Young John in school.
Our father may have extolled education, but not in matters of sex. When I first felt stirrings for a pretty young thing, along about fifth grade, I was innocent enough to convey my yearnings to the object of them in writing. She turned my note over to her mother who turned it over to the teacher who turned it over to our father who turned me over a sawhorse and belted my bare backsides. That was the only sex education I got from either of my parents.
ARTHUR:
The only kissing I knew of that went on around our house was on the occasions when Mama would put Blanche to bed, when she was little, or wake her up in the morning. I’d wished I was a girl so’s I could get some of it.
BLANCHE:
I must have been little, Arthur, for I don’t remember that.
RALPH:
I guess we all got kissed when we were babies but not after we’d gotten old enough to remember it. I never saw Mama kiss Papa or vice versa, nor did I ever hear ’em saying mean things to one another, like most folks do on occasion. Mama was fair at sarcasm though; she had a wit, and she’d use it to express her dissatisfaction with the way the farm was run. She’d toss a sidewise swipe at Papa now and again, but that’d be about the size of it.
I’m beginning to see where John got his sense of humor. He adored his mother, and adopted her sardonic ways. As we’ll see later, John’s father Frank, while a man of few words, also favored irony in making a point. John had not, however, adsorbed his parents’ reluctance to disagree noisily.
ARTHUR:
Yes, and there was the time when we quit the Methodist church altogether because the Minister refused to oust Lem Dunkel who, a married man, was living with Dad’s sister, an unmarried woman. We went to considerable trouble to travel the greater distance to the Friedburg church and take our business elsewhere, so to speak. Later, I guess, there was some forgiving, or at least forgetting, because, as Ralph and John mentioned, we ended up going to those two churches and Enterprise as well.
KENNETH:
You know, I don’t believe his knowledge about sex extended much beyond a practical one. He, along with the whole community, had us boys believing that Felix Dipple fathered eleven girls and no boys because of his missing right testicle. He’d lost it in a boyhood accident. That’s one of those things that was common knowledge.
JOHN:
I told that story to the surgeon who did my vasectomy; and as he tied off the right side he said, “That takes care of the boy one.” Then later, the left side: “That takes care of the girl one.”
ARTHUR:
Well now, I’m glad to see one of us, anyway, is taking a conscientious attitude about the population problem. You have two fine young children, John, one from the right side and one from the left. That’s anybody’s share at this stage of world history, I judge. Although, if that had been the case sixty years ago, none of us from me through you would be here talking. But as long as I am here, I think I’ll continue to talk for a while.
Here’s another piece I’d jotted down earlier; appropriate, I think, to the subject at hand:
When I was young, about four I’d judge, I went to Uncle Dave’s one night, and when I got back home next day, the first of the red-headed brothers was born. Every time I went anyplace, except Grandpa’s, after that, I asked when I got back home if a new baby had arrived.
I asked Mama about babies one Saturday, while I watched her make the usual eight to ten pies that morning, and she said, “Pigs come out of knots on logs, and babies are let down from Heaven by a rope.”
Babies, and future scientists, John and Ken.
Then I went to Uncle Dave’s one other night sometime later, and Blanche was born. “What?” I said, “A girl? Now she can be the girl instead of me, but it’ll be a long time before she washes dishes.” I was the third child and was supposed to be the girl. I became Mama’s boy. I washed the dishes while the other boys played. They called me “mama’s boy.”
Before the third redhead arrived I’d gotten some idea of how babies really got born. I was at Frank Perryman’s birthday party and we heard his mother hollering upstairs. A little later, it was announced that Frank had a new baby sister. Ah ha, I thought, babies come from a mother’s hollering.
When Kenneth was born, I knew he was coming. Afterwards, it was my job to tend to him and help Mama.
So you see, it took a while for me to learn about babies. I had to put bits and pieces together here, there, and yonder, and still I didn’t know all the details ‘til I was grown.
LUTHER:
For a long while I thought Doctor Bob brought the babies. While I was walking in the woods one time with another boy—don’t rightly remember who he was—he said, when we passed a hollow in a tree, “That’s where Doctor Bob got you.” Course I knew he was kidding at the time, but I did think the Doctor brought the babies from somewhere.
BLANCHE:
I guess it was possible not to know that babies were borne by mothers because the women wore such full skirts; furthermore, they stayed at home during the last few months before the baby was born. Those were very modest times. Mama and I, I remember, were too embarrassed to go even to the privy when there were men in the yard.
One thing I learned about much later on was that one woman in the community had ten children with no apparent fathers. I can remember the woman’s name, but I won’t say it here. The Moravian churches wouldn’t tolerate such goings-on. She was expelled from Enterprise, but she continued to go to Mt. Olivet. The Methodists seemed to figure where there’s life, there’s hope, even for the most sinful among us.
Then there was the affair between Elsie Herkimer and Freddie Dunkel, Lem’s son. Elsie was the organist at Mt. Olivet. Fred was married, had a family even. Elsie lived down next to him. They’d go out together and do whatever they did in those days.
HOWARD:
You know what they did in those days.
BLANCHE:
I suppose I do. Anyway, she got with child. This happened after I’d grown, when I was privileged to know about such things. The baby was born prematurely—never survived. There she was, at church the next Sunday playing the organ as if nothing had happened. By then the story was all over the place, and some folks refused to attend the service on account of it. Others didn’t know whether to go to church or not. One said, “Well, it’s my church, and if the Devil himself wanted to come to my church he wouldn’t keep me away.” The Methodists were split on this one, but in general the incident was tolerated.
AUBREY:
Now hold on here, Blanche, honey. The Moravians showed a speck of tolerance, too—they had to, with the likes of my grandaddy, Julius Beckel. Grandaddy drank too much, and his wife didn’t approve. “Julius,” she said, “if you don’t stop drinkin’ you’re going straight to burnin’ Hell.” “I’m not going to any burnin’ Hell, because there isn’t any burnin’ Hell,” he replied.
She took him on over to the Minister at the Friedburg church the next Sunday and told the Minister her husband didn’t even believe in burnin’ Hell. The Minister just looked away; he didn’t want to get involved. I’m not sure he believed in burnin’ Hell himself.
Grandpa Beckel was incorrigible, you might say. Sometimes he’d start to mention sex, and his wife would say, “Grandpa, there are children around.”
KENNETH:
Some of the children—and I wish I’d been among them— got sex educated unexpectedly in a Sunday School class at Friedburg one Sunday morning when the regular teacher was ill. The Minister’s son took over and told the class all he knew about sex, which was considerable, because his papa was a liberal and believed that his own children, anyway, ought to understand such things.
This showed a speck of tolerance from Moravian quarters, Aubrey, but it really expressed a private view of the Minister himself and was unusual, I believe. When word leaked out about that particular Sunday School session, most mothers and fathers of those children were shocked, to say the least.
BLANCHE:
I wonder if our parents realized how much we learned from watching the animals.
JOHN:
Oh, they must have.
BLANCHE:
Well I learned a right proper amount about sex, just watching the bulls and the cows and the turkeys. The turkeys went through a regular ritual. The male would strut about the female, all the while showing his very fine feathers. This would go on for a half an hour or more before they’d get down to the business. I used to love to watch them.
I wonder also if our parents realized how much we got from the Bible. Since they wouldn’t even talk about sex I used to seek out the juicy parts and such of the Old Testament—about the Israeli Patriarch; I read Paradise Lost all the way through because of all the gory details.
HOWARD:
Why, Sister, you surprise me.
Well now, I suspect we could get stuck on discussin’ sex all evening long, if we’ve a mind to. Just because our folks didn’t talk about it then doesn’t mean we’ve got to make up for it now. I agree with you about their laxity, if you want to call it that, in acquainting us with the fundamentals in that area, but they did a good job in most every other way.
You know, my parents didn’t kiss in public either. Nor did I ever see them holding hands. I did burst in on them in their bedroom one night when frightened by a nightmare. I couldn’t understand why they lay entwined on the floor between their twin beds making funny noises. They shooed me out. I got some inkling of what they were up to only later when Mom handed me a book about “birds and bees” and we timidly talked around the subject.
As for Bible readings, my mom read to us little kids every night before bedtime. When she chose the Bible, I, like Blanche, always preferred the Old Testament because of its ghastly tales, somewhat reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm, which I preferred to Andersen’s fairy tales.
CHAPTER 8
Obey the Conscience
HOWARD:
I’d like to get on into some of our parents’ attitudes about life in general.
I always thought of our father as rather strict, and so was our mother, as related to our conduct and our behavior, such as truthfulness and carrying out a job once it had been assigned.
There was a difference, in my impression, in the way Father approached an idea as compared with Mother, in that Father looked apparently over the hill instead of at the side of the hill. His life was spent, as I see it, improving the neighborhood, whether it was better roads, building the telephone line, donating land for the church or the school; he went to the point of dabbling in politics. He wasn’t very successful; he got defeated by the Republicans. He never became County Commissioner, but he was always at Lexington, at the courthouse, on the first Monday of each month, hoping for something he could bring back to our community.
Also, my impression was that he felt he had not received all the education he could have accepted and would have liked to have had. He felt that more keenly because of the association he had with a first cousin lawyer, Emory Raper, who practiced at Lexington. He would have liked to have had the opportunity to do that type of work.
The fact that he settled down on the family farm after his father died gave him no such opportunity; but he was determined each of his children should have an education, and he sacrificed that we might go to school. Never once did he say, “You better not go; we don’t have the money.” He skimped what he could. He didn’t say, “Go get you a job.” He never once said, “Go get you a job, and then you can go to school.” Now, in my way of thinking, his ideas were on beyond an immediate goal.
Mother, on the other hand, was a little more realistic in her raising, about thrift and maybe orderliness. She was very devoted and a good mother. She was, I think, a Christian mother if there ever was one. She was as keen or as bright as Father was; she was the champion speller, if you want to call it that, around the neighborhood.
BLANCHE:
She surely was. She went to spelling bees, and she won right more often than the other folks. She had that tum-ta-dumtum way of spelling things, and she’d try to teach us how with one of her favorite spelling words, like antidisestablishmentarianism, or another one was incompatibility—I wonder if that had anything to do with your growing up to get so interested in studying incompatibility in the fungi, John.
Middle-aged Frank.
Young Frank Raper.
Widowed Julia on her birthday, 1939.
Anyway, her way of spelling went like this! She’d pronounce the word first, “incompatibility,” then spell one syllable at a time and pronounce it thereafter: “i-n, in, c-o-m, incom, p-a-t, incompat, i, incompati, b-i-l, incompatibil, ity, incompatibility.”
HOWARD:
You do it better than I ever could, Blanche, but Mamma did it faster and better than she was ever able to teach any of us to do, I think. She also taught Sunday School classes. “Miz Julie” was always present.
“Mister Frank” was known to be the leader of the community and was probably the best-read man in the whole Welcome-Enterprise section . . .
BLANCHE:
Your comment, Howard, about Mister Frank being the best-read man around says something about our community, for, as a child, I remember no books in the home except the Bible, Sunday School leaflets, Bloom’s Almanac, and a simplified version of Paradise Lost with authentic Durer illustrations and obtained by way of the evangelist Sam Jones.
Now as the big boys returned from boarding school they brought books with them, and every afternoon, when I could get away from the work, I read them, but I don’t think Papa ever did.
Incidentally, Cletus was the first to go away to boarding school, and when he came home and talked knowingly about a lot of people we’d never heard of before, that was the first time I ever remember somebody discussing somebody I’d never heard about.
Never to be forgotten was one afternoon when I read some selections from Plato’s Laws and the Apology. From the Laws, I remember the statement, “Men do not sin willingly; they sin because they do not understand the truth.” And, from the Apology, I observed that here was a man who made death seem as natural and right as living. That same afternoon I also read a short book on comparative religions. It brought to mind my talk with Papa earlier about things in our religion we couldn’t understand.
I discovered in the reading of that book that many people besides Christians had ideas about the things Papa and I couldn’t understand, and some of those ideas sounded reasonable and good.
HOWARD:
Maybe Papa didn’t read many books, but he took a newspaper daily, and the minute it came he’d drop what he was doing and read every word of it. Nobody else got a glance at it before he finished.
GERTRUDE (CLETUS’S WIFE):
So that’s where Cletus got it from: the newspaper could never come through our door and be in the house for more than one minute when he would grab it, and all else would stop until he read it through. That never changed. I remember Mother Raper saying, “You might as well let him sit right down and read the paper, because you’ll never get a lick of work out of him until he gets through with it.”
ARTHUR:
Little wonder that was so, Cletus took after Papa in a good many ways, I think.
I can understand how scientific brains make a contribution. It’s recognizing, then stating the problem; thereon after, it doesn’t matter who takes care of it as long as it’s managed by some fellow who knows how to do it. It’s the idea that counts.
I recollect our father’s remark when driving our first Ford automobile where you always had to be changing the spark lever and the gas lever. He said, “What you need do is put these levers in one place and leave them there.” Well, we said to ourselves, he just doesn’t understand. If we did that we’d break our necks going down the first hill and never make it up the next.
But you know these modern machines are fixed that way right now. Why, a $5,000-$10,000 farm tractor has a governor on it, and you can set the gas feed, wit
h automatic spark. The machine goes six to eight miles per hour, up hill or down.
It takes a special kind of scientific sense to say, “Do this; this is what has to be done.” Well, Frank Raper may not have gotten the hang of driving the Model T Ford, but he had an idea about what ought to be done. Even though he wasn’t a scientist he had vision, imagination . . . He recognized the need, and that had to precede the deed.
That’s the kind of thinking we have to have first, to start us off towards Mars or some other far-out place. The engineer boys don’t have that kind of sense; they just figure out how to do it.
LUTHER:
I knew Father as a somewhat jovial type person, and I also knew him, John, when he had lost his strength. He’d lost his hope; he wasn’t well.
JOHN:
Well, I only knew him like that.
LUTHER:
That is the reason I say, but it was definitely different earlier. I remember when he used to play pranks on us, practical jokes, and so do the rest of you, at the tobacco barn. You remember we used to play checkers with him, and that’s how we learned to play the game.
When we got older and got to where we could beat him, he’d gradually let his knees come apart, and the checkerboard would fall—just before we would finish him off. He would sheepishly say, “Excuse, please.” That was a typical type of thing as I knew him then. That wasn’t true in his latter years.
RALPH:
I have some more rememberings I’d like to read.
I remember bailing hay from a stack at the Baxley place
And, as we approached the ground,
Finding a den of weasels in the dunnage surrounding an old mill stone
That held the pole in the middle of the stack.
I remember the tree down behind the barn.
And how it bent way over and broke off near the stump
In the calm of a summer afternoon
Not more than two hours after
There had been a very violent wind
An American Harvest Page 7