TREES

As one ages, thoughts go to what things and what people were part of the life story-soon to be lost. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Dig deep enough into any family, and one finds both the trash and treasure of lives past that brought us to the lives present. These are points worthy of passage to those that will be part of that history, long past our demise. This is such a point. It was real and not artifice. It is all about character and what we are.

INFLUENCE AND INFLUENZA

7 February 1918 was a very cold day in Brownfield, Texas. The temperature had plummeted to -15 eight days prior and had never risen higher than +20 degrees. The temperature drop was accompanied by a steady moaning wind out of the northwest that blew without letup and carried with it small tiny ice crystal flakes that cut through skin and blew through the spaces between jacket buttons and under the doors and window sills. The ice crystals didn’t pile in corners and protected areas like snow but constantly swirled and settled like Depression dust. It was impossible for boys to make snowballs with the fine floury material as its water content was almost nil. It was indicative of the major problem that all local farmers had faced this year and the last three as well. Nature had not been kind lately and gave no sign of changing its attitude.

The house the wind strained against was typical of the West Texas sharecroppers architecture. It was about 30 feet wide and 40 feet deep with a steep pitched hip-style roof designed to funnel off the excruciating summer heat. The roof itself was covered in a mottled collection of tarpaper reflecting the best available material that could be found for hasty repairs over time. The house was built of cheap, rough-cut slab pine. The planks had dried and twisted over the course of years giving the outside walls ridges at every point they joined. 

The owner had compensated for this weathering by nailing tarpaper and feathering strips across the walls. Even so, there were cuts, tears, and abrasions that permitted the loess-like ice to silently filter through the boards and collect in small peaks in the corners and hidden areas of the interior where no heat reached. The entire structure was raised 2 feet off the ground on log pilings. Under the house, there were shelters built for the chickens and dogs. Nevertheless the wind cut not only through the exterior walls, but also found its way around the animal shelters and worked its way through the floor boards and the deteriorating cheap green linoleum and tin patching. 

To gain entry into the house, one climbed six elevated steps directly into the main room. The steps were thick wooden planks supported by heavy pine elevators. They were well worked in the center with rounded edges and stained to dark chestnut. All along the lee side of the steps, small piles of wind driven ice had gathered and sculpted themselves to reflect the ebb and flow of the constantly-moving wind.

The interior of the house was dark, save for the single light of kerosene lantern next to the iron kitchen stove and the flickering flashes of light that shot through the Isinglass front of the pot belly stove in the central room. The light cast an amber glow that lit all that could be seen from the doorway. A single large room served as the kitchen, dining room, living room and bedroom. Another door led to a smaller room for the man and his wife and an open door that revealed a somewhat larger room with four old large beds. Two were made of simple wood planking and two were of iron with plumbing pipe head and foot boards.

Divided among the four beds were 11 children ranging in age from 2 to 14. A small baby was in bed with the wife and oldest boy who was fitfully asleep. All save the father had influenza-the Spanish Flu that had erupted across the planet.

The father was a big man, or had been in his youth. He was about 40 now and bent from a lifetime of labor, mostly for other people, or like now, for the bank. He had fairly long salt and pepper hair. It hung long against the side of his head and then abruptly chopped next to the skin where his wife had exercised her sewing scissors.

His arms were short, well-tanned and almost hairless. His hands were large with thick fingers and broken nails. His skin was covered with a network of lines and fissures—some small and others deeper and more defined.  The texture of the skin was rough in some areas and worn smooth in others. His palms were uniformly calloused with numerous cracks and darkly traced cuts.

He was dressed in bib overalls that had been washed to a pale whiteness by the constant immersion in his wife’s raw lye soap. Under the coveralls, he wore a dark wool shirt with the top two buttons missing. He compensated by tying the shirt collars together with a small brass safety pin. His boots were a well-scuffed dark stained brown tied with a long leather thong. The brass eyes had long since been missing and he had enlarged the holes with an ice pick to permit the thick hand cut thongs to pass through.

In spite of his common exterior, there was something striking about his appearance. His face was very solid with a handsome nose and firm jaw line. His face was set off by remarkably eyes. They were of a greenish blue set under hooded eyelids which were invisible when he looked directly at you. His eyes were balanced by a contemporary walrus moustache of the period that overflowed his lips. It was stained a thin brown on the edges. Still, the casual observer would always return to the eyes which spoke of strength—a necessary commodity in his harsh and unforgiving world.

The house itself was typical and non-descript for the period and place. Certainly nothing extraordinary by local accounts. It was owned by a bank in Bowie, Texas and was provided for the sharecropper’s use. The sharecropper had lost his farm to the same bank.  He had elected to take his displaced family to Brownfield at the bank’s suggestion and work the land some equally unfortunate farmer had been forced to relinquish.

For all its commonness, the property had one very redeeming feature—a small grove of splendid trees that surrounded the house. They were a mix of cottonwoods and oaks of varying size from mature to youthful. Trees by themselves were fairly unusual in this flat tableland and highly prized by their owners. 

The town, several miles from the farm, had decided to build a park around its few trees even though the site was inconvenient to most everybody. The general feeling was that this particular farm had a stand far better.

Two trees in particular stood out on the property, both large oaks. They straddled the house on both sides and provided shade throughout the summer. Attached to some of the trees were crossties to hitch horses to, a birdfeeder put out by the mother and the remnants of several youthful attempts at a treehouse. 

The farmer had utilized a portion of the trees that grew closely together as living fence posts to corral his two cows, two horses, and two mules. Now, the larger sentry oaks, stripped of leaves by the cutting wind and ice, served as violin strings for the wind’s constantly-blowing bow. An undulating moan unceasingly sounded within the house as the outside air gained and lost velocity against the oaks’ bare branches. By this sound, the father was able to judge the nature of the storm outside. The sound had not ceased for a week.

The father’s routine had become set. Initially during the family illness, he had tried to adopt a normal routine but that approach quickly failed. The first person sick was his wife, followed immediately by the infant and two of the youngest children. 

He would begin his day before dawn by making soup from the vegetables saved under the house and the hog bones in the smoke shack in the rear. He tried to keep coffee on the stove but he quickly ran out and had to settle for his wife’s homemade tea leaves. He milked the cow and would take the still-steaming raw milk to his wife and children and they would consume it rapidly with hurried gulps.

 For the older, still-well children, he fried thick slabs of pork and sliced potatoes and turnips and served them on tin plates with a liberal coating of bacon grease. By the end of the second day of the storm, school was cancelled and the entire family, both well and ill was confined indoors.

The mother lost her ability to nurse by the end of the third day, necessitating make-do measures by the father. He poured the raw milk into a glass and let the cream settle to the top. This he would try and spoon to the infant. When that failed, he gathered a piece of cheesecloth from the smokehouse, boiled it on the stove and tore a strip. He saturated the strip with cream and placed the strip in the baby’s mouth and funneled more cream down the cheesecloth with a spoon. The infant did not respond and for a combination of reasons, died on the fourth day. The mother was not cognizant of the death as the father gently carried the infant from the bed and placed him, wrapped in canvas duck, in the smokehouse. One by one, each of the children was struck by the Influenza until by the end of the fourth day all but the father were in bed and semi-comatose.

The demands of the situation and the house were unceasing. The house was heated, if it were called that, by the Vulcan iron stove and the Smithfield pot belly. The pot belly stood in the center of the main room on a small frame of wood containing several inches of sand. A long-angled black pipe went from the top of the stove through the roof. Where it exited through the ceiling, a ring of tin flashing fit loosely against the pipe and permitted a steady stream of frigid air to blow downward from the unprotected attic.

 The previous winter, the father had added 4 feet of pipe and an angle turn to the exhaust to increase the heated surface in the house. The additional angles had routinely become soot-clogged and he kept a small stick next to the stove to strike the pipe and loosen the soot. He rapidly ran out of wood that he had precut next to the door and ceased using the stove. From the fourth day on, he heated soup and water, their sole sustenance, on top of the pot belly.

Several times a day he would pull on his heavy wool jacket with the high collar and place the thick leather Mule Hide work gloves on his hand and go outdoors to gather wood. Under his jacket, he wore a summer linen duster, the kind used by cowboys and his standard bib overalls. Under that, he had two pair of Union long johns. Still, his effective work time was very limited by the biting cold. To use the privy, he omitted the gloves and duster. His sole work tool was an old double bitted ax that he kept wedged with several horseshoe nails. Directly under the ax head, was a strip of tin plate he had pegged with tacks to protect the handle from missed blows.

He initially worked the dead branches and stripling trees well away from the house. But by the end of the third day he found it necessary to cut two of the fence post trees. He cut them 5 feet off the ground so that the fence would still be intact. To gain the necessary height, he had gone to the shed to hitch a horse to the buckboard, that being his intended cutting platform. He found one horse frozen to death and the other lying on the straw pile. He hand-pulled the wagon to the trees, completed the task and then quartered the horse with the ax while the carcass was still relatively warm and placed the pieces in the smokehouse alongside the baby. By the time he had done all this, the entrails had frozen stiff and were impossible to separate from the earth.

His work was routinely interrupted by cries from the house from one or more of his children. He would lay the ax down and bending against the wind, go inside and minister to their needs. Usually, they were burning with fever and he would place cold cloths on their head, wipe their eyes, and try to spoon them soup. Other times, he would help them stand up and have them urinate in a Lemon Soda bottle or his wife’s canning pot of chipped blue enamel. On one such trip, he found his 11 year old boy dead; silently watching the light from the pot belly flicker across his glazed eyes. He quietly picked the boy up and placed him next to the baby and then went back to the backboard and felled the second tree.

The combination of a leaky house, blowing wind, and small stove kept the room temperature barely above freezing. The father would steadily feed the insatiable appetite of the stove, whose best efforts would dissipate before its thermal message would reach either his wife or the majority of his children. By the end of the sixth day, he had eliminated the cattle corral and the chicken coop.

 The chickens were placed in with the horse and mules after two were killed and stewed on the stove. By this time, he was the only person that could be truly said to be eating – his family would take only spoonsful of broth or raw milk. Most of the time, they lay asleep under the mounds of quilts with beads of sweat on their exposed skin. Between the third and the seventh day, his wife rarely regained consciousness. He did not tell her about the infant and she did not ask. By the end of the fifth day, his youngest daughter had also died. But this time she did so holding his heavy collar with her fingers; her body giving a heavy convulsive heave. This was the only child that died in his arms and he spent a longer-than-usual time outdoors. He cut down the remaining cottonwoods and split the logs and threw them against the side of the house next to the stairs.

This routine kept on without interruption until both day and night blended into one – the difference being irrelevant. Whenever the wood was sufficient and the house quiet, he would sit on the rocking chair in front of the pot belly and stare into the flames. He would feed each split log in separately. The newly-revealed interior would be alive with ice crystals of frozen sap and he would watch fixated as the fire turned the ice into water, then steam, with loud pops and snaps. With each report, his eyes would open slightly wider and he would imperceptibly rock back in the chair. His moustache would come within inches of the exposed flames and then with a jerk, he would retract himself further back in the chair. He would follow this routine until interrupted by a sound from the bedroom.

 Constantly accompanying his action was the undulating whistling and grinding of the wind as it played through the oak branches, bounced along the eaves of the house and filtered through the myriad openings in the walls. The sound never left his consciousness and remained in the forefront of his mind.

Day and night melted together as the father maintained his dogged routine. Half an hour to chop wood, 15 minutes to help the children urinate, clean the occasional bowel movement, back to the trees for 15 minutes, back to the house to wipe the faces of the children and feed them some water, milk the cow, split the wood, feed the horses and mule, stack the wood, wipe the wife’s lips, cut another tree, feed the fire, add water to the stew, 5 minutes for the privy, change the sheets of one bed, cut some more logs, strip a side off the tool shed, spoon some broth to one, milk to another, split more wood, heat some water and pour it down the pump head so it would draw, take the top rung off the corral, pick up the quilts that fell on the floor, stoke the fire, cut another tree. 

Always another tree, more splitting wood, more wood, more fire – an insatiable maw for his efforts and his rapidly-dwindling mental reserves. Throughout it all, the wind maintained a steady rhythm in his ears as it coursed its cold and remorseless way through the remaining oak branches.

Oak was considerably harder to cut than cottonwood. It yielded only grudgingly to the ax and was hard to split. The logs twisted and gripped the ax and refused to pass the blade cleanly. He had to get a crowbar from the shed and beat one side of the bit through the logs. This flattened the other bit and he had to stop more often to file an edge back on the remaining side. Nevertheless, by the end of the eighth day, the only trees remaining were the two large sentinel oaks still playing their frigid symphony to his ears.

Sometime on the eighth day, the boy on the pallet in the main room awoke. He saw his father in the rocking chair next to the stove. His father was bathed in the amber crackling glow of the fire with his head tilted down toward the open fire door. The boy recognized this scene from the previous times he had awoken and lay back down. This time, however, he intuitively sensed something was different and made an extraordinary effort through his fever to sit half-erect and turn his body to where he could view his father in full profile. 

What he saw was burned forever into his mind. The father was sitting on the edge of the rocker with his feet hooked under the rocker arms on the inside his weight was extended over the edge of the seat and his face was within inches of the open flame. However, this time instead of centering himself on the open door, he was offset so that he faced the stove wall. The black wall glowed with a dull cherry color next to the door and gave off small microscopic flashes as sparking dust and organic material struck the glowing surface.

 Slowly and with ponderous rhythm, the father would carry his weigh forward with the mechanical aid of the rocker arms. His forward progress would be halted by the flat surface of his knuckles striking the wall of the stove. Whenever his skin touched the stove, his eyes would open and he would involuntarily jerk his legs which would carry him back from the stove. His physical placement in concert with the rocker arms would then carry him forward again where he would repeat the act. In this manner, the father stayed awake for the remainder of the storm, alternately waking to the sound of the wind and the dull sensation of his fingers and falling asleep on the backward track. The boy watched this for about a minute and then fell back on his bed and went to sleep.

On the tenth day, the wind ceased. Its silence was accompanied by the arrival of the local Baptist Minister who on getting no response to a knock, opened the door and found the father slumped on the floor next to the stove, now putting out only a feeble heat. The Minister quickly went from room to room, assayed the situation and rode off. He retuned shortly with his wife and two sons and restarted the fire. The wife had brought large Mason jars of soup and vegetable which she heated on the stove. 

By this time, several of the children had recovered sufficiently to explain in general terms what had happened though they knew nothing beyond their own personal experience. The father was laid out on the living room pallet and slept for 3 days. The Minister and his wife alternated staying at the house until the older children had recovered sufficiently to take charge of the younger ones. The Minister’s son discovered the bodies in the smokehouse and carried them in a Ford delivery wagon with hard rubber wheels to the town cemetery for burial. Only on the twelfth day did the mother recover enough to be aware of her children’s deaths.

The day after he woke up, the father went outside. The Minister had left by now and his oldest son and daughter were managing the younger children’s needs as his wife slowly recovered from sickness and grief in bed. The day was cold and crisp. The sky was a high light gray with a broad, flat band of clouds cutting the center of the sky signaling an approaching storm. The horizon was lit with a weakly glowing orange and pink sun trying vainly to overcome the West Texas chill. 

The father stepped outside the house and moved toward the first sentinel oak. Deliberately and with increasing energy and emotion, he attacked the tree – girdling it around with rapid strikes like a beaver ring until he had indented to the point where it fell on its own weight. Though this effort took over an hour and he was weak from sickness and hunger, he moved immediately to the second oak and felled it also. He attacked this tree with equal ferocity and his swings rhythmically hewed out large chucks of bar, cambium, and heartwood. Each stroke seemed to provide more energy for each successive blow to when the tree finally withered and fell from the rain of blows.

 The father appeared almost like a mechanical device – untouched by the normal frailties of the human body. His breath was timed with each stroke. As he swing down, he would exhale a great gout of white steam. As he swung back, he would ingest a large gulp. Rapidly, his head was shrouded in a white cloud that dissipated around the fringes of his body and left the image of some literary ghost madly assailing his victim. As he moved around the trees, the steam followed him and keep his face in a constant white mantle of energy as he set his jaw and watched each blow fall and chip fly with intense wide-open eyes. Once during the work, the oldest son had looked out the window at his father assaulting the tree and felt and urge to speak to him. Something restrained him inside and he contented himself with observing the scene but taking no action.

On a spring day following the Influenza Winter, the father mounted his remaining horse and rode to the west. He spent most of the day gone but came back satisfied. He visited the Minister and left his house content. At home he drew his wife into the bedroom, shut the door, and spoke to her in a low serious tone for several minutes. They both left the bedroom and returned to their respective chores, silent and thoughtful. Four years later the father died.

The Brownfield town cemetery was a beautiful place to the local people and to the traveler as well. It was green, on a slight rise by the edge of town and had a well-conceived brick and ironwork fence surrounding it. Its most striking feature was the large stand of trees that cornered the area and the even larger trees that served as the center of the cemetery were the services were held.

 In accordance with her husband’s desires from 4 years previous, the wife bypassed this oasis and buried her husband on a piece of flat brown earth, several miles away from town where neither his farm nor a tree could be seen. The town council had originally opposed this “free will” cemetery but had backed down when the Minister stepped forward as the sponsor.

 The children would often return to the plot from their own homes and as time went on they would bring their own children. These children would often ask about their grandfather and several, independently, suggested that they might plant a tree in remembrance. They never fully understood the vehemence and sudden negative reply their mother or father provided and would retreat into silence and irritation. On the trip home from the family plot, the children would watch out the rear window as the headstone rapidly faded into the treeless horizon and was swallowed up by the vast emptiness of the continuously windswept prairie.