The Cross Timbers

by Edward Everett Dale

  “Mean?” replied George. “It means just what it says. You’ve seen sparks fly when we’d hit a rock a glancing lick with a hammer. Well, ole Paul’s horse was shod, so his iron shoes knocked sparks from rocks and set the whole blamed country a-fire. You know the leaves and grass would still be dry in April that far north. Why before we had matches, people always had to use a flint and steel to start a fire.”

  Of course I accepted this explanation as I did everything else that my big brother told me. Sparks from coal-burning locomotives often set the dry leaves on fire during the winter season in our neighborhood. In fact, such fires had burned part of our brush fences and made it necessary to split more rails to enclose one side of a field.

  Mr. Minor’s school was the last one that I attended long enough to amount to anything during my ten years of life in the Cross Timbers. The following year, 1891–1892, a new man came to teach the Keller School. Rains delayed cotton picking that autumn so that we were late getting ours picked and then we also helped some of the neighbors. In consequence, the school term was half over before I entered. As spring planting caused me to leave early, my attendance that year was only for a few weeks.

  During the few years that I was of school age it is doubtful if I attended the Keller School as much as twelve months. Certainly, I learned more at home by reading during these years than at school. In fact, only at Mr. Minor’s school did I feel that my education was advanced very much. Most of the other teachers declared that review was useful and put me back in all subjects to go over material that I had studied the previous year.

  Yet, my schooling in these years was not without its rewards. I became familiar with classroom procedure, picked up much information from the reading of pupils in the more advanced classes, and made many new friends. During the long walks to and from school I developed close friendships with two or three other boys, with whom I later visited and played.

  10. Cross Timbers Society

  For older people of the Cross Timbers, social activities or diversions were limited largely to all-day visits, such as we often had with the Brileys, short visits in the afternoon or evening with nearby neighbors, and attendance at Church and Sunday School. Since my father was a devout member of the Primitive Baptist Church, whose members did not believe in Sunday Schools, none of us ever attended the Sunday Schools of the Methodists or Missionary Baptists, which were the leading denominations at Keller.

  The Primitive, or Old School, Baptists, often called the “Hardshell Baptists,” are usually depicted as a grossly ignorant group who practice foot washing and oppose not only Sunday Schools but foreign missions. No doubt, many Hardshell Baptists in the mountainous regions of some of the states farther east are backward and ignorant even today, but this was not true of the group to which my father belonged.

  Among the leading members of his church was Brother McKelvey, a Civil War veteran from Tennessee, who was for several years county treasurer of Denton County. Others were Brother McMakin of Georgia, who took the Atlanta Constitution and believed implicitly everything he read in it. Still others were prosperous farmers, including Brother Bourland, who lived only about a mile southeast of our home in one of the largest and most attractive houses in the community.

  Although he did not believe in Sunday Schools, our father’s Church meant everything to him. He was never happier than when some of his “brethren” came to visit us or when he could visit some of them, and the weather was never too severe for him to attend church. For several years the nearest church of his faith was the Denton Creek Church, some ten miles from our home, but a year or so before we left the Cross Timbers a church was built at Keller. This pleased Father very much, for then we could entertain in our home some of his Church brothers who lived several miles away.

  George and I always shook hands with such visitors and called them “Brother” McMakin or “Brother” Howard instead of “Mister.” We thoroughly enjoyed their visits even when we were keeping “bachelor’s hall” and did our best to help provide them with well-cooked and tasty meals. We enjoyed their conversations too, for although they talked of religion and the Bible a great deal, they frequently told of their old home lands and their boyhood days.

  Brother McKelvey was an especially entertaining talker. He had served for the four years of the Civil War in the Confederate army. During these years he had participated in many battles and bore the scars of many wounds.

  “When I enlisted in the Southern army soon after the war started,” he once told us, “I thought that to get shot meant to be killed, but after being wounded half a dozen times, I learned that this was not true.”

  He said he was so badly wounded in one battle that he was sent to the “dead house” along with the dead and dying, while the surgeons gave their attention to the wounded that they could save or that they had some hope of saving. After lying all night among the dead bodies of his comrades, he was still living in the morning when the detail came to bury the dead. He was then removed to a field hospital and within a couple of months was back with his regiment again.

  Such stories made Brother McKelvey a doubly welcome guest, but he also related humorous incidents of his life as a boy and youth in Tennessee. Some of these stories dealt with social events such as candy pullings and expeditions to pick up hickory nuts or gather wild grapes or pawpaws. These stories were always told with rare humor and in a most interesting fashion. Many other members of our father’s church who visited us told stirring tales of their adventures as boys or young men before coming to Texas.

  While Father and other members of his church derived a great deal of pleasure from church going, the fact that there were no Sunday Schools, prayer meetings, or ladies’-aid societies made the Old School Baptist Church somewhat less important as a social institution than were the other churches, which had such features, as well as an Epworth League, Christian Endeavor, or Baptist Young People’s Union.

  In addition to participating in church activities and all-day Sunday visits, older women often met in groups to do quilting and to piece quilts, or in a sewing circle to visit while they worked at patching their husbands’ and children’s clothing, at knitting socks, sewing on buttons, and making dresses or other clothing for themselves and their children.

  Such meetings were always in the afternoon and the women’s tongues often moved faster than their fingers as they discussed the local news and gossip. In the summer they often brought their smaller children, who played outside—the little girls making play houses and the small boys riding stick horses around the yard or playing some simple game such as marbles or “last-one-on-wood-is-a-bear.”

  The older men sometimes found the grocery store an attractive social center. This was especially true in winter, when they could sit around the big potbellied stove, chew tobacco, and spit in a flat tobacco box, which was full of sand. Here was an ideal place for the cross-pollination of ideas on politics, religion, and local affairs. The gristmill on Bear Creek, a mile or more east of Keller, was an equally good place for such “man-talk” while waiting to get a “turn” of corn ground.

  As for society in the usual sense of the word, meaning socials, dances, parties, dinners, and luncheons, I was only a more-or-less disinterested observer. Kid parties may have been given in the larger towns or cities, but in rural communities such as ours they were unknown. When a boy had a birthday he was lucky if his mother baked him a cake and only one or two persons spanked him, giving him one lick for each year of his life and “one to grow on.”

  As I was only thirteen when we left the Cross Timbers, girls played little or no part in my life there. Of course, Minnie Brown, referred to in an earlier chapter, was a good playmate, and I liked her, but my feeling about girls was that of the average small boy, who regards them as an unmitigated nuisance. I admitted that there might be an occasional exception but not many.

  Of course, George would often tease me about girls even when I was very small, usually choosing some little girl in the neighborh
ood that he knew I detested, such as Jane Blodgett or Effie Clark. As a boy I had the devil’s own temper, and if something happened to make me angry when I was playing with other children some little girl was sure to chant the old verse:

  Ed is mad and I am glad

  But I know what would please him.

  A bottle of wine to make him shine

  And Effie Clark to squeeze him.

  This, of course, made me doubly furious, but I could do nothing about it except grind my teeth and say to myself, “Oh, if you were only a boy!”

  In previous chapters it has been shown that my brother George was my “guide, philosopher and friend” throughout my boyhood years. Always he was to me the fountainhead of all wisdom, and anything he told me was accepted as Gospel truth. We had never been separated for a single day until Alice and I went west to Navajoe, and when Father and I started on the return journey in June, 1899, my most cherished thought was of being with George again.

  When at long last we reached the home of Tom and Lucy, and George came out to meet us, it was hard to restrain my joy. He seemed equally glad to see me, for it had been three or four months since he had left Navajoe to return to the Cross Timbers and help Tom make a crop.

  Of course we had many things to talk about, but I could not avoid feeling a little disappointed when I discovered that George had a girl! It was not jealousy exactly, but a realization that we no longer had identical interests. Up to that time the current of our thoughts and actions had always run in a common channel—work, playing games with other boys or with one another, fishing, hunting, telling stories, reading and talking over what we had read, plus rambling in the woods in search of mulberries, wild grapes, plums, and persimmons. Now George had an important interest which I could not share.

  Obviously, I should not have been surprised. George was now about sixteen and for several months had been living with Tom and Lucy, whose home was always a haven for young people. Lucy was the youngest child in a family of five children. She had married Tom when she was only a kid not quite sixteen and had never entirely grown up.

  For eight years after her marriage she had no children, and with her husband at work in the fields all day she would have been very lonely had she not always had some girl or woman in her home most of the time. They were not hired girls, but guests, although they always helped with the dishes and other housework. There was little to do, for Lucy was a notoriously sloppy housekeeper, but she was an excellent cook, and she could always find some girl or woman glad to come and stay for several weeks in return for good meals and lodging.

  Because Lucy dearly loved young people and was a born matchmaker there were few Sunday afternoons that two or three young couples did not drop in, sure of a cordial welcome and refreshments of lemonade and cookies, cake, or gingerbread. She was always willing to give a party, at which the young people played such “parlor” games as “pussy wants a corner,” “blind man’s buff,” “fruit basket,” or some of the play-party games.

  Dancing was regarded as sinful in our part of the Cross Timbers, where most of the older people were members of either the Methodist or Baptist Church. There was apparently no objection, however, to the play-party games, in which singing took the place of music. The term “music” is used with reservations, for by no stretch of the imagination could the singing of most of the players be called “vocal music.”

  The origin of some of these games is obscure, but no doubt most of them had been brought to the Texas Cross Timbers as part of the cultural baggage of immigrants from Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and other Southern states.

  Among these many games were “Skip to My Lou,” previously mentioned as a game that Uncle Jack Clark had played in Tennessee, and “Little Brass Wagon,” closely resembling the Virginia Reel. Still others were “Old Dan Tucker,” “The Miller Boy,” “Hog Drovers,” “Coffee Grows on White Oak Trees,” “Mr. Buster,” “We’re Marching Down to New Orleans,” “Buffalo Girls,” and many more.

  The tunes were often quite catchy, but the words meant very little and were sometimes sheer drivel, as may be seen by the first stanza of some that were most popular in our community:

  We’re marching down to New Orleans

  With our drums and fifes a-beating

  The Americans are gaining of the day

  And the British are retreating.

  Mr. Buster, do you love sugar in tea

  Mr. Buster, do you love candy

  Mr. Buster, he can reel and turn

  And swing those girls so handy.

  Happy is the miller boy that lives by the mill

  The mill turns around with a free good will.

  One hand on the hopper and the other in the sack

  The ladies step forward and the gents step back.

  There were variations in the words of “The Miller Boy,” but in both it and “Old Dan Tucker,” there was an extra man, who tried to steal a partner when the ladies stepped forward and the gents stepped back.

  In “Old Dan Tucker” the words were as follows:

  Old Dan Tucker’s down in town

  A-swinging the ladies all around

  First to the right and then to the left

  Then the one he loves the best.

  Get out of the way for Old Dan Tucker

  Came too late to get his supper.

  Supper is over and nothin a-cookin,

  And Old Dan Tucker stands there lookin’

  Dance Tucker, dance Tucker.

  The game was played by the couples standing in a circle, while the extra boy, who represented Old Dan Tucker, stood in the middle. After each boy had swung the girl to his right and the one to his left and the “one he loved the best,” with the words, “Get out of the way for Old Dan Tucker,” the boy and girl of each couple faced each other, joined hands, and danced with short sideways steps completely around the circle in what was called “promenading.”

  The objective of Old Dan Tucker was to steal the partner of some boy who had left her side for a moment to “swing the one he loved the best.” If he succeeded the man left without a partner became the next Dan Tucker. In any case, however, the lone man was expected to dance a brief jig as the couples chanted “Dance Tucker” while they rested a moment from their promenade.

  While this was one of the simplest of the play-party games, none of them were as complex as are some of the square-dance figures of today. I never attended any of the play parties, but when Lucy had a group of young people in for an evening I often joined in in such simple games as “blindfold,” “pinning the tail on the donkey,” and in summer such outdoor games as “drop the handkerchief,” in which both boys and girls took part. George did not go to as many such parties as some boys of the community but went at times and knew all the songs. George’s romance with this first girl was also brief, but there were others later.

  The school at Keller was never a social center except that older people sometimes visited it on Friday afternoons when we had “speaking pieces” or spelling or arithmetic matches. In contrast, the one-room rural school called Mount Gilead, only two or three miles east of our home, had a flourishing literary society every year, which met twice a month on Friday evenings. Not only most of the pupils took part but also many young people of the community who were not in school.

  George and I attended its meetings a few times but never appeared on the programs, which consisted of recitations and declamations, drills, and similar activities by the small fry, and one-act plays by the older persons. The recitations and declamations included such old favorites as “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight,” “How We Tried to Lick the Teacher,” “The Widder Spriggins’ Daughter,” “Spartacus to the Gladiators,” and “The Face on the Bar Room Floor.”

  The younger children, of course, gave short and simple poems and sometimes put on a stunt, in which several small youngsters took part. One, for example, was called “Choice of Trades.” In this, a half dozen small boys, each dressed in suitable garb for his futu
re vocation and carrying the appropriate tools, appeared one by one and recited a short stanza of verse. The lad hoping to study medicine came out with a doctor’s bag and gave a brief speech:

  When I am a man, a man as you see

  I’ll be a doctor if I can, and I can.

  My pills and powders will be nice and sweet

  And you may have just what you want to eat

  When I am a man.

  He might be followed by a would-be farmer wearing a blue shirt and overalls with a hoe or rake over his shoulder. He gave his little speech and retired to be followed by a future cowboy, carpenter, painter, teacher, lawyer. Then they all appeared and marched across the stage, each reciting his own verse.

  The young men and women who were not in school usually gave one-act plays called dialogues. These included such favorites as The Train to Mauro, Arabella’s Poor Relations, and Marrying a Poetess. Others might be blackface comedies, in which some of the characters blacked their faces with burnt cork for their roles as Negroes. The meetings of the Mount Gilead Literary Society were interesting, and the schoolhouse was always filled to overflowing.

  The summer months were usually marked by a huge Fourth of July picnic, and often two or three smaller picnics were held by some Sunday School. Fireworks did not seem to have as much prominence on the Fourth of July as they had at Christmas. Thanksgiving was seldom celebrated at all, at least in our community, and comparatively little attention was given to Easter except by a few families that colored eggs for the children.

  A Fourth of July picnic, however, brought out almost everyone in our neighborhood, for there was always at least one lemonade stand, from which the proprietor loudly proclaimed, “Ice-cold lemonade, made in the shade and stirred with a spade, milk shake and sody-pop!” The youngsters patronized it freely if they had any money. The lemonade was usually in a large barrel which, like the legendary miraculous pitcher, never became dry, for the proprietor added water and ice from time to time. As a result, by the late afternoon the lemon rinds floating on top and a strong imagination were required to assure the patron that he was actually drinking lemonade.