The Cross Timbers Read online

  One morning Jack went out to milk and when he picked up a large bucket turned upside down on his well curb he found a big ’possum under it. The animal had been placed there the night before by some fun-loving ’possum hunters. After he had recovered from the shock Jack called his wife to come and see his strange find. As the animal stood there blinking at them Mrs. Clark remarked that it had eyes like those of their baby daughter, “Fat.” This comparison caused Jack to refuse to permit the animal to be killed. Any critter with eyes like his baby girl’s must be turned loose to roam the woods in peace!

  One morning when we had driven over to Clark’s well for a couple of barrels of water, Mrs. Clark came out to visit a few minutes and told us that when crops were laid by she was going to take the children and go “back East” to see Jack’s folks.

  “Where is back East?” inquired Father, thinking that she probably meant Tennessee.

  “Grayson County,” she replied. This was only about fifty or sixty miles northeast of our home.

  “Are you going on the train?” inquired my father.

  “Law no! I don’t ‘spect I could get any of my children nigh a train ‘cept John!”

  John, who was about George’s age of nearly seventeen at this time, was the only one of the three Clark brothers who spoke plainly. Bill and Ben were never able to pronounce words correctly, both having a speech impediment.

  A month or so later Mrs. Clark and all the youngsters, except Bill, who was left to keep his father company, started for Grayson County in a covered wagon. She had a large flock of chickens and earnestly urged Jack to take good care of them, for she wanted to sell two or three dozen fryers when she got back and also plenty of eggs later. She had set an excellent example, for she never killed a chicken for dinner except on Sunday and then only one, which supplied only a couple of pieces each for the five kids.

  Jack assured his wife that he would do his best, but the wagon was hardly out of sight before he and Bill went out and started wringing chickens’ necks. When we arrived at the well for two barrels of water Jack and Bill were seated at a table on the little front porch diligently eating fried chicken, and two large skillets on the stove inside were full of more being fried against the time when their well-filled plates were empty.

  When Mrs. Clark and her brood returned she found her stock of poultry sadly depleted, but Jack talked convincingly of the inroads of hawks, wolves, and other varmints. Also, he and Bill, like the peasants of France before the Revolution, had carefully concealed the evidence by burying the feathers! Aunt Mariar probably had her suspicions but definite proof was lacking.

  While the Clarks were sufficiently queer and ignorant to be interesting, we had other neighbors that we found more congenial. Among them were the Taylors, who owned a large farm about a half mile northeast of ours. They lived in a big two-story white house with a wide porch in front and above it an upper porch, which we called a “portico.”

  The family consisted of a deaf-and-dumb son Alex, a daughter Sally, often referred to as an old maid though she later married and had several children, and twin boys, Paul and Dow, who were about the age of George. Another son, “Jeems Henry,” younger than Alex, was married and lived in a “rent-house” some distance from the Taylor home and farmed some of his father’s land.

  My brother Tom and his wife, Lucy, could hardly be considered as neighbors, but Lucy’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. McCarty, lived on their large farm joining Tom’s place on the east. With them lived their son-in-law, Will Chaney, and his wife, Leona, Lucy’s older sister. The Chaneys had no children, but the McCartys’ grandson, Cam, lived with them. His father, George McCarty, was Lucy’s older brother, whose wife had died soon after Cam was born. Jim McCarty, another brother, who lived directly south of us, eventually sold his farm to the Ponder family, who had a grown son and four or five daughters, but we never came to know them very well. Another family nearby were the Bourlands, who owned a large farm. They belonged to my father’s church—the Primitive, or Old School, Baptist Church, commonly called the Hardshell Baptist Church.

  Until John and Mattie Briley and their children left that part of Texas they were our closest friends. They came to Texas from Tennessee and lived a year or so on a rented farm adjoining the one that my father had rented on the prairie. About the time Father moved his family to our new home in the Cross Timbers the Brileys bought and occupied a farm about three miles northeast of us. It was deeper in the woods than was ours but had a fairly good house, outbuildings, fenced fields, and an orchard.

  We visited the Brileys often and they often came to see us. These visits were usually on Sunday, and when we spent the entire day together. They had three sons and a daughter. The older boys were Walter, a couple of years younger than George, and Oscar, almost exactly my age. They were good kids and would sometimes come over on Saturday afternoon and spend the night and all day Sunday with us, or George and I would visit them for a short weekend. We missed them a great deal when, about 1890, Mr. Briley sold the farm and took his family to the Prairie West.

  In addition to our social contacts with the neighbors, we frequently had visitors who lived several miles away. One of our perennial callers was Uncle Bill Lopp, who came to see us almost once a week for ten years. He was a talkative old fellow, who was reputed to have considerable knowledge of medicine.

  One day, when I was about four years old, my sister Mattie slipped out the back door and fled to the orchard when she saw a mother and daughter coming whom she thoroughly disliked. My mother gently reproved Mattie after the visitors had gone, but the incident impressed me a great deal. As a result, the next time I saw Mr. Lopp coming I hurried to the smokehouse in the back yard and sat down in a corner behind a barrel of salt pork. Mother and George called me but I remained still as a mouse, fondly believing that the old man was being deprived of all the pleasure of his visit!! Not until by peeking through a crack I saw the old chap walking away smoking his pipe did I appear to face the family, somewhat flustered by my mysterious disappearance.

  Although Mattie was a typical “teenager” of the time, she married when quite young, and therefore had only one beau who came to see her quite often while she lived in our Cross Timbers home. This was Benton Scott, a young telegraph operator of the Keller railroad station. As there were few social affairs for them to attend, Benton was more or less a “fireside companion” except for walks about the farm.

  George discovered that by leaning a post up between the chimney and the outside wall of the kitchen it was possible for us to climb through the north window of the attic, where we slept. As soon as we had reached the attic George and I would pull dirt dauber’s clay nests from the rafters, crumble them with our hands, and drop them through the cracks in the attic floor onto Benton’s head when he was being entertained by Mattie in the living room below. She would grind her teeth with rage but was helpless. Aften Benton had gone she would urge Mother to give us both a licking, which of course we deserved, but our mother had such a keen sense of humor that she never did.

  Since our house stood on a hill in plain sight of the railroad we were frequently visited by tramps. We always fed them but never let them come into the house. They were always asked to sit down on the little front porch and were given a generous meal of bread and butter, cold meat, preserves, and a quart can of milk or buttermilk. In cold weather my mother or Alice would substitute a pot of coffee for the milk. Evidently the word got around among the hoboes that our home fed well, for hardly a week ever went by without our having a least one tramp as a visitor.

  3. Vittles: Plain and Fancy

  All the residents of the Cross Timbers demanded three square meals of what was collectively known as “vittles.” These meals were always referred to as breakfast, dinner, and supper. Not until long after my boyhood days were past did I ever hear the midday meal called lunch or the evening meal dinner. In fact, the word “lunch” was hardly in the vocabulary of ourselves or most of the neighbors. A slice of buttered bread or s
ome cheese and crackers eaten between meals was usually known as a “snack.”

  Breakfast did not differ much from the other two meals. Breakfast foods were unknown in our community. Biscuits, fried potatoes, bacon, eggs, butter, milk gravy sometimes called “hushpuppy gravy,” and syrup or sorghum molasses constituted a good breakfast. Sometimes the thrifty housewife omitted the eggs, especially if the local grocery store was paying a good price for them. In the winter homemade sausage might take the place of bacon, and hominy and fried sweet potatoes were common. If “company” was present at breakfast, ham and eggs were often served and sometimes fried chicken.

  In our home my father always said grace before every meal, unless we had one of his church brothers as a guest, in which case the guest was asked to “return thanks.” In our household Father saw to it that we were all present before grace was said and we began eating. No doubt he would have been horrified by having a child come drifting in when the rest of the family were half through the meal.

  As my father came to Texas from Nebraska and had spent most of his life in Missouri, our fare was a bit different from that of others in the community, who were either born and reared in Texas or had come from the Deep South or Tennessee. Most families from those states ate either cornbread or biscuits at every meal. My father said that he had eaten enough cornbread as a Missouri farm boy to last him the rest of his life. Both my mother and Alice made large snowy loaves of what was usually called “light bread.” Slices of this were often toasted on top of the stove for breakfast, although biscuits made with buttermilk and soda appeared more often on the breakfast table.

  The striking difference between the food in this part of Texas during the 1880’s and that of today was that most of it was produced on the farm. Perhaps we raised more of our food than did most of our neighbors because of the large orchard and garden, and yet my father sometimes complained bitterly of the high cost of living.

  “When I was a boy in Missouri,” he would often declare, “my father had a big family and three or four Negro slaves, but a hundred dollars in cash was all we spent in a year. Now I do not have a big family at home but it takes two or three hundred dollars a year to run us!” He would then explain that they tanned their own leather, made their own shoes, and spun and wove the wool from their sheep to make homespun clothing. He admitted, however, that they ate cornbread three times a day every weekday and seldom had biscuits except on Sunday morning for breakfast.

  Looking backward it seems to me now that we bought very little at the grocery store except sugar, coffee, flour, soda, syrup, salt, and pepper. We always bought green coffee, which was roasted in the oven and ground in a small coffee mill nailed to the wall above the cook-table. Very few persons drank tea, coffee being the universal beverage often served three times a day.

  The grocery stores bought syrup in barrels and drew it into gallon jugs brought by customers. There were several types, such as sugar drip, ribbon cane, and corn syrup.

  Nathan Vick, one of Mr. Taylor’s renters, owned a sorghum mill and made sorghum every summer, not only from his own cane but “on the halves” for others in the community who grew sorghum cane and hauled it to the mill. A grist mill, which was a short distance east of Keller, ground corn, taking a share of the meal as “toll.”

  On the whole, the people of the Cross Timbers ate fairly well, though I felt that we fared a little better than most of our neighbors. During the summer there was little fresh meat since refrigerators were unknown and no ice was available to those living on farms. From time to time someone would kill a fat heifer and peddle out the beef, but as a rule chicken, fried, baked with dressing, or stewed with dumplings, was the nearest approach to fresh meat for a Sunday dinner. Ham, boiled or fried with “speckled gravy,” was also quite suitable for any meal when company was present.

  The word “meat” usually meant pork or bacon, sometimes called “side meat.” Almost every family kept a few hogs. Father always butchered three or four every fall or early in the winter. For some days after “hog killing” we lived “high on the hog” with fried liver, baked spareribs, and boiled backbones.

  Our father cut up the meat, trimming the hams, shoulders, and sides, which were “salted” down in a barrel or large box for a few weeks. After the pieces of meat had “taken salt” they were removed, the surplus salt was washed off, and the flesh side of the hams and shoulders were rubbed with brown sugar and pepper. They were then hung in the smokehouse and smoked by a small fire made with hickory or post-oak chips. The “side meat” might only have the surplus salt brushed off and kept as dry salt pork.

  In common with our neighbors we always had a large garden planted with “Irish” potatoes, “English” peas, radishes, onions, “mustard greens,” lettuce, cucumbers, beets, string beans, and squashes of various kinds. We also planted peanuts and a few rows of popcorn. Sweet-potato slips were grown in a bed and set out in rows to be dug in the fall. Turnips might be planted in early spring but more often in early fall as part of a “fall garden.”

  During the summer most families had plenty of green vegetables but in winter they often had only sweet potatoes, which were either kept in a cellar or heaped up on the ground and covered with a layer of straw, on top of which was spread a thick layer of earth so they would not freeze when cold weather came. Cabbage was seldom grown in our community but some families grew collards, but we never did; nor did we ever plant okra, which was a favorite vegetable of most of our neighbors who came from the Deep South.

  One day George and I, while looking for wild grapes in the woods, found a “bee tree.” It was a large hollow post-oak tree with numerous bees coming out or going into a hole about halfway up its trunk. We marked the tree by cutting a cross in the bark and a few days later our brother Tom helped cut it down. The hollow trunk burst open when it fell, revealing a large quantity of honey. Our father made a “bee hive” and Tom, who had half-a-dozen hives of bees and knew how to handle them, helped us to get them into the hive after they had attached themselves in a huge cluster to a branch of one of the nearby trees.

  This started our bee keeping, but we later got three or more hives of bees. We “robbed” them about twice a year and so always had plenty of honey for our own use and some to give to our friends. It was put in stone or glass jars that were then placed on shelves in the cellar. Here were also put the large flat “crocks” of milk, as well as butter, pickles, jam, jelly, preserves, and canned fruit or anything else that should be kept cool. Sometimes a jug of buttermilk would be lowered by rope into the well, for although we could not drink the water it was quite cool!

  Although there was a certain amount of sameness about the food of all the families in our community, no two housewives served their families meals that were exactly the same. The basic materials might be the same, but the blending and cooking brought differences. The McCarty’s made salt-rising bread, which could be smelled by any visitor as soon as he entered the house.

  Every woman made biscuits using the same ingredients, which were flour, buttermilk, lard, a little soda, and salt, but no two women’s biscuits were alike. Some were large, tough, and of a bluish tinge; others light, dark brown, and flaky; some were streaked with soda, and others with too little soda were heavy and flat. They varied in size, too, but were usually of fairly generous proportions. All were made with sour milk and soda, for baking powder, sometimes referred to as “yeast powders,” was considered not healthful, and the sour-dough biscuits of the Cow Country and Alaska were unknown in the Cross Timbers.

  Dining rooms were virtually unknown by rural families. Everyone ate in the kitchen and there were no dining chairs. When visitors were present they sat in the living room until the hostess announced dinner. The host then asked everyone to bring his chair unless he happened to be sitting in a rocker. The straight chairs were of various types. Some had seats of rawhide, others of cane, and still others of wood. Along the wall behind the table in most homes was a long wooden bench, on which some of the
children sat.

  If several visitors were present there might not be room for the children at the table, so that they had to wait until their elders had eaten, which might seem a long time. Because screening was unknown one child would be given a leafy branch of a tree to wave back and forth above the table to keep flies away. Guests usually deplored this and urged that it was not necessary, for “everyone could mind his own flies.”

  Any youngster assigned to such a task fondly hoped that his parents would agree and relieve him of this tiresome duty. Having to wait was bad enough, but it was immeasurably worse when the child was in a situation where he could smell the food, see the choicest pieces of chicken disappear from the platter, and hear the shouts of the other kids, who were outside playing “black man” or “town ball.”

  When the summer was extremely hot my father would build a brush arbor just outside the back door of the kitchen. Beneath this he would put the dining table, the bench on which George and I sat at mealtime, and any chairs that were not needed in the house. It was far cooler to eat out there than in the kitchen that was heated by the big wood stove, on which the meal had been cooked. In case of rain the table would be brought back to the kitchen but it was taken outside again when the skies were clear.

  Almost everyone in the community covered the table with an oilcloth except on Sunday or when company was present. Meat of some kind was served at almost every meal. In the summer the vegetables might be green beans boiled with a slab of salt pork, or mustard or turnip greens—again with salt pork. Green peas and new potatoes were boiled together and seasoned with butter and a little milk.