The Cross Timbers

by Edward Everett Dale

  Our greatest difficulty was a lack of water for household use. Father had dug two wells and although he struck a plentiful supply of clear, cool water at a depth of about thirty feet, it tasted as though the contents of a family medicine chest had been dumped into it. Just what minerals it had in solution we never knew, for no one in the community had ever heard of water analysis. Strangers who were called upon for information tasted it, made a face, and guessed that it might be saltpeter, gypsum, or any other mineral of which they knew.

  As a result, we were forced to haul water in barrels from a big spring half a mile away or from the well of our nearest neighbor. A small stock pond was built in the hog pasture to supply water for the livestock, but in time of drought we sometimes rode the horses to the spring to water them. We also often took the family washing to the spring or the neighbor’s well on “washday.”

  The railroad which ran along the western edge of my father’s farm was the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. On it, a mile and a half south of us, was the little village of Keller. This was our nearest town though Roanoke was only three miles north of our home. Fifteen miles south of Keller was Fort Worth, at that time a little city of perhaps thirty thousand. I never visited it, however, until after I was eight years old. In fact a trip to that city was something to be considered carefully, and almost prayerfully, for a journey of sixteen and a half miles in a farm wagon was quite an adventure. One was forced to start at dawn and seldom got back until after dark. Besides, my father felt that the relationship between Fort Worth and ancient Sodom was much the same as that between Minneapolis and St. Paul—a feeling which at that time may have had some justification!

  In the fall of 1884 Henry sold his Nebraska farm and came to Texas to spend the winter with us. He drove down with a new wagon and a team of large horses and considerable money in his pocket. He had developed a great interest in photography and promptly bought a couple of cameras and materials for developing pictures.

  Obviously, no one in the community had any money to buy photographs, but he made many tintypes and other photographs of members of the family. These he touched up with paint until we looked like Indians ready for the warpath. He put gold rings on our fingers and, if not bells on our toes, brooches and watch chains on blouses and vests that had never known such adornment. When winter was over he gave up the venture and drove out to the Wichita Falls and Vernon, Texas, area to engage in freighting, hunting, and trapping.

  Mattie had spent part of the fall and winter of 1884–1885 at Fort Griffin visiting Jay, who had secured a room for her at the home of his landlady. She must have had a wonderful time attending parties and socials in this little frontier town, where the coming of an attractive young girl was an event of major importance. Here she made many friends, including the young man she was to marry later.

  Jay’s employers not only owned the large general merchandise establishment for which he was bookkeeper but also had extensive ranching interests and some manufacturing enterprises in Mexico. In the spring of 1885 they were sending a herd of 2,500 steers north to a range in North Dakota. Jay, tired of indoor life, asked them to give his brother John and him a job on this northern drive.

  With some reluctance they agreed and the two brothers made the long drive to the range of the Long X Ranch near that of Theodore Roosevelt. Here Jay remained for a year, but the following summer his employers offered him the job of bookkeeper for a cottonseed-oil mill and soap factory they owned in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and he gladly accepted. Later that summer Mattie returned to Fort Griffin to visit friends there and soon wrote that she had married the young man she had met the preceding winter.

  That fall came the death of my mother. She was a sweet-faced, gentle woman, too frail perhaps for the hard life of the American frontier of that time. Her health had been bad for two or three years, but she was always cheerful and happy and was never confined to her bed.

  For some reason I was sleeping on the little trundle bed in the back bedroom when I was awakened by George shaking my shoulder and saying, “Oh, Ed, poor old Ma is dead, we won’t ever get to see her any more.”

  I sat up with my eyes heavy with sleep not quite able to realize the tragedy that had befallen us. Then my father came in and kissed me gently and went out. I got up and dressed; while going through the living room to the kitchen I saw a sheet spread over something on the bed which I knew must be my mother’s body. Lucy and a couple of other women were in the kitchen, while George was outside doing the chores, and Father had gone to Keller for a casket.

  The women fixed me some breakfast and when George had finished with feeding the livestock, he was sent to notify two or three of the neighbors and I trailed along. When we reached the first house George knocked at the door and when a woman opened it he said, “They sent me over to ask if you’d come over and help us a little. Ma died last night and we need a little help.”

  The shocked look on the woman’s face as George made his simple announcement is still vivid in my memory. She replied that she would be right over and George and I went on to take our message to a couple of other neighbors.

  When we reached home, she and three or four other neighbor women were there. Some of them had brought their children, who were playing about in the yard. On the little porch before the front door an old woman sat in a rocking chair picking out the seeds from a pile of cotton in her lap to make a little pillow for my mother’s head. I went inside and saw a long black box with shining handles, which I knew was the coffin to hold her body.

  I joined the other children at play in the yard while the women inside the house, with rough, toil-worn hands, prepared the body for burial and cooked dinner and supper. Most of them then returned to their homes, but three or four men and women remained to watch throughout the night, as was the universal custom.

  The next afternoon the casket was placed in a wagon, and we all drove to the little Bourland Cemetery, where Reverend Bourland conducted a brief funeral service. The casket was then lowered into the grave which willing neighbors filled. Then my father, George, and I, accompanied by Tom and Lucy, returned to our little house which seemed strangely empty and lonely. The next day, however, Alice resigned her job in the hospital and came home to keep house for us.

  2. Neighbors and Visitors

  It is fortunate that children seldom brood long over a tragic loss or great sorrow. George and I loved our mother dearly but her passing made little change in the normal pattern of our lives. Our sister Alice, who was a fairly large blonde woman, took over the management of the little household with expert hands.

  She was a good cook, an excellent housekeeper, and so much older than ourselves that we accorded to her the same respect that we had always given to our mother. In fact, courtesy to older persons had been taught me so thoroughly since earliest childhood that my practice of it proved a bit embarrassing sometimes in later life, when some people thought me old-fashioned.

  Upon one occasion I heard someone calling me from the next room. Thinking it was George, I yelled, “What!” Unfortunately it was my father, who came in frowning as he asked, “What do you mean by answering me like that? Isn’t that a pretty way for a boy to talk to his father? You say ‘Sir’ when you speak to me.”

  I could only reply in stammering fashion that I thought it had been George calling me, which was the Gospel truth.

  Long before the death of my mother I had developed something of a local reputation for singing and quoting verse. This was probably due to my lisping voice and inability to pronounce the letter s. One of my favorite songs was the old ballad about Sam Bass, the Texas outlaw, whose center of operation had been the town of Denton, about twenty miles north of our home. My own version of the first two stanzas was as follows:

  Ham Bath wath born in Indiana-a-a,

  It wath hith native home

  And at the age of heventeen

  Young Ham began to roam.

  He firth came out to Texath

  A team-ter for to be


  A kinder hearted fellow

  You heldom ever hee.

  ’Tarted with a herd of Texath cattle

  The Black Hillth for to hee

  Arrived at the town of Denton

  And there got on a ’pree

  Hold out in Cuther Hity

  And there got on a ’pree

  A tougher het of cowboyth

  You heldom ever hee.

  My love of verses or rhyming lines also came very early and is still with me. When I was a small youngster, however, this was chiefly because the ringing words of a poem appealed to me, just as did the rattling of pebbles which I put in a tin can and shook to accompany my so-called singing.

  Probably the first rhyme I ever memorized must have been read to me from a Democratic newspaper soon after the presidential election in November, 1884, but it still sticks in my memory as this is written in 1965:

  Blaine on a warhorse

  Logan on a mule

  Butler on a saw-horse

  Looking like a fool.

  Cleveland in the White House

  Counting out his money

  Hendricks in the hó-tel

  Eating bread and honey.

  It must be confessed that I never sang or quoted poetry when in the presence of my father or any adult visitor but only when playing or working alone or when performing for the doubtful benefit of George or kids of the neighbors.

  In a so-called “horse and buggy age,” though my father never owned a buggy in his life, our friends and neighbors were largely limited to persons living within a radius of three or four miles of our home. Moreover, some of the farms near us were occupied by renters, who moved frequently. As a result, in the period of ten years when we lived in the Cross Timbers three or four families might occupy a single farm, each living on it for only two or three years.

  When I was about five years old, one of our neighbors, Jap Blodgett, who lived in the edge of the timber southwest of us, had to make a week’s trip to Wise County, some thirty miles west of Keller. His family—consisting of his wife; a fourteen-year-old daughter, Sarah Ellen; Bill, about George’s age; and Jane, about my own—were afraid to stay alone at night. Jap accordingly asked George to come and spend the nights with them while he was away, and I always tagged along. Just how much protection a boy of ten could give to them apparently never occurred to Jap.

  Mrs. Blodgett insisted that we always come and have supper with the children and her. After supper we always played marbles with Bill until dark and then “fox and geese” by the light of a small brass lamp until bedtime. It was cotton-picking season, and in one corner of the so-called living room Jap had built a large pen, into which the full cotton sacks had been emptied as they were brought in from the field. The top of this pen of cotton had been leveled and quilts spread over it. Here George, Bill, and I slept every night.

  When morning came and Mrs. Blodgett called that breakfast was nearly ready George and I rolled out and dressed instantly. Bill’s mother never called him, but merely turned the cover back and started spanking him as she exclaimed; “Git up from there you lazy, triflin’ rascal you! Breakfast is just about ready and them cows has to be milked. Git up now this minute.”

  Groaning and yawning, Bill would at last bestir himself and slip on his shirt and overalls. He would then snort two or three times in the washpan as he dabbed a little water on the central part of his face, dry it with a towel, and sit down to breakfast.

  I can remember thinking, even this early, how different the Blodgett home was from our own. My father would never have thought of piling cotton in the house. He would either build a pen for it at the end of the field and cover it with a wagon sheet or empty the full sacks directly into the wagon in which the cotton was to be hauled to the gin. I noted too that the Blodgett home was dirty, though our own was always scrupulously clean, and that Bill said “You-uns” in speaking of George and me. This was bad to me, though Heaven knows my own use of English left much to be desired.

  Jap returned to report that he had found and bought a little farm in Wise County. As soon as the crops had been harvested the Blodgetts removed to it and we never saw them again.

  They were replaced by the Elstons, but they stayed only a year and we never “neighbored” with them very much. They had no children, but Mrs. Elston’s nephew, George, lived with them. He was about my age and once told me that he was “an orphan and a half” because his father and mother were dead and his brother was dead!

  The farm was then bought by Jake West, who lived there for many years. He and his wife, “Pet,” had no children, but Pet’s brother, Bob Kemp, lived with them. He was about a year older than I but we played together sometimes and both of us attended the Keller School.

  Jake’s teen-age sister, Evie, also visited Pet and him from time to time, often staying for several weeks. One summer evening Alice, George, and I had dropped over to the Wests’ after supper to visit until bedtime. Because it was very warm, chairs were brought out to the back yard and we were sitting there talking. Soon after dark we heard an unearthly scream from the nearby trees. Both Evie and Pet were nearly scared out of their wits until investigation proved that it was only the cry of a harmless little screech owl.

  “I just didn’t know what it might be,” said Evie apologetically, “with that child dyin’ over here at Smith’s just night before last.”

  The old superstition that the spirit of a person who had just died might hang around its familiar haunts for several days was common in many parts of America seventy-five or a hundred years ago.

  Probably not many of our neighbors believed this, but some of them had other superstitions equally absurd. One day Fletcher Williams, a neighbor boy, came up when George and I were throwing rocks at a big frog at the edge of the water in the stock pond.

  “Stop that!” he called excitedly. “Don’t you know that if you kill a frog it will make your cows give bloody milk?”

  We laughed at Fletcher to show scorn at any such idea but he still insisted that it was true. Upon another occasion I asked a girl carrying her baby brother what was the small dark object on a string tied about the baby’s neck.

  “A mole’s foot,” she replied. “We tied it around his neck so cuttin’ his teeth wouldn’t be so hard for him.”

  George and I both scoffed at this, just as we did at old man Smith’s carrying a potato in his pocket to relieve his rheumatism, but it must be confessed that we had a few superstitions of our own.

  Someone had told us a yarn about an old fellow who had gone out to his watermelon patch in early spring and counted all the little melons. Unfortunately, he had pointed his finger at each one as he counted and the following morning found that every one at which he had pointed had dropped off the vine! I doubt if we really believed this but just to be on the safe side we never pointed a finger at any baby melon, but used a stick or a fist or foot to call attention to it!

  We had also been told by some lad in the neighborhood that if you were walking along the road and your side began to hurt, it was easy to stop it. All you had to do was to stoop over and pick up a small rock, turn it over, spit on it, and then replace it with the “spit side” down and the pain in your side would be gone. I tried this a few times and it always worked but I later found that pausing long enough to stoop over and straighten up brought the same relief.

  Our nearest neighbor during the entire time that we lived in the Cross Timbers was “Uncle” Jack Clark and his wife, probably christened “Marie” but called “Mariar.” The Clarks owned a twenty-acre farm joining ours on the east. About five acres of this was woodland, leaving only fifteen acres in cultivation minus the space occupied by the house, yard, and out buildings. Their family consisted of three sons and two small daughters. John, the oldest son, was about the age of George. Bill was about my age, and Ben a year or so younger. To provide a living for a family of that size the Clarks needed to rent fifteen or twenty acres of land every year from someone in the community who owned more land than h
e could cultivate.

  Jack was born and reared in Tennessee, but his family had migrated to Grayson County, Texas; after marrying Mariar he had removed westward to our neighborhood and had bought this little farm. Since his home was only a quarter of a mile from ours we saw him and his youngsters nearly every day, for we usually hauled barrels of water for household use from his well.

  He was a queer character who walked in a curious crablike, sideling fashion, possibly due to some injury or a slight stroke. Before meeting anyone he would call out, while still sixty to seventy feet away, whatever he happened to be thinking about at the moment, always followed by a “yep, yep, yep.” One day George and I were walking along the road leading to Uncle Jack’s house and saw him coming to meet us. When he was about twenty yards away he suddenly leaped into the air, executed half a dozen fancy dance steps and called to us, “All jine hands and skip to my Lou!—A game we used to play back in Tennessee, Georgy, yep, yep, yep. Guess you and Eddie never played it. Lots o’ fun though, yep, yep, yep!”

  Under the Common Law of most backwoods rural areas, including the Texas Cross Timbers, there was a curious division of property in every family. The chickens, milk cows, and garden belonged to the wife, while the horses, dogs, pigs, and farming tools were owned by the man. Usually the wife milked the cows, although a doting husband would sometimes regularly relieve her of this task. In any case, however, the “butter-and-egg” money and the proceeds from the sale of any garden vegetables were sometimes about all that the housewife had to spend as she pleased. In consequence, she diligently cared for the chickens, growing as many as possible, and insisted that the cows be well fed so that they would give plenty of milk to make enough butter for the family and some to sell.

  No woman in our community was more solicitous in such matters than Mrs. Clark. When the cows began to yield less milk she earnestly urged her husband to feed them more, and Jack responded that he would add a full feeding of cottonseed to their hitherto scanty ration of fodder. The result was miraculous. Jack, who did the milking, began to bring in each morning and evening two huge pails almost overflowing with milk instead of only a little over half-full. Yet the quantity of butter made remained the same as before. Mrs. Clark was puzzled until she at last caught Jack stopping at the well and filling the half-empty milk pails with water! Fortunately, she had a sense of humor and was so pleased with her husband’s cleverness in trying to keep peace in the family that she gleefully told the story to the neighbors.