MAPLE CREEK MEMORIES XXI

UP THE BRANCH

Part V


Thinking of that old woman who lived across the bottom in that old shack who watched her privy float away and be destroyed by hitting the bridge reminds me of some other zany things she did or was a part of--

We all had fun when the postman came by in his truck. We were on a rural route and the mail was delivered every day by a short little old guy from up the hard road. She could see the intersection of the hard road and our branch from where she lived, and we always knew when the driver had turned into our hollow road because she would suddenly burst out of her house and practically run to the mailboxes down by the bridge going up the branch where she lived. Poor old Joe was shanghaied every day for about an hour talking with her. She would stand there for a few minutes, then put her foot up on the running board and gab for an hour or more. All the time, Joe was trying to get out of the conversation by easing the truck forward. She would take her foot off the running board momentarily and grab hold of the mirror on the truck, effectively stopping him. This would be repeated time and again, until the truck was twenty or thirty feet beyond the mailboxes, and, finally, she would let him go.

Up on the hill in the woods, just before our house, we had put old bedsteads and springs out in the woods as we had gotten new ones. We would go out there in good weather and play. There was a path going around the side of our hill out to the place where we had put them and we'd go out there and hide when we thought Mom was about to tan our hides. But, woe unto us, if she found us out there hiding.

We eventually got smart and placed leaves all over the springs that we had turned on their sides to make a fort so that she couldn't see us. One day, in the fall when leaves had fallen all over, my two next older brothers, Bob and Lee, came back to the house and told me of a trick they were doing. I wanted to see for myself and we all three went out to the fort. Bob lit a match t the leaves on the side of the fort. The idea was to blow the fire out before it got big. We did that a few times and it was really fun. But the last time, we weren't quite quick enough. Boy, did that fire ever get big fast. Before we knew it, the entire fort was flaming and we ran back to the house to tell Mom. By that time, the old woman across the bottom was out yelling that she was going to call the sheriff unless we put the fire out.

We couldn't get it out, of course, and she didn't call the sheriff. The fire took off up the hill and got to the gas road where it stopped without damaging any more of her property (actually it wasn't her property, but her brothers', but he had moved away a long time ago so she thought it was hers. What a rude awakening when a couple years later it was sold and she didn't get a dime out of it!) But it did go through a small hollow where there was a path from our house to a basketball court we had built on top of the hill. At that one place on the gas road, it had jumped it and gone over probably an acre or two of open field to the top of the hill overlooking Clint's house. At this point the fire would have had to go downhill to keep burning and fires don't do that too often. We were lucky on that one, because if it had gone downhill, it would have gotten into a broom sedge patch and then gone all over the hills. Other than our backsides, the only casualty was my brother's cap. It had fallen off some time previously, I guess, and we found it lying smoldering by the path near the top of the hill.

One night our father came home from work about one o'clock in the morning and got us out of bed to go fight a fire that was burning near the gas well. It was probably about five in the morning before we got that one out. We took hoes with us and cleared lines around the fire then went back inside the lines to put out any of the fire that was still burning. After we got back to the house, Mom fixed us biscuits and eggs with cereal for breakfast and let us go back to bed. We did not go to school that day.

There was another time that a guy over on another adjoining ridge let a fire get away, supposedly from his moonshine still. The fire burned up the hill from his house and came over the ridge and down toward our house. It had gotten to the top of the hill just above our house and we got five gallons of kerosene from the store to set backfires with. There were about eight or ten of us, neighbors included, that went up into our strawberry patch and we set fire to the broom sedge at the edge of it all along the entire line, all at once. Whoosh. The fire caught in the broom sedge and took off up the hill so fast that it didn't have time to get into the trees but stayed on the ground like we wanted it to do. After the fire was out, we did a walkthrough to make sure there were no hotspots and found three rabbits that didn't make it out of the way in time.