The Cross Timbers (16 page)

The teacher then pronounced the words from the spelling book, starting with fairly easy ones in order to give the poorer spellers a chance to stand in line for a few minutes at least. When one missed spelling a word he returned to his seat. This was continued sometimes until only one on each side was left to carry on a duel and until one of them went down and the other won a victory for his side.

This was called “spelling down the school.” It was my good fortune to win this honor a number of times. In addition, my love for poetry usually enabled me to make a fairly creditable showing in speaking. In a “ciphering match,” however, my weakness was readily apparent and no captain chose me early in the game. It must be admitted that in either spelling or arithmetic the competition was not too keen.

During this term of school a new set of readers had been adopted. This pleased me, for although I had always used McGuffey's readers and had a great respect for them, it was good to
have a new fifth reader, as I was still in the fifth-reader class. The new book had many new poems and prose articles.

Yet, McGuffey's fourth, fifth, and sixth readers did much to advance my education. They gave me at least some acquaintance with many of the authors in the fields of English and American literature up to that time. In them were found extracts from the writings of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Southey, Tennyson, Byron, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Gray, Hood, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Irving, Whittier, Everett, Beecher, and many others.

All of these I read and reread at a most impressionable age and memorized many of the poems and quite a few passages from some of the prose selections. As a result, such characters as Falstaff, Prince Hal, Shylock, Brutus, Mark Antony, Cassius, Little Nell, young Lochinvar, Robert Bruce, the Disinherited Knight, David Copperfield, Hiawatha, Miles Standish, Paul Revere, Rip Van Winkle, the Village Blacksmith, and a host of others became as real to me as were my own playmates or their fathers. It is true that I did not understand everything and frequently called upon George to explain a stanza or paragraph, which he never failed to do.

After I had memorized “Paul Revere's Ride,” George was asked to explain the meaning of one stanza:

A hurry of hoofs in the village street

A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark

And beneath from the pebbles in passing a spark

Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet

That was all, and yet through the gloom and the light

The fate of a nation was riding that night

And the spark struck out by that steed in his flight

Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

“Just what does that mean, George?” I asked.

“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 neighborhood 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.