The Bell Ringer Ch. 01

I was suddenly desperate to see my kids again. I wanted to see Judy, but I knew it was over with her, even if I could pull out of the sickness in my soul. I had heard she had found a new man, a nice one. I wanted her to have a chance at happiness.

Crying I lay there, lost, alone, a shell of the man I was before Ohrdruf!

FORMATION

My early years were spent north of Wichita, south of Valley Center and close to the Little Arkansas and Meridian. Of course the Big Ditch hadn't been built then so it was much easier to get around than it is now.

My dad was a carpenter, a good one. He added a couple of rooms to a farmhouse, and as part of the payment the farmer deeded to dad about an acre of brushy land caught in a fold of the winding, twisty river. My dad threw up a house with the help of a couple of relatives. It seemed big at the time but looking back it had to have been less than a thousand square feet.

There was one small bedroom downstairs, maybe eight by ten feet. In the front was a living room running across the front of the house. Going to the back of the house was a small dining room the same size as the bedroom. Across the back was a kitchen the same size as the living room. Going up from the dining room was a steep stairway leading to the second floor.

The pump was outside for a few years and then moved indoors under the stairwell. Luxury! It was never fun in the mid-winter months to build a fire under the pipe going into the house! The water tasted like the sweet water of Canaan the Sunday School guy was going on about all the time. Years later I visited the people living in the house at the time. I couldn't drink the water! It was terribly brackish. It was then I began to understand that perception was reality.

The upstairs room was the area over the kitchen, the same size and shape. That's where we kids slept, six of us in four bunk beds. This caused no end of problems over the years.

My mom and dad separated when I was about five. They had always had a strange relationship: always either in strong love or strong hate, divided by the strong stubborn streak common to both of them. Finally, after a long shouting, shoe-throwing episode that I saw through the front screen door, the hate won out and the marriage was over. This was a couple years before the depression started and mom was left with six kids to raise by herself.

One incident that happened was typical of dad. We were living in the house before it was completely finished, and the stairs weren't built yet. There was a ladder with wooden rungs. I must have been about four. I was always climbing trees and such and was going down the ladder headfirst. I slipped and cut my chin pretty bad and was knocked out. I still have the scar.

When mom came home from work one of the kids told her that I was in the hospital. Mom was frantic. Well it turns out that my dad's car was low on gas so he had the neighbor take me to the emergency room. He was over at the neighbor's house having a beer with the neighbor's wife. That's just how he was.

One story that mom still tells me (even today with an evil smile on her face) was the night dad came home from honky tonkin'. He had this thing about smoking: he had to have something sweet first. So he told mom to make him a pie. She tried to tell him the flour was bad, but he just started yelling. So she made the pie.

Afterward he sat around smoking, in a better mood, telling mom, "That was the best damn pie you ever made!"

We didn't find out until years later that the reason mom wouldn't let us eat any of that pie is 'cause the four was full of weevils!

After they separated dad picked me up more than the other kids. I was quiet, shy, well behaved, and too cute. He would take me on dates with him. All the dates were basically one thing or another. Sometimes we would go for a drive, maybe stop for lunch or maybe go down by the river and lay around fishing for carp or catfish. We never kept them, threw them all back in the river. Dad was a natural ladies man. He was handsome, with black curly hair and had a nice easy way with women. Any time I was with him, there was always a woman, laughing and smiling.

The other thing was to go to a bar. Back then no one said anything about kids being in the taverns. Dad would set me up on the bar with a soda. Some woman would come over and fawn over me, smother me with her big tits (later I figured out that I was small, not that the girls' breasts were particularly large!), and then dance with dad. It was at this time that I developed a lifetime love for what used to be country music and now is somewhat euphemistically calledclassic country music.

I knew at some level I was being used but I didn't care. It was fun and I learned a lot about people and their natures that helped me later as a cop. When I came home smelling like a French whore house from all the intermingled perfumes mom would get pissed at me. I never understood that.

I suppose dad sent some money once in a while but I never saw it happen. We struggled through. It seems like the only meat we ever ate was chicken or rabbit. Before dad left he raised rabbits. Later during the depression, as soon as the first hard frost, the men in the area, mostly farmers, would grab their shotguns and pile into the back of a big truck, one of those kinda fenced in with wooden stakes.

They would park beside one of their large fields, planted with winter wheat at that time of year and line up a ways apart and march across the fields, banging away as the Jacks popped up. These guys were good; this wasn't hunting for sport! The kids would come along pick up the rabbits, one or two at a time depending on the size of the kid and the size of the Jack. We would grab them by their long ears and carry 'em or drag them back to the truck and put in small galvanized horse troughs.

We tried to carry the dead rabbits if we could, but you could see a lot of streaks of blood across the brown soil, or sometime the powdering of snow. We would get home covered in blood and mud. Some days there was more blood, some days more mud, but there were always plenty of both.

As soon as we got home mom would put the washtub in the middle of the kitchen floor. One at a time, oldest to youngest, we would cycle through the water in the tub, heated one kettle at a time on the kitchen stove. Being in the middle I didn't fare too bad, but times were that Paul, the youngest looked worse getting out than when he went in! Except for rabbit hunting, baths were given on Saturday nights, whether we needed one or not.

Of course we had to make do with an outhouse. Once a year the boys pitched in and dug a hole about eight feet deep. Then we would get some help and drag the outhouse to its new spot. One of my jobs was to fix the shingles whenever necessary and every three or four years to rip the old ones off and re-shingle.

Summers were always chaotic. Every summer the river would flood at least once. We would all pack up and go into town to grandma's place near Linwood Park. We would stay until the water went down then go home and shovel out the mud. The water level was usually about four or five feet up the living room wall and the mud was maybe six to eight inches. The smell was terrible, a smell of corruption. Some summers it would flood two or three times. It wasn't fun for mom!

One time comes to my mind that was hilarious in retrospect. My dad had given me a single shot 22. It was very short, maybe three feet long. It broke open like a shotgun and took one shell at a time. It was chambered for long rifle, but dad told me it was so old (the bluing had worn completely off) so he would only shoot 22 shorts. I mostly used it to plink at carps in the hot Augusts as the water dropped to maybe six inches in the river. The fishes' backs would stick a couple inches above the water. It wasn't really sport but I had fun.

The biggest problem after the floods was rats. It was always a hassle getting rid of them. One night dad was gone somewhere and we were all asleep upstairs when we heard thatpop that a 22 makes. Then in intervals of maybe ten or fifteen seconds another one. We ran downstairs and mom was standing on a chair, almost hysterically cracking open my rifle and jamming in another shell. There were three dead rats on the floor!

About a year after the separation, dad had moved to Texas and started calling mom and sweet-talking her. Finally he wired some money for gas and we packed up the car and the five of us kids (one of the twin girls died) and drove down to Houston. At least he told her it was in Houston.

Where we wound up was in the middle of a swamp in what would many years later become Lake Houston, northeast of the city. The directions were pretty clear. Go down this asphalt highway (I don't remember the route number) until you pass this bar called "Cabin in the Pines" (I would spend alot of time there). Then all of us kids started looking for a small grocery store that was to play a big part in our lives later. After the grocery we were to make the next left, about a mile father on.

About a half-mile down a dirt road we were to watch for a homemade bridge over the ditch on our right. When mom saw the bridge she was afraid to drive over it, but didn't see any choice. It was really home made: just some logs with two-by-eights nailed to them.

After crossing the logs we drove down the path; not a road, only a clearing between the trees. The path twisted around a lot, finding the high spots between the bogs. We came to a clearing and saw a dry area of about ten acres with a house up close to the swamp. Mom parked, leaving us in the car and took a look at the house. She walked in and came out not ten seconds later. She sat down on the stoop and started bawling. Even at six years old I knew the difference between crying and bawling.

We piled out of the car and ran up to mom, hugging her and all of us bawling. She told me many years later that if she had had the money for gas she would have turned back for Kansas right then.

We got up and started exploring, as kids will. Even if mom was crying it was an adventure for us. We went in the house. It wasn't a house. It wasn't even a cabin. It was a shack. It was two small rooms with a tiny bedroom up front. Neither dad nor grandpa was there. The bedroom was for grandpa. It had a single bed with a coffee can under it. No closet, no dresser. A bed and a coffee can, nothing more!

In the other room there was a small table with a couple of chairs, a ratty sofa and an even rattier chair. That's it! The list of what there wasn't is much longer that what there was.

There was no: kitchen, dining room, bathroom, dressers, cabinets, beds (other than grandpa's), and not any furniture except the table, sofa and chair. We pulled everything out of the car and mom tried to organize it into different stacks in the corners.

When dad got home there was a lot of shouting for a long time, then the sweet talking started again as dad promised a couple of beds. He took mom out to the Cabin in the Pines that night, but it didn't do much good. It never really got any better.

At my age you lived for the moment, the future was just a word, like "In the future you'll get married, then you'll see!" There was an old barn that I spent hours playing in, mostly alone. That's what I was, a loner.

I wasn't bothered by not having an outhouse – you walked out the door and took a piss! Some morning my brothers, one older and one younger, would come out at the same time so we would line up and have a pissing contest. I always won and for some obscure reason this made me inordinately proud. Spending twenty minutes priming the pump was no biggie, I wasn't going anywhere.

I loved running around the swamp, climbing around in the deadfalls, investigating every new feature. I learned about dead animals and maggots. I watched the flies and figured out that's where the maggots came from. Who says that little boys don't know about sex? My favorite sport was building fires over the mounds of fire ants. I'd pour a little kerosene on the mound and light it. Never did any good, an hour later it was like the disaster had never happened.

It seemed like there was a new adventure every day. One that always stuck in my mind was the rabid dog. He had been around the neighborhood for a few days, mostly out by the road. We had to walk all the way down to the paved road to meet the school bus. One day the bus let me out, for some reason none of the other kids were with me. I knew the dog was around so I didn't want to go that way.

I knew I could cut across the swamp. I had an instinctive sense of direction and I just knew that I could find my way, as I would take the twisty misdirection's to stay on mostly dry ground. I knew the snakes were there, they didn't normally bother me, I knew the bad ones: the cottonmouths and the diamondbacks.

But that day my imagination was working overtime and I just sat there. A couple hours later my mom showed up with a big stick to chase the dog away and we walked home. The next day my dad and older brother took the shotgun and took care of the dog.

One week or so the snakes were really bad. Dad would sometimes get a ride to the little bridge over the creek and having nothing else to do I'd usually be there waiting for him. That one evening as we walked back I was holding his hand and he held his sheet-rock hatchet in his other and leaned over and chopped off the heads of the snakes, mostly rattlers. The last one was right as we entered the clearing. A little later our dog was terrorized by the not quite dead diamond-back and it bit him in the neck. He was dead in minutes.

Later we were sitting around the front yard, just at sunset. My little brother Paul, two at the time, was sleeping on the front step. My mom was walking across the yard and froze, pointing at her baby. Dad walked over to the edge of the swamp and grabbed a stick, maybe six foot. He casually walked over, stuck the end of the small branch under the snake and flipped him off! Then he walked over and stomped it with his boot. He sat down and made another cigarette, like nothin' had happened.

Then there were the strange days. My grandpa used the coffee can under his bed to spit his 'bacca juice in. At nights it was his piss can. Well you can imagine it got horrendously smelly. One day my mom threw it away, disgusted. But she forgot to put a new one there. Mom and dad were gone somewhere and grandpa came home and went to his room. He never read or anything, we had no radio, geez we didn't even have electricity! We never could figure out what he did in that room other than spit, piss and sleep.

Well, he went into his room and came out screaming at us kids. We scattered like chickens do when it's time to pick out dinner! He would chase one, then another throwing bricks at us and swearing in German. The old coot was crazier that a bedbug! I don't remember him ever talking to any of the kids.

My favorite memory was when my uncle had me learn a song to sing to his new bride on her birthday. He was one of the reasons dad moved down there. They were always close. He was a sheetrock guy.

Anyway he had me learn a song, and then on Dottie's birthday my dad took me to the Cabin in the Pines. He got me a Seven-up, sat me on the counter, and my uncle asked everyone to quiet down and gather 'round. I was embarrassed at first but then I got into it. I sang, "Black Jack David" by T. Tex Tyler. Well, all the girls did the "smother me in their tits" thing again, starting with dad's current girl friend.

My uncle gave me a worn out shiny smooth fifty-cent piece (that I kept for years in my pocket, always remembering how much fun I'd had that night). The bartender gave me some peanuts and the girls kept coming up kissing me and running their hands through my pale blond, almost white hair. I got home and I thought mom was going to throw me into the swamp when she saw the lipstick on my face. I think dad had the girls do it just to piss her off.

One day when dad was off at some carpentry job, my mom piled us into the car with whatever clean clothes we had and she took off for Kansas. While it had been an adventure for us, it was a living hell for mom. What she had done was to work out a deal with the old man that owned the grocery. See, the problem was that whenever she needed to get some food dad gave her whatever amount of money he thought she needed. When she got home he would take the change back from her... that was his beer money.

Well, every time she went to the store the grocer would throw a few coins into a cigar box for her. When there was enough money for gas for the trip, we took off. Later in talking to her she said she never even left a note! One souvenir she had from Texas was a set of false teeth at age thirty-one.

We settled back home with no problem. All she had done was empty the icebox and leave the door open so it wouldn't mildew. There were no locks on the doors. She got back on at Beech with no problem but the salary wasn't much. It was a hell of a life for her but she never complained. The only time I saw her cry after Texas was when I was twelve and she started to slap me for sassin' off.

I grabbed her hand and said, "Mom, you can't do that anymore!"

She sat down and really started bawling. That was the first time I realized that I didn't understand women.

End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 should be out within a day.