#39, Huck Finn Ag'in
Posted Thursday, May 14, 2020 10:56 PM

#39

Huck Finn, Ag’in

Teacher’s Pet, Finally

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By the time our stay in Benavides was over, we had made lasting friendships with “Buster” and Marion Smith and their son Kent, and C.W. True, a Roy Rogers look-alike, his wife Ellie, and kids, Martha Ann, Buddy, and Jerry. The fact that we would always move away and leave friends behind, demonstrates that friends are where you find them, and each one of them holds a place in the process of us becoming who we are. Kent was a few months younger than me but our interests were very much the same, and through the summer, Mom or Marion would have either three boys or no boys, as we would spend a week in town, then a week at the “oil camp” with the Smiths. Out there, we could go to the pool every day, which was a treat. One exciting afternoon, there was a diamondback rattlesnake swimming, mostly just floating, in a corner in the deep end of the pool. Discretion being the better part of valor, we let the adults deal with it. I had a long-running fantasy that finally became a reality; I had always hated to get my hair cut in hot or muggy weather because of the prickliness of the tiny clippings sticking and itching. It would be a perfect world if I could go directly from the barber’s chair to the pool and jump right in. We were completing a week in town, and Buster was coming to get us to make the switch. Kent needed a haircut, which he would get before we left town. Mom decided that Wes and I should get in line and get one, too. Shirtless, and wearing cutoffs, we asked Buster to take us directly to the pool to let us out of the car. At the instant I splashed into the water, my fantasy was realized and for that moment, it was a perfect world!

 

Time would work in favor of our friendship. A brief peek into the future would reveal that after two contracts in Louisiana, Dad would be transferred back to the Valley, and when we informed the Smiths, they were glad at the news. With the move in progress, when they knew our route and approximate schedule, they actually got on the highway, driving in our direction. Estimating our progress, they found a vantage point with roadside parking, and watched for us; a turquoise Packard pulling an aluminum mobile home is hard to miss. We recognized them flagging us down and pulled into the parking area. We visited briefly, switched some kids to share a common vehicle and followed in convoy style. What a welcome home! Looking again into the future, in the summer of ‘53 , the Smiths would visit us in Montana for part of their summer vacation, then invite Wes and me to join them as they extended their trip into Canada. Kent wanted to see a Mountie, so we visited their headquarters and museum in Regina.

 

While we have the future dialed in, there would be reasons to hold dearly our loved ones. C.W. was bound for adversity as Ellie died at an early age, and Martha Ann, as a young adult, followed. Then Jerry, also as an even younger adult was the victim of a mysterious and unsolved murder. I am glad to report C.W. was a man of strong, active Christian faith which was his shelter in these times of trouble.

 

Our transfer to Louisiana would afford us opportunities to visit the three D’Cote “Cookin’ Cousins” in Cottonport, 96 miles away, while in Winnfield, and the Kennedys, 149 miles, while in Winnsboro. These benefits were bonuses, as both of these towns were nice places to live and enriched our lives in ways both great and small. The schools were excellent, and thanks to the policies of the political Long dynasty, school supplies were furnished by the State. My teacher in Winnfield, Mrs. Smith, opened class each morning with Bible reading, and then she would pray aloud for a safe and productive day. She had my respect and admiration from day one and it grew from there.

 

There were a couple of adventurous boys our age in our neighborhood, whom Wes and I met and got to know. One was named Darrell, whose father owned a small local railroad line. These were nice boys from good families, but they had a bit of the “Huck Finn” love of the outdoors in their make-up, and would prefer the woods and waterways to any other environment. Their favorite form of fun was to follow the railroad tracks out to the crossing of the Dugdemona River, and spend the day in the forests, the swamp, with its bayous, and the river, building rafts. We would locate wooden railroad ties that had been discarded during track repairs and had floated away from the right-of-way during the frequent high water events. These would be left high and dry when the water receded. As we searched for ties, we would gather bottles and cans to use for rollers to get the ties back to the waters edge. The rafts had to be assembled in water deep enough to float them, because they would be too heavy to move otherwise. And they didn’t float very well, either. We would cut poles to strap the ties together, but we could only afford one big spike nail at each spot where the strap crossed the tie, so when we would ram the rafts together, if it hit on a corner, it would knock it into a diamond shape which was too narrow to be stable and would tip like a canoe. Huck Finn had a corn cob pipe, but we had to fashion ours from huge acorns for the bowl, and a section of cane for the stem. There was no need to light these “props” with empty bowls, and any matches anybody brought would likely be wet. In the “don’t tell Mom” department, when the train was running in our direction, we would “hop” one of the slow-moving inter-mill lumber-movers and jump off near our destination. The trains were very slow and served the timber/wood products mills in the area, and presented minimal risk and maximum excitement!

 

Mrs. Smith seemed to be on a quest to maximize the Christmas Season experience for the kids in her class. I believed her reason to be the low incomes and diversity of family backgrounds of the youngsters under her charge. Her motivation was to demonstrate that “home-grown” versions of celebration are equal to, if not superior, to the “store bought” ones. She asked for volunteers to supply various items from her wish-list that had very little, if any, out-of-pocket cost. I volunteered to bring the boughs of American holly, because I had already gathered quite a bit of it on my last adventure in the Dugdemona Swamp, where it was plentiful, and it was loaded with red berries.

 

I had a list of my own. I wanted a B-B rifle, and had finally been granted an agreement from Dad; if I could save enough money, I could buy the one on display in the window of a store I passed every day, on my way to and from school. It was the cheaper model, but I could afford it sooner, and sooner was better. Christmas morning would short-circuit my plan, because under the tree, Wes and I would find, not the cheaper model, but the best one! It would be for us to share, but Wes had been required to wait two extra years past being “old enough”, because I was too young. He had his theory that he liked to bring up occasionally: “I had to wait two years longer for a B-B gun because Ronnie was too young, but when I got “too old” to spank, they quit spanking Ronnie, too. I think they quit spanking him two years too soon!” That could explain some of my rowdy ways.

 

When we lived in Sapulpa, Christmas of 1948, I was given a package of Plasticine, a synthetic substitute for modeling clay, marketed with art classes and children in mind. I found it fascinating with possibilities almost unlimited, and it became a favorite pastime for a time, and much of my spending money went for additional colors and quantity. There would be occasions that it was hard to find in stores, and even unavailable, off the market, due to being a product of Britain, where the patents were held, and ownership changed hands periodically. In spite of this, I always had a stash of it among my stuff, and because the various colors would become mixed, it usually wound up a muddy gray color. Dad was slightly amazed, or amused, at some of the things my little fingers created from the muddy ball, and would photograph some of my soldiers, animals, and vehicles, and whatever else was running through my eight year old mind at the time. Now I was two years older, and with the Christmas season nearing, I was working on various figures of a nativity scene, and was bogged down with slight dissatisfaction with my representation of the face of Mary. Finally, admitting to myself that the scale was too small, and the medium too soft to ever do justice to the delicate features of my chosen subject, I decided to pose her with her head bowed toward her Christ Child, and hide her features behind a flowing scarf. After all, can anyone today honestly say how she looked? With nothing further I could do but to call it done, I took it to school and put it on my teachers desk, and waited for her to return to the room from monitoring the hall before class.

 

She arrived and approached her desk with a look of purpose on her face as she began finding places for the armload of the day’s necessities. Then she stopped, her gaze focused upon the clay figures. Her expression was now one of curiosity. Her expression didn’t change as she raised her head and her gaze swept the room, looking for an answer to the questions lining up to be addressed. The girl sitting behind me, who will be known as “Sue”, was wearing an unnatural “smirky” smile she couldn’t control, so she simply arched her arm over my head and pointed downward. Mrs. Smith asked me if I could enlighten her, so I told her I had been working on it for Christmas. She wanted details: how did I learn to do this? I watched my grandfather, a skilled woodcarver; this was not that different, just easier to correct mistakes, and no sharp knife was required.

 

She asked me to go with her, then she carefully picked up the scene by its base and we did a door-to-door tour of the other teachers’ classrooms doing a mini show-n-tell at each stop. When we returned to the classroom, she asked me if I had ever used colored chalk. I didn’t think she meant on sidewalks, so I said, ”No Ma’am”. And would I like to try? “Yes, Ma’am”. And would I mind staying in at recess to “decorate” our chalkboards? I couldn’t believe I was being offered such an opportunity. The designs I chose were not original, but replications of two Christmas cards, one holly and evergreen we had received, and one of my grandmothers, a Bethlehem scene that I purloined while in the second grade and had been doing from memory ever since. I had to get used to working in front of an audience, mostly teachers, who had more freedom to drop in during recess. Lunch hour was when students would stop by to watch. I had watched Dad retouching his photo negatives of portraits which, because of the placement of studio lights, always had two highlights on the eyes of the subject; he would leave only one, the one closest to the “two o’clock” position , so I remembered to put a white highlight at 2 o’clock on each red berry, and tan highlights on the front edge of a row of the teeth of the pine cones, making them look very professional. With the holly in the upper left-hand corner of the board, and the evergreen and cones in the lower right, and “Merry Christmas” scrolling in the space between, it turned out very nicely; my thanks, and my apologies to the original artists!

 

We had been invited to attend the D’Cote family dinner in Cottonport, the Sunday before Christmas; we had been corresponding, but had not seen the three cousins since we left Alberta. Two of them had married while in Canada, and had wives we had not met. The dinner was an elaborate affair, reminiscent of Thanksgiving in Red Deer, with enough food to feed half the Parish. The tables, placed end to end, reached from the kitchen door, through the dining room, and well into the living room, and there was a wine glass at every plate. Mom turned mine and Wesley’s upside down. When we were preparing to leave for home, the family patriarch, the grandfather of Flute, Spec, and Pete, said he had something for me and left the room. When he returned, he was carrying a box containing a white rabbit. It was a convenient thing that what was left of Mrs. Rogers’ turnip patch still had some tops that were green..