The Cross Timbers Read online

  In winter navy beans were boiled with a ham hock or a piece of salt pork or bacon, or lima beans were boiled and seasoned with butter. Sweet potatoes, which were baked in the oven, were available in several varieties, but pumpkin yams were our favorite type.

  In bitterly cold weather my father liked to roast sweet potatoes in the ashes of the fireplace in the living room. A dessert was seldom served on weekdays unless visitors were present but the molasses pitcher was on almost every table three times a day and virtually every meal was “topped off” by molasses.

  One day when supper was a little late John Clark dropped by while we were eating. When asked to sit and eat with us he refused, saying that he had already “et” his supper. After a few minutes, however, he remarked, “I believe I will taste of them molasses.” He picked up the pitcher and poured a little of its contents into a spoon, assumed a judicial attitude as he turned his head to one side, and finally said, “No, they’re not quite like ours. Mighty good though.”

  Upon another occasion Lucy’s nephew, Charlie Robinson, and his father, who was county assessor, stopped at our house about noon and were persuaded to sit down and have dinner with us. Charlie was slow of speech and still slower of action. After everyone else had finished Charlie continued eating until Mr. Robinson grew impatient to get back to his work.

  “Come on Charlie,” he said sharply. “You’ve eaten enough. Let’s go!”

  “Why Pappy,” was the response, “I ain’t tetched the molasses yet.”

  Although syrup was usually considered sufficient for an everyday meal, most families canned a considerable quantity of fruit, largely peaches and blackberries. It is a significant commentary, both on the size of the average family and the capacity of the youngsters for food, that almost every housewife bought half-gallon glass jars for canning instead of the quart or pint sizes commonly used today.

  “Law no,” one of our neighbor women once said to Alice, “I allus buy half-gallon jars cause a quart wouldn’t go half-way ’round at our house.”

  Fruit jars cost so much that few families felt able to buy a sufficient number to serve canned peaches or berries except on Sunday or when “company” came. At other times, if any fruit appeared on the table it was likely to be dried peaches or possibly dried apples. Because our orchard was large we had a great quantity of peaches to dry every summer. We also made a great deal of blackberry jam and peach preserves. In some instances these preserves were made with sorghum, which was far cheaper than sugar.

  My father was more “forehanded” than were most of the neighbors. At hog-killing time we “rendered out” many stone jars of lard, and we always borrowed a big sausage mill and usually ground a washtub full of sausage. George always turned the mill, while my duty was to feed it with the meat Father had trimmed from the hams and shoulders, together with the tenderloins, putting in two strips of lean and one of fat.

  After the meat was ground, it was seasoned with salt, black pepper, sage, and a little red pepper. Two or three sausage cakes were then fried and eaten in order to determine whether it was properly seasoned or needed a bit more salt, pepper, or sage. Once it had been approved, it was packed tightly in long cloth bags about three inches in diameter and hung in the smokehouse.

  Sometimes part of it might be packed in gallon jars of stoneware, with melted lard poured on it to a depth of a couple of inches. These jars were then put in the cellar along with the stone jars of lard, honey, preserves, pickles, jelly, and jam, and glass jars of canned fruit. A jar or two of headcheese, sometimes called “souse,” was made and placed in the cool cellar.

  With these resources produced on the farm plus an ample supply of milk, buttermilk, eggs, butter, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and dried peaches, perhaps my father was justified in feeling sorry for any family that “lived out of paper sacks.” It is doubtful if there were any of these in our part of the Cross Timbers but most of the wheat farmers on the nearby prairie might be so classified.

  Although our daily fare throughout the week was plain and sometimes lacked variety, it was substantial, nourishing food calculated to “stick to the ribs” for several hours of hard work or active exercise. Almost without exception, the same was true of our neighbors. Most of them would have viewed with horror what is now called a “Continental breakfast,” consisting of a sweet roll and coffee. A man who was to split rails, chop cotton, or plow from around sunrise until noon wanted meat, eggs, hot biscuits, gravy, and maybe pancakes!

  Getting the children to eat is today a problem for many parents. This was not so in the Texas Cross Timbers in my boyhood days. Then the problem, if any, was to fill them up. The kids seemed perpetually hungry. Even getting them up for breakfast was no chore when they were awakened to smell the savory, sagey odor of frying sausage or of country-cured ham, and knew that eggs, hot biscuits, and plenty of butter and syrup or peach preserves would also be on the table.

  If the weekday meals were substantial but plain, the “vittles” served at Sunday dinner or to any expected visitors were of such nature that they might be called “fancy.” Because of the lack of refrigeration the type of food served to “company” depended to a considerable extent upon the season of the year. In the summer the meal was likely to include a big platter of fried chicken with a large bowl of cream gravy, green peas cooked with new potatoes, mustard greens, radishes, onions, and perhaps other vegetables from the garden. Dessert would be cake, custard or peach pie, or blackberry or peach cobbler.

  In the winter the meal might consist of either boiled or baked ham or baked chicken with dressing, candied sweet potatoes, cabbage or turnips, lima beans, pickles, and the usual dessert of a fruit cobbler, pie, cake, preserves, and jelly. Chicken and dumplings might be served at any season and always there was butter, strong coffee, milk, and buttermilk. In the late fall or early winter the meat at a dinner for company might be baked spareribs or roast pork.

  While a white or red tablecloth was spread over the weekday oilcloth, I cannot recall having seen napkins on a table more than two or three times in ten years. They were of cloth, for if paper napkins had been made before the last decade of the nineteenth century they had not reached the Cross Timbers. The dishes in our home were ironstone china made by Meakin in Hanley, England, while Tom and Lucy’s were Meakin lusterware, now eagerly sought by collectors willing to pay a high price for a lusterware plate or platter.

  The children were usually taught “table manners” with great care by their parents, who diligently sought to “practice what they preached.” It must be admitted, however, that some of these elders were at best a bit old-fashioned in their eating practices. Hot coffee would be “saucered and blowed” by some of the oldsters, and more than a few senior citizens who visited us used a table knife not only for cutting but as a “common carrier,” just as did the writer of this old-time verse:

  I eat my beans with honey

  I’ve done it all my life

  They do taste kind of funny

  But it sticks them on the knife.

  Such a person, however, thoughtfully put the coffee cup on his plate while he drank from the saucer in order to avoid staining the tablecloth and was careful to wipe or lick his knife clean before reaching for the butter!

  Looking backward over three-quarters of a century, I feel that the vittles of the Cross Timbers dwellers were often more palatable than the food served today in many swank restaurants, where it costs a dollar or so to sit down and a great deal more to get up.

  4. Reading: Common and Preferred

  From the time we had stayed with Mrs. Blodgett, I began to feel that George and I were not quite like the other boys of the neighborhood. This did not mean a feeling that we were better or worse than the other kids of the community but only that we were different. Just how or why we were different never occurred to us, but it seems clear to me now that because we both read a great deal we lived, to some extent, in a make-believe world, into which few of our boyhood friends could enter.

  Just
when I learned to read with some degree of fluency would be hard to say, but it must have been by the time I was five or six years old or possibly even earlier. At any rate, when I entered school at the age of eight the teacher put me in the fourth-reader class and in a few weeks advanced me to the fifth-reader group.

  My father read almost nothing except the Bible and his church paper, The Signs of the Times, devoted to the Old School Baptist cause and published in New York by Gilbert Bebee. Father knew the Bible almost from cover to cover, however, quoted passages from it constantly, and applied it to daily life.

  There were not many books in our home except George’s school books and mine, after I started to school. We also had a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress with illustrations. This was most interesting to me and I must have read it at a very early age, for the allegory did not penetrate my skull. To me the giants Pope and Pagan as well as Giant Despair were real giants; Doubting Castle, the Slough of Despond, and the Key called “Promise” were only the names of a swamp, a castle, and a key.

  My brother Henry had left us a copy of Longfellow’s Poems, some neighbor had been kind enough to lend us a copy of “The Ancient Mariner” with illustrations by Doré, and another had given us a paperback thriller called The Trader Spy. There were a few others—a thick one-volume History of the United States and a copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Poems, including his plays.

  I also remember seeing, when very small, a novel entitled The Eye That Never Sleeps, and another, Broken Links and Southern Soldiers. Both of these and The Trader Spy must have been either temporary loans to Mattie or the property of one of the men my father hired from time to time to help pick cotton, for they had disappeared before I was able to read with any degree of fluency.

  All the other books I read and reread many times, and I memorized many of the shorter poems of Longfellow and long passages of most of Scott’s poems, including “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” “Marmion,” “Lady of the Lake,” “Lord of the Isles,” and at least a little of “Rokeby,” “Bridal of Triermain,” and “Harold the Dauntless.” In addition, I memorized most of “The Ancient Mariner” and many of the poems in McGuffey’s fourth and fifth readers. In fact, I memorized some from the sixth reader, for although I never studied it in school my brother John had given me a copy, and memorizing verse was always easy for me.

  For some years the only periodical which we received except my father’s Signs of the Times was the semimonthly publication The Farm and Fireside, published by Mast, Crowell, and Kirkpatrick. As the name indicates, its contents consisted chiefly of articles on farm problems and household matters, including recipes, with usually one short story or an installment of a serial story.

  Because of the scarcity of reading matter George and I always looked forward to the coming of every issue and read everything it contained, including the recipes and advertisements. If the magazine happened to be running a serial, or what we called a “continued story,” we talked about it for days and each of us expressed his opinion of how it would end.

  In reading the ads in the latest number of The Farm and Fireside we found a long list of books, any three of which could be had postpaid for a new two-year subscription or a renewal for two years by one already a subscriber. As the little journal cost only fifty cents a year this seemed such a bargain that we raked up a dollar and sent it in, naming the three books which we had selected.

  Alice had chosen a cookbook, as she, like virtually all of the neighbor women, had never owned one but cooked largely “by ear.” George selected The Swiss Family Robinson, and I, Dick Onslow among the Indians. When the books at last came George and I eagerly plunged into reading our selections, while Alice began the study of her cookbook and soon tried some of the most alluring recipes.

  My own volume had a strong, spicy odor that was not too agreeable. This was probably because it had been stored in a room or box liberally treated with some insect repellent but as neither of the other two books had this scent I assumed that it was the smell of Indians!

  Certainly, there were plenty of Indians in the story, which was a real thriller-diller, in which Dick and his buddy were both wounded in an Indian attack on a California-bound wagon train. The Indians were defeated but the two wounded men were inadvertently left behind when the wagon train resumed its journey. Their adventures during the next few weeks were amazing!

  When each of us had finished his own book George and I exchanged volumes and for some weeks I lived with The Swiss Family Robinson. Interesting as were the adventures of Dick Onslow, those of Fritz, Ernest, James, Francis, and their parents were far more so. In our work and play we talked of them as though they were our close friends.

  Even the animals of the Swiss family made some contribution to our daily lives. When our faithful old dog, Ring, died of old age and a neighbor gave us a pup we promptly named him “Turk” for the Swiss family’s dog. Our old mother cat, originally called “Old Puss,” we had named “Madame Arles” for the chief character in a short story that we had read. When she presented us with a batch of kittens, however, we named one “Nip” for the Swiss family’s monkey; another, “Bruin,” Dick Onslow’s designation of a bear; and a third, “Fedora,” again from a short story.

  When The Farm and Fireside announced that a quart glass fruit jar had been filled with corn and that a prize of one hundred dollars would be paid to the subscriber who could guess the closest to the number of grains it contained, George and I were much excited. We quickly borrowed an empty quart fruit jar from Alice, filled it with shelled corn, and carefully counted the number of grains it held. The publishers had set the date when the jar would be opened, the grains counted, and the winner of the award announced in the columns of the magazine.

  The number our jar had contained was something over 1,800. George had carefully jotted down the date when the official count was to be made and when at last the day came, gave a monologue with only Alice and me as an audience.

  “Well, I guess they’re counting right now. Probably old Mast is saying, ‘I’ve got 621 grains. How many do you have Crowell? You say 593? How about you, Kirkpatrick? 637? All right we’ll add ’em up. It looks like that feller Dale down at Keller, Texas, has hit it almost exactly and will be the winner’.”

  It is always fun to dream, but the official count was over 2,600 grains instead of the some 1,850 which our quart jar held! Evidently a grain of corn, like everything else in Texas, grows big!

  While we continued to read The Farm and Fireside, we eventually subscribed to the St. Louis Republic, which as I recall was at first a weekly and later a semiweekly newspaper. This gave us more to read, but both George and I eagerly sought books and magazines or any other reading matter. There was no opportunity for selection because very few families in the community read much. As a result, we read what we could get, regardless of whether it was trash or a classic.

  Somewhere we acquired a copy of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, which we read and reread with much pleasure. While it never could hold a place in our affections equal to that of the Swiss Family Robinson, we talked about it a great deal and even tried to play the story, using part of the south field as the desert, and the corn crib as the mountains, while each of us assumed the role of two or three of the principal characters in the story.

  The Taylor twins, Paul and Dow, and their sister, Miss Sally, were apparently the only other persons in our neighborhood who read much except ourselves and our brother Tom. One day when Father had gone to the Taylor home on an errand he returned with a huge pile of magazines, which Miss Sally had sent us.

  This was a delightful surprise. Most of them were copies of a magazine called Good News devoted largely to fiction, including a number of serials. Fortunately, the file was unbroken and each “continued story” was equivalent to a book. Some of these were “Breakneck Farm or the Merriman Twins,” “Boys Will Be Boys or a Harvest of Wild Oats,” “Peter Potter the Page,” and a sequel, “Peter Potter’s Pilgrimage or the Lively Vice Cons
ul to Korea.”

  Just why authors of that time should give double-barrel titles to their books is a deep dark mystery. Possibly they could not make up their minds as to which title was better, or, more likely, the practice was designed to attract the hoped-for reader’s interest. Neither George nor I were concerned about this. It was enough to know that we had some rattling good yarns to read, for which we were most grateful.

  Until after 1887 I had never been more than six or seven miles from home except once when Lucy and Alice took me to Fort Worth by train to spend part of a day with Lucy’s sister. In the autumn of that year my sister Fannie, and her husband, Mace Hutchinson, and their two children came down from Nebraska to spend the winter with us.

  About this time my brother Henry and Mattie’s husband, Herbert Acers, established a general-merchandise store at the little town of Navajoe in Greer County. This village was about forty-five miles north of Vernon, Texas, and only about three miles from the North Fork of the Red River. Beyond this stream lay the great Kiowa-Comanche Indian Reservation.

  The two partners in the firm of Acers and Dale hoped to sell much merchandise to the Indians, as well as to the ranchmen who leased their lands, and to sell supplies to the foremen of trail herds on the Western Trail from Texas to Dodge City, which was only three or four miles west of the little town. A few settlers were also coming in to establish homes in the area between the north and south forks of Red River and extending west to the hundredth meridian, which Texas had organized as Greer County in 1860 under the assumption that the North Fork was the main stream. This was denied by officials of the United States, who claimed that the South Fork was the principal stream and should be considered the Red River.