Many times, when I was young I time traveled daily with my grandfather and his storytelling back to that prairie state of Kansas. Since he first gave me that office I do it now with no apology and with further details I could only guess at then. We were both transplanted to Oregon. He at eighty years old and myself at nine.
Perhaps my first memory of him though, was when I was younger than three, I tried to swallow a whole chicken gizzard, which lodged somewhat sideways in my throat during a Sunday fried chicken dinner. My Grandfather, ignorant of the Heimlich maneuver, but innovative none the less: reached the three remaining fingers of his right hand into my young mouth in a matter of fact way, while holding my squirming and about to turn blue body by the nape of the neck and with his left hand, he pulled out the crispy southern fried portion of innards that had just about shut my own vital organs off, and I was alive. Squalling I suppose, but alive. I think I took to him then. I was told that he’d pretty much taken to me when he first heard they’d named me after him.
He did not homestead as his Grandfather had, during Bloody Kansas, but he was born in a sod house on a homestead of Norwegians who had escaped from mid-19th Century poverty of the Scandinavian ruling elite, and perhaps like the Irish a potato famine. His father, an immigrant at nine, learned carpentry and built a wooden house on another farm around 1884. He was my maternal grandfather, a second-generation Norwegian, had an English mother who happy in anglicizing the name Nygaard to Thompson, forbade the children to speak Norwegian and loathed her in-laws spitting tobacco juice on the dirt floor of their first home on Grouse Creek.
Ross, my grandfather was the second son, and took to cowboy life as soon as he could. He worked for a former Texas Ranger named Crump. He went on one cattle drive from Texas to Abilene and an expedition against small farmers who were putting up barbed wire fences and all this after, as a lad, he’d seen prairie chickens fly up in such vast numbers as to block out the sun.
He broke horses for a living, going on cattle drives, working for men who had been Texas Rangers and knew the pedestrian facts of the day from the fiction that had been the Old West. After my Grandmother died, he came to live with us in Oregon when he was eighty years old and in his first year as a widower. He was so indelibly a farmer somewhere in his soul from his Northern European genes that this indelibility had him seemingly poised to reap the fecundity of the earth all his life. I can still see his movements and mannerisms, they can all come back easily, and I can remember how his whisker-bristled jaw would roll rhythmically with its ever-present lump of Beechnut chewing tobacco stuffed into one side of a tanned cheek. He arrived on the small Oregon farm we live on in 1960 in his cowboy boots and a tall grey Stetson hat that had a card on the inside of the hat band that said, “Like Hell its yours put it Back!”
I lived in Oregon with my aunt and uncle beamed in from Kansas from 1950 family dysfunction. When he came, because his wife of almost sixty-years had died, the old man turned the twenty-two acres in less than a year into a small farm that grew all of our food and turned a very modest profit. A couple steers, a few sheep, chickens, and a huge garden were all in place before he’d been there a year. Before he came a my aunt and uncle had me in grade school twenty miles away where they had a small business they commuted to during the week. After his arrival I had someone at home and began to take a bus to a rural school district. Every afternoon I came home to find him somewhere, tinkering, feeding, chewing tobacco and generally when he saw me outside, he’d take off his hat and cry “Oh Jimmy!” in a sometimes-high creaky voice.
Summer days often were he and I and a Ford 9N tractor and the border collie on missions of fence building, garden tending, and work on the barn.
He worked with the strength of a man younger than his years and he worked every day. There was this afternoon that, through the interlude of years, I can see him with his back bent through strands of barbed wire to hammer a metal staple into a cedar fence post. His motion was taking place in a valley surrounded by mountains. Now living with his son, he had a farm to tend again. He’d lost his own farm thirty years earlier in the depression. This, however, was Oregon; his home had been the Flint Hills of southeast Kansas. Often his mind, despite the west coast splendor, would go there unashamedly.
As the wood resounded with an empty solidity from a cedar fence post at the last stroke of the hammer fastening a staple to the fencepost and he began slowly to untangle himself from the barbed wire, removing his sweat-stained straw hat and wiping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, he spat a gob of brown saliva that slowly dripped from the wire now in its place.
“Oh, Jimmy, bring the water jug,” he rasped in a strong voice that traveled a scale from a shrill attention-getting rift to a weary hoarseness. He then headed towards the shade of a tall cottonwood tree with short sure steps from bowed legs which gave rhythm to the hammer dangling from his right hand.
I ran to the tractor and retrieved from the toolbox a wet cloth-wrapped Mason jar, which clinked with half-melted ice cubes. I put it under my arm and ran toward the tree with more energy than I had been capable of all day now that the drudgery of fence-mending had ended. As I raced up to him, throwing myself to the base of the trunk, he had just got to the tree and stopped in front of me. He dropped the hammer and stepped off to the west and relieved himself.
After surveying the horizon, with his head tilting back for a small upward glance to check the sun’s position, he came back and slowly let himself down by clutching the bark of the tree and dropping to one knee. I looked at him over the Mason jar, from which I was already gulping large drafts of ice water. He smiled at me. Then taking one more mouthful, I passed him the jar and, as I swallowed, he took a small sip and placed the jar between us. There was light coming through the rustling leaves of the cottonwood tree and as he did, I saw how the landscape was reflected for an instant in the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses.
“Well,” he breathed, “I got an idee that’ll do ‘er.” His gaze came down to the fence that stretched across the field and disappeared over the hill.
“Least as well as needs be done,” he added, then pulled his hat down over his eyes and settled into the tree.
My thoughts moved from the coolness of the water to all that I had missed while being detained by the chores of the day—endless twelve-year-old imaginings: catching bullheads in the slough, skipping rocks on the river. After the trout quit biting the grasshoppers, I’d float down riffles, or get the dog to dig out muskrat holes, or play with Junior Johnson in his fathers’ hay barn. Sometimes there would be a pickup baseball game with Junior and the four Medina brothers up the road from our farm, but generally that only happened on Sundays.
“There was a time,” he began from beneath his hat, “when there weren’t no fences. When I’s yer age back in Kansas, why, you could ride miles an’ miles over the prairies an’ not see anybody all day. I seen prairie chickens fly up in a flock that’d block out the sun! Then came more people.”
He paused, laughing, straightened himself, pushed his hat back from his forehead, reached into his back pocket for his package of Beechnut chewing tobacco, stuffed a big handful into his mouth, and I smelled the acrid sweetness, of those black shiny shreds of tobacco being positioned with his tongue as he continued in a muffled tone that let the juice begin to flow around his gums.
“Well, that changed everything,” he held forth. “People never quite figured out the best way to control yer cows or yer horses was jest to let ‘em have a big open prairie to run around in—people ain’t a hell of a lot different. When all the towns started to grow an’ all the fences started separating all the land well, it was jest all beginning to change when I’s bout yer age.
“Once, well, I couldn’t have been much older than you, a-riding into town to get some nails fer my Pa an’ there’s two fellers come rid’n up to me where the road forks back towards Cloverdale…”
Misplaced from my daydreams, I realized that he was beginning a story, one which I had heard before and, though I would most assuredly hear it again, I became awake to his words. I listened to his stories as no one else would. Though, through the years, various sons-in-law would doubt this one, it was filled with enough detail to be true as far as I was concerned.
As we sat in the heat of the afternoon, I moved around to face him squarely, and all the antecedent memories became, through his eyes and words, my own eyes and words to cut through time, to fuel my imagination to reality. I could feel the undulation of the horse as it began, through its movement, to bring back a dusty Kansas road. By now I could hear the horse’s hooves: to my right, approach two riders whose indistinct forms become a focus of attention.
“Howdy,” one of them says with a smile.
“Howdy,” I say.
The taller one with the mustache wipes his nose with his hand and pays no attention to me. I eye their handguns slung low and Winchesters rifles strapped to their saddles. The younger one with the dull face continues to smile as the motion and sound of the horse brings them abreast of mine.
“That’s a fine horse,” says the one that’s been smiling at me.
“Thank you,” I reply with pride.
“Bill, ain’t this here a fine lookin’ sorrel filly?”
“Yep,” grunts Bill, not taking his eyes off the distance down the road.
“Well, now my name’s Bob and this here’s Bill, and what might yer name be?” Bob asks as he leans in his saddle toward me.
“Ross,” I hear myself say.
“Well now, Ross, where’d a farmer boy like you come by such a fine piece of hoss flesh?”
“Pa give ‘er to me,” I blurt out defensively.
“My, my, such a fine filly,” says Bob again as he slows his horse and rides around to the rear of me, looking at my horse all the while, and then, riding to the other side, placing me between them.
“From back there,” says Bob to Bill, “this filly reminds me a little of a woman I know.”
Bill for the first time smiles not leaving his thousand-yard stare.
“You fellers going’ to Burden?” I ask.
“Yep,” says Bill, who is now looking at me. “How fur is it from here?”
“About a mile,” I reply.
“Well now, Mr. Ross,” Bob says, “how’d you like to trade this filly of yers? I bet she kin run a fur piece and I’d make it worth your while.”
“Pa would take the buggy whip to me,” I say uneasily.
“I ‘spect he would,” laughs Bill.
“It’s a pity,” says Bob, shaking his head from side to side, “such a fine filly.”
The ride continues with Bob’s good nature, Bill’s silence and my wonder. I come out of my reverie now and am back with the old man’s words and the Blue Mountains that surround this about-to-be-told tale, are apparitions and out of place inside our minds that day in 1961, in south Oregon, much removed from the Kansas plains and the almost lawless days of my grandfather’s youth.
“…. anyways, after we got to town, I stabled their horses an’ they each gave me a quarter, which was a lot of money in them days. I asked ‘em if they wanted me to unsaddle ‘em and put away their rifles an’ things, but they jest laughs an’ looks at each other an’ then says that they ain’t gonna be stickin’ around very long. The one that liked my horse asked me again if I was shore I didn’t want ta trade horses with him. Anyway, I went about my business and I’ll be damned if a half an hour later they didn’t rob the bank!”
“Come to find out they was Bob Dalton and Bill Doolin of the Dalton gang,” he slaps his knee and laughs with his jaw tilted skywards to keep the tobacco juice from running out of his mouth, and despite this a small trickle found its way down his craggy chin.
“They shore did like my horse,” he said.
Again, I’m in Kansas, circa 1890, standing on a dirt street about to witness the best part of the best story I’ve ever heard. At twelve years old, I’m living the imagination of a thousand other kids who are burning their eyes in some vague luminescence of Saturday matinees and television screens.
Bill Doolin and Bob Dalton come rushing out of the bank, guns drawn and satchels of money draped over their arms they leap onto their horses and spur them into motion. A scrawny bank teller rushes out of the bank with a small caliber pistol and pops a shot at them as they are halfway down the street.
Bill Doolin wheels in his saddle and fires his Colt .44 that sounds like a cannon shot, and turns around just as fast with his weapon high in the air; all of this seemingly in one motion as the bank teller falls to the ground with a puzzled look on his face and holding his hand under his arm. I can see someone down the street step out of the hardware store with a rifle or shotgun. Bill and Bob start firing at him and store owner jumps back through the doorway much faster than he came out. Then this portion of the Dalton gang rides by the hardware store and bullets are shattering the plate glass window and the quiet air of this small Kansas town with pistol fire.
“That bullet went right through that scrawny bank teller’s armpit, jest burned him a little,” he laughs and continues, “the sheriff was sitting’ in his office through the whole thing and took about a half hour to get a posse together to go after ’em.
“Well, by that time they were clean into Oklahoma, which was Indian Territory in them days. The feller that owned the hardware store dug two bullets out of the counter and kept em in a jar by the cash register and bragged years afterwards that he’d had a shoot-out with the Dalton boys. He never fired a shot and was hiding’ behind that counter after they was long gone.”
The old man and I rode the tractor back to his son’s house, fifteen hundred miles and seventy years away from a dusty Kansas town. The story continued to crystallize and document itself with his presence, as did other stories and anecdotes; they were laced with the good humor of a man who had worked hard and tempered by the lines in a face that had known hard times.
The bank Bill and Bob had held up later took away his farm when wheat, hogs and cattle became worthless in l930. And I remember him once showing me a photograph in an Old West Magazine of Bob Dalton lying dead with his brothers on a Coffeeville street when they’d tried to pull off the ultimate bandit feat by attempting to rob two banks at once in their own home town. And in another issue of the same publication, Bill Doolin, who wouldn’t ride with famous brothers on the ill-fated Coffeeville raid, his picture in a morgue with his head twisted to one side and a couple dozen buck shot holes in his chest.
My Grandfather, a man when in his eighties, never let his children’s children, like myself, call him grandpa. Said it made him sound like an old man. We called him simply, “Ross.” Sitting in his chair and with hands that seemed always strong (though one middle finger had been cut off in a corn chopper) he would gesture through his stories of breaking horses for a living, pausing only to lift up the MJB coffee “spit can,” and Kansas farmers and characters whose lives, sometimes tragic but characterized by humor and goodness, walked periodically through my mind more real than the black and white video representations of life that sat next to the dining room table and filled our lives every Saturday night. His presence filled all of us that knew him ever since those days in the sixth decade of the last century.
He told me about riding into town for his father in 1892 and buying a newspaper and a little outside of town he had dismounted his horse, spread the newspaper out in the springtime grass and while his horse grazed read the three day old blow-by-blow account of the John L. Sullivan heavyweight fight with “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, who won the World Heavyweight Championship by knocking out John L. Sullivan in the 21st round.
I watched the fights with him most every Friday night in the early sixties, seventy years after the newspaper account. We watched live the 1962 Emile Griffith and Benny “the Kid,” Paret fight when Griffith put Paret in a coma in the twelfth round where in a corner he hit the Cuban fighter eighteen times in six seconds. Paret never awoke from the coma and died in a hospital in Manhattan ten days later. I remember rooting for Griffith and at thirteen I was there with my Grandfather and the black and white television and the Gillette commercial jingle, “You’ll look sharp, and you’ll feel sharp too, choose the Razor that is built for you!” and I’m yelling, “Kill him, Kill him,” for my favorite. I distinctly remember the hollow feeling when I learned, Benny “The Kid,” Paret had later died from a massive brain hemorrhage.
He’d tried to fight in the Spanish-American war but was sent back from Florida when he was discovered to be sixteen. After returning, he was breaking a horse on Crump’s Ranch and was thrown and, picking himself up out of the dust; he heard an old timer at the edge of the corral laugh, knowing he’d just got back from trying to go to war, “Remember the Maine!” the old Cowboy yelled.
That same year he was thrown from a horse again, compound fractured his leg below the knee, and crawled six miles back to the ranch house, where they put him in a buck board wagon and drove him ten miles to a doctor. Never claiming the miracle of escaping gangrene, he showed me those scars.
I heard a conversation he had, with an old timer who lived up on the South fork of Little Butte Creek in a cabin here in Oregon, about how in 1901 they, unbeknownst to each other, had both been at a rodeo at the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. At that rodeo, they both saw a young Will Rogers, and an old Geronimo. The Apache was under Federal guard in a cage. The guards let him out and made the fierce old man shoot a buffalo tied to a stake. My grandfather and the other old cowboy agreed that this was a disgusting spectacle of the fierce Apache warrior. They saw Will Rogers lasso a galloping rider by throwing the rope completely over the animal and man and catch the horse by one hind hoof.
Two years later in 1903, while working as a farm hand, he courted my grandmother, the daughter of the owner, a third-generation German-American born to a family from Ohio. He and my Grandmother married in October. The farm had 600 acres of bottom land. In September of 1905 he was feeding hogs for his father-in-law from a wagon. The older man was opening a gate twenty feet from him, when a lightning bolt struck my Grandfathers’ father-in-law, knocked his younger son down, and knocked my Grandfather off the wagon. According to a newspaper account the charge blew two holes in my Great-grandfathers’ chest, having entered his neck, and turned his corpse into what my Grandfather described to me as charcoal. The day of the lightning strike he and my Grandmother eventually inherited the farm.
He was a successful farmer for almost thirty years, with most of his children living and graduating from High School. He told stories of family life and of scores of farm hands he employed, all thinking well of him as a fair man. Stories of neighbors and stories of stock bought and sold, and wheat crops and corn crops and hogs, and cattle, and early machines of mechanized agriculture—like a corn chopper that took off his middle finger, and the time he threw the Klan off his property when they tried to recruit him. The time the tornado took off the barn door, when he was trying to get the horses out, and landing on him broke his back, laying him up for a time in the hospital.
Then the Great Depression came and he and my Grandmother and my mother, their youngest, had to drive away, in a buckboard wagon pulled by a team of horses, from their property and prosperity. The lightning bolts this time came in the form of a squall of bloody Kansas bankers, after the wheat and hogs and corn crops that mortgaged the farm became worthless. Some of the family would never speak of the loss of the farm to economic forces of unfettered free enterprise lest it sully their political philosophy.
While down in Texas, however, during the depression, Lyndon Johnson did things a little differently, with persuasion and threats to Texas Bankers he saved Texas farmers from far-away Washington D.C., and knowing this, years later, my Grandfather was happy to vote for LBJ in 1964, while the rest of my family, who, though they revered the oil painting of the stone farm house they’d grown up in, that was by then owned by some dentist from Winfield—voted for Goldwater, complaining that the government was too large.
The winter after he died in 1967, the old cottonwood tree that provided shade that warm afternoon he told the tale of the Dalton gang, groaned and swayed, and then fell over the Oregon fence we’d mended that afternoon for a time letting livestock trespass freely.
James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) and Flash Fiction have all featured one or more of his stories.