Hope Springs Eternal (eBook)

John Fee Gibson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
First Edition Design Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5069-0356-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Hope Springs Eternal is semi-autobiographical and touches on actual events and incidents experienced by the Author. They range from the earthy life of an Appalachian Sharecropper, to the grotesque and Arabesque actions and delusions of a genius gone mad!

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"e;Hope Springs Eternal"e; is semi-autobiographical and touches on actual events and incidents experienced by the Author. They range from the earthy life of an Appalachian Sharecropper, to the "e;grotesque and Arabesque"e; actions and delusions of a genius gone mad!

Textauszug

The Sometimes Preacher

Oh Threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! one thing at least is certain---- This life flies;

One thing is certain and the rest is lies;------ the Flower that once has blown, forever dies!

 

 

 

1

When I was a little boy, my Grandfather told me if I had the faith of a mustard seed, I could move a mountain! Of course, he told me a lot of things; like if I played with frogs I’d get warts, or if I wandered out of view of the house I’d be eaten up by a mad dog. However, despite all those admonitions, I would forget and play with frogs every chance I got, and now and then, I would slip off and go a mile down the road to the general store for a sack of smoking tobacco or an RC cola and a moon pie. Well, I never got warts and I never saw a mad dog; although, I have to admit, I wrestled with that mustard seed idea for quite a long time. I was never able to make any sense of it and eventually just stored the idea back there somewhere on the rivers of my mind along with many of my Granddaddy’s other famous sayings. It was not until several years later when I was near morally and spiritually destitute, and my best friend had lost all hope, that the concept of “faith” became a prominent theme and driver in my life.

Ty Hardy was my friend; we had always been good friends. We had known one another all our lives and in fact were born only a few days apart. I am not very sure, but I believe I am just a day or two Ty’s senior. The Hardy place was the second farm south of ours. My great Aunt, my Granddad’s sister and her husband Rousseau, or Rusaw, as we called him, owned the farm in between. Ty and I lived about half a mile from each other on that old dirt road. We were born during the “great depression” and were born not only during hard times, but we were born in a “hard” country. What folks called farms there in those Appalachian foothills was more like five acres of tillable bottomland and a hundred acres of rocks and hillsides, much too steep on which to plant a crop of anything edible.

A good example of the futility in trying to feed a family or even grow a crop of corn on one of those hillsides is the year my father attempted such an overwhelming feat. In fact, I am sure this was the reason he just threw the towel in when it came to farming. He worked like a dog through one fall and winter clearing one of those hillsides in hopes of growing a decent crop of corn come planting season. He cut down the big trees, chopped them up into stove wood, dynamited the stumps out of the ground and burned them. I remember the stumps burning and smoldering all winter long. Then when spring arrived, he turned the ground with a hillside plow, disked and dragged until that hillside was as smooth as a pancake. Now mind you, he accomplished all that work with only a team of flop eared mules; there was no fancy tractor to be had in those days unless you were a fabulously wealthy farmer, and my Pa was far from fitting into that category. Anyway, along about the last week in May, he plowed nice straight furrows and meticulously dropped and covered the seed corn. The next day we experienced one of those hellacious spring rainstorms. That would have been a blessing if the corn had been planted on level ground, but the situation being what it was, the seeds were washed out of the furrows and down the hillside. They were scattered about as if they had been sown by the wind. Tending and cultivating that corn crop would have been impossible. I believe that failure to be the last straw; my daddy’s spirit was broken. I feel sure that is when he finally made the decision to quit the farm and move on up to Cincinnati!

The world was at war; it had only shortly begun for the United States, and jobs, especially factory jobs were plentiful. The one or two dollar an hour wages for working in the defense plants was far more enticing than the three dollars a day for sun up to sundown backbreaking farm labor. My folks, along with hordes of other Appalachian dirt farmers, harkened to the sirens call and moved north to Cincinnati or Detroit. My older sister made the move to Cincinnati with my folks but they left my older brother Dale and I, there on the farm to assist my grandparents who were already beyond retirement age; although there is no retirement age for subsistence farmers.

There was little or no money available, but my brother and I did not know the difference at the time. You just do not miss something you never had or know very much about to begin with. The only cash crop there in Appalachia was tobacco, and the Government allowed us to grow four acres per year. The proceeds from that carcinogen provided us with coffee, sugar, clothes, and a few minor necessities. The remainder of our essentials, such as food, we grew there on the flat spots of the farm. Anything other than that which we required, we cobbled together with baling wire, duct tape and sweat. Our farm equipment consisted of a pair of mules, a farm wagon, a hay-rake, three or four plows and various and sundry miscellaneous essentials for tilling the earth. We worked from daybreak to nightfall during the spring, summer, and fall. We always had some chore to perform. It was do or die! Work or starve! I know you have heard this said before about “the good ole’ days” and whoever said that was right; those were the happiest days of my life.

Ty and I were near inseparable during those early years. Of course there were things that had to be attended to on our own farms, but when we got caught up a little we would often trade a day or two of labor with our neighbors. If my brother Dale and I were any ways near ahead with our work, we would pitch in and help Ty and his folks; and when we got behind, the Hardy family would reciprocate. Therefore, between work and school, Ty and I were together most of the time about like brothers!

The highlight of my early days on the farm was that special time in the evenings after I had finished with all my chores. I would feel like I was finally free for a spell. That is, after I had finished with the milking, chopping stove wood and kindling, and feeding the livestock. There was a long driveway from the house down to the main road and with nowhere to go and not much to do to occupy my time, I would generally amble down to the end of that driveway until I was out of sight of the house and crank myself up a cigarette. My folks did not allow me to smoke. Of course, they knew I did, but I could not stand my Grandmother’s look of disappointment when I smoked with her nearby. They were always afraid if I got too persistent with the habit that I would become careless and set the barn ablaze and that would have bankrupted us. 

By and by, as the Sun was beginning to slide behind the mountains, I would here that familiar whistling; that would be Ty. He liked to whistle. Fact is, he whistled about all the time he was not talking. Sometimes he would whistle “Yankee doodle,” or “Buffalo gals,” but mainly he liked to whistle hymns, such as “When the roll is called up yonder” or “Shall we gather at the river” or “When we all get to heaven.” TY and I attended church together about every Wednesday and Sunday night. I think he knew every word of every hymn in the book. Sometimes my brother Dale, and Ty’s older brother Jack, would gather there with us at the end of the driveway and we would get up a game of mumble peg; although most of the time we would just sit around and tell jokes, smoke cigarettes and throw rocks at the bats. The bats always came out just before dark. They were hard to identify from ordinary sparrows or barn swallows except when you threw a rock in their direction several bats would dive after the rock. We must have thrown a million rocks at those bats but were never able to connect with a single one of them.

2

Occasionally Ty would ride his little mare when he came to visit. He had named his mare “Fanny.” She was sort of a peculiar looking animal. Frank, that was Ty’s father, had taken old Fanny in on some kind of trade. Frank was always swapping animals. I saw Fanny the day Frank brought her home. She looked to be undernourished and most of the hair appeared to have been scraped off her sides and belly. Ty said they had worked her in the coalmines. She was small and docile enough for the job I figured. Ty bragged and said she would be a right pretty mare when he was finished with her. He doctored all her lacerations with a mixture of linseed oil and some other chemicals he found around the barn, and believed that concoction to be a cure-all for any sore or infection an animal might incur. I always made him hitch her downwind of us, since that “duke’s mixture” of medicine he had applied to his animal smelled awfully like rotten eggs. Ty said as soon as she was healed, he was going to train her to be a five-gaited saddle mare. I choked back a laugh when he told me that. Later on, when I told Dale about Ty’s intentions for old Fanny, we laughed so hard we actually got down and rolled on the ground. After about a month, the mare did start to perk up some. Ty was feeding her that high protein horse feed and the linseed oil poultices were working. She was beginning to look like a different animal.

One evening Ty rode up on old Fanny at a full gallop. He was wearing a shiny new pair of cowboy boots and a set of leather chaps. I noticed a new lariat attached to the saddle and a little bell dangling from the saddle horn. Old Fanny was sporting a new set of shoes along with shiny shellacked hooves. Dale and I cast a sidewise glance at one another and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.1.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
• ISBN-10: 1-5069-0356-8 / 1506903568
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5069-0356-9 / 9781506903569