Spreading Wing - Chapter One

SPREADING WING

CHAPTER ONE – THE TWO HEADED MONSTER

Listen to me now. I want to tell you something. I was a child of The Great Depression. But that was before your time, you say, well after that catastrophic event was over and done, and times were back to normal again.

      But those who say this didn't live on our farm, and they didn't see what was in my daddy's heart. It wasn't the wall street crash, black friday and the like, that hit those country folk so hard. No, the money was not the main thing. Country folks were already accustomed to living off what their land could grow, and what could be reaped from the forests and the river. The real problem was, when the money left, the rains just chased along behind. And the hot sun brought its rays to bear and never let up. Dad often told me, the temperature topped one hundred degrees F. on one hundred days in 1930, though I can't verify those exact temperatures. And, 1930 had the driest July ever, one hundredth of an inch. That I can verify. Seeds lay dormant in the dust. What few seeds found enough moisture to sprout, and begin to grow, just wilted and shriveled under that unforgiving sun. The two headed monster; The Great Depression, and the blistering drought. Six consecutive, very hot, dry years, with a record high temperature of one hundred twenty degrees F. in 1936, just allowed no time for country folks to recover. And, they occurred at the peak of The Great Depression.

     When that two-headed monster finally pulled out of Wing, a piece of it just curled itself around my Daddy's heart, and lived there forever.

      My Grandfather, John Wesley Gillum, and his wife, Martha Jane Tucker Gillum, arrived in Wing in 1898. They had a wagon load of young'uns in tow, and more to come. They worked hard at Wing, and it paid off. Wing was then in it’s glory days. The Gillum’s added more land, more livestock, and more sharecroppers. Now I didn’t say it was fun. Hard work is seldom, or never, to my way of thinking, a real fun thing.

      Grandpa's new business venture, producing larger and stronger work mules, did well. John Turner, The Postmaster and store owner at Wing, and Bob Compton, a stock trader and Grandpa's friend, were involved in this venture. Two prize Black Mammoth Jacks, (male donkeys) who were purchased for three thousand dollars, were the heart of this business. King Leo was purchased out of Texas, for one thousand dollars. He won first place at the Arkansas State Fair, no small accomplishment. All of my few sources seem to remember all about King Leo. Although records (not many families have a donkey in the family records) show Pizo, also a Black Mammoth Jack, was purchased from Spain for $2000, I can find little mention of him. Pizo, oh Pizo, where did you go? A recent report indicated an early demise for Pizo.

       A mule is a hybrid, produced by the crossing of a male donkey and a female horse (mare.) Since there is considerable size difference, even for a Black Mammoth Jack, I wondered how this was accomplished. So I asked. Turns out, it's just as simple as can be. Dig a trench for the mare, and the jack’s natural romantic inclinations will pretty well take it from there, with a little steering of his valuable-as-gold member by hand. A huge barn was built for this enterprise, costing one thousand dollars. Now, that may not seem like so much, but at the turn of the century, it was considerable. By comparison, The three bedroom house I was raised in cost five hundred dollars to construct.

   At the peak of his success, John Wesley died in his early sixties, in 1922. Grandma Martha Jane called Dad back from the oilfields of Oklahoma to run the farm. Grandma and Grandpa both had said Dad was a better horse trader than Grandpa, and that's quite a statement because Grandpa was a pro. I'm sure Dad considered this an honor, getting that call. Martha Jane had other strong and capable sons, and some were older. Dad was now twenty-nine, a veteran of World War I, and a strong, hard and hardworking man in his own right. Dad once told me he took a job in the boiler room in the oilfields, one that nobody had been able to hang with. It was just too hot there. Dad took the job, drank only lukewarm water from the boiler, and made it fine.

    Many years later, I had a little experience in the hayfield that convinced me Dad was onto something there. I was placing the hay and tromping and shaping the hay stack, Dad was hauling the hay to me. It was very hot. The cold, cold springs in the creek were nearby, and I started running and jumping in that cold water between loads. The more times I jumped into that cold water, the harder it was to go back out and face that heat again. By the end of the day, I thought I was going to die. My hardest day ever in the hay fields, and I had many.

    Things continued to go well, under Dad's watch, for a time. Dad bought a car, and spent most of his time running up and down the dirt roads, supervising the sharecroppers, rather than actually working the land himself. He went in with Uncle Homer, who was a pretty hard and stern man in his own right, and bought a new herd of cattle.

      But it was not to last. The two headed monster reared it's ugly head, and things started going bad. Dad soon did not even have the money to put in a crop of his own. Cattle prices went to almost nothing, and the cattle had to be ranged out into the mountains, so they could find forage, or sold outright.

     The sharecroppers could not borrow money to put in their own crops, unless Dad signed their notes. Now, Dad was never real big on those kinds of arrangements, but it was that or just turn belly up. The sharecropper's seed just lay there in the dust. They had to walk, and Dad held the notes. Dad sold off timberland to the government, at fifty cents to two dollars per acre. He had to sell at least eighty acres. He had no money to hire a lawyer to negotiate a better price, so he just had to take what the government would give. Grandma still had some money, and when she found out about the sale, she insisted Dad buy it back. But it was too late. The deed was done. That land would become a part of the Ouachita National Forest.

       Those sharecropper's notes took many years to pay off, but Dad finally did it, somewhere along about the time I made my appearance in this world. I didn’t know Dad during those years of hard work to pay off other men’s debts, but the scuttlebutt going around among my older siblings was, Dad was not really a man one would want to be around during that time. The word was, a kid just never wanted to put himself into a position of watching Dad pull off his belt. They just knew no good was ever going to come of that. Tales of those days pretty well galvanized my timidity around Dad as I grew up, and I never, ever, saw him pull off his belt while frowning at me. I just made sure of that.

      Those notes extended the tenure of The Great Depression for us many years. Dad had to put his car up on blocks out at the barn. He could not buy gas. That car sat there, a rusting hulk, until well after I was born in 1944. A monument to better times, long gone. Someone once commented on that car, and asked Dad what happened to it.

     "The depression hit it," Dad replied.

     My older brother Harold, a small boy at that time, seeing a rusty spot showing up on the door, asked, "Is that where it hit it?" Dad never had another automobile until 1947.

  Harold was born in 1931. He was Dad's helper when Dad was in his prime, and he says Dad was much a man. Afraid of nothing, or nobody. When the well at the barn went dry, the mules and other stock needed water. Dad climbed to the bottom of that well on a rope. He lit a stick of TNT, climbed back out. BOOM! We now had water.

   Once, a mare and a colt were in the barn lot with the mules. Now, no love is lost between a mule and a colt. The mules hemmed the colt up by that well, and the colt jumped into the well to get away from them. Harold saw Dad lasso the colt's leg, and he pulled it out. By himself. Later, the mules caught the colt again, kicked it in the head, and killed it.

    Dad and Uncle Arthur went in together and bought some land in the Rover Slashes, two miles east of our farm and down by the river. Then Nimrod Dam was built, and the government took the Slashes and other rich crop land. The drought persisted. Soon it became hard to feed a family. Years later, Dad showed me how to build quail traps and rabbit gums, and described little tricks for catching fish when the need is great. Those tricks stay within the family. I still use one occasionally. He told me, "If a person saw a rabbit cross the road, chased by less that two people, we knew times were getting better." After the rains returned, I never again knew of a Gillum eating a wild rabbit. Memories of bad experiences with rabbit fever during the bad times lasted a lifetime.

      Much had been lost to the Gillum farm, under Dad's watch, through no fault of his own. Dad's solution to the situation was, just work harder and longer. And work all of us harder and longer. The depression mindset never left my dad as long as he lived. Never buy food that we can grow, or reap from the forest or the river. Buy flour, salt, sugar. Maybe a little coffee. And sometimes a little tobacco, on a bad crop year. That will about do it. Borrow money as a last resort. Actually, I only remember Dad borrowing money once. That was when a house on twenty four acres next to our farm was foreclosed on, and he was able to get a heck of a deal. Store up extra food every year, the rains can go at any time. Always work as hard as we can, every day, except Sunday.

       A large building that was constructed earlier by John Wesley and his boys for storing food they produced for long periods of time was perfect for Dad’s needs now. It was finished around 1920. Dad put a German coin in each concrete step leading down into the cellar. Why, I could just never figure out. It was just not like Dad to throw away money. He brought those coins back from WW1.

    This large building had several different compartments, each perfectly suited for its purpose. A smoke house was always filled during the winter with three hogs we butchered each fall. Very little was wasted. The hogs produced large tins of lard, lye soap, sausage, mince meat and head cheese. The well-cleansed intestines were even used for storing sausage. Everything was used except the squeal.

   An insulated potato house held hundreds of pounds of potatoes, with lime on them to prevent rotting. Those potatoes had six-inch sprouts on them by the time we ate the last one in the spring. The woods were searched for fresh poke weed, pokesalit', in the very early spring. These fresh poke weed sprouts furnished vitamins that had been missing from our diet all winter. Mom later grew it in her garden.

    The cellar underneath held hundreds of quarts of canned food put up by my mother as she labored over that hot wood stove each summer. Sometimes close to eight hundred quarts per year. Shelves above the cellar held many gallon cans of sorghum molasses. The house was underpinned, and piles of sweet potatoes were stored there. The barn held tow sacks full of peanuts. 

    Had it not been for the Two Headed Monster, that building would probably have soon become obsolete, and the Gillum’s would most likely have bought more and more of their food, like most people of the time. But with these facilities in hand, I think Dad just went back to what he knew worked in his boyhood during the good times, and we stayed there. Growing and storing our own food, living like the 1920’s in the 1940’s. Everything considered, it was a good life. Everything, except for the fact that we worked our butts off.

    All my siblings, and I mean every last one, as they graduated from high school, found themselves spreading wing and moving on to the rest of their lives, far from that farm.

All this, of course, was done in the spare time, working around the really big jobs of putting up enough hay and corn for the livestock. Plus, working the money crop, mostly cotton. That money crop began to play out on that overworked land, and a cotton gin became hard to find, about the time I was born. I remember riding a load of cotton to the gin only once. I must have been around two. In my memory, it seems that gin just sucked my cap right off my head, but I don't believe Dad would ever have let that happen. Power of suggestion, maybe. I have dim memories of a man kidding with me, and he must have said something to that effect. Cattle became, more and more, the main money source as the cotton crop diminished.

    Two milk cows not only produced plenty of milk, but cream, butter, and cottage cheese. During dry years, bitter weeds were about all that was left for those cows to eat. We just suffered through bitter milk on those years.

     A yard full of chickens, usually ordered from Sears and Roebuck, or produced by our own settin' hens, produced plenty of eggs, and mom was a master of wringing the necks (I remember seeing three or four headless, bleeding chickens flopping about the yard at one time) and producing a great Sunday change of pace meal, fried chicken. One just never knew when the preacher would be dropping in for Sunday dinner, and she was always prepared.

   

    My older brother, Harold, was, at first, the family wild meat provider. Fish and squirrel, mostly. The deer had pretty well been killed and eaten around Wing by then. I took over that job at a very early age. Harold went off to college when I was about four, and although Dad was always far too busy working to teach me how to hunt and fish, Harold helped me some. Dad gave me time and the freedom to wander the hills, bottoms, and the river. I soon figured it out on my own. Never again was Dad's family to be stalked by hunger, as when the two headed monster prowled the land.

    This was the world, and the mindset, that I was born into in 1944. The shadow of that two headed monster was ever-present, hovering over me, until the day I also found myself spreading wing and leaving the farm, in 1962.