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

Horace’s Westley Richards

One November morning as it was growing light, I could hear Horace Werden’s voice downstairs. “I’m a-trying to break in forty acres of corn I have, and I’m just to damned old and stiff any more to enjoy getting on and off the tractor every two shakes. I could sure use a boy to drive whilst I pick up.” He looked up at me coming down the steps. “Harry with your permission,” he said, “I could sure use the services of a good hired man.”

At last I was going to have a good look at his place. He unwired the passenger door of his car, moved a gunny sack of bean seed, scooted a bucket of rusty nails more to the center of the seat and bid me get in. I tucked a sagging strip of ripped headliner overhead so I could see, and we were off.

Horace had built a huge modern two storey house about a hundred yards back onto his place from his log cabin a couple of years earlier. It never looked from the road as though it belonged there, neatly finished, white and trim, surrounded by sprawling junk and horse weeds. Consequently I felt oddly relieved to find it all smeared with mud by the hogs, as we drove up beside it.

“You get on the tractor, I’ll be out directly,” he said, nodding at his completely rusted machine hitched to a wagon.

I started to unwire my door, but decided to climb over the junk and go out on his side. I eagerly mounted the tractor and fiddled with the controls. I had never driven a John Deere before. From my perch I could see all kinds of enticing curiosities, especially the steam engine, ‘way back next to the woods. “Horace?” I said as he came back outside, “Dad said that you used to have an old Fordson.”

“Yeap. It’s on the other side of that shed, yonder. Maybe you’d like to look at it after we’re done,” he said, checking the controls before me. He walked around the front of the tractor, opening a petcock on each side of the engine. He stepped up to the flywheel and gave it a counter-clockwise heave.

“Fuff,” said the old contraption.

He gave it another throw.

“Fuff. Fuff. Fuff. Fuff…” it replied.

He scurried ’round, closing off the cocks, giving the tractor a change of voice: “Fuff. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang…!” He stood on the drawbar behind me, explaining the controls. I pushed forward on the hand clutch and we were off, forthrightly, wagon clattering after.

Breaking in a field of corn meant shucking the outside two rows by hand, all around the field, so that a pull-type corn picker could enter the field without mashing down un-harvested corn. He already had most of the corn shucked and piled, so all I had to do was drive past each pile and wait whilst he threw the ears into the wagon. I offered to jump off and help pick up each time, but he insisted that I stay on the seat. I appreciated the gesture, but without the exercise, I began to think I would freeze to death.

On the last side of the field, Horace got a good look at me and stepped up to the tractor, killing the engine. “I should ‘a’ been a-watching you more closely. You’re about froze, ain’t ye? You run around the tractor and wagon and stir your blood, whilst I go off here and wet.”

I gratefully clambered down to do as he bid.

“All right, let’s get to the house,” he said. “You’re too damned cold to walk. Here! Let’s trot!”

It was a shock, stepping inside his house, for there was no floor between the first and second storeys, and there was a mountain of the previous year’s corn, starting at the middle of the house, sloping clean to the roof at the far end. The rest of the house’s enormous single room was a veritable sea of junk, piled about chest deep, stringing up onto the foot of the big pile of corn. In the midst of a cleared space, he drew a kerosene can up to the table. “Here,” he said, rattling coal out of a hod into the top of his range. “Have ‘ee a seat whilst I scratch things together.”

I sat at the table, feigning nonchalance, looking at the flotsam which buried the far end of it. He sat in a swiveling office chair, upholstered with frayed paper feed sacks and masking tape, wheeling back and forth on its casters. “Got everything ye need, right here. Here,” he said, banging a filthy gallon glass jar of cloudy tea before me. “Have ‘ee some tea.” He handed me a plastic measuring cup from a sack of calf milk replacer. Then seeing my hesitation, said: “Oh here. You’re cold. let me heat that stuff.” He poured some into an iron sauce pan.

As I sat there wondering what was next, he caught me eyeing three or four old soot blackened guns, leaning against the wall by the door. “This here one’s my favorite,” he said, handing me the longest one with exposed hammers.

“I’ll be darned. It’s got engraving on it.”

“It’s an old Westley Richards twelve gauge. It takes the old short ca’tridge. Hard as the very dickens to get any more.”

“How old is it?” I said, handing it back.

“Oh, sixty-five or seventy years, anyway. Now you don’t tell no one, but I reckon ye won’t, that gun’s worth two cars, but I ain’t sold it because I can hit with it right smart. You know, a shotgun’s got to fit you right to hit with, and that one’s the only one I’ve got that does.”

He slid a greasy skillet over the fire box. “Got everything ye might need right here,” he said, slicing up a huge hunk of Bologna sausage. Each time he turned to flop some slices into the skillet, a rat would peer out from the junk, darting back in as he turned back to the table. The room began to smell of scorched rancid fat. He set out some grocery store white bread as he turned the meat with his pocket knife. Whilst he was busy, the rat grabbed a piece of bread the size of one’s thumb and returned to his hiding place, disregarding me altogether.

“Here ye be,” he said, handing me a sandwich.

I took tiny bites, swallowing them with my tea.

“Want another ‘n’? Got plenty. Don’t be bashful.”

****

I was relieved to be back in the field. This time, I managed to stay warm. He had not shucked the last through beforehand, and there was enough space between the fence and the corn to drive the tractor. He shucked two rows at once, going just a bit slower than the tractor could crawl, so I’d stop here and there and shuck ahead as he caught up.

“All right Tom, let’s leave the wagon by the house. I’m a-going to run in and count my money and one thing and another, and whilst I’m a-doing that, you hike ‘er over to the steam engine and the old Fordson and look ‘ee all ye want. I’ll be out directly.”

I was standing by the Fordson, drinking in it’s primitive elegance when he found me. “How long has it been a-sitting here?” I said.

“I think since just before you was a baby.”

“Ever think about selling it for iron?” I said, glancing at the money in his hand.

“Mercy no!” he said. “That’s a good old tractor. I could have ‘er running in half a day.” He gave a shove at the drawbar with his boot. “Well half a month, maybe. But ye know what I mean, once a fellow lets go of something it’s gone for good.”

****

Years later, Horace had a sale. I had heard that he had been in and out of the hospital with uremic poisoning. I rode over on my bicycle in spite of the cold wind out of the northwest.

The crowd swooped in, settling in huddles about the hay wagons, picking at his things. The auctioneer rasped and crackled over his electric horn. They were bidding on the old Westley Richards. They were unaware of its worth, trying to sell it in one lot with some junk, but I couldn’t make myself bid on it. “I don’t see anything I want,” I said.

I found Horace standing off by himself , stooped, looking at the trees. He was wearing a smartly tailored tweed suit and overcoat and gumboots wrapped with tape and twine. His eyes watered from the raw wind, his face red and swollen with uremia. “Well, if it ain’t ol’ Jesus Christ hisse’f!” he said with a snort and a grin as he eyed my beard and shoulder length hair. He grabbed my hand with a shaky eagerness that put a lump in my throat. “Tom, it’s been many a sore long winter.”

Tom Phipps

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