It was a joy to be back in the Cross Timbers neighborhood again, although we could not move into our own home until Mr. Pulliam had harvested his scanty crops. We lived with Tom and Lucy for some six weeks in order to assist Tom, who needed help in getting his crops “laid by,” which, in the lingo of the South, meant the final plowing and hoeing of the corn and cotton. Then John Briley, who was moving to Roanoke to operate a small meat market, asked us to occupy his house and care for his cows and pigs until he could sell them, and the man to whom he rented his farm could move in. This we were glad to do and “bached” in his home for a month.
By that time the cotton-picking season had come, and we returned to Tom’s home to help him with the first picking of his cotton crop. There would be a second picking when the rest of the bolls had opened, but that would be a month later. Until then there seemed comparatively little to do on Tom’s farm. If we had been in our own home Father would have found plenty of work for all three of us clearing land, building or repairing fences, and doing any other thing needed to improve the farm.
Unwilling to remain idle, he decided that we should drive west to Parker County in the Upper Cross Timbers, where we had heard that there was a great demand for hands to pick cotton and gather corn. We accordingly packed the wagon with the necessary food and bedding, put on the bows and canvas cover, and headed west. After crossing the wide belt of prairie we entered the Upper Cross Timbers and on the second evening camped in a grove of trees on the banks of Walnut Creek.
We were on land belonging to Mr. McCrory, who grew corn, cotton, sorghum cane, and other types of feed on his farm of four or five hundred acres. He was in sore need of cotton pickers and help to gather corn, which in most Southern states is not husked but snapped from the stalks in the husk or “shuck.” He paid seventy-five cents a hundred for cotton picking and three cents a bushel for gathering corn.
Unfortunately, it had been raining and the cotton and corn were both wet. We spent the next day or two in fixing up our camp while we waited for sunshine to dry them so that we could work. We were camped at the edge of a field of millet which had been cut and shocked. Just beyond were shocks of sorghum.
Father cut down a sapling to make a ridgepole. One end of this was lashed to a tree and the other rested in the fork of another long pole sharpened with an axe and driven into the ground. Over this ridgepole was stretched the canvas wagon sheet to make a tent. Enough tall stalks of cane were brought to form a wall at the back and a thick layer of millet was spread on the ground beneath the canvas. In the back part of this shelter we spread our blankets and slept at night, while in the front we kept the food and cooking utensiles.
We lived in this crude camp for over a month while George and I picked cotton. George could pick from 250 to 300 pounds a day, while my limit was about 150 pounds. Father, who had never acquired any skill in picking cotton, gathered corn, which weighs about seventy-two pounds to the bushel in the husk. As he could gather a hundred bushes a day and was paid three cents a bushel, he made about as much money a day as George and I both did picking cotton at seventy-five cents a hundred.
Pickers were so hard to find that Mr. McCrory had only a young Mr. Daugherty and George and me as hired help. As a result, his whole family, consisting of a twenty-year-old son, a seventeen-year-old daughter named Cynthia, twelve-year-old Georgia, and a little girl of six called Dora, picked every day. Even his wife came out every afternoon and picked cotton until time to go home and cook supper.
Except when picking beside Cynthia, in whom he apparently had a romantic interest, Mr. Daugherty sang most of the time. Unfortunately, he seemed to know only one song and just a single stanza of it:
Jesse had a wife
Who mourned all her life
Three children they were brave
But a dirty little coward
Shot Mr. Howard
And laid Jesse James in his grave.
After I heard this all day long it seemed to ring in my ears when I lay down to sleep at night.
When we had finished picking all of McCrory’s cotton, we picked for a neighboring farmer, Mr. Chandler, who paid us a dollar a hundred for picking a field that had been covered with water when Walnut Creek overflowed its banks after a heavy rain.
We became acquainted with three or four other families living near our camp and found all of them “mighty clever people,” the word clever meaning generous and kind in the vernacular of the Cross Timbers. When George and I called on the Nelsons to see if we could buy a gallon of sorghum and half a bushel of sweet potatoes they seemed glad to let us have them. They refused any payment, however, saying that they “would not dream of charging a neighbor for a jug of sorghum molasses and a few sweet potatoes.” We were much pleased by their generosity, but applying the term “neighbor” to persons camping for a few weeks half a mile farther down the creek seemed to be stretching the word quite a bit at least.
This generous attitude seemed to be typical of everyone we met during our stay in the Walnut Creek camp. Mr. Chandler brought us a big piece of beef cut from half of a quarter that he had bought from someone who had butchered a fat heifer and was peddling out the meat to families in the community. Father did most of the cooking over a camp fire built in front of our so-called tent. Biscuits were baked in a Dutch oven, while beans were boiled in an iron pot with a slab of salt pork to season them. We often had hot cakes for breakfast, with bacon, sorghum, and dried fruit, plus plenty of hot coffee; all of us gained weight.
When, after a few weeks, most of the cotton had been picked Father decided it was about time to return home. We all felt that it had been a successful venture. Unfortunately, there had been several days when rain or misty weather made it impossible to pick cotton or gather corn. At such times George and I had fished or hunted, unless it was actually raining. Yet, on every working day we had made five or six dollars. Because our living had cost very little, by the time we started home we had saved seventy or eighty dollars. This was important money at a time when bacon sold for nine or ten cents a pound, and a good farm hand could be hired for fifteen dollars a month, plus board.
Once we were back at Tom’s place we helped him pick the rest of his cotton. By that time our tenant, Mr. Pulliam, had finished harvesting his crop and had rented another small farm. To this he and his daughters, Adar and Idar removed, and we occupied our old home once more after an absence of nearly a year.
We were all most happy to be back home, and the neighbors seemed pleased also. In “neighborly fashion” they told us that the shiftless Mr. Pulliam had allowed most of the blackberries and peaches to ripen and fall to the ground and rot. Plainly, he had not kept up the fences or barn and sheds and he had allowed the weeds and sprouts to grow up in the fields.
With characteristic energy our father set to work with the help of George and me to put the little farm and its improvements in good order again. He bought two or three milk cows, a couple of sows with their litters of pigs, and a dozen or more hens. The fences were mended, the fields plowed, the fruit trees checked for borers, and the orchard enlarged by our setting out forty or fifty more peach trees.
During my stay with Mattie in Greer County I had done a bit of the cooking. This now helped, for we were keeping “bachelor’s hall” and had to do all of our own housework, including preparing our own meals. So-called mixes, and biscuits and rolls ready to pop into the oven, which have saved the reason of many young brides and the lives of their husbands, lay several decades in the future. In consequence, we had to deal with the raw materials in our culinary efforts.
Father, whose experience went back to the days of the California gold rush, did most of the cooking, but I could do a fair job at “skillet slinging” myself, even if only ten years old. As George was a fair housekeeper we got along in excellent fashion and even entertained a good many persons at dinner or for overnight, including old Mr. Lopp and some of my father’s brethern in the Primitive Baptist Church.
Toward spring Lucy, who wa
s a remarkably good cook but a notoriously sloppy housekeeper, sponsored a surprise party for us. She conspired with seven or eight other women of the neighborhood to bring food for a sumptuous dinner and come to our bachelor home soon after breakfast to clean every inch of the house and prepare the noonday feast. They came in full force, each bringing her contribution of food.
After looking the situation over, with two or three suggesting that maybe they should go home and clean up their own houses, they set to work. Some prepared the dinner, while others washed the windows and did a bit of scrubbing. Then, after finding a large stack of copies of the St. Louis Republic, they decided to paper the living room and small “side room” with newspapers. Because we did not have enough copies of The Republic to complete the project, one lady sent her son home to bring back an armload of another newspaper, to which she and her husband subscribed.
It was a grand day, for two or three women had brought their children, and we had a lot of fun playing “hide-and-seek” and marbles while their mothers cooked and mixed flour-and-water paste, and applied it to the newspapers with which they covered the rough walls. Although it was to be a surprise party, I am sure that someone must have given Father a tip as to what had been planned. It is true that he seemed surprised but rather overdid it. Everyone had a good time but, unfortunately for me, these amateur paper hangers pasted some papers upside down or “slaunch-wise” on the walls. This almost forced me to stand on my head or in a slanting position to read them!
With the coming of warm weather we were kept very busy planting corn and cotton, setting out sweet-potato slips, and making a garden. We even planted a patch of peanuts and a few rows of popcorn. Father and George did most of the plowing, but in thinning corn or chopping cotton and other work done with a hoe George and I worked together. From the time I was four or five years old and had been told such stories as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” and “Sinbad the Sailor,” George and I had told one another stories which we had “made up” ourselves. They usually began, “Once you and I were little fairies.”
Now that we were older and had read a good deal we resumed this practice to relieve the tedium of working all day in the field at such mechanical tasks as thinning corn and chopping or picking cotton. After reading the Swiss Family Robinson our stories ran largely to being shipwrecked on some desert island. Sometimes we were accompanied by two of our playmates, Walter and Oscar Briley. With complete disregard for geography the wreck usually occurred while we were on a voyage across the Atlantic to enter school in England.
Not all of our made-up tales were based on wrecks while at sea and attacks by pirates or savages. Some of them were “Westerns,” probably due to our reading Dick Onslow among the Indians or The Trader Spy. In these we were usually on our way to California with a wagon train and had been captured by Indians when we left it for an hour or so of hunting. After reading a book about Africa, which the Taylors had been kind enough to lend us, our yarns tended to shift to the Dark Continent. They usually dealt with lion hunts and adventures with Pygmies.
Our story telling was to sustain an enormous advance from an unexpected source the following year. We made a good crop of corn and cotton in 1890, and the peach trees were loaded with fruit. As a result, we worked hard drying peaches all summer and harvesting the field crops during the autumn months. The wheat crop of the prairie farmers was also good, and Father was able to sell all the blackberries and best peaches at what was then considered a good price.
In February, 1891, my brother John wrote that he had just married and settled on a claim, where he had built for his bride a large and comfortable sod house. There was little prospect of making a crop on freshly plowed sod, however, and if Father could rent some additional land he and his wife would be glad to come down and make a crop with us. Father accordingly rented a twenty-acre field about three-quarters of a mile southeast of us to be planted in cotton. The terms were for the renter to receive three-fourths and the landowner one-fourth of the money derived from the sale of the crop.
This twenty-acre field was level, fertile land which had formerly had a house on it occupied by a family named Moore. The house had either burned or been moved but the tract of land was still known as the “Moore farm.” In the corner where the house had stood was a small plot of grass and a big apple tree that bore large, long apples resembling the variety called “sheep’s nose.” Evidently the tree was a seedling, for the fruit was extremely sour and never seemed to ripen.
Once this field had been rented, Father wrote to John, who, with his wife, Ava, arrived by train late in February. We were all delighted to have them with us. Ava was only nineteen years old, while John was about twenty-seven. She was a gay, lively girl, the oldest of a bevy of sisters ranging from seventeen to three or four years of age, though she had an older brother, who was married and lived in Dallas.
As the oldest of so many sisters, Ava had been forced to assume a measure of responsibility in her parents’ household. She was an excellent cook and a remarkably good housekeeper. Her big snowy loaves of homemade bread, six-layer chocolate cakes, golden-brown doughnuts, and luscious pies were most welcome additions to our bachelor fare of the past year. To our great distress, a late freeze wiped out our crop of peaches, but we had berries and the products of a big garden.
A couple of months after John and Ava joined us, Ava’s mother and a seven- or eight-year-old daughter, Minnie, came to see us. They had gone to Dallas to visit the son and family and were returning to their home in Vernon, Texas, with a stop-off to see Ava and the family into which she had married. We all liked Ava’s mother, Mrs. Brown, very much. Apparently she largely supported her family by keeping boarders, while her husband, a more or less worthless old fellow, contributed a little by working at odd jobs that he could find.
Mrs. Brown stayed only a day or so but left Minnie with us for the summer, which pleased Ava and me very much. Minnie was a nice kid, and because I was two or three years older she came to regard me as the fountainhead of knowledge and wisdom. This was a new role for me, which I savored to the fullest. Hitherto I had been the one to seek knowledge from George by asking numerous questions, which he never failed to answer.
With John to help with the work, even the addition of twenty acres of cotton did not require my spending as much time in the field as usual. As a result, I helped Ava with the housework, with Minnie as my able assistant. I soon found that she liked stories and when we were working or playing alone she proved an enthusiastic audience for my made-up narratives, usually about nations of Pygmies about a foot tall. These little people often engaged in wars, in which a part of the troops rode into battle mounted on jack rabbits! Minnie even told some stories of her own, in which her only toy, a “sleepy doll” named Pearl, was always a leading character.
When the time came to chop cotton, I had to lend a hand part of the time. Knowing that our scholarly brother John had read many more books than we had, George asked him to tell us one of his favorite novels. John was willing but said that he would rather tell an original story. That suited us exactly; for the next few months he and George, when working in the field, took turns in relating some amazing narratives. I was not able to hear all of these, but new ones were started in the fall when we began picking cotton, which kept all three of us in the field all day.
The summer slipped by as if on fleet wings. When it became intensely hot our father built a brush arbor in the back yard. We moved the dining table out of the steaming hot kitchen and set it up under this shady arbor, which made eating our meals and the aftermath of washing the dishes far more comfortable. As we had no peaches to prepare for drying, we all had more leisure than in previous summers. Minnie was a good playmate as well as a good listener to my stories, and I was truly sorry when late in August two of her older sisters, who had been visiting in Dallas, came by with instructions from their mother to take her home.
Ava returned to Greer County in October, going to
Vernon by train, where she was met by Henry. John stayed another month to finish picking the cotton crop. He then bought an old wagon and a yoke of oxen, and drove to Navajoe. This must have given Ava ample time to put their sod house in order, for travel by ox team was indeed slow.
Some of the stories told by John and George were truly thrillers, and following the pattern set by the imagination of John, George and I continued to relate amazing narratives of adventures by land and sea as long as we lived in the Cross Timbers. I recall one in which George was seeking gold in Alaska, when he discovered a hidden valley with a warm climate due to many large hot springs. Here the vegetation grew almost as rank as in the tropics and a few mastodons were found.
In another yarn he had sought to reach the South Pole by balloon. With a parachute strapped to his back and with chemicals to generate enough gas to reinflate the balloon so that he could return after a landing, he drifted south from Australia. Upon reaching the Antarctic continent he floated over a range of high mountains and discovered a valley with a subtropical climate caused by smouldering volcanoes. Here he was forced to bail out because of a gas leak but, relieved of his weight, the balloon rose enough to pass over the mountains to the south.
He landed safely, but soon after he had repacked the parachute and strapped it to his back he was seized by four tall black warriors armed with spears. He tried to talk to them by signs, but with little success. They led him to a village of round grass houses, where black men, women, and children seemed much excited by his appearance. His captors took him to their king, who lived in a big house in the center of the village.
The king apparently ordered him to be destroyed, because the four warriors led him to the south side of the valley and up a steep trail to the top of the mountain on the south. Once there he was led to the edge of an overhanging cliff where he could see, some two thousand feet below, huge boulders half-covered by snow and ice. He was permitted only a brief look before two of the warriors grasped his wrists and the other two his ankles and with a “heave ho” launched him into space.
The Cross Timbers Page 6