trudged through the darkness toward home, “there are a lot of things you can’t explain if you don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” he said, “you know that screened west back porch on Uncle Coy’s house?  You walk on it and those old floorboards squeak like the devil.  Also that old screen door screeches whenever it’s opened.

“Not long ago Uncle Coy was gone to Greenfield one evening.  Aunt Morma, Eldon, James Lowell, and the girls were there by themselves.  After supper they were sitting around in the kitchen by the lamp waiting for Uncle Coy to come home.  It got to be well after dark.  Now he always goes in by the east kitchen door from the open cement porch like we all do over there but all of them suddenly heard that west screen door screech open, then closed and footsteps came across the porch to the kitchen door.  The doorknob turned, then slowly turned back and there was not another sound.”

Now not only were the hairs on the back of my neck prickling but there was also goose bumps on my arms as Richard went on, “They all waited a minute then Aunt Norma called out, ‘Coy, is that you?’  There was still not a sound.  Finally, Eldon, being the oldest, got Uncle Coy’s shotgun, then went over and opened the kitchen door.  There was no one on the porch and none of them had heard anyone leaving after the doorknob turned and turned back.  Now, it is impossible to cross that old porch without those old floorboards squeaking and you can’t open that screen door without it making a racket.  I know, because James and I tried it.  Now, you tell me who or what came on that porch and turned that doorknob!”

The frosty, dark night suddenly seemed cold.  Somewhere in the far darkness a dog howled and a vagrant breeze caressed the nape of my neck like a clammy hand.  I shivered, pulled up the collar of my sheepskin coat and looked at the familiar stars that were brilliant overhead for reassurance.  I could see the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, Casseopia’s Chair, and the Seven Sisters were in their places to the east.  I found myself wishing that the yellow lamp light of home was closer than more than a mile away.  Pup must have sensed my mood because he whined and crowded close to my heels.’ I was just trying to think of some smart-aleck comeback when everything sort of came unglued.  We had been hiking through dry weeds across an old farm and past an unkempt burial ground that was enclosed by a high wire fence supported by big corner posts made of field stones piled into a circle of woven wire.  We came around one of those corner posts and suddenly from the graveyard, something white reached out in front of us in the dim moonlight.  It was truly a specter.

There is no telling who broke first but suddenly we were running as if our very lives depended on our feet in those clodhopper shoes as we bolted toward where we could see the lamplight in the kitchen at home.  We never slowed until we came to the county road in front of the house where we slid down into the ditch to catch our breath before we went inside.  I believe I got there ahead of Richard but he was close behind.  Ol’ Pup was not with us—he was already ensconced under the kitchen porch, his pink tongue hanging out on his forepaws.

I went over by that old graveyard during daylight not long after that, and it turned out our graveyard “ghost” was a very faded flag at the grave of a Union soldier killed during the Civil War and buried beside the fence.  Apparently a slight breeze had flipped the flag out toward us and it had appeared white in the dim light of the half-moon.  It was a bit disappointing—I would have much rather gone on thinking that maybe we had seen a genuine ghost rise up out of the grave.

This Little Piggy Did Not Go to Market

Ol’ Pup was my buddy, but he is not the only animal I remember from those days.  I recall that one time one of our sows had a big litter of piglets and there was one little runt that was not going to survive—the sow had more piglets than she had teats and the little guy was not going to make it.

Dad told me that I could have the runt, but I would have to raise it myself.  I jumped at the chance because pigs were a “money crop.”  Our brooder house did not have any chicks in it at the time so I made a box for my little pig in there.  I fed him from a bottle for a while, then when he could drink by himself, I started giving him clabbered milk because I had good luck raising Pup on that.

It all went well for a while.  I would hand feed that little pig twice a day and he started to grow.  I figured that when we got to a couple of hundred pounds I could take him to market and sell him for, what to me, would be a lot of money.  When that little pig was only eight inches long and weighed maybe two and a half pounds, my mother was amused when I was the one that rushed to the mailbox the day “Capper’s Weekly” [a weekly farm publication] that came and the first thing I turned to was the produce prices so I could check what hogs were bringing.

As it happened more than once in my lifetime, I counted my chickens before they were hatched.  After about four weeks of my tender loving care and that clabbered milk diet, that little pig got diarrhea and I found him stiff as a board one morning.  So much for my becoming a pork tycoon.

Richard and I had an even more memorable animal at one time.  Someone—I think maybe our cousin Harold Frieze—gave us a billy goat kid.  I guess he might have been a runt or an orphan as he ws just a little guy when we got hi, tottering around on spindly legs.  We bottle fed him and, inevitably, we named him “Billy.”

Billy was a lot more successful than the little pig.  He grew in a hurry, eating almost anything he ran across, and almost before we knew it he was a rambunctious full sized goat and growing horns.  He was the most agile creature I had ever seen.  When he got his growth he could go over any fence as if it were not there.  When we went to Bona, Billy would follow us down the road.

Dad finally decreed that we had to build a pen that would keep that billy goat in.  Richard and I went to work.  We cut long persimmon poles and build a pen about six feet high using two courses of chicken wire fencing.  It did not work.  Billy could not jump it because the pen was too small for him to get a running start, but he sure could climb over it.  He was one danged nuisance.  When he started to grow horns—and I guess get horny, too—he like to butt anything in sight.  Mother would be out in the back yard hanging out the wash and ol’ Billy would get her from behind, ker-thump!

That goat did provide some moments of amusement.  He developed a taste for tobacco.  Dave would often give the goat the butt of a cigarette, still lit.  Billy would gobble it up and blow smoke out his nostrils at it went down. [Okay, that’s rather horrifying.] 

Billy was a nice goat as goats go, but he really did not have any redeeming features other than eating cigarette butts.  He stunk just like a goat and, after having hi butt her one too many times, Mother laid down the law—“that goat has got to go!”  Our cousin Harold (who may have given us the kid to start with) was running a farm for Fred Hulston at the big white house south of us and had some goats so we have Billy to him.

A Boy and His Dog Pup

The puppy was a sort of scroungy, scruffy little runt—mostly black on his back with a white belly and some brownish yellow around his ruff and his eyes.  Someone had told me that clabbered milk was good for pups and we had plenty of that.  I raised that little runt on clabbered milk and table scraps.  It must have been good for him because he grew at a prodigious rate.  By the time he was six months old that runt had turned into a big-bonded, medium sized, deep-chested dog.

One evening my father asked me what I was going to name the dog.  Up until then we had simply been calling him “the pup”, but my father said that a dog should have a proper name.  I thought about it for a long time but could not come up with anything that seemed appropriate so, by default, the dog’s name remained simply “Pup.”

I never did manage to train Pup to bring in the cows by himself like some dogs will do.  Pup was more what you would call a “biscuit hound.”  He would hang around outside the kitchen door at mealtime (neither cats nor dogs were ever allowed into the house) hoping someone would throw him a biscuit—which I usually did.  He was my constant companion, though, and turned out to be one of the best squirrel dogs I ever saw.

When I went squirrel hunting with that slim little Remington twenty-two, Pup always went along.  He seemed to know just what to do.  He never barked and simply padded along silently at my side or behind me through the thick woods until we spotted a squirrel in a tree.  Of course, as silently as we moved, the squirrel always saw us and would promptly move around to the other side of the trunk or limb.

I did not have to signal or direct Pup in any way.  He would see the squirrel as soon as I did—probably before.  When I halted and froze in position, Pup would silently circle around the tree until he could see the squirrel again, then he would go “Whuff!”  just once.  The squirrel would circle away from Pup and I would have a clean shot at it.  Ol’ Pup and I put a lot of meant on the table that way.

Pup did have one real failing—he really loved to chase the cottontail rabbits.  We might be crossing a pasture to go squirrel hunting and, if a rabbit got up, Pup was off and away.  I do not recall that he ever caught one but he would be gone for several minutes, then finally show up and throw himself at my feet, panting and looking very pleased with himself.

Chasing rabbits almost got Pup killed one time—y me.  I had the rifle and, although they were not as a young squirrel, would not hesitate to kill a rabbit to take home.  Well, we jumped this cottontail in a wide pasture and Pup took off after him.  The rabbit circled and was running crosswise to me so I had a clear shot.  I pulled down on the rabbit just when Pup was close on his tail.

I did not lead the rabbit enough and he shot out of the sight over the hill before I could reload, but old Pup let out a pained yelp and skidded to an abrupt halt.  He pawed at his nose then came trotting back and sat down looking reproachfully at me.  His muzzle was bleeding.  Turned out the bullet had just grazed the end of his nose.  He did not chase anymore rabbits that day.  I think he was trying to figure out if it was my fault or if that rabbit had kicked him in the snoot.  He must have decided that it was me because in a day or two he was back chasing rabbits.

Spit and Whittle Clubs were common in the south and Midwest.

The loafers at Grandpa’s store used to kid me about Pup just being a “biscuit hound” and not much good as a cattle dog or to chase a fox.  Pup was with me one hot summer afternoon when I went by there and there were three or four of them loafing in the shade on the store porch.  One of the loafers was white-haired old Buck Blair who lived in a shack just down the road and would mosey up there in the afternoons to get a bucket of water from the well at the churchyard.

Someone started ribbing me about Pup as usual and old Buck decided to put them down.  “Why, fellows,” he said, “that there is one of the smartest dogs I ever did see.”

They did not stop whittling and Cook Neil never missed a lick at his chewing tobacco but they all looked at Buck to see what was coming next.  I sort of wondered myself.

“Well, sir,” Buck went on, “I took Conrad fishing the other day and that there dog went along.  We went down to Maze Creek and when we got there, just to see what that pup would do, I threw a quarter into a deep hole in the creek.  That there dog went down and dived in right after it.”

Buck paused and struck a match to light his old pipe.  The whittlers stopping making shavings for a minute and everyone waited for Buck to go on.  I did, too, because I knew I had not been fishing with Buck Blair and I also knew he probably hardly ever had a quarter in the pocket of his patched overalls to go throwing into a creek.

“Well,” he said solemnly, “that pup dived deep and he was down there so long that I was beginning to wonder if he had gone and drown hisself.”

Another pause (Buck had the timing of a great comedian) then, with a twinkle in his faded old blue eyes, he said, “Nossir—after a couple of minutes that there dog popped back up and he had a string of catfish in his mouth and fifteen cents in change!”

They all laughed and went back to whittling while Cook Neil spat a big squirt of tobacco juice into the dust of the road.  I was tickled pink and took Buck’s galvanized water pail and drew him a bucket of water from the well to take home.  I used that tale of his about Pup several times years later.

High on the Hog

A better part of the fall was hog killing time (in the local patois—“hawg killin’ time”).  With no electricity, no one had a refrigerator or freezer so the winter supply of pork was laid in after the first frosts when the meat would keep until it could be cured in the smokehouse.  The bacon slabs, hams, and shoulders were usually salt cured; however, sometimes Dad would sugar cure a couple of hams.  Most folks did not bother cutting pork chops but simply trimmed out the long pieces of tenderloin—the choice part of the hog—which we ate fried in slices while it was fresh.  There was nothing better for a school lunch bucket than a slice of tenderloin sandwiched into one of Mother’s biscuits.

Nothing about the hog was wasted except, as the saying went, the tail and the squeal.  I never did care much for pigs feet although many folks thought them a delicacy.  The brains were cooked with scrambled eggs for breakfast, the fat was rendered into cooking lard, the ribs eaten barbecued, and all the scraps and leftovers went into the sausage grinder.  A good country sausage biscuit is the next best thing to tenderloin for a school lunch.  Some folks cleaned pig intestines and stuffed the sausage in them; however, we usually just made patties of the sausage.  Just about everyone had their own private recipe for making sausage, most of them delicious.  To this day I think one of the finest breakfasts in the world is biscuits with good sausage gravy and a sausage patty on the side.

To get back to the hog killings, everyone raised a few pigs just for winter meat.  Usually Dad would get together with Uncle Coy Tygart and Uncle Claud Frieze at one of the farms and kill and butcher hogs for all three families, probably two hogs each.  It was a devil of a lot of work and mostly us boys just stayed out of the way and helped to carry stuff.

Preparation was mainly digging a trench, placing a big metal trough over it, filling it with water (that’s where a lot of the carrying came in0.  Then a fire was built in the trench to bring the water to a good rolling boil.  When the water was ready each pig in turn was shot between the eyes with a twenty-two rifle and its throat was quickly cut to bleed the carcass.  The pig then had to be carried to the trough and lowered into the scalding water to loosen the hair on the skin.

Tripod for hanging hog

A pulley would have been rigged to a tree limb or an A-frame made out of timbers so the scalded porker could be hoisted up by the hind legs.  The hair was then scraped off and the pig gutted, saving the heart and the liver which had to be eaten in the next few days while they were fresh.  The carcass was then split, laid out on a trestle table made of timbers across saw horses, and the butchering done.

Scraping off the hog hair

The women and children would “man” the hand-powered sausage grinder where all the scraps went and someone had to tend the big black cast iron kettle set up over an open fire for rendering the fat into lard.  There was plenty for everyone to do.  The slabs of bacon, shoulders, and hams had to be cured with salt and/or sugar before they were hung up in the smokehouse for the winter (never knew of anyone to smoke any meat but we still called them the “smokehouses”).  The sausage had to have all the seasonings stirred and kneaded in and then the sausages were put down in big crocks in the plentiful supply of lard rendered from the fat.  We ate “high on the hog” for a time after hog killin’ on fresh hog liver, brains, ribs, and tenderloins.

Sausage stuffer

Storing up Wood and Lessons

Chapter 7

Possums, Ghosts, and UFOs

Blackjack oak

My favorite time of year in the Ozarks hills was always the spring (“green-up time” we called it) and we could look forward to squirrel hunting, fishing, swimming in the creek, and the myriad things we had to do besides chores when school was out for the summer.  The fall had its own attractions, however, when the leaves had turned to a riot of golden yellow and blazing red, the weather was cooler but with plenty of Indian summer sun, harvest was finished, and we could look forward to possum hunting when the first frosts came and the persimmons were ripe.

Persimmon tree

Even after the oats and wheat had been harvested and threshed, the field corn gathered and the stalks cut and made into tall conical shocks, there were fall chores to be done on the farm.  Some were fun—such as hog killing time—but the one that we really detested (that is an understatement—we hated it) was cutting a winter supply of firewood for the cast iron kitchen range and wood stove in the living room of our little house.

Ozark woodlot

Every Ozark farm had a “woodlot”—an acre or two of trees left when the farm was originally cleared—to furnish a supply of firewood.  Unfortunately, most of the trees in the Ozarks are hardwood; white oak, blackjack, burr oak, and the like, which is hard to saw and even harder to split.  Those hardwood trees made good, long-burning firewood, but getting them cut down, sawed up, and split was a real muscle builder.

We had never heard of chain saws in those days.  Our tools were a two-man crosscut saw that we called a “misery whip,” a good sharp double-bitted axe, a post maul, and a couple of steel wedges.  Dad would notch the base of the selected trees to control its direction of fall then, once we were into our early teens and had put on some muscle, Richard and I would go to work with that danged cross-cut to fall the tree.  When it was down, Dad would trim the limbs off with the axe and pile the brush for later burning while Richard and I sawed the tree into stove lengths.

We would cut wood in the fall after it had gotten cold because it was much too hot for that kind of work in the summer.  On frosty mornings we would go to the woods in our sheepskin coats but after a few minutes on that saw we would have to peel them off and, if the sun was shining, after a while our shirts, too.  It was onerous, sweaty work and it took a lot of passes of the crosscut to get through a log that was a foot and a half in diameter.

We bickered constantly, of course.  I would accuse Richard of not pulling his share and he would accuse me of “riding” the saw (putting on extra pressure when he was pulling it back his way).  We grew up fighting constantly but never came to blows in the woods because Dad was there and getting into a fistfight instead of working could result in a licking for each of us.

The worst licking Dad gave was out in the woods.  At home, when it was in order, he would use either his leather belt (if he wasn’t wearing overalls and had one on) or his razor strop which was also flat and really did not sting very bad (the real punishment was simply the ignominy of getting a licking) but out in the woods it was something else.

Buckberry

The Ozark underbrush includes a plant we called the buckberry bush.  It grows rather like spires with long and very limber limbs about as thick as a lead pencil.  There would be leaves and red berries all along the shoots.  I do not recall that the berries were good for anything unless the birds ate them as they were bitter as gall.

When a licking was in order (I am happy to say that was not very often for Richard and me), Dad would simply and without a word cut a buckberry shoot for or five feet long, run it through his closed fist to remove the leaves and berries, and wield it like a buggy whip.  When he was really mad that little limber buckberry limb would really whistle through the air and would wrap itself clear around your legs, leaving neat red welts that stung for quite a while.  It was better if Dad was only aggravated—the buckberry did not sing much and only stung for a little while.  If we happened to be wearing long underwear, it did not hurt much at all but we would let out a yelp anyway.