1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/MUDDY CALF

We were tromping around in the pasture in front of the house, and  what we found that day stunned me and made my heart ache.  The wind was bitterly cold,  and I was bundled in a heavy coat, an ancient houndstooth that belonged to Mother, long retired, badly scuffed boots three sizes too big for me, dirt caked gloves, and an old wool scarf tied tight around my long brown hair.  Light rain blown hard by the wind stung my cheeks.

Nothing fit because I never prepared to be outside in the freezing weather, just grabbed whatever I could find off the large wallhooks on the backporch, where lots of old coats and other winter wear hung like abandoned carcasses during the summer, and  moved from hook to hook during the winter, simulating some type of rejuvenation or reincarnation.

Stephen and I were headed toward the creek where a mother cow stood bawling on the opposite bank.    We had just kicked out 25 bales of hay from the back of the old blue pickup after I pushed them out of the top of the barn and he loaded them into the bed of the truck.  The herd had  thundered up to eat, with the exception of the bawling heifer. 

He strode ahead of me. Keeping the boots on my feet was a continual problem,  and I was having to stop every few feet to pull one or the other up.  He focused on the mama cow, making his way straight toward her. 

"What's the matter, mama?" he said loud enough for me to hear above the shrill wind.

'I hope it's nothing bad," I muttered to myself, feeling an uneasiness about why she stood there like a bawling statue.

He was almost even with her now, standing on the edge of the opposite creekbank.  In the summer, the creek was often dry, except for the few deep holes that retained water between rains.  In the winter, depending on the amount of rain we had, it could have a low flow of about two feet in the main channel, with sand bars cropping up every 20 or so feet.  Rarely, it overflowed the banks, flooding the pasture for a quarter mile and on down its length, the gravel road leading to civilization, blocking us from passing through for school.

Stephen was looking at the mother cow, but I caught movement in the creekbed. 

"What is that?" I yelled over the wind, pointing down.  It looked like a muddy stick moving back and forth. 

"Uh oh," I  saw him mouth under his breath.  "It's her calf."

Looking more closely, I felt a deep sob come up through my throat.  The little calf had evidently fallen from the creekbank, about fifteen feet above, into the muddy bottom.  It was caked in mud and thrashing about,  though you could tell it was weakened. 

"No telling how long it's been here," Stephen yelled.  "I didn't hear her bawling earlier, though, so maybe it hasn't been a long time."

"It's coated with mud, though," I said loudly, almost crying.

"Yeah.  We've got to get it out of the wind and rain."

"How?"

"I'll go get a toesack at the barn.  We'll get him on it and take him to the barn.  The mama can get in the barn with him too.  She'll probably follow us."

I wasn't scared of cows.  I seemed to be scared of everything else, but somehow, I was never afraid of them.  I watched the bulls carefully, but I would just walk by them or run toward them if I thought they didn't move out of my way fast enough.  The mama might get mad at us, but somehow I thought she would know we were trying to help her, and she did.

I sadly watched the little thing thrashing and bawling weakly while Stephen walked  the hundred yards to the barn.  He soon returned with the toesack, and we clambered down the bank.  Once down there, we lifted the calf a little at a time until we had the toesack completely under him.  Then Stephen pulled and I pushed, keeping the calf safely on the sack, until we got him up the side of the bank.  Stephen went and got the truck, and we laid him in the back, then drove slowly to the barn where we unloaded him onto a bed of soft hay out of the cold wind. 

We went back to the house and got warm water and rags so we could clean him up some, but we figured his mother would work on him too since she had followed the pickup to the barn..  We called Daddy, and he told us how to mix up some milk and syrup to feed it.  I made several trips back and forth that day, trying to get the calf to eat, cleaning his hide some, drying him, making sure he was warm.  But despite my intensive efforts, around sundown, he took his last breath.  I was heartbroken. 

It was my grandmother's cow, so I had called earlier to tell her about the events, and she wanted to be kept informed. 

"Nettie," I blubbered into the phone, "the calf died.  I did everything we were supposed to do, but he died anyway.  It's so sad.  His mother is just bawling."

"Honey," she said.  "Ya'll did all you could do.  Nature is just harsh sometimes.  I'll give you another calf to replace that one.  Tell your Daddy.  He can brand one for you next time they work cows."

"Okay," I snubbed.  "But it sure was sad."

"I know, honey.  I know," my kind grandmother said, her voice soothing. 

True to her word, she gave me a calf.  I let it grow for four or five years, and when I married at age 20, I sold it to make the down payment on a cobalt blue 1971 Ford Maverick, the first car I ever owned,  and our first purchase as a couple.

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/SLICK GRAVEL

After Nilene's heroic driving skills taking Neila to the hospital, I didn't worry too much about the way she handled a car.  For sure,  we were all far too young to be driving at 14, but it was the law.  We could, so of course we would. 

Several of us had been involved in a wreck the year before in her convertible.  The top was up.  It was an old off-white  1953 Nash Rambler.  We weren't really going fast, but we were talking, and I believe the other car ran a stop sign.  Or maybe we did.  My dad seemed very interested in the details which were of no significance to me.

Just after earning my license, I had been an involuntary participant in two other fender benders that summer, one in which I was driving and an elderly woman ran a yield sign and hit my car.  It didn't do any damage to the car, and she didn't want to call the insurance, so I didn't bother to tell my parents.  A year or so later, when I slipped up and told them, they were appalled.

 I told them I was afraid they wouldn't let me drive any more and  said reasonably "I've been driving another year without an accident, so it would have punished me for something I didn't need to be punished for."  I gave them so little trouble as a teenager, they simply looked at each other and by tacit agreement didn't challenge my assertion, even though their looks told me they didn't agree my handling of the incident.

The other wreck had happened much the same way, only my friend Nancy was driving, and again an elderly woman ran a yield sign and hit us.  We 9th graders were like magnets for white haired females driving big lumbering cars. 

We had to call the police because of the damage to the car, but we weren't hurt.  My father got a little more upset each wreck I was in, but even though our family had suffered the ultimate tragedy a year earlier when Susan died as a result of a car wreck, I guess I still felt invincible.  I tried to reassure him that everything was all right, and would have again protected him from the knowledge, but the police insisted on notifying him.

But on that bright spring day of the wreck with Nilene, a day so pretty it'd make you cry, Nilene slammed on the brakes, and we skidded on the gravel street right into the passenger side of a car containing a schoolmate, a boy we all liked.  None of us were hurt seriously, but images of  the look of surprise and dread on his face haunted me for weeks after the wreck.  His older sister, the driver, calmed us all down and called the police.  Miraculously, no one was hurt.  Our friendship continued unabated and we still spent lots of time together.

Nilene came to visit one clear April day in her car,  fairly flying over the cattle guard,  hitting the first pothole  in the driveway with a loud bump; the second pothole bouncing her car up like a bucking bull.  As she neared the house, I walked out on the porch to meet her and saw her face, grinning crazily,  through the windshield.

 Jumping from her car and assuming a roping stance,  she yelled, "Ride 'em cowboy!", swinging an imaginary lasso in a circle with her right hand.  "Woohoo!" 

I laughed appreciatively.  "You could hit those holes a little slower, cowgirl," I said, teasing her.

"No, I enjoy the ride," she returned, her good humor apparent.  "Course my daddy's gonna have to buy me some new shocks pretty soon if we stay friends."

We spent the rest of the day talking, calling people on the phone, making plans for the summer and cooking fudge,  a favorite thing we did with friends. 

"I want to go to a lot of baseball games this summer," Nilene said, licking a spoon of dark chocolate.  "All the cute boys play baseball, so we can see a lot of them at one place."

"Sounds like fun to me," I said.  "We need to spend a lot of time at the pool, too.  Not as many there because a lot of them will be working, but still some."

Jan came in with the guitar and wanted to play a folk song for us she'd been practicing.  It had 3 or 4 chords and she'd mastered them pretty well.  She sang along with the song, but faltering for the words, had to run back to her room to retrieve the lyrics which were printed out on a piece of typing paper.  There were seven or eight verses, all with  repeating chorus and melody. 

"I've got to go," Nilene said all of a sudden, glancing outside.  "It's starting to get dark.  I told my Daddy I'd leave before dark.  I need to call him.  He's going to meet me on Highway 31 at the drive-in."

She left hurriedly after calling her dad, waving cheerily as she left.  She had put the top down a little earlier in the afternoon, so her blonde curls were blown about by the wind as she drove down the long drive toward the gravel road.

Jan and I were in the living room, doors and windows open wide to take advantage of the cool spring weather, about to practice some harmony on the folk song, when we heard an odd sound.  It sounded far away, but not too far.  I described it as sounding like the release of a giant spring.  Kind of a "sproing" sound.  We discussed it, but couldn't come to any conclusion what it was.  It was only about 10 minutes, though, till we knew exactly.

During the fourth stanza of  our best harmony blending rendition of Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, we were startled to see someone coming up the dark walk.  Night had consumed the front yard.  We rose almost reflexively to close the door, fear crossing our faces briefly until we realized  it was Nilene,  holding her left arm like it was a baby, limping, and crying.

 "I ran off the bridge," she wailed.  Her demeanor, so changed and uncharacteristic, ignited terror in my heart,  my breath seeming to stop momentarily.

There were two bridges between our house and the farm to market road.  A small bridge, formed by a culvert placed under the road, and a big bridge that crossed a creek that ran about eighteen feet below the road.

"You ran off the little bridge?" we asked in unison, unable to comprehend anything worse.

"No, no.  The big bridge," she whined.  "My daddy will be waiting for me.  He'll be worried.  I think my brakes locked , and I skidded down the bank.  I had to climb up to the road.  I think my wrist is broken."

I could think of nothing but the terror of the inky darkness and the added terror of snakes of all kinds that I knew lived in that creek, water mocassins and copperheads at the very least. 

Mother arrived home about that time, and we quickly loaded Nilene in the car, she the patient this time rather than the driver, and took her to meet her dad at the drive-in.  He in turn headed to the hospital where they found out her wrist was indeed broken, and she was given a clean white cast.

 Within a few days, she realized she had climbed through poison ivy on her trek out of the creek, and the vicious rash tortured her beneath the cast.  She made her own "scratcher" out of a coat hangar, which she carried to school in her notebook.  We laughed watching her frantically scratching under the cast, often ending the frenzied activity with a long, loud "ahhhh", a look of satisfaction coming across her face, irregular red marks showing through the thick freckles on the ivory skin of her arm.

Later that spring, in May, she introduced me to the boy I would marry, though neither she, he, nor I would have guessed it at the time.  I was nearly fifteen, and just able to begin car dates.  Her date was a boy named Roy and mine had the unusual name of Coy. 

Though Coy and I dated all summer, we only shared that one date with the other couple, our ways diverging sharply as we entered high school.  I still spent summers at Camp Wanica with Nilene, but she married at the end of our senior year, and though I visited her in her cute little house, I left for college and we drifted apart.  Roy moved to the Houston area with his family,  and we heard through the grapevine that near the end of his high school career, he killed his father in order to protect his mother.

Things just happened to people.  Coy and I talked about it a few times; I wondered privately about it; we went on with our lives.  But it was odd how you could be close to people, then their lives turn so abruptly in a different direction.  You'd wonder if you could have stopped it if you'd stayed close to them, but it didn't really make any difference.  What happened, had happened, and you couldn't change it. 

I always kept a soft place in my heart for Nilene, though, because she made me laugh, and years later she'd enter my life again, but an underlying sadness would replace the joy we had known in our relationship when we were younger.

"Au reservoir," I'd call to her some days when we parted,  waving goodbye, poking fun at my study of French.

"Well Boulder Dam to you ,too!" she'd laugh, hopping in her car in that jerky way she had, spinning out slightly, throwing up just the tiniest bit of gravel.

I wanted to anchor her, keep her safe, but she was like a brightly colored hot-air balloon untethered from its moorings.  The flight looked deceptively harmless and calm, but as she floated higher and farther from base,  all I could do was watch until she drifted out of sight.

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/STRAWBERRY TWISTS

Neila kept her horse at Corbet.  In the summer, when she was not teaching school,  she sometimes came down from Dallas.  That Thursday in August,  she came,  visited with us, then decided she wanted to ride Strawberry.  She was  the only one of us girls who was brave enough to ride without Daddy around to help.

She was teaching school in DeSoto, Texas about 50 miles away, just south of Dallas.  We were busy in the house, so we didn't go out with her when she went to saddle her roane, who had recently become a mother to a colt, Patches.  Strawberry had always been a little contrary, but we saw her trot by in front of the house, Neila sitting solidly in the saddle, Patches following them like a small horse puppy, her legs still rubbery looking.  Jan, Nilene(a friend of mine), and I ran to the picture window to watch them.

"Look at Patches," Jan said animatedly.  "Isn't she cute?  Look how she runs on those wobbly legs."

"Neila's not afraid of horses like we are.  I like them, but I'm always afraid of what they're going to do," I said, like admitting my fear would change anything.

"Aw, horses are so nice.  They won't do anything." Nilene said almost simultaneously to Strawberry's apparent decision to throw Neila off her back.  Suddenly, she started bucking, one, two, three times.  The third time Neila sailed off to the side and fell on the hard dry ground.

The three of us almost ran over each other getting out the front door.  We sailed off the front porch, through the gate, and ran across the gravel driveway to the pasture where Neila had already pulled herself to a sitting position.  Strawberry was running for the barn, reins dragging in the sand, Patches following with her awkward gait.

"Are you okay?" three voices chimed breathlessly.

"Yeah.  I'm okay.  I guess she's a little nervous because of the colt.  I have to get back on her though."

"Why?" one of us asked--the city girl.  Jan and I knew.  Cardinal rule of our dad and as far as we knew of all horseriders.  Never let the horse have the last say.  Get back on.

We followed Neila to the corral this time.  She was irritated with Strawberry, but understood why she might be acting the way she was.  Still, she had to let her know who was boss. 

Neila's sister-in-law Jean was also visiting today and she was  22 years old, two years younger than Neila.  Jean had witnessed  the disturbance and followed the horse to the barn.  Her very quiet nature had allowed her to approach the horse and eventually get control of the reins.  She was talking to Strawberry in a much kinder way than we thought the mare deserved after what she did to our beloved sister.

Neila took the reins  from Jean, and Strawberry immediately backed up fast, almost tearing the reins from Neila's hand.  Then she tried to rear up, but she was under the edge of a low shed near the corral that was used for storage of fencing materials, so when she reared up, she hit her head.  The whites of her eyes were showing, and we three were looking at each other with unvoiced questions. We kept a respectful distance between the horse and us.

Neila spoke quietly but firmly to Strawberry.  She led her a little way out into the dry brittle brown grass of the pasture.  After petting her for a while, she put her left foot tentatively into the stirrup.  Strawberry seemed skittish, but Neila kept talking to her, stroking her neck, and as she did so, she swung her right leg over  the horses's back and sat in the saddle.

 Strawberry reluctanly took about ten steps, then we saw her tense, her back rising up in the middle like the scooched up back of a caterpillar, and with that movement, she jumped straight up, then started bucking and running in a circle, both designed to get Neila off her back.  She was successful, and as we three ran to Neila and Jean ran to the horse, we noticed that Neila didn't sit up this time.

When we arrived at her side, she groaned quietly, as though holding back.   My heart sank.  I'd never seen her any way except upbeat, happy and healthy.  I had no idea what injury Strawberry had inflicted. 

"Ooooh, " she breathed out the pain,  an understatement,  I was sure, for the injury.  "I'm hurt.  I think my collar bone is broken." 

I glanced behind us.  Jean had Strawberry taking her toward the corral and barn.  The colt was meandering along behind.  She would see to  them,  but we had to take care of Neila. 

"Um, what should we do?" I asked her, still looking to her for guidance, unable to grasp the role I needed to assume.

"You need to get me to the emergency room," she said calmly, gritting her teeth. 

With that, we sprang into action.  We had turned 15 that summer, and unbelievably been driving for nearly a year.   Nilene was the only one who could drive a stickshift with any fluidity,  and we had to drive the white Chevy pickup, which was a standard.  Nilene ran back toward the house across the tank dam, opened the door of the truck, jumped in and spun out, throwing sand and gravel in the air as she gunned the motor moving the truck rapidly toward us.  She slammed to a stop ten feet from where Neila lay in the dirt, her head held gently in Jan and my hands. 

We all wanted to cry, but we couldn't.  Too much depended on us right now.  Portia, Neila and Tom's giant German shepherd had run over to get in on the commotion, and she sat silently as close to Neila's face as she could get and panted, dripping saliva on her occasionally while we tried to shoo her away.  She had been busy chasing and "cracking" the shells of the abundant armadillo population when Neila was bucked off. 

With great effort, Neila got to her feet, holding her left hand over her right collar bone as if to hold it in place.  She looked pale when she stood up and we were afraid she was going to faint.  We somehow all got in the truck except Jan , and Neila lay down with her head in my lap.  Jan ran to the house to call Mother and Daddy and Neila's husband Tom, who was at work in Dallas.

"Slow down," I told Nilene.  "She's going to be okay.  We need to get her there in one piece."

"I know, I know," she said, staring straight ahead at the highway.  "I can't let myself look at her or I'll just drive faster and faster."

I can hardly remember anything more except that we got to the ER at Memorial Hospital in Corsicana, and I felt a big sense of relief once the nurses and doctors took over.  An even bigger weight was off my shoulders once Mother and Daddy arrived.  The collar bone was broken, and Neila had to have surgery the next day.  Tom got there a few hours after we called him, so he took over staying with her.

"Why did  the horse throw her?" my dad asked later as we sat in the hospital waiting room, like I could read a horse's mind.

 "I don't know why," I said a little sarcastically, "but it threw her twice, and it was the second fall that hurt her."

"Twice?", he asked, seeming puzzled.

"Yeah, you know you always told us to get back up on a horse that threw us, to have the last say."

  It was hard to interpret the look that crossed his face then, wistful, sad, regretful, I wasn't sure.  "Oh," is all he said.   With that, he looked away, reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and started puffing slowly on it, staring into space.

I think Neila fed Strawberry for several months after she recuperated from the surgery, but the relationship was never the same and eventually she sold her to someone else, along with her bumbling colt.

 My experience with horses with fractious personalities is that they don't stay anywhere too long.  They move around because initially the owner thinks they can correct the problem, make friends with them, be kinder to them, understand them better than the former owner.  But in the end, the horse isn't going to change much, so they wear out their welcome and have to move on.  We had several like that.

Once,  my dad had all but sealed the deal on the sale of a horse he had raised from a colt that ended up being one of those "difficult" horses, when my mother breezed into the den. 

The potential buyer looked at her, tipped his cowboy hat, and drawled, "How 'bout that horse, Miz Skiner?  Can I ride 'im?"

"Oh, yeah, he's great to ride," my mother effused.  "You'll just probably have to use a twist to get him to stand still for you to get in the saddle, then he's great! And isn't he pretty?"

My dad shriveled in size; the man looked at him with eyebrows raised, snorted, and stood up.   "Waaal, Mr. Skinner.  I reckon I better think 'bout buyin' that geldin' a little longer.  I'm not sure I know how to handle a twist."  We watched him walk down the sidewalk, his shoulders shaking just the slightest bit, head down.  My father's face was beet red, but when Mother turned and he started his recrimination, she just looked at him, confused. 

"I just told the truth," she said in her own defense.  "Don't say any more about it."

My dad apparently found a buyer who wasn't afraid to use a twist (a rope that is placed around the horse's nose and twisted to control him), and one more animal with a troubled personality left the property.

There seemed to be no end to them, aberrant horses, dogs, cats.  Finally Daddy stopped having Sugar, our mare,  bred, to stop the procession of ill behaved colts, and we just lived with a sweet and lazy horse who lived a good, long, life. Occasionally she humored us by allowing us to  ride even if we had to keep prodding her with our feet just to keep her at a slow walk.

She never failed to come to the fence to be petted though, and that won her points with all of us as sometimes that's all someone visiting wanted--to pet a horse.  She outlived my dad as it turned out, and when she died, at age 28,  a kind man from my mother's little church came and dug a big hole with a backhoe and buried her.  Mother had a small headstone made for her and placed it behind the tank dam where she was placed for burial.

 And that was the end of her pets.  After years of animals hanging around, the only ones left were cows.  It seemed a little sad, the ghosts of all those animals still hovering around in my memory, trying to correct history and somehow make themselves seem normal.

"Comic relief," I thought.  "Who wants perfect animals who always do what's acceptable and expected?  Not us.  No good stories in that!  And how would we ever have learned to deal with the unusual people in life?"