Treasury of Joy & Inspiration

by Editors of Reader's Digest

Once, on the island of St. Lucia, an elephant brought over by a rich estate owner emerged from the woods into a clearing where Santos was merrily scattering a flock of chickens. Our dog reacted in character: he charged. The elephant panicked, flaring its ears, splitting the air with its trumpet call and smacking the ground with its trunk as Santos dodged and darted underfoot. We had to catch Santos and drag him away.

  We’d never see another like him, I thought as I steered upriver.

  Soon after, I woke one night to an empty bed. I found Dorothy sitting in the moonlight. From the way her eyes glistened, I could tell she’d been thinking of Santos. I sat down and put an arm around her. After a while she spoke. “You know what I miss most? His shaggy mane filling the porthole. He liked to watch me cook. Now every time a shadow falls over that port, it reminds me of the love in those bright black eyes.”

  We watched the moon slip below the treetops; then, our hearts filled with grief, we went back to bed.

  Two weeks passed as we made our way 150 miles up the Gambia River. One afternoon Dorothy and I were reinforcing the deck awning when I saw a catamaran with a man on board inspecting us with binoculars.

  “Are you the Americans who lost the dog?” he called.

  “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “I don’t know if it is yours, but the police at Denton Bridge have a small black dog found on the beach.”

  Everyone tumbled up on deck shouting, “Oh, my God! Yes! Yes!” But I cautioned, “Someone might have found a stray mutt and brought it in, hoping for the reward. Don’t get your hopes too high.”

  Dorothy and I took a series of bush taxis and old buses back to Banjul the next morning. With hope and trepidation we caught a taxi to Denton Bridge to see if Santos had truly survived.

  “You’ve come for your dog!” the police officer on duty greeted us. He turned and called to a boy, “Go bring the dog.” Dorothy and I waited on tenterhooks.

  Then, led on a ratty piece of string down the path, there was Santos. He walked with a limp, head down. But when Dorothy called “Santos,” his head shot up, his ears snapped forward, his whole body trembled as that beloved voice registered. He leapt into her arms and covered her face with licks. Dorothy hugged him, her eyes filled with tears.

  The police officer told us that the morning after we’d hit the power lines, a Swedish tourist was walking the beach and found Santos—six miles from Oyster Creek. The Swede smuggled the wet, hungry animal into his hotel room and fed him. When the Swede had to fly home, he gave Santos to the police.

  We noticed Santos’s muzzle seemed whiter, and when we patted him on his right flank, he sometimes yelped in pain. We wondered what he’d experienced as he was swept into the surf and carried along the coast. We marveled at his fortitude and his luck. But most of all we were grateful to have him back.

  Next morning we made our way back upriver. We arrived just after sundown and shouted for the boys.

  “Do you have him?” they called. Dorothy urged the dog to bark. His unmistakable voice rang across the river, to be answered by a cheer of wild exuberance.

  Later that night we toasted Santos with lemonade. No need for champagne when euphoria spiced the air we breathed. Santos was back. Our family was intact.

  Life in These United States

  My wife and I were looking at paintings in a gallery. One was of a beautiful nude woman with only a little foliage covering her private areas.

  “Bad taste,” muttered my wife, and moved on. Not me. I lingered, completely transfixed, until I heard her shout, “What are you waiting for—autumn?”Dennis Dook

  • • •

  Robbie, my nine-year-old grandson, recently asked his mother about puberty. She explained that it occurs when children’s bodies begin to change. “Boys,” she said, “grow taller and develop muscles. Their voices deepen, and they start to grow hair, like facial hair.” She paused. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I just hope it happens on a Saturday, when I’m not in school.” Michael Stephenson

  “A Man Don’t Know What He Can Do”

  by Elise Miller Davis

  October 1952

  Just before midnight Roy Gaby, driving for a Houston, Texas, trucking company, ran out of gasoline while returning from Waco in a heavy 14-wheel truck-trailer. From a house nearby he telephoned his wife, “SOS, honey, I’m out of gas.” Mrs. Gaby sighed, bundled up the baby and set out to the rescue in the family car. It was February 18, 1952.

  On the way home Mrs. Gaby drove ahead of Roy. About ten miles from Houston a speeding car, with an apparently drunken driver who never stopped, darted out of a side road, forcing Mrs. Gaby’s car off the highway on the right. In the rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of Roy’s truck swerving to avoid a collision. Then she heard a crash.

  The engine had smashed into a mammoth oak tree, the trailer had piled up on the cab and Roy was trapped in the twisted debris.

  A passing motorist rushed into the village of Fairbanks and notified Deputy Sheriff Don Henry.

  Henry decided to try “untelescoping” the wreck. “We attached a wrecker to the front of the mashed-in engine, hoping to pull it straight enough to get Gaby out. But the idea didn’t work. We added the power of a truck at the front of the wrecker. Finally two more trucks were attached to the rear, and they pulled in the opposite direction. But still, no soap.”

  Small flames appeared beneath the truck, and there was no extinguisher at hand. Halting passing drivers, Henry set helpers to working frantically at the crumpled doors with hammers and crowbars. The twisted doors refused to budge. Henry crawled onto the hood of the cab and turned his flashlight on the victim. The steering wheel was crushed against ­Gaby’s waist and his feet were pinned between twisted brake and clutch pedals. Tiny flames were licking at his feet.

  “I’m an accident investigator,” Henry told me later, “and I’ve seen a lot of terrible sights. But I’ve never seen one more terrible and I’ve never felt more helpless. I looked at Mrs. Gaby and the baby, then back at the poor guy in the burning cab, and I felt like praying for a miracle.”

  At that moment, a husky black man appeared out of the darkness.

  “Can I help?” he asked quietly. Henry shook his head. Nobody could help if three trucks and a wrecker couldn’t budge that cab, and by the time cutting torchers and fire apparatus arrived it was going to be just too bad. The stranger calmly walked over to the cab, put his hands on the door and wrenched it off!

  Speechless, the crowd watched him reach in the cab and tear out the burning floor mat. Then he put out the flames around Gaby’s legs—with his bare hands.

  “It was just about then that I caught a glimpse of the big fellow’s face,” said one of the witnesses. “At first I thought he was in a trance. Then I saw that set expression for what it was—cold, calculated fury. I’d seen it before—at Pearl Harbor, on Okinawa. I remember thinking: Why, that guy’s not calm, he’s enraged. It was just as if he despised fire.”

  Swiftly, almost as if rehearsed, the black man worked on, poking large arms into the truck cab. “He straightened that steering wheel like it was tin,” the driver of the wrecker said. “With his left hand on the brake pedal and his right on the clutch, he all but uprooted the whole works to free Gaby’s feet.”

  But the crucial job wasn’t done. The victim still lay encased in what witnesses called “a squashed sardine can over a bonfire.”

  Patiently, then stubbornly, the big man struggled to squeeze in beside Gaby. The space was too tiny. Stepping back from the cab, he hesitated fleetingly. The flames were growing. He glared at them, slumped to
a squatting position and began pushing into the cab, fighting crazily. At long last he was in far enough to rest his feet firmly on the floorboard. He started rising slowly. His muscles bulged in the half-light and the sleeves of his shirt tore.

  “My God, he’s trying to push up the top!” a woman’s voice called.

  Neck and shoulders against the caved-in cab roof, he pushed. Hard.

  “We actually heard the metal give,” reported a farmer who had come to the scene. Discussing the rescue afterward, Deputy Henry shook his head, still baffled. “And he held that top up until we could pull Gaby out.”

  In the excitement of attending Gaby, no one thought to thank the stranger or even ask his name. Later, at the hospital with Gaby, Deputy Henry told newsmen: “The mysterious Samson disappeared as quietly as he’d come. If I hadn’t witnessed it I’d never believe a lone man could do a job we couldn’t do with three trucks and a wrecker.”

  “I wish I knew his name,” put in Mrs. Gaby. “He was a giant.”

  No giant, 33-year-old Charles Dennis Jones was in fact six-feet-two inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. He’d been out to nearby Hempstead to change tires on a disabled truck when he came upon the accident. By morning the whole city of Houston was wondering about his identity. Newspapers throughout the country carried the story. But Jones didn’t tell even his wife about his experience. His boss, C. C. Myers, became suspicious, however, when he noticed the big fellow walk away from a group of employees who were discussing the amazing rescue. Remembering the mission he’d sent Jones on the night before, Myers grabbed a photograph from company files and headed for the sheriff’s office. “Yes, that’s him,” agreed Deputy Henry.

  And Myers knew immediately how Charlie Jones found the strength to lick that fire.

  One December night 14 months before, Jones had come home to the three-room house where he lived with his wife, Mildred, and their five small children. Under one arm he carried a tiny pine tree and a single string of Christmas lights.

  They’d had a lot of bad luck that year. Only two months before both his mother and Mildred’s had died within a week, leaving grief, doctor bills, funeral ­expenses. But Evelyn Carol, his eight-year-old first-born, wanted some real Christmas-tree lights and he had them. He’d manage. He was healthy and husky and could stand a 16-hour day. Double work meant double pay. And they had a roof over their heads. Paid for.

  Mildred left for church, where she was singing that evening. Jones tucked in the children. As he undressed, he wondered if he should risk leaving the tree lights on. He decided he would. Evelyn Carol wanted to surprise her mother and he’d promised. He fell asleep.

  Mildred’s pillow was still untouched when Jones awoke, sure he was having a nightmare. There was a burning in his nostrils, a crackling sound in his ears. He heard a child’s cry: “Daddy!” Instantly he was on his feet, awake in a world on fire, pushing through choking waves of smoke, grabbing small bodies until he counted five, finding his way to the open window, pitching the children out.

  People gathered. And Mildred came running through the darkness, crying his name. Then Jones heard a man’s voice, maybe his own: “No, no—Evelyn Carol, come back, come back!” A child’s answer: “But I must get my Christmas lights!” And like a fleeting spirit Evelyn Carol in a little white nightgown ran back toward the flames.

  Later a neighbor told how the men couldn’t hold Jones. How he’d raced after his child but hadn’t reached her because just as he neared the dwelling its last remains exploded. How the blast had thrown Jones to the ground unconscious, and he’d been dragged out of danger.

  The next morning, for the first time in ten years, Charles Dennis Jones failed to report to work at Robertson Transport. Everybody there had heard. When a man loses a child and his home, has four children to support and another one on the way, what can other men do?

  Before nine o’clock a paper was circulating—from workshops to offices to yards. By noon it bore the names of 84 Robertson employees, and was sealed in an envelope and delivered to Charlie Jones. In the envelope Jones found $765.50.

  The following day friends at Hughes Tool Company, where Mildred had formerly worked, sent in $80. By mail, from strangers, came $16. There were countless offers: Can you use a refrigerator? An army cot? A boy’s coat, size six? It seemed everyone had united to help the Jones family. And before long Charlie began to work on a new home. He figured that before the new baby came he’d have his family back under their own roof.

  You could understand why he always would hate fire.

  Reading a newspaper account of Jones’s heroic ­rescue, R. A. Childers, a Houston businessman, wrote the papers, saying he would give $400 to start a fund providing an annual college scholarship for a black high school graduate. The rescue had taken place during Brotherhood Week. “Could anything be more characteristic of brotherhood than the fact that Jones walked away without waiting for thanks?” Childers asked.

  And so it came about in the new house Charlie and Mildred and their children had built with their own hands that they received a group of citizens who informed them of the proposed Charles D. Jones Endowment Fund. Jones heard the committee’s proposal in his faded blue overalls, eyes glazed by unshed tears. His wife stood beside him, his children huddled near. He didn’t say a word.

  Finally, Childers broke the silence. Somehow Charlie must give a statement to the press. There was the mystery he might yet clear up. How in the name of heaven had he managed to wrench off a steel door, beat out flames with his hands, raise with his own back the crushed-in top of a driver’s cab?

  Charlie Jones looked at Childers and at the hushed group around him. He cleared his throat and said, simply:

  “A man don’t know what he can do until another man is hurting.”

  All Our Problems, Solved!

  Scene: A preschool class on plants.

  Teacher: This plant grows something red and round that we use to make spaghetti sauce. What is it?

  Student: Meatballs. Donanne Seese

  The Forked-Stick Phenomenon

  by Emily and Per Ola d’Aulaire

  May 1976

  Condensed from Saturday Evening Post

  Dowsing, as a way of locating underground water, lacks any scientific basis, according to most geologists. How then, to account for its many successes?

  A well-dressed man strolls across a meadow on his 130-acre Connecticut farm, a forked twig gripped between his upturned hands. Onlookers giggle. He ignores them, concentrating on the stick. Near a corner of the field, the tip of the twig suddenly turns down, seemingly pulled by some other-worldly force. He carefully marks the spot, and then calls in a well driller, telling him there’s water—plenty of it—about 125 feet down. The driller shrugs. “It’s your money,” he says, and starts work.

  Later comes the call: “We’ve hit an underground river! At 127 feet. Enough water for the whole town.”

  That is what happened to Joseph Baum, a Hartford, Connecticut, advertising executive, ten years ago when he needed water for his farm. Baum had been skeptical about dowsing, but changed his mind back in 1950 after reluctantly joining a friend on a dowsing expedition. Soon, people were calling him a dowser, a diviner, a water witch. Since that time he has located some two dozen wells for other people, and even written a book on the subject (The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing,Crown).

  This kind of innate ability to find water has fascinated mankind for centuries. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have tried dowsing, and been intrigued. Reputedly, Thomas Edison attributed successful dowsing to electricity—while Albert Einstein thought the explanation lay in electromagnetism. The American Society of Dowsers estimates that nearly a quarter-million water wells sunk on the Atlantic seaboard since Colonial times have been located by “witching.” Today, some 25,000 people like Baum practice the arcane art in the United States, while millio
ns more may possess the skill.

  One of those maddeningly slippery phenomena that slide back and forth between truth and fiction, dowsing has long been a subject of controversy. Skeptics scoff at it as illogical, ridiculous, scientifically impossible. (Dowsers, in turn, point out that aero­dynamically, bumblebees can’t fly.) Geologists claim that in many places water can be found no matter where one digs. Then why, counter the dowsers, can they often find water where trained geologists can’t?

  Take the case of New Sharon, Maine, a small town which until last summer was so short of water that residents were restricted to one bath a week. In five years, the town had sunk $180,000 worth of federal loans into geological studies and deep wells that consistently turned up dry. As a last resort, community officials hired a professional dowser for $500. Armed with his divining rod, he shortly located a site. When drilled, the well provided all the water the town could use.

  Or take the case of the Shoreline Clinic in Essex, Connecticut. This million-dollar regional health-care center was nearing completion in 1975. Though several thousand dollars had been spent, engineers found themselves unable to get sufficient water from four wells sunk at sites deemed hydrologically most promising. A local water witch volunteered his services. Following the pull of his V-shaped fiberglass divining rod, he headed toward the rear of the clinic property. There the stick suddenly bobbed earthward. A drill rig started work, and soon there was a new well, yielding 20 gallons a minute—plenty of water for the new clinic.

  “Just because science can’t explain it doesn’t mean dowsing can’t work,” says Baum. “We are still surrounded by mysteries here on earth which at present cannot be explained.”

  The practice of dowsing goes back for millennia. Archeologists found an 8,000-year-old cave painting in North Africa’s Atlas Mountains which shows a dowser, divining rod in hand, surrounded by a group of onlookers. The idea of the magic wand may well have begun with the divining rod. Some scholars trace the work of dowsers through Biblical times. When Moses smote the rock to bring forth water in the wilderness, was he in fact dowsing?