Chapter 11

Spring & Summer in Texas

As spring came, the wind blew all the time from some direction—mostly the west.  We would often come home from school and find Mama’s eyes red from smoke and crying.  Our kitchen was a side room and the stovepipe was not high enough so the wind blew down it and sent smoke into the house in great puffs until the house was filled and the doors had to be opened, bringing in the cold.  The cook stove didn’t work at all.  Mama would cook what she could on the heater.  Some time passed before a neighbor told us what was wrong—then Papa got some more stovepipe and put it up.  The wind blew it down.  He put it up again.  It blew down again.  Finally, he put it up and tied it with wires to the roof so it wouldn’t fall.

The hard winds made the walls of the schoolhouse swell in and out like a blacksmith’s bellows—the teacher would turn out school for fear the house would blow down and we would fight our way home, our clothes almost blowing off.  These fair weather storms were something we couldn’t understand—where did all that wind come from?  Wind and no rain.

One day at afternoon recess two young men came to the schoolhouse on a horse and wild mule, which they were breaking.  Some of we little girls were in the house.  They rode up to the door asking for a drink of water.  Another girl went for the water.  I went to the door, and not thinking of being afraid, started to rub the mule on the nose.  The fellow urged him a little closer, and into the house he came pitching and bucking up and down the aisles.  We girls went out of there screaming and climbing onto anything to get away from that mule, as scared as if an African lion had been let loose among us.  They got him out of the house, and Mr. Foster helped get him off the school round, and he went off across the prairie still pitching and bucking.  When we got home and told Mama about it, she said, “What next?  Cold, wind and smoke, now mules in the school house!”

When there was nothing to do in the fields, Papa would cut prickly pears and put them in piles.  When he had them all cut, he hauled them in the wagon to the back of the pasture and burned them.  Stickers on the cactus came off in the wagon; Papa would sweep them out with a broom—the big ones, at least.   The little ones were so fine they could barely be seen and stayed in the wagon.  They would get into Papa’s clothes and work into his skin to torment him.

Bluebonnets bloomed in the pastures and looked as if the blue sky had come down and spread out over the ground.  Other flowers bloomed in patches.  Prairie pinks in their lovely shades of pink, rose and salmon.  Little white daisies in clumps.  Wild cosmos sprinkled the picture with a beautiful shade of dark red.  A few prickly pears left to bloom the most delicately beautiful flowers of all.  We had never seen anything like it—our whole pasture a veritable flower garden, except the front yard, which was one big solid rock.

We gathered armfuls of flowers and made bouquets, and, I think Mama almost forgot the continually blowing wind.  I missed the woods, with their dogwood, honeysuckle and ivy in bloom, our rose and lilacs and apple blossoms and the songs of the birds.  But, I got out at night and walked in the pasture among the flowers in the moonlight and though long thoughts, looking away to the lights of Hamilton, twelve miles away.  Only once did I get homesick enough to cry.  One night I cried myself to sleep thinking of Grandpa and Grandma, afraid I would never see them again, and I didn’t.

The people all lived in big nice homes.  The Kavenaughs (Mr. and Mrs., Verna, Vera, Cecil and Lawrence) lived in a five bedroom home with bath, wall-to-wall carpeting, crystal chandeliers and velvet drapes, yet they visited us and treated us as equals, as did all the community.  The Porterfields ate with us, and asked us to spend nights with them, and we did.  The Blacklocks had five little girls, Johnnie, Dot, Essie, Hope and Rose, and a piano, which I loved to play with all of us singing.

The Charlie McClintocks soon seemed like homefolks.  Papa and Mama had known them in Alabama when they were young.  Mr. Mc. was Aunt Sidney’s brother, and Mrs. Mc. was the Mitchell’s daughter.  He was tall, red-headed and jolly, and they were two of the kindest people I ever knew.  They had a large family, seven girls (one married) and two boys.  Iula, Eva, Henry, Troy and Truett were around our age.  We were together often.  They all just took the place of our grandpas, grandmas, uncles, aunts and cousins.

Papa was appointed county lecturer for the Farmer’s Union, and his way paid to the convention at Galveston.  Still no rain came, big black clouds and thunder, but no rain, just wind.  But Papa whistled and sang and plowed, thinking that some day we would have a nice house and barn like our neighbors.

The corn grew tall and made a shade for us to walk through to the well as we chopped cotton.  How good it felt, and how sweet whispering of the cottonwood leaves—and how good that water tasted after walking up and down those rows in that parching burning sun.  Clouds stacks up on top of clouds like castles in the sky, but no rain.  What were clouds for if not to rain?  It was hard to understand.

Heat glimmers danced over the fields.  Hot winds blew and the sun beamed down parching the soil to a powdery dust.  The corn started twisting and Mr. Porterfield said, “If we get any good out of the corn we’ll have to cut the tops.”  So they cut corn tops and let them dry and hauled them to the barn.

The well in the field went dry and we had to carry water in a jug wrapped in a tow sack.  We would we wet the sack, but it wouldn’t stay wet.  We kept a jug at each end of the field and the rows were half a mile long.  OH, how dry and thirst we would get before we could hoe a row and Chester wouldn’t let us go and get a drink.  We had to hoe to the end of the row.  As we trudged up and down the rows digging a spring of grass here and there (Papa though every spring must be out) our feet burned and our mouths parched.  We spit cotton and licked our lips and watched the windmills in the distance “clank, clanking”, bringing up precious water.  Chester would tell us if we would work instead of watching windmills we would get water sooner.  But, Elsie and I were pure-dee sissies and though Chester a hard master.  He was so much more brave than we.

We could see Grandpa’s spring again in a mossy dell, shaded by beeches and willows and alders.  Cool sparkling water bubbling up and pouring over the side of the spring box and running off in a beautiful clear stream.  Oh, to be there!  To lie down and let that cool water pour into our mouths, to splash our hands and faces in it and feel its coolness running over parched feet as we waded up and down the stream—and there was Bluff Spring with water so cold it hurt your teeth, bubbling out from beneath a bluff.  “Cool, clear water.”  It was maddening.  We would cry and beg, “I’m burning up, I’m dying.”  But we must hoe to the end of the row.  When we at last reached the end of the row, Chester wouldn’t let us drink much water until we had passed it on to the next one.  “It might hurt us,” he would say.  I wonder now how he could have been so wise and brave while not being a very big boy.  Are boys naturally braver and wiser than girls?

As hard as we thought Chester was, he was not totally without compassion.  One day, he found a baby streak-field lizard.  Imagining it to be very thirst, he put it in his pocket and carried it, as he hoed, to the end of the row.  Then he made a hole in the ground packing in the dirt hard and filled it with water and put the lizard by it.  It drank, then he put it back in his pocket and hoed back to where he had found it and put it out.

The remaining corn leaves sang a mournful dirge as we walked through them, carrying our water jug to the shade of the cottonwood tree by the dry well to rest and pass the jug around, reveling in the water, before starting back through the hot sun to the other end.  The cottonwood leaves still sang in the wind, but it was a song of despair.

We had no shades outside to play in, so we had to play in the house.  Mama had never let us get on the beds in the daytime, but now it was too hot to do anything else, so she let us sit or lie on the beds anytime.

Late in the afternoons we could play in the lot under the cow and mule shed and in the shade of the corn crib.  We would rake the manure, which was dry as powder, into rows for walls to be different rooms of our playhouse.

The sun, beaming down on our rocky yard, heated it up like a furnace and reflected into the house, which by night became almost unbearable.  The beds were so hot we couldn’t sleep on them.  The wind stopped blowing and we all but suffocated night after night.  I don’t remember how the others tried to sleep, but I recall Mama lying in the floor with her feet propped up in the window, and I on my knees on the floor with my head on the said of the bed.  We all fanned and moaned and groaned.  We had been accustomed to pleasant summer nights and sleeping in comfort with the windows and doors closed.

Our hog pen was made of poles, and the hog rooted under it and got out.  We all worked trying to get it back.  It would run and we would run after it.  When we got it back in the pen, Papa saw it was too hot so he got water to pour over it.  But it died, leaving us hogless and feeling almost helpless.

The Blacklocks invited us to come and eat ice ream with them on a Saturday night.  O joy!  The cream was made in the yard.  We took turns turning the crank or sitting on the freezer while the men turned.  When it was too hard to turn, we played hide and seek and booger while waiting for it to mellow.  Dishes and spoons were brought out and we all gathered round.  The heat was forgotten for a season while everybody cooled off with that delicious ice cream.  Nothing was better than ice cream—unless it was more ice cream.

There was the Hico Old Settler’s Reunion with its merry-go-round, ferris wheel, cat-racks, balloons and all kind of jolly things.  The merry-go-round was the most fun of all with its loud piping music and ponies—black and white ones, and speckled and gray.

One day our feet almost blistered walking down the road to the mail box and we could hardly wait to get there to cool them in Egg Creek, only to find the creek dried up.  We went to the store and Dr. Agee, who ran the combination grocery, drygoods and drug store, was advising everyone to stay in and take it easy.  The temperature was 110 degrees in the shade.  We “took it easy” back to Iula’s and Eva’s house, where we stopped for awhile without Mama’s consent, feeling sure she would understand, and she did when we told her what the doctor said.

The McClintocks, May, Emme and Ike Porterfield, Viola and John Jackson (Dr. Agee’s grandchildren), and all of us went to the Leon River and camped two days and a night and what fun!  I could smell the water before we got to it and like a longhorn steer, wanted to run and get in it.  Papa and Mr. McClintock did a lot of fishing.  The rest of us played in the water to our heart’s content and had the time of our lives, splashing, squealing and shouting with joy.  When we started home I wanted to take the water with me.  That’s what I loved.  Was it I who had been afraid Texas might be covered with water again?  Never Texas!!

Summer burned on.  All our corn burned up but a little in a draw at the end of the field.  Mama gathered all we made and brought it to the house in her apron.  The cotton made only a boll here and there.  Papa bought a crop in Erath County, and we went there and picked it.  Uncle Dock’s boys and girls came and helped us—twelve of us in a four-room house.  Mr. McClintock also bought a crop nearby, and we had fun.

We had a letter from the Porterfields.  They had picked our cotton—one scrappy bale on forty acres.  It had rained and prospects were good for a crop another year, so we moved back, we kids started to school, and Papa started farming with high hopes again.