Iris nodded. “You missed out of a lot of adventures, being the baby. Let’s hear what Dad had to say about the house. It would have been about here.” Iris was north of the outhouse and marked a big X in the dirt. They turned on the narrative.
Grandpa Krejci and his friends built every one of the buildings on this farm. That’s what people did in their day—they helped each other. I’m sorry the buildings didn’t live long enough to stand up to the abuses of nearly 100 years of seasons. They were built of pine and oak, tongue and groove for most of the interior work. There was a two-story house with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living area, and front and back porches. The front porch wrapped around the side of the house. The back porch opened up to Mom’s carefully tended garden.
She grew all of her herbs, poppies for poppy seed, carrots, onions, tomatoes, peppers, squash, pickling cucumbers, red and white potatoes, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, lettuce, and green beans.
Iris turned to Mary. “The 2-story house was a miracle of human ingenuity. For many years they had no electricity. It was horribly hot in the summers, so they built the house with a lot of windows so that there would be a cross-breeze. They planted shade trees next to the house for cool shelter. Grandma Krejci plotted her garden so the vegetables would have enough sun, and she had her own shaded spot on the back porch where she churned butter, made her cheeses and crafted soap. She kept chickens in a large chicken coop back here.”
Iris walked about 50 paces. “When we came to see her on special occasions she would let us gather eggs. It was like Easter—some eggs were blue, some yellow, some white. And watching the chickens preen and cackle at each other was hilarious. I remember when Hap would chase them around. Even Grandma giggled sometimes. When Grandma was ready to cook a chicken, she’d come back here, take her largest hen, break her neck, throw her in a boiling pot, then start plucking the feathers. There is nothing that beats a fresh roasted chicken with Grandma’s homemade dressing.”
Both Iris and Vicki were quiet for a while. The wind stirred, they walked, searching the perimeter. Mary was absorbing all of this news. She was born after the buildings were razed, and she was trying to imagine what this must have looked like.
“Inside the house was an icebox, not a refrigerator,” Vicki told Mary. “It needed a block of ice to keep things cool. Grandma kept her butter and eggs in the icebox. She had a potbelly cook stove. She baked her bread, roasted her chickens, made her kolaches, and cooked her vegetables all on a potbelly stove. Holy cards were pasted on the walls in the bedrooms, like wallpaper. The pillowcases were made from flour sacks. Her sewing machine was a Singer pedal foot. She washed clothes in a galvanized steel wash tub and hung them on a line in the back of the house, away from the chickens.”
“She worked her butt off,” Iris interjected. “Four kids and no running water or electricity! Can you imagine trying to iron your husband’s shirts with a heavy cast iron block on a hot stove on a hot Texas day?”
“What’s ironing?” Mary laughed. They all laughed.
“Sometime, Mary,” Iris began, “we need to tell you how it was in the Landry family before you were born. Every one of the girls had to iron clothes—it was a communal job. We had a weekly schedule. We would sprinkle water on the shirts, skirts, pants (usually our uniforms for Catholic school)…”
“Dad’s handkerchiefs,” Vicki interjected.
“… and roll them up a certain way and then refrigerate them. Then we’d iron them. The only clothes taken to the dry cleaners were Dad’s dress shirts and anything with a ‘dry cleaning only’ tag.”
“Looks like we need to get back to the B&B,” Vicki said, as dark clouds approached. Time had flown by. They were expected at an intimate gathering with the local historian and drinks and dinner back in town. They waved their goodbyes to the imaginary Grandma and Grandpa Krejci and sped back to Flatonia.
On the way back, Vicki pointed out a little farm on Highway 95. “That’s where the Scott’s School was.”
“Dad’s school—where Mr. and Mrs. Wiseman taught?” Mary asked.
“Yes, and lived. They had a home next to the school. I have the funniest story—on second thought, not funny, a rather odd story about Fred’s 4-H Club heifer, Beauty.”
“Bring it on,” Mary laughed.
“Well, Fred Wiseman, Dad’s best friend, evidently loved this Jersey heifer he raised for 4-F Club. He named her Betty, and his routine was to put Betty on a rope, take her out of her pen during the County Fair, and just romp around. One year, Fred needed to find a restroom, so a fella asked if he could walk Betty around, and Fred agreed……”
“Then?” Iris asked.
“Hmmmm…evidently Betty was inadvertently choked to death in a sexual encounter with a mentally impaired young man.”
“Ewwwww…..” both Iris and Mary said in unison.
The next day they continued the narration from the same spot with VF’s tale of the Cracker Jack box.
My half-brother Paul was a real jerk. He was 7 years older than me, so of course he was bigger and stronger. Whenever he goaded me into fighting him, our daddy whipped both of us. Getting a box of Cracker Jack back in those days, the 1920s, was a very special occasion. It was better than Christmas because you got a sweet treat to eat and a present. Well, I saved mine in my pillowcase in our room upstairs. Paul found it, ate it all, stole the prize, and filled the box with dirt. Of course I was furious when I saw what he did and fought him until we were both bloody. Your Grandpa beat us both, and wouldn’t let us eat for a day.
“Wow!” Mary said. “That’s so sad. So what’s the story with Paul being a half brother?”
Vicki explained that Grandpa Krejci’s first wife died of TB and left him with three children—two daughters and a son. “Bessie Vala came to the farm in answer to his ad requesting a nanny for the kids. She and her twin brother were teenagers when they came to the US from Prague. She stayed here on the O-Bar taking care of Grandpa and his kids and eventually they married and she had Dad. Later she became a US citizen.”
“What happened to her brother?” Mary asked.
“He returned to Prague after working in the US for many years as an accountant and a translator. He was multi-lingual—Czech, Russian, German and English. I never met him. People said he was very smart. Dad did not like him, though. Said he was a cheat. Said he abandoned his sister to get social security payments abroad.” Vicki sure was the family historian.
Iris was standing by a large cypress with a rock wall built around its lower trunk. “Remember this tree, Vicki? The butchering shed was close by.” They listened to VF’s description:
If you stand by the old cypress with the stone wall and look northwest imagine seeing the butchering shed. That was a low-rise structure made of a white freestone rock base with wood siding and concrete floors. It held your Grandpa’s large round foot pedal stone sharpener, all the knives and tools for butchering and making sausage, the heavy long butchering table, hooks in the ceiling for holding the carcasses. This is where beef, pork, turkey, and venison were processed. Some of the meat was dried in the small smokehouse that was close to this structure, and other meat was stored in the salt cellar, below the house, close to the cool well waters. We sold the hides.
Iris remembered a lot of flies in that slaughterhouse. It was a scary place for her and she stayed away from it. The smokehouse, though, had a delicious, flavorful aroma and memories of beef and venison jerky with their unusual spices swirled in her mind.
Back in the Jeep, they drove to the railroad tracks on the far east side of the land. This is where they used to pick dewberries. People outside of Texas called them blackberries.
“Last time I picked dewberries with Dad I got such a bad case of poison ivy! My hands swelled to twice their size. I had to soak them in ice water three times a day. Nothing helped. No holistic medicine, no prednisone. Nothing.” Mary looked at her hands.
“About two years before he died. He and I were visiting Grandma in the nursing home and he had the hair brain idea to pick dewberries.”
Everyone remembered Grandma Krejci’s tragic death.
“But there’s an unusual ending to the poison ivy story. Before the horrendous experience with poison ivy—which lasted for two months—I had premature arthritis in my fingers. It hurt even to shake hands. After the poison ivy, no more arthritis. See?”
Mary held up her smooth, unblemished hands.
“JAMA.” Vicki observed.
“JAMA?” Mary asked.
“Yeah, it’s one for the medical journals.”
The huge plump masses of sweet berries grabbed their attention. “These always stained your fingers and clothes when you picked them. No one knew why they grew wild close to the railroad tracks. Perhaps it was the rocky soil that gave the berries room to roam,” Vicki said.
Both Vicki and Iris remembered coming to this area of the tracks with its wooden trestle bridge over Cady Creek and picking pails and pails of ripe dewberries with their dad. They parked the Jeep and hiked up to the trestle bridge and sat, dangling their feet over the bridge.
“Vicki, do you remember we called this Candy Creek?” Iris asked. Vicki smiled and they listened.
Here at the trestle bridge of the railroad tracks is where the Vala boys and I would put a penny on the track and watch the train roar by, then pick up a flattened coin and celebrate. That passed as entertainment in those days. We also picked dewberries and mustang grapes. The grapes were used to make sweet wine, much like Manischewitz.
The greatest entertainment the tracks brought were ice and the circus. Ice was delivered here at the railroad tracks every week. We would meet the railcar, and Grandpa Krejci would get those giant tongs and hoist several blocks of ice onto our wagon. Then we’d drive the horses and wagon back to the house, give your Grandma a block of ice for the icebox, and put the rest in the cold cellar. Sometimes we’d cut up a block and ice down watermelons for dinner.
The Vala boys (no relation to your grandmother) and I would follow the railroad tracks to the annual circus, set up just outside of town. We would sneak under the tent and watch the tricks and the riding magic of those horsemen. Later we would try some of those ourselves on my gelding, Snip. Oh! We loved the circus. For a boy who never had movies, television, or a zoo this was spectacular—the color, the liveliness, the smells, the pretty ladies, the action, the strange animals.
The sisters looked at each other with amusement.
“Can you imagine what a circus must have been like in the 20’s in Texas?” Vicki asked. “What a big deal for those little farm boys.”
“Just think the Hardy Boys meet Federico Fellini,” Iris offered.
Mary laughed. “Can’t you see Dad as a little boy, practicing standing on his horse Snip as he trotted around this farm? Maybe they also practiced juggling, and walking on a wire!”
They laid out the blanket with a delicious picnic--cold drinks, assortment of deli meats, cheese, fresh bread, lettuce and tomatoes. From their vantage point high on the eastern edge of the farm, they could see far across the land nearly to the Indian mounds. “See Thunder Valley? That’s it!” Iris said. “Right below us. That’s what Dad talks about later in his narrative about the thunder rolling in over the hills and lightening striking and the hellish sound of hail, then buckets of rain. Or the thunder and no rain in those years of drought.”
“Hard way to make a living,” Mary said. “You’ve got to be a gambler to be a farmer. Dad was no gambler, and I think that’s why ranching appealed to him.”
“But ranching demands that you have feed. And in order to have feed you either have to pay a fortune for pellets or you have to have rain and good pasture,” Iris countered.
“So, what are you thinking?” Vicki asked Iris. “Would you use this land for pasture? Would you run cattle?”
“I’m too old for that. I’m thinking something more up-to-date. Solar farming. Wind farming. Perhaps grow aloe. Still food for thought.”
After their late lunch, they drove back to town to chat with the director of the Arnim Museum, which holds artifacts of the town’s history, and to see the Railroad Tower, a three-story tower used to signal the trains. They read the rail fan pamphlet:
Flatonia was one of the earliest busy railroad junctions in the state of Texas, hence Tower 3. Tower 3 has been moved from its original location and preserved. There is also a caboose on display next to the tower.
The next morning they stopped at the town’s cemetery and found the Krejci family gravesite. Grandpa Vince and Grandma Bessie Krejci had head stones, the stepsister and stepbrother Esther and Paul Krejci had stone markers buried in the ground. They cleaned the site and laid fresh flowers on the graves.
“In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” Vicki began, clearing her throat, and bowing her head. “By Your grace and goodness, oh Lord, let us appreciate and celebrate those who have gone before us. Enlighten us with your grace, and show us the way to help Iris reinvent the land our grandparents lived for. Give her wisdom and blessings in her pursuit. Amen.”
“Amen,” Iris and Mary repeated.
They continued to search the cemetery.
Martha Krejci, VF’s half sister and his protector, who became Martha Redding, had lived her adult life in Chicago. Her grave was not in this cemetery. It was in that smoky city as VF had described it.
Mary noticed all the other Krejci markers. “Who are these people? Are they related to us?”
“Probably,” Vicki said. “We didn’t know them because Dad just wasn’t close to his relatives. He hated Paul so much, and Paul married and had six kids. We never met them. Paul was a troubled man. He eventually killed himself. His oldest son became the town sheriff.”
“Well, looks like I have some family history to learn,” Iris said.
Flatonia seemed buried in its past. It was still a one-traffic-light town with a small hardware store, one bank, a large Catholic church, antique shops, a coffee shop, and a couple of B&B’s for the drivers who needed a break traveling from Houston to Austin.
The sisters drove out to Thunder Valley Farm, opened the main gate, and stopped in a large, pale yellow pasture filled with buttercups and phlox. “I call this the Easter pasture,” Iris said, “because this is where Grandma would hide the eggs.” They all got out of the Jeep. “Listen to what Dad said about this,” Vicki insisted.
In 1970 Easter came early. The bluebonnets were just opening and the dewberries were budding. The married daughters asked for an Easter Egg hunt—Vicki and Iris brought their little ones. Grandma was waiting with a noon dinner of delicious ham, sausage and all the trimmings. Grandpa was severely arthritic—he could hardly walk, so he stayed at the house. Dishes were put away and everyone else headed to the living carpet of the front pasture. A crisp breeze whipped the budding pear trees and waved the Indian blankets. I remembered my old home--the green grass, deep soil, hard work, good times and bad.
“I vaguely remember that Easter.” Iris said, “I was still in PTSD mode.”
“Splain yourself, Lucy,” Mary said. This was her way to make fun of sad times—just take a page from the I Love Lucy series.
“During the first few years of my early marriage to my rapist husband I was numb, and caring for the babies and going to school and working full time all at the same time was a continual bout of sleep deprivation. So, really, my clearest memories of Easters here at the O-Bar were when I was a child with Jillian, when she was still alive, Bits, Hap and Vicki. We would all be dressed in our finery, usually wearing either white or black patent shoes. There would be an unusual amount of food, always with fresh bread. After dinner, Grandma would hand us these hand-made ‘baskets’ made from coffee tins with colorful crepe paper glued to them. We would race out to t
he pasture and start finding eggs and little hard fudge-like candy wrapped in tin foil that Grandma made special for Easter. I saw Dad and Grandma talking Czech, and laughing, always laughing. It was so sweet. One Easter Jillian found a sweet little feral kitten behind the barn and she brought it home with her, hidden in her blouse.”
“After the hunt I would head to the teepee fort I made every Easter in the calf pasture, down by the tank,” Vicki added. “We would be full of ticks. Mom was always so irritated. She made us bathe before we got in the car. We’d have to undress outdoors and jump in a huge galvanized tub, soap off with Grandma’s lye soap—the water was so cold! Dad and Grandma would hold up blankets around the tub for privacy.”
Iris was giggling. “Do you remember the time Hap found the key and started up Grandpa’s Model A? He must have been 10 or 11 years old.”
“Right…yeah…I do,” Vicki said with a smile. “I thought for sure he’d get a whippin’. But Dad surprised us all and threw us in the rumble seat and took us for a ride around the farm. Jillian wasn’t with us that year.”
“He must have had some of that mustang grape wine he always talked about,” Mary said, amused.
“Let’s take a look at the tank,” Vicki suggested.
They drove over to the western side of the farm to look at the large earthen tank, bulldozed years ago to hold catfish and provide water for the livestock.
When you come to the large tank, stop and look at the eastern side. You’ll see pecan trees that are some of the best in Texas. We harvested pecans, peaches, and acorns from the oaks at that tank. We had it stocked with catfish by the Texas Game Commission. I remember teaching Vicki and Hap how to fish from there. This is where the KKK burned that cross. It’s also where lightening struck a cow and killed it.
The tank still held water; the pecan trees stood stately, limbs full of nuts. The oak trees were grand, their gnarled roots holding firm the berms of the tank. There were no peach trees left—they had either died during a drought or had been struck by lightening, which was very likely.
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