I still don"t know why I was sent to Grandma"s that day, but I remember I was glad I went. I came back with a deep, dark secret of my own and a pleasurable memory to add to my storehouse.
In our youth, if any of us kids complained of feeling a little under the weather, we were given a "scientific" medical examination at bed time. We had to stick out our tongue for our parents to look at. If there was the least bit of white coating on the tongue, it meant we must take a calomel tablet and go to bed.
I"m not sure I am spelling "calomel" correctly because I failed to find the word in my small dictionary. And I sort of doubt that our family doctor knew how to spell it. But it"s just as well. I have yet to find a doctor who can write so anyone can read what he wrote anyway.
But anyhow, that was the science of medicine in our family-if the tongue is coated, take a pretty little pink tablet and wash it down with a gla.s.s of water.
I hated even the thought of taking one. The slightest taste of one gagged me. To prevent vomiting in the kitchen, I would ask Mama if I could go out on the porch and take mine.
Now, I knew I wasn"t apt to vomit on the kitchen floor, but Mama didn"t know it. Another thing she didn"t know was that there was a knothole in the porch floor, under which, as years went by, a small mound of pink tablets grew into a large mound.
They never caught me putting the tablets through the hole because it was always dark. No one ever took calomel in the daytime, unless he had nothing else to do but sit around and wait for a call to the bathroom, which was way out back in the cold-always cold. Not one of us ever had a coated tongue in the summertime.
Mama would say, "Hurry, now, it"s cold out there." I knew full well it was cold out there. But I wasn"t about to take that little pink tablet. I was determined to go through ice or snow or any other bad weather rather than have that little tablet go through me. It didn"t take long for me to put a tablet through a knothole, throw a gla.s.s of water out into the yard, and get back into the warm kitchen. I don"t know how the other kids made out. The knothole was my own secret which I shared with no one.
Looking back, I can easily see that I should have let the entire family in on my secret. They could have saved the cost of the tablets as well as those miserable early morning trips to the cold bathroom. And as it turned out, the white coating on my tongue disappeared during the night the same as theirs did.
I was about eight years old at the time-that is, at the time I learned to use the knothole. I enjoyed it until we moved away from the Exum place. By the time I was 12 or 14, I began to understand the scripture where it reads, "As a man thinketh, so is he." The scriptures proved to be true. I thought I didn"t want to take the tablets, so I didn"t. I thought I would get well, so I did.
Another verse reads, "The Lord will provide." We often overlook the little things the Lord does for us, like putting knotholes in the most convenient places. Fifty years later, I learned that at age eight I was a Christian Scientist. They too, are a group of people who do not believe in taking medicine.
Many years later, when I was 40 years old, a neighbor told me he had fleas under his house and he wondered if I might know how to get rid of them. I told him, "Try Calomel. I used it when I was a kid and we didn"t have fleas under our house."
When I was quite a small boy, a number of us were hoeing cotton one day. We had stopped at the end of the rows to get a drink and sharpen our hoes. Playfully, Frank picked me up and pretended he was going to throw me over the fence and out into the county road. Well, he swung me over the fence and stood me on my feet down in some weeds. And there between my feet was a beautiful little pocket knife.
This seemed almost too good to be true. I was the happiest little boy in the whole wide world. I guess every boy wants a pocket knife, and I had one-all my very own.
The others all looked at the knife and wished they had one like it. Jokingly, Frank said the knife was half his because, if he hadn"t pitched me over the fence, I wouldn"t have found it. So, a few days later, when he asked if he could borrow it, naturally, I loaned it to him, not because I thought it was half his, but because he was my brother and wanted to borrow it.
Frank was going to school at Hamlin at that time and when I thought it was time for him to return my knife, he told me that a boy in town had borrowed it and wouldn"t give it back. And that was the end of my knife.
Now, did I hate Frank for what he had done? Of course not. I was too young to hate. Hurt, yes, but hate, never! I still loved Frank just as much as I ever did. And it was the same when he had to correct me. I loved him just as much while he was whipping me as I did before he began and after he stopped.
At any rate, my little knife was gone for sure. But a few weeks later, I dreamed one night that I found another knife, just about like the first one. And, as before, I dreamed I found it by the fence at the end of our cotton rows. I dreamed I put the knife in my pocket. The next morning when I woke up, I went and searched my pockets, but the knife wasn"t there.
A few weeks later I dreamed of finding still another pocket knife. And I dreamed that I remembered having dreamed of finding the first one but had lost it by putting it in my pocket instead of holding onto it. So this time I clutched it tightly in my hand. This time, I reasoned, it could not possibly get away from me, even though I seemed to know I was dreaming. I felt sure there just had to be a way to pa.s.s from asleep to awake and bring that knife with me. But when I woke up, I was disappointed again and had to conclude that it just couldn"t be done.
After that decision, I began putting my dreams to better use. When I dreamed a dream, and I seemed to realize that I was dreaming, I would do things to entertain other kids-things no one else could do, like sliding down the roof of a big barn, dropping off the edge, and just before I hit the ground, I would close my eyes so the fall wouldn"t hurt me.
At other times I would tease a vicious bull until he would chase after me, and just before he hit me I would laugh at him and close my eyes. He couldn"t even find me, let alone hurt me. Often I would open my eyes and get him to charge again, only to lose me and miss me when I closed my eyes.
Our youngest son is named Larry. And after he was a grown man, I dreamed that he and I were going some place in a Model T Ford car on a highway in Texas. It had been raining for weeks and was still raining. The highway was muddy and the ruts were so deep our axles were dragging. We were wet, cold, tired, and stuck in a mud hole. Then the truth came to me. I got in the car and called to Larry to get in out of the rain and take it easy. He was puzzled, but he got in the car, sat down, and asked, "Why?"
I told him, "Relax and rest, I"ll wake up in a few minutes and everything will be all right. I"m dreaming all this. We"re not stuck out here in the mud. It"s not raining on us. There are no unpaved highways in Texas and no Model T cars on them. I"m dreaming that you are out here in this wet and cold with me. You are not really here. You can"t even hear me talking to you. You are lying up somewhere in a nice warm bed. Come to think of it, so am I."
I woke up sometime later and found things to be just the way I had described them to Larry in my dream.
Another time I dreamed that Ima, my wife, and I were touring in the mountains. We had stopped at a lookout point and were looking into the valley below. Dinosaurs were grazing down there and walking around. One cute little fellow, with a neck about as long as four telephone poles, came toward us and stuck his head up over the rock banister where I stood. Ima had gotten scared and ran to the car. I called to her, "Ima, don"t be afraid. Come back and let"s pet him. You know we"re dreaming because these things have been extinct for thousands of years. Come on, he won"t hurt us and we"ll be the only people living who ever petted one-or even saw one."
In high school we were told that a long dream might take place within a few seconds. But I already knew it from first-hand experience.
I was about nine years old when I had such an experience. One day I was riding in the back seat of our Reo car. Papa was driving at about his regular speed of twelve miles per hour down a country road. I was sleepy but still awake when we crossed Dry Callie Creek on a noisy bridge.
Then I fell asleep and dreamed we went places and did things that would have taken a couple of hours in real life. When I woke up, I thought I had slept all the way to town and almost all the way back home. I was disappointed because I had planned to buy some candy while we were in town.
I looked around to see how far we were from home only to find that we were about two hundred yards from the noisy bridge, and were still on our way to town.
CHAPTER 6
PROSPERITY, ANIMALS, GROWING UP
We were about the luckiest kids in the world. We always had as much or more than the average kids in our neighborhood. And of course, we had each other. But most of all, we had parents who had the knack of teaching us how to get pleasure from working and how to make our own fun, using a minimum of worldly goods while doing it.
For instance, we played a game called "Driving the Old Sow." The equipment for playing the game cost absolutely nothing. It consisted of one beat-up tin can and a mesquite stick for each player. We spent many happy hours playing the game, especially when we had a bunch of other kids to play it with us.
Many of our playthings were not bought with a lot of money, but were the result of our parents" ingenuity and willingness to build things for us, as well as playing with us and teaching us how to live more abundantly.
We were the only ones who had a merry-go-round all our own. It was a big one-a four-seater, big enough for grown people. And we had to hold on tightly or be slung off. There was a special seat for the smaller ones so they wouldn"t get slung off. And of course it was propelled by boy power.
At Christmas we got our share of toys and things, and we got candy and fruits too. We had apples during the entire year, and we got bananas a few times. But we never saw oranges except at Christmas time.
On Christmas Eve nights, before we went to bed, we placed chairs around the living room with a name in each one. Gifts from Santa were never wrapped. He put my things in the chair with my name in it, and the others likewise. Next morning no one was allowed to go into the living room until all were ready to go in.
We were taught that our family should work together to make a more abundant life for all in the family, and now I was beginning to see families working and playing together to bring a better life to all in the community.
The Stevens family lived about a mile from us and one day one of the boys got married. The whole neighborhood knew that the newlyweds were spending the night there at his parents" home.
I was only about nine years old, and I can"t remember much about that one and only chivaree I ever attended. In fact, I don"t think there was much to remember about it. But when they explained to me just how a chivaree was carried on, naturally I wanted in on the action. Any country kid could beat a bucket with a stick. And it seemed that all the little kids and big kids and grow people were there with buckets and pans and sticks.
We waited until all the lights were out in the Stevens" house. Then we silently surrounded the house and when the signal was given we all marched around the house drumming up all the noise we could make.
After a few minutes, someone came out of the house with a lighted kerosene lantern. Then the newlyweds came out on the porch. I suppose they figured we wouldn"t go away until they came out. The groom came out into the yard and said something like, "Ah, come on that"s enough noise, leave us alone." The older ones in our bunch exchanged a few friendly words with them and then we all told them goodnight and went home.
Like all farm families, we had animals. And when a cow found a new calf out in our pasture, one or the other of us kids would claim it for our own. We would beg, "Papa, can I have it?" or, "Mama, can it be mine?" Yes, they said it could be ours. And so, it belonged to one of us kids.
Just about everyone of us had a calf or a colt all our own-until it came time to sell it. Then guess whose it became. Papa"s, naturally. But then, those of us who were young enough to believe it was really ours in the first place, were young enough to forget our loss easily. After all, there was no harm done. It had been ours while it was little and cute.
We had one old mare that we called Old Ribbon. She was not only called Old Ribbon, she was old and her name was Ribbon. She was gentle and slow and patient with us young ones and didn"t seem to mind if four or five of us rode her at one time.
To get up on Old Ribbon we had to lead her up beside a stump or a tub or a wagon tongue or something else we could climb up on and then jump on her back.
Along with her other admirable characteristics, Old Ribbon was also smart. When she didn"t want us to climb up on her, she would move away just far enough that, when we tried to jump on her back, we would land on the ground between her and whatever it was we jumped from.
If we cheated on Old Ribbon and helped each other up without her having to get near some climbable object, she was still patient and gentle with us. She wouldn"t pitch us off. She didn"t have to. She knew where there was a low-hanging limb on a tree that she would walk under. And when she did, there was no way anyone could stay on her back. What"s more, there was no way we little kids could keep her from that low limb. If we pulled her head to one side, she would go sideways to the limb. Then we had a choice-jump off or be forced off. The one in front could hang onto the limb; the others would all fall in a pile behind Old Ribbon. We soon learned it was best to bail out beforehand.
But one day, I remember, Old Ribbon gave us a little trouble.
However, I"m sure she didn"t do it intentionally.
When the Abilene and Southern Railroad was being built into Hamlin, Papa got a job helping clear the right-of-way. And it was Mama"s job to take Papa"s lunch to him. Pardon, in those days it wasn"t lunch-it was dinner, at or near midday. Then we had supper at the close of day. Anyway, Mama and I would hook Old Ribbon to the old buggy and take Papa his dinner every day. One day we took Papa"s dinner to him and found him sawing down trees where the railroad was to cross Dry Callie Creek. While we were there, he sawed into the hollow of a big elm tree and water gushed out. After the tree fell, the hollow stump was standing full of water. Of course, you"ve got to be a little kid for something like that to impress you. And that"s what I was.