Why Fantasy?

I grew up in the land of Eden, I swear, which I could not possibly appreciate until it was too late to come back. I grew up on what was for its time, a large dairy farm, with a big pond, a huge woods and the third best cream producing dairy herd in the state. We also had sheep and occasional hogs. We had milk, home-made butter and cottage cheese out the ears. We butchered. We dressed chickens

and made cider. We had a five acre apple orchard in its prime, put up every bit of our own produce from our garden and had irises and peonies, gladiolas

and snapdragons growing everywhere. We had no pesticides yet. Barn swallows swooped after flies, herons nested by the pond and every species of bird imaginable filled the air with their calls on a June day.

Mom and Dad were positively crazy about each other. They got giddy and sang as they worked together. The neighbors were like extended family and everyone, I mean everyone got along. We went to the church down the road and we would go to each other’s houses and have square dances and big sings. Both sets of my grandparents were alive and well in their eighties, and the neighborhood was brimming with people born well before the twentieth century. I got taken to a lot of funerals, but I spent a lot of afternoons after Sunday dinner, rolling around on the floor, listening to old folks tell about their parents breaking the first prairie sod with oxen or about what happened to them during the Civil War.

Suddenly I found myself in college. I was going to come back home and farm, but Dad got Alzheimer’s and sold most of the farm before anyone was awake enough to stop him.

Carol and I went west and taught on the reservations. Some of that was pretty rough, but I always reckoned we could manage to get through it, since I knew that sooner or later we were coming home to what was left of the farm.

The day came. I knew that the family were all gone before we ever started home. I knew that nobody waved anymore. I wasn’t surprised that everyone I knew had moved away, either. After all, we had to go west, ourselves. Due to the massive pesticide use with no-till farming, I didn’t expect many birds. There has not been a single whip-poor-will call since we returned. And a thief took every last one of the tools which I grew up watching my family use to work the land.

My grandma said: “Time is a river. You can’t stick your foot into the same water twice.”

I don’t care. There still has to be an Eden to go back to. One’s mind has to be able to escape to some place enchanted. There has to be one good place. Carol opened a door. She invented the land of Niarg. And we’ve been visiting there ever since.

Tom Phipps

Mr. Duckworth’s Ice Cream

When I was a little squirt, we sold the milk from our cows to the cheese factory east of town, and we would separate some of our cream and take it once a week to the Purity Dairy, south of the Square. One day, Mom delivered some cream and left me to eat a dish of ice cream in the dairy’s parlour.

“Are you too busy for me to leave Tom here while I run to the bank, Mr. Duckworth?” said Mom.

“I ain’t doing nothing but washing up this here dab o’ dishes and reading today’s paper, Hilda. You just go right ahead. If he gives me the dickens, I’ll just sit on ‘im and keep him quiet whilst I read the paper,” he said with a wink at me.

I sat at the black marble topped table with its twisted wire legs, spooning out the last streaks of ice cream from my glass bowl. Round, immense and flushed, dressed in white with a tall baker’s cap, Mr. Duckworth sat cross legged at the far end of the room, peering at me from time to time over the top of his paper. I fidgeted for a spell, studying the chairs with their twisted wire legs and backs which formed a heart within a heart. The ice cream freezer hummed out a rhythm, joined by the muffled din and clanking from the dairy in back. I rose after a spell and slowly meandered up to the freezer, scooting my sweater along the length of it as I peered through its glass windows.

“Did you ones get your favorite kind this morning, honey?” he said, lowering his paper, looking seriously over the top of his spectacles.

“Yea.”

“Now, which kind was that?” he said with an impish grin above his great wattling jowls. “I gave ye a dip o’ lemon and a dip o’ vanilla.”

“Lemon,” I said, looking at an open can through the glass. “Lemon’s my favorite. What’s that orange stuff?”

“Why orange. And it ain’t sherbet, neither. Sherbet’s all watery. Ye got to have a proper lot o’ good heavy cream for any dessert, even if it’s a doggoned pie. I put as much cream in that as I do in my vanilla.”

“What’s your favorite, Mr. Duckworth?”

“They’s all my favorites,” he said, heaving himself around the freezer with short, heavy breaths. “But I’ve got one here I’ve tried for years to get just so, and I think I’ve finally done it. I first had it when I visited Mississippi. Now they wouldn’t give me the recipe, but the flavor stuck with me. I eat it every day, and now I believe to my soul that I’ve got ‘er just so. Fetch me your bowl up here.

“This is it,” he said, putting a dip into my dish. “Mint julep. Now it’s got to have a dip o’ orange right beside it to be just so, don’t it?” He gave me a wink, sticking out the tip of his tongue.

“Thanks. But Mom said that I wasn’t to have any more.”

“Fiddlesticks! That’s what she gets for having me look after ye. Proper ladies all tell ye no, if ye know what I mean. Besides, if she wants t’ skin me when she gets back, you can have a full tummy whilst ye watch the fur fly,” he said, mounding his own bowl with the same flavors which he had just dipped for me. I took my seat as he huffed and heaved, baker’s hat swaying from side to side like a great white mushroom, back to his place at the far end of the parlour. He rolled and closed his eyes, smiling and grunting with each mouth full.

“Well?” he said, startling me with a sudden beady eyed gaze.

“It’s delicious! I love it.”

“There, by George! That’s how I know I’ve finally got it. It tastes the best to me when theah ain’t nobody comes through that door that don’t like it.”

****

With all our progress, ice cream just doesn’t seem to be the sublime delight that it once was, does it?

Tom Phipps

Pappy Taylor’s 93rd Birthday

One evening on the first of October, better than twenty years ago, Gary Harrison and I drove down to Effingham to call on Pappy Taylor for his ninety-third birthday.

“Yea!” he hollered at our knock. “Come on in! “Grab ‘ee a ch’ir!” He was sitting on his davenport, his ankles swollen with dropsy, coffee can cuspidor at his feet, when we stepped through the door. “Hand me that there fiddle, would ye, Gary?” He fingered its strings and tightened a peg as we hauled out our instruments and the evening began. “What do you ones want to play?” He leant forward and took a spit.

“What ever you feel like, Pappy,” said Gary.

Pappy sawed haltingly for a bit, rummaging about through fragments of tunes. “I know all kinds,” he said, “if I can just think of them. Here’s one. Lonesome Indian.” He commenced playing with a flourish as Gary and I followed along on guitar and banjo. With a scarcely a pause, he started another tune with the verve and abandon of a long lifetime of playing.

“Man!” I thought. “He must have been something in his prime.”

“You know that one, don’t ye Gary?” he said as he finished.

“King’s Head, ain’t it?”

“Yeap. Now this here’s one,” he said, striking up another piece.

“Now what was that?” said Gary.

“Six Pound ‘o Feathers in a Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“I don’t recall ever hearing that one.”

“Yea.

“Theah was an old woman, wanted a new feather bed,
And an old man, white hairs upon his head,
Old man he come from the west,
Old woman, wouldn’t have any but the best…

“Oh hell, I’ve clean forgot, but anyway he found six pound o’ feathers in a cuckoo’s nest,” he said, raising his fiddle again. “This here ‘n’s pret’ near my favorite.” For a long spell he played an elaborate version of Turkey in the Straw.

“Now what was that?” said Gary.

“That there was the piece that Turkey in the Straw was wrote off of. It’s called Natchez Under the Hill. Theah’s fellows ask what that is, and I say: ‘Ain’t ye ever heard of Nachez Indians?’ It was written ‘way back in George Washington’s time. See, the White man got to cheating them, and one thing and another, so they danced all night, a-getting ready for a big Indian war the next day. That’s what that there tune is.”

“Say Gary,” he said, nodding at me, “what’s his name?”

“Why, that’s Tom Phipps.”

“Well I know that, you fellows know what I mean, but I couldn’t think of his name to save my neck,” he said, leaning to one side of his fiddle for a spit. “Now here’s one…” He put his fiddle to his collarbone and played Paddyin’ on the Turnpike, a tune about the Irish who laid the first railroad tracks across Illinois. Then he played Flop Eared Mule, Picking Cotton Down South, Bear Pen Hollow and Devil in the Haystack. He played Sugar Foot Rag and West Coast Rag and somehow ended up talking about Buffalo Bill. “He was an Indian fighter,” he said as he picked at some small something on the side of his bow. “Now that’s the part that wasn’t right. The White man wanted their land, and the damned government come in and killed women and children, by God, and old men. And they hadn’t done nothing, nothing at all except to try to live peaceful. They killed women and children! That son of a bitch Custer got what was a-coming to him, by God!

“You know, the United States Government stole this universe from the Indian. No use a-saying they didn’t ’cause they did, and now they’re a-starting to acknowledge it. They stole it! A fellow asked if I wanted to see the monument out there, ye know, at Wounded Knee, and I said no, I ain’t going to. That ornery cu’se Custer had it a-coming.

“You fellows got any Indian in ye?”

“Both sides, I think,” said Gary.

“The Walkers,” I said.

“Well I have,” he said. “My dad was part Iroquois. He used to tell that they’d trade an old gun for as much land as a man could walk in a day. But then the White man went to cheating, and directly it was all gone.” he raised his fiddle. “Here ye go. You ones know this one.”

We played Cumberland Gap for quite a good long time. When we finished, Pappy stared off into days long gone. “Got married when I was twenty-four,” he said to no one in particular as Gary and I refined the tuning of our instruments. “I married her in Arkansas, when I crossed the Mississippi to work on the railroad. She was awful pretty, and she was sure my wife. She was full blooded Osage. She died of tularemia when I was twenty-eight.

“She took a notion for to eat some rabbit, so I went out and shot her a couple. Now I don’t eat no raw meat, but she did. In three days she took sick and died.”

He raised his fiddle and played Payroll, then Hell Amongst the Yearlings, then Mockingbird, then Arkansas Traveler and Old Molly Hare. On and on, picking up momentum, keeping us on the edge of our seats away into the night. At somewhere between one and two in the morning, we rose to leave.

“No need to be rushed off,” he said. “I can play all night if you fellows want to.”

A train whistle blew, off in the night, as we stepped outside.

“You’ve still got trains a-running through here,” I said. “We’re losing everything these days, trains, middles of towns. And all the small farms…”

“Why them’s the Hundred Cries,” he said as he steadied himself against the doorway.

“Hundred Cries?”

“Yea. My Indian father-in-law used to tell about that. The Hundred Cries is the voices of the multitude, never to be heard, as they’re driven from the wilderness for good.”

The next February, Gary and I were pall bearers at Pappy’s funeral. We rode in silence most of the way back to Effingham from the grave yard. “He was the last one wasn’t he, Gary?” I said at last.

“Yeap. Sure was.”

If Pappy (Harvey) Taylor was not the absolute last who had learnt his tunes from older fiddlers instead of from the media, he was without a doubt amongst the last. Pappy had tunes in his repertoire several hundred years old. King’s Head, which he had learnt from his dad, was about the execution of King Charles I in 1649.

I cannot help but feel that the passage of people like him leaves us all impoverished. Tunes imitated from the media are not the same. However, the passage of the old fiddlers isn’t the half of it. I grew up with regular square dances. The neighbors got together and had big sings. Dad sang with a barbershop quartet. We sang in church, a mile away. All this is gone. So what? We all know that the rural neighborhoods are gone, wiped out by centralization. But that’s not all. We used to sing every day in music class at school. We looked forward to the traditional carols we practiced at Christmas. Several years ago, the music teachers replaced the old songs with shallow parodies of them from the media. Soon the schools stopped having music classes. Soon the grade schools gave up recess. This is ‘way better for us, all sped up and modern, right?

Tom Phipps

Ross Harwood’s Blind Cattle

Part Two

Over the next few years we would see Ross out and about, always wearing the same insulated coveralls regardless of the weather, his pith helmet, boots and his machinery changing color with the season. We would encounter him at night, suddenly seeing him in our headlights, driving without his lights on, two wheels off the pavement, two wheels on, creeping along like some kind of garish ‘possum.

Dad had thirty acres of the most beautiful corn on the south-west part of Grandpa’s eighty. It was about the best ground that we had and we’d planted it at exactly the ideal time, and the weather had been just right for growing. He went to inspect it incessantly, his one perfect field. On the fourth of July, his birthday, I went with him to see his corn one more time. Grandpa had a contrary wether outside the fence, so I stayed to help get it back in whilst Dad went to see his field.

When Dad returned, he was livid with dismay. Ross’s cattle had tramped the fence and were stripping his corn. “Locks a-missy! Hell fire and damnation!” he said, looking away at his field. He took a champ on a timothy stem, flinging it aside.

“We don’t need the corn that bad,” said Grandpa, shuffling up.

Within the hour, Dad had been to see two or three of the neighbors who farmed close by. One of them, Jack Best, came with us to see Ross. We turned into Ross’s lane between hedges grown wild with mulberries, carefully straddling the ruts and gullies as we climbed to the house.

The grand fronted Civil War era brick house rose at the crest of the moraine with neglected majesty, its windows looking out across the front yard which was now a hawthorn and blackberry thicket to rolling pastures that once were. We parked beside the kitchen at the back. Dad and Jack stepped through the vines smothering the porch and knocked at the pink and blue door. The pink and blue piano stood resignedly, its keyboard facing the vines. The windmill beyond the sheds squawked in spite of the still air. A starling gave a breezy whistle. Dad knocked again. They slowly stepped off the porch and hesitated, Jack idly pushing at stones in the gravel with his toe, Dad glancing at the sun, kneading his watch to the top of his overalls pocket.

“Yea?” said Ross, stepping into the doorway without his pith helmet, steadying himself against the piano. His face was white as a pupa behind its egg crusted bristles. His gum boots, their blue paint crackling and peeling at the ankles were fastened mercilessly to his filthy coveralls with yards upon yards of adhesive tape. “You’ll pardon me, but I’ve been blacked out for a few days. I couldn’t manage to get to town for my insulin until yesterday evening,” he said, catching his balance.

“Did you know that your cows are out?” said Dad. “They’ve been all through our corn. They’ve been over on Jack’s some, too.”

“Ain’t surprised. Pasture’s all petered out and I haven’t had the strength to feed ’em for a spell.”

I looked into the kitchen as they talked and nearly reeled from its fetid reek. I held my breath and peered in again. Its floor was stratified with banana peels and flattened ice cream cartons, mired in a blackened goo better than a foot deep, as though it were some ghastly calf shed with more than a year’s accumulation of manure. The kitchen stove and a kerosene heater stood anchored in the mire like oriental furnishings in some lost corner of Hades. Jack read my face as I stepped back off the porch, giving a slight grimacing wink and shake of his head.

“I ain’t able to he’p,” said Ross, “but if you ones could round ’em up and take them to the packing plant, you can divide up what they fetch. I hope it covers your corn, Harry.”

Jack and Dad decided to get some hands and run the cattle back onto Ross’s place and corral and load them in his barn lot. Word was sent out by telephone and after dinner we joined a sizable party of neighbors and their hired hands at the edge of the Whisnand Woods. We took out a large section of fence next to the corn and started our drive.

We learnt several things right quick. The herd simply could not be driven. They went insanely wild as we closed in, running every which way, breaking through our line repeatedly and unpredictably. Dad and Jack had been puzzled by Ross’s inability to say how many head he had. It was now quite clear that he had neglected his herd for years, allowing them to inbreed. Most of them were blind and over a third of them were bulls of various ages.

I was at the edge of the trees when a bull and three heifers broke and came my way from the corn. As I was clapping, waving my arms and hollering, I heard sticks snap right behind me. I wheeled about to find a dozen or more of the brutes coming straight for me at a dead run out of the timber. I remember a fleeting glimpse of the trunk of the tree next to me and I recall watching the beasts thunder by beneath the limb I was standing on, but I remember nothing at all of my climb. I wasn’t about to go back down the way I had come, either, for my sudden refuge turned out to be an old honey locust tree, bristling with sharp spikes all over the trunk which was also smothered in a mantle of poison ivy vines.

By and by Dad came to my aid, parking his tractor under my perch. He stood on the seat, steadying me as I dropped onto the hood. “Don’t you reckon that this is a poorly chosen time to watch birds?” he said.

The men milled about at the edge of the corn, visiting and spitting. “We’re not a-getting anywhere this way,” said one.

“No. Not when the help is a-trying to go to roost with the owls,” said another.

“I don’t see how we’re going to get anywhere without horses, do you Harry?” said Jack.

The next morning I flew through my chores. I had scarcely begun doing them when Dad took off for the Whisnand Woods. After what seemed like a small eternity, I finished up, put a drawbar and clevis on one of the tractors and drove after him.

There were pickup trucks scattered all along Grandpa’s lane when I got there. The pasture looked like a fairground with neighbors and hands milling about several small tractors and the large cattle truck from the Charleston Packing Plant. Whilst everyone visited, waiting for the horsemen to arrive, I marveled at the tree I’d been up the day before.

The voices picked up, accompanied by the clank and rattle of iron. The first two horse trailers had arrived. The two drovers began saddling their horses. In spite of their riding boots and chaps, they didn’t look much like Hollywood cowboys. One wore a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap and a t-shirt with a picture of a belted Hampshire hog on it. The other fellow did wear a white hat, but it was made of straw and had International Harvester stenciled on it. Each of them had a cheek stuffed tight with tobacco.

They were off directly, in pursuit of some cows in the brush at the edge of the woods to the south. Dad and I each followed with a tractor and several passengers apiece. It didn’t take long for each drover to run a cow-brute into the open and rope her, but it was an ordeal getting them hitched to the clevises on the tractors, for upon being roped, the cows went wild, dragging the horses about. My cow broke her rope and hied off into the brush again, horses in pursuit. Directly, she was re-roped, bellowing and snorting, throwing her head about. This time, a hand managed a hitch knot which wouldn’t cut the rope, feverishly tying, mindful of his dear fingers. “All right! Take up the slack! If she comes for ye, switch off the tractor and get under it right now!” he hollered, springing aside with a wave.

She was the one who took up the slack! She gave the tractor a hair raising jerk as I got under way. She bolted from side to side at first, causing the tractor to sway and labor. She growled through her froth, stiff-leggedly planting and sliding her feet like some furious dining room table.

They were struggling to load Dad’s creature as I approached the truck. She fought, blind pink eyes rolling, muzzle a-froth all the way up the chute. They pulled with ropes through the slats on the sides of the truck as they prodded at her flanks and rump. At last she lurched into the truck. My brute began her ascent much the same way , except that half way up, she decided to climb over the sides. She nearly made it before lying down, refusing to move.

The drovers kept all the tractors and hands busy throughout the morning, even whilst changing mounts. The loading chute was what slowed us, so they called for another truck to cut loading time in half. To my surprise, the bulls were the easiest to load. Some of them would give in and walk, with only occasional attempts to bolt. Yearlings weren’t too bad either, but it was the cows who fought us relentlessly, especially if they had calves.

A little past one ‘o clock, the cloudless sky began growing dark. “What the dickens is going on?” I said to Bill Hall, a fierce old man with a couple of teeth in his mouth to match the two fingers he had left after a corn picker accident.

“Ain’t ye heard?” he said. “That’s the eclipse. We’re supposed to have a solar eclipse.”

“Aw shit!” I said, I wish I had a cardboard box and some white paper and tin foil.”

“What on earth for?” he said, fixing his steely gaze upon me.

“So I could look at the eclipse.”

“Well look at it then!” he said. “You’ll miss it if ye don’t.”

“That’s why I want the box. I don’t want to burn my eyes.”

“Experts!” he said with a brown spit. “For Christ’s sake! Is that what they teach you at the Lab School? Now don’t get me wrong. I’m right glad you’re a-going to the Lab School. But them experts don’t want you to wipe your ass unless they say it’s all right.”

“But they say…”

“Of course they do! They can’t feel important unless they can demand you heed their narrow minded judgment, if ye know what I mean. They’ve got to have you a-stepping in time to their dance. Men have looked up at the sun for thousands o’ years to get the time ‘o day. How many blind farmers do you know? You’ll miss out if ye let them keep ye from looking.

“I’d better get this here rope,” he said, looking up at a thrashing heifer.

I felt sheepish, still afraid to look up at the eclipse. As it grew light, I finally plucked up the courage to glance up at the sun as the last fragment of black slipped off the orb.

The following January, Ross burnt up in his house. The local paper allowed him the dignity of printing a picture of his charred torso being removed from the hot ashes with a manure fork.

Tom Phipps

Ross Harwood Goes Mad

Part One

On an unusually hot and humid day, the last week of June, I got permission to stop at Bill Richardson’s store for an ice cream bar and a bottle of soda pop on my way to Grandpa and Grandma Phipps’s. I leant my bicycle against the store’s brick tar paper wall under a rusted Coca-Cola thermometer. A Massey Harris tractor and cultivator, it’s shiny shovels wound with morning glory vines, stood by the gasoline pump. A house wren sang out its declaration. The screen door whispered a squeak as I stepped inside.

“Why there’s ol’ Tom,” said Mr. Richardson. “What can I do for you, this fine sub-zero day?”

“I’d like an Eskimo pie and a seven Up.”

“That would be twenty cents. Go h’ep y’se’f.”

“How are you folks a-coming with your cultivating? You ’bout to get ‘er all laid by?” said Jim Best, a fellow who farmed directly west of us.

“Dad thinks we’re ‘way behind,” I said, dangling my hands in the icy water of the soda pop cooler.

“Well we’re better off than we could be, the year a-being what it is, but I really don’t need to be a-sitting here,” he said, carefully shaking some Prince Albert into his folded cigarette paper. “How much rain did you all get over here two nights ago, Bill?”

“Three tenths.”

“Boy. That was the spottiest rain. We didn’t get quite a tenth,” he said, licking the paper. He struck a match. A cicada buzzed its pulsing song in the maple branches over the store. The coolers and freezers rattled and hummed quietly.

I sat down at the far end of the bench from Jim, savoring his tobacco smoke, chasing my dribbling ice cream with my tongue. After a while, Mr. Richardson stood up from his keg of nails, picked up my dimes and dropped them into the cash register, returning to his seat with a newspaper. Above the shelves of laundry soap and cereal, the Pepsi girl, reposing on the sand in her pink bra and pedal pushers, waved from her faded poster.

A 1946 Cadillac quietly drove up and parked beside the tractor. It was painted all over with aluminum and pumpkin-orange colored house paint, even its tires and parts of its windows. A man wearing insulated coveralls zipped up to his chin and an aluminum painted pith helmet shuffled into the store and up to the counter.

“Morning Ross,” said Mr. Richardson. “What do ye need?”

“Couple Co’Cola,” he said, scarcely moving his bristly lips.

“Am I in your way out there, Ross?” said Jim.

“No-no. Don’t need no gasoline,” he said, scratching around in his coin purse. By the time he laid out his change and turned to shuffle to the soda pop cooler, his odor had filled the store. It was vaguely like that of a sugary sour slop bucket heating on a stove.

Mr. Richardson traded glances with Jim, then rose and immediately propped open the back door with a flat iron.

Ross sat between Jim and me with his two bottles of pop.

“What’ve you been up to this morning, Ross?” said Jim.

“Cultivating.”

“Looks like you’ve been a-painting,” he said, nodding at Ross’s aluminum painted overshoes, fastened to the legs of his coveralls with hog rings.

“Oh I have been, but that was yesterday.”

“You paint your car again, this year?”

“Yeap. And my tractor. It needed it. I even had enough left over for my piano.”

“Your piano?”

“Sure. It sits out there on the porch. It needed it.”

“Looks like you got your hat and boots, too,” said Mr. Richardson.

“Of course,” said Ross. “They ought to match, oughtn’t they?” He certainly had them there. For a moment all was quiet except for the wren and the cicadas. Ross unzipped his coveralls, spread out his collar and poured Coke all around his neck and collar bone.

Jim leant forward, looking at Ross. “You must be pretty hot,” he said.

“Tolerable hot,” said Ross, stretching his chin to one side to slop on some more.

Mr. Richardson lowered his newspaper and stared agape, shifting his eyes to Jim.

Jim grinned with raised eyebrows, searching for a reply that wouldn’t quite materialize. “Well Bill,” he said after a spell, “I’d better get back on the cultivator.”

“I followed him outside with my cupped hand full of ice cream that had thawed whilst I was struggling to get used to Ross’s bouquet.

“Say hello to your folks for me,” he said, starting his engine.

I wiped my hands in the grass beneath the Kool penguin and the Philip Morris buss boy, forever waving in rust-streaked competition from the wall. I mounted my bike and pedaled to Grandpa and Grandma’s.

I found Grandpa under the shade of the big black locust outside his work shop in the orchard, running the treadle of his grindstone, sharpening a hoe.

“You wouldn’t believe what I just saw Ross Harwood do,” I said.

“I just might,” he said, stopping the stone.

“Ross came into the store and poured Coke all down his neck.”

“You mean the outside of his neck?”

“Yea. Almost the whole bottle.”

“Well if that don’t beat the bugs a-fighting,” he laughed, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “That’s a new one, all right. But I’ve seen him do similar, many a-time.

“Years ago, when Ross was still a young fellow, he was a-helping us put up the silo at the cattle barn, over on the east place. He was a-running the rope with one of the mares, a-hauling up concrete blocks to us. He’d be ready for to send up a load before we were, nearly each time, so he started building a hog shade over in the corner of the barn lot. It was just perfect for an old sow and her litter. He even wired up gates around it.

“When we took a break at about eleven, he scattered straw under it and then crawled in on all fours. The hands were a-watching him, kind of amused. He didn’t say a word to anyone. He’d lie still, then he’d wallow and thrash around and lie still again, just like an old sow and her pigs.

“Ross ain’t stupid. He’s just stuck on making himself the brunt of his own jokes. The more of an audience he has, the harder he’ll work a-clowning, that a-way. He’s been doing that almost the whole time he’s been grown.”

“You mean he was normal once?”

“Yea. At least he didn’t seem too queer whilst he was a-growing up.”

“So he just got that way gradually?”

“No sir. He changed right now.” He paused, straining to pull his leg off the grind stone. He scratched his head and replaced his cap as he studied one of his ewes coming up for a drink. “Nope. All of a sudden. He lived with his folks, right where he lives now, straight south. He even went to college at Eastern. I don’t remember what he studied, but I reckon he did all right. he put in nearly all of four years. He’d room at a boarding house through the week and then ride his horse home and farm on the weekends.

“Well he had a sweetheart up there, some young lady from Windsor, if I’ve got it right. And they were engaged to be married. He was home one spring weekend, out in the field a-harrowing. His mom come out where he was a-working with a letter from his fiancée which said that she was a-marrying some other fellow.

“He went mad right then and there. He ran his team and harrow off into the brush, tangled them up in some wire fence and beat the holy daylights out of them. They were a nice gentle young team of Clydesdales, too. Just as sweet as ye please. They’d bought them from us. The mare’s legs were so badly cut up, she had to be destroyed.

“Well, he left his team and ran off into the timber and was gone for days. And when he finally showed up, he didn’t act right. And from that day to this, he’s been just as odd as odd can be. When his mom died, he boarded off their dining room, parlour and upstairs with her things in it, and has let everything else run down ever since.”

Tom Phipps

That Old Ox Yoke Downstairs

Grandma poured some tea from her cup to her saucer as Grandpa removed his napkin from his collar, all eleven white hairs on his bald head a-fly.

“Grandpa?” I said. “Where did that old ox yoke in the basement come from? It was your granddad’s, wasn’t it? Was it your Grandpa Phipps’s?”

“Grandpa Phipps used oxen every now and then for heavy work such as hauling gravel and one thing and another, so I expect he had at least two or three yokes. He died before I was ten, so I don’t know what became of them. A lot of people used oxen back then. A yoke of oxen won’t quite out-pull a good big team on the start, but if it’s a right smart heavy load, a team o’ draft horses will tire out and the oxen will just keep a-going.”

“How much could they pull?”

“Oh,” he said, pausing to wipe his mouth one last time, “you can take one of the tractors with a two bottom plough and break about ten or twelve acres in a day, you know. Now if you hitched a good big team of fresh horses to the draw bar of the tractor, the team could pull the tractor backwards for several rod before they’d give out. That same team and another ‘n’ to spell them off could plough, oh maybe four acres in a day with a walking plough. They wouldn’t be able to keep going with a two bottom, if you hitched them up. But now a team of oxen, I don’t think could pull a two bottom tractor backwards, but they’d be able to pull a two bottom plough all right. In fact, they’d be able to take it and plough maybe half to three quarters of an acre in a day with it. Course, nobody ever pulled a two bottom plough with oxen, at least not in this neck of the woods. Now that’s what that yoke downstairs was used for.” He paused, fiddling with his bib overall pocket, fishing for his twist of tobacco.

Grandma began clearing the table. “What are your folks a-doing this morning, Tom?” she said.

“Dad’s a-pruning apple trees. I don’t know what Mom’s a-doing.”

“You have any more ewes to lamb?”

“One. Joanie. She really looks like a butterball. She always does though, and then has just one lamb.”

Grandpa broke off a piece of his twist and loaded his cheek with it. He pushed back his chair a bit. “Now that’s what that yoke downstairs was used for,” he said. “Grand-dad Balch, he’d ‘ave been your great-great grandpa. Bill Boyd Balch was just a little bit of a fellow. I don’t think he was much over five foot. He had a real deep voice and he had a long white beard which went down below his belt buckle. And he had a brown stain that went the length of it, down from his mouth. He wore a wide heavy belt and his boots went ‘way up above his knees.

“Now you never did get to see the old big bluestem prairie grass which grew all over. Any place theah wasn’t woods it grew. It was so tall that if you stood up in a buggy, you could scarcely see over it. The buffalo had paths tramped down all through it. And when the English first came, everyone would turn his cows out to graze in it. They’d put bells on each of them for to be able to locate them when they’d bring them in of an evening. Everyone had to build his buildings before he could manage to put up fences, so everyone branded his stock with ear notches and turned his animals out into the grass, like a great common.

“Well that’s what that yoke downstairs was used for. The big bluestem sod was heavy and tough, and an ordinary team of horses and a walking plough couldn’t get through it. Grandpa Balch had a great big old prairie plough. It had one bottom with a share which probably didn’t cut more than a foot wide, and it had a big wooden moldboard. It had a beam on it, oh I’d reckon it was twenty-four foot long at least. The last I saw it , it was up again the fence next to the old scales, over on Dad’s.”

“What ever happened to it?”

“Theah was a racket to it?”

“What ever happened to the plough?”

Oh! I wouldn’t know. Your uncle Hen farmed there for pret’ near thirty years. It was just old junk at the time, I reckon.

“Well Grandpa Balch would use it , a-going around a-breaking the heavy bluestem sod for people. He went all over. He ploughed all around here, and between here and Palestine, and he broke ground all around, up north o’ town. He’d plough for someone and hear about somebody else a-needing ploughing done, then he’d go plough for them, just a-hopping around that a-way.”

“Did you ever see him do it?”

“Once or twice when I was real little. He’d have three yolk of oxen hitched to the plough. he didn’t have any lines. He’d just say gee or haw and crack his whip in the air to the opposite side of the heads of the lead team of where he wanted them to go. It was the longest dag-goned whip ye ever saw. It would reach from the back of the plough clean to the lead team. He’d get to the end and stop, and they’d put their heads down to graze, and he’d take the butt of his whip and shove each yoke forward to let the air get to just ahead of their withers whilst they rested. Then he’d give each one of them a real quick pet or a scratch, and then he’d crack his whip to turn them and go on. he’d have another three yolk a-resting whilst he had the three on the plough, and every couple of hours he’d change them and spell off the ones which had been a-working. He’d do, oh maybe half an acre to an acre a day that a-way.

“Now this don’t sound right to people these days, but theah used to be these little rattlesnakes, about a foot or eighteen inches long, which used to be thick in places in that tall grass. I’ve heard time and again that when everyone had first come here, they didn’t think anything at all about killing a half o’ dozen or so of the little cu’ses in the morning, a-hoeing in the garden. Anyway, Grandpa would have to watch right close, ’cause every now and then whilst he was a-ploughing, one of them would grab onto the hide of an ox and just hang there, a-working its mouth. The old ox’d get to kicking and he’d take the butt of his whip and knock it off right now, or it would make a pretty mean sore. That’s also why I’d allow that he always wore them heavy leather boots up over his knees.

“Now his great-grandad, James Balch, would tell about when they had the first horse collars. Up to his time, all the ploughing was done with oxen…”

“And I know two fellows, slow as a couple of them,” said Grandma.

“I guess I’d better get to clearing sticks out of the yard,” I said.

“I reckon you’ll see my crocuses and daffodils, but you mind my lilies a-coming up when you go to cutting.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. And I went out to see if I could start the lawn mower.

Tom Phipps

Ow!

The hay shed was finished by June, and nearly the whole neighborhood showed up to help put up the first hay which ever went into it. Two of the Allisons brought over an extra hay loader apiece, and after a long private discussion about safety and responsibilities and not getting carried away in front of everyone, Dad allowed me to drive the hay loader. I nearly burst my buttons.

I drove Old Crip in first gear, idling astraddle the windrow, pulling the hay wagon which in turn pulled the hay loader along behind, languidly clanking and squeaking, feeding up the hay. Two men forked and tramped the hay from the loader onto a sledge which covered the back half of the wagon. When they had a stack that rose three feet or better above the loader, I stopped the tractor, un-hitched the wagon and pulled the sledge and hay to the front half of the wagon bed with the tractor and a cable. Then I hitched up the wagon and we were under way again, the men loading the back half.

The load of hay was drawn alongside of the end of the hay shed and parked under its hood. Dad stood by the wagon and pulled hand over hand on a trip rope which ran up into the shed under the hood to a heavy two tined fork suspended by a carriage which scurried toward the hood along an iron track under the ridgepole. The carriage reached the end of the track under the hood and tripped, dropping the fork to the wagon. It fell fluidly, feeding itself a long loop of heavy hay rope.

Dad mounted the wagon and drove the fork into the center of the front half of the load. After tramping it home, he pulled up a couple of levers, setting trip fingers in the hay, near the points of the tines. He took up the trip rope and slid off the side of the load with a bound, hollering: “All right!”

On the far side of the shed, a hand started his tractor and began backing, taking slack out of the hay rope which ran to the foot of the building, up to the eave, then along the track under the ridge pole to the carriage under the hood and down in a loop to the pulley atop the fork. As he backed, a large dollop of hay broke free of the wagon load, rising to the hood. The neighbors clapped and cheered as the fork engaged the carriage, jerking the hay inside. Dad waited a moment for the hay to travel to the far end of the shed before yanking the trip rope, dropping the hay to the mow floor.

When the hay was up and the neighbors gone, Dad went up into the mow to pull the rope inside. He crawled along in the tight space atop the hay, just below the track and ridge pole. From below we heard a muffled: “Ow…! Ow…! God…! Ow…damned… son of a bitch!” He appeared in the doorway shortly, squeezing shut one eye with streaks of blood running from the crown of his bald head.

What on earth happened up there, Harry?” said our hand. “Of course you don’t look much like ye want to talk about it.”

“Well,” said Dad with a rumpled glance about with his good eye, “I was a-crawling along, and damned if a son of a bitchin’ straw didn’t poke me in the eye. Well I reared up with a jerk, and damned if a son of a bitchin’ nail a-stickin through the roof didn’t stick me in the top of my head. Then I jerked back and poked my eye again on that same cursed straw, which made me run my God damned head into that same God damned, son of a bitchin’ nail again!”

Tom Phipps

Ahead of Their Time

In February we went to the woods for oak poles to build a new hay shed. Dad tramped all over the woods, measuring trees at breast height, carrying an axe to mark the ones which suited. He hauled out the cross-cut saws, setting and filing their teeth. He mounted awooden box over the drawbar of one of the tractors and loaded it with chains, axes, mauls, wedges, a jug of kerosene, a sack of corn cobs and a small sack of potatoes, and we were off to the timber.

We crashed through a thicket that had grown across the lane where it entered the woods, following a large hogback. We left the lane well into the woods, making our way to a group of marked trees, saplings springing upright behind the tractor.

“Here,” said Dad, handing me a cross-cut saw. He walked slowly around the first tree, looking up into its crown. Presently he chopped out a wedge shaped notch from the side of the tree’s trunk facing where it was to fall. He took the saw and started it at the inside of the notch. “All right,” he said, “you take your end. Don’t struggle with it. You let me do the cutting. Just follow me back and forth to keep the saw from binding.”

Dust trickled into a pile on the roots in front of me. “That’s the time,” he said. “Now you’re a-getting it. Now let’s change sides. When I say, ‘timber,’ you run for the tractor, right now.”

Pulling out of the cut which was about a third of the way through the tree, we started from the other side, about an inch further up the trunk. When we reached the first cut, he took a quick step back away from the tree and hollered: “Timber! Go on, get!” With a groan and a pop, the tree slowly settled toward the notch. Then picking up speed, it furiously crashed to the ground.

I rushed back to smell the cut and stand on the stump.

“Here. Hold this right here at the end,” he said, feeding out his measuring tape along the trunk. He marked a spot with his axe and stood, reeling in his tape whilst I scampered up and down the trunk.

We heard a tractor coming into the woods. Directly, Grandpa appeared with the hired hand on the fender. He dismounted and shuffled up with a mallet and a heavy spade-like chisel.

“What’s that, Grandpa?” I asked.

“A spud.”

“Good,” said Dad, looking up.

Grandpa set to work at the opposite end of the log from Dad, driving the spud along the trunk under the bark with his mallet, quickly peeling it away.

Dad and the hand disappeared into the woods for a time, talking as they went. Grandpa fastened a chain around the large end of the log. I lay down on my back, idly shoving at the massive pole with my feet.

“Hey!” said Grandpa. “You don’t want to do that. If you get that thing to rocking, it could come down on ye. That old cu’se is heavy. It’d kill ye.” He gave a chuckle and slowly sat down on the stump. “When your Uncle Jake and I were kids, we were looking after some calves that we were a-running in the big hollow. There was a big old hollow gum tree, a-lying there, near where we were a-fooling around. It had its top cut off and was still a-resting on its stump, like this ‘n’ here. Jake went to lying in the leaves on the downhill side, a-doing just what you were a-doing. Well directly, it rolled off the stump and on over him. It’s a good thing he was in kind of a soft low spot, ’cause all it did was mash him into the mud and leaves.” He paused with twinkling eyes.

“Well, he wasn’t through. Directly he crawled clear up inside it. It rocked a little as he went along, and then, doggoned if it didn’t take off a-rolling and bouncing down the hill. It really went a-kiting! Boom, boom! Bang! It was one dickens of a long way down to the creek. I tore off down the hill to see if he was all right, about the time the log came up right smart again the trunks of a couple of large ironwoods that stood on the bank of the branch.

“When I got to him, he’d crawled out white as a sheet, just a-reeling, steadying himself again one of the ironwoods. I said: ‘Are ye dizzy?’ And he said: ‘This ain’t dizzy!'”

Later in the morning, I looked up with a start to see an old man who looked like a tall version of my granddad standing there, watching me work.

“Look ‘ee there at that rotten old carcass your dog just drug up, Tom,” said Grandpa.

“I had to walk over here to make sure that thing there didn’t cause Harry and his hand too many headaches,” said the old man with a spit and a nod at Grandpa.

“Grandpa just told me about you a-rolling down a hill in a log when you were a kid,” I said.

“I was just ahead o’ my time is all.”

“How’s that?”

“Well back before the first automobile, I had to come up with some way o’ going for a spin. ‘Course, your uncle Albert ‘as done one better ‘n that.”

“So what did he do?”

“Well,” he said, “he and his older brother were down in the bottom early March, and they came across this crow’s nest, ‘way up in the crown of a yellow poplar. Well Albert’s older brother, a-being full of piss an’ vinegar, decided for to shinny up to it. He worked and scuffled and strained, and after so long a time, he peeped over the edge of the nest and hollered that theah was a mess o’ young ones.

“Well by then, your uncle Albert was on his way up, too. He come up just below his brother and said, ‘Let me see.’ So his brother got hold of a fist full of young crow, all belly and pin feathers and held it out, as far as he could manage. Albert craned his head ‘way back with his mouth open like this, in time for the crow to kerdobble right square into his mouth. Well he let go right now and dropped clean to the ground.

“Now you might ‘ave allowed that I was ahead o’ my time, but Albert flew neigh thirty year before the Wright Brothers ever got off the ground.”

Tom Phipps

Fletcher Fawkes Told Me That it Was My Turn

Gary Harrison stumbled into quite a gold mine for old fiddle tunes in its twilight, a weekly gathering of old musicians and people who came to listen, in a one room school house in a little place called Bible Grove (once known as Georgetown). There was always quite a crowd, though they were nearly all elderly. We drove down there quite often and learnt quite a few tunes.

One evening we found the place more packed than usual, with folks milling about, having pie whilst waiting for the musicians to get settled in their circle of chairs with their instruments. Since I grew up on a dairy farm with fresh skimmed milk in my tea, I passed by their smelly fat homogenized stuff and got a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and sat down with it next to Fletcher Fawkes, an old bald headed fiddler known to everyone as Guy. Guy gave me a nod from behind his crooked spectacles as he shifted a fresh chaw of tobacco around in his mouth, spitting into a Styrofoam cup of his own. As usual, he had his fiddle all wired up with electrical tape to a dinky little speaker which always made his instrument sound shrill. He would have been much better off without it, but I always allowed that it made him feel up to date.

The music began with a flourish of microphone feedback as Bud Ingerham with his flattop and brilliant red bow tie played a boisterous Dixieland rendition of Wabash Cannonball on his tenor banjo as the rest of us followed along the best we could. The next tune, Natchez Under the Hill (Turkey in the Straw) was led on the fiddle by old Benny Sutton who sat in the chair to Bud’s left.

On it went chair by chair, until it got around to Guy. He bashfully beamed, spit in his cup and shifted about on his seat as he thumbed his strings and raised his fiddle to his collar bone. He began playing Town Hall Jig. I would be next.

I picked up my coffee from the floor beside me. “Funny it’s gone cold, just like that,” I thought as I took a swig. “Better drink ‘er down quick.”

Suddenly, I could see how it all was. “Holy rollercoaster in a cup! God forbid!” I thought as I spied my hot cup of coffee on the other side of my chair whilst vomitous waves played up and down my throat. “Mercy, mercy! You putrid old grasshopper! You ghastly foul old fart!” I thought as I considered the gustatory nuances of his sputum, his overpowering bouquet of fetid, sugary rot clinging to my lips. “Oh how could I already have it swallowed…!”

Guy gave me a gentle poke. “Look alive Tom,” he said innocently enough. “It’s your turn.”

As a rush of prickles came up my spine, I raised my banjo in my cold sweaty hands and played an urgently feeble version of Silver Bell.

Tom Phipps

Re: Mom

I enjoyed your “niarg.com”. The lead photo brought back some memories. I remember when the picture was taken. I think the tractor was sitting about where Joyce’s and my house trailer sat. The picture was taken to feature farm women who were helping in the war effort. I don’t think the picture was taken the year that we moved to the farm [which you grew up on] (1943), so it likely was taken in 1944 or before the war ended in 1945. I thought it was dumb that they had Joan and me climb on the tractor with Mom. I guess that Mom was supposed to be taking care of her kids and farming at the same time. Dumber yet was that they had me wear my “soldier” outfit. The neatest part of the outfit was the hat, which they made me remove to better show my face. I think the left part of the field in the background became the orchard and the little building in the background was the original part of the first hen house.

You gave a very interesting description of Mom and the Sweet Williams. I also brought Sweet Williams to Mom. I don’t recall tying it to Mother’s Day; I simply did it when the Sweet Williams were in flower. It seems to me that I started it when, one year, she didn’t have a chance to get over to the section of the woods that had a big patch of Sweet Williams, so I brought a bunch to her. I remember doing this on more than one year, but I really didn’t make it into an annual affair.

I thought it was neat when I learned that you were bringing a bunch of Sweet Williams to Mom as an annual event. Even so, I wondered if you might have started your annual event as a result of sentimental ol’ Mom having mentioned that I had, on occasion, brought her Sweet Williams when they were in flower.

Dick

[Dr. Richard L. Phipps]

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: