Grandpa
How do you describe a man like my Grandpa? His name was Jack Smith. I guess that’s maybe the most common name in America or at least it was back then. But I don’t believe he was a common man. One thing I’ve observed about Grandpa and Grandma is they weren’t folks who liked to put on airs or as Grandma would say, “show out”, a lot. The names they gave their children are pretty indicative of this. There was Jack Jr., John, Jim, Clay and Steve for the boys and Donna, Mary, Betty, Nancy and Cheryl for the girls.
Grandpa was a handsome man, in fact my Grandma and her sister called him handsome Jack when she first met him but that is getting way ahead of this little tale. Or maybe this tale is way behind those days because this story is about the time Grandpa give me my only whipping, we didn’t call them spankings ’cause that was just too citified, us country kids got whuppin’s and we were proud of ‘em. I can just imagine the looks on some social worker’s faces out there right now. Their mouths forming a perfect O and their eyebrows raised in horror at the thought of a grown man whacking a kid on the butt. Truth was, I remember the competitions we boys had on the school bus of which kid could tell the biggest tall tale about the whuppin’s he got from home; they were sort’a like a merit badge. It’s good that no one heard our stories back then or probably all of our parents would’ve been hauled off to the hoosegow in handcuffs and chains. Truth was, we probably deserved a whole lot more whuppin’s than we got. But, in some cases maybe we got a swat or two we didn’t really deserve. I’m still not sure about this one.
When I knew him, Grandpa was a dairy farmer, he had formerly been an oil field worker. When I knew him, he had been married to the same woman for almost his whole life, had a passell of kids and he believed Championship Wrestling was real. I was his oldest Grandkid and lived just down the road one mile and since I had an Uncle Steve who was four months younger than myself and he was the closest kid near my age in the surrounding countryside, I spent a lot of time at my Grandparents house.
Much of the time when we were under the age of twelve the main thing Grandpa wanted from Steve and myself was for us to be out of the way. I can also say I was the apple of my Grandparent’s collective eye… at least I was until all those other Grand kids started showing up. By the time this story took place there was a whole bevy of Grand kids that could be found hanging out at the ‘Farm’ on any given weekend or summer’s day. That was pretty much alright when it was Steve, my cousin Terry, my cousin Shawn, or cousin Kenny and myself. Problem was there were those girl cousins that always wanted to tag along, mostly Terry’s sisters, Linda and Kathy. That’s were the trouble started from.
At Grandpa’s funeral, my Dad was talking about how Grandpa was still upset, even after all these years, at having to give me and Steve a spanking for ‘hanging Terry.’ It was the only time he’d ever had to spank me, was what Grandpa had told my Dad. When I heard this I just started laughing and my comment was, “So, that’s what that spanking was for?” Dad was a little confused at first until I told him, as Paul Harvey used to say, ‘The Rest Of The Story.’ And here it is:
On the farm there were two main features that provided hours upon hours of entertainment for us boys when we were kids. One was the hay barn and the other was the creek. Now the hay barn transfigured itself constantly all year. It would go from completely full of bales of hay stacked tight and to the top of the barn, to half full and shrinking during the winter. By spring it would be nearly empty but would usually be home to a bunch of ‘bucket calves’ that we used to love to stick our fingers in their mouths and feel how hard they would suck on ‘em… at least until they got big enough to have a pretty good set of teeth and then the fun sort ran out of that little game real quick. The fact is, no matter what level the hay was in the barn, it was a great place to be a kid. We built ‘forts’ in the hay and tunnels. Sometimes the haystack played the part of the Matterhorn when Steve and I reenacted Disney’s ‘Third Man on the Mountain.’ All Steve, Terry and I had to do to have a good time was get to the hay barn. This was usually accomplished easily by being a little too ‘rowdy’ in the house.
The other amusement park feature of the farm was, ‘The Creek.’ Now, the creek only had really two faces; dry or flooded. If flooded we weren’t allowed close to it, but since it was dry most of the year, we played along it’s banks almost constantly. I still believe every boy should have a creek to grow up on. It had lots of trees, some small and some large, some persimmon and one giant Mulberry. There was the bee tree and the willows around the big pond that set just off to the side of the creek.
Along the creek us boys could be anything. We were Musketeers, the Swamp Fox and went into outer space. We played Tarzan (although we could never decide for sure who was cheetah the chimp) and had many adventures with Marlin Perkins and his Wild Kingdom crew. Superman, Spiderman, Roy or Gene, it didn’t matter to us if we played Cowboys and Indians or Robin Hood, we always had adventures to play out in the hay barn. In other words, we used our imaginations to entertain ourselves back then. What a concept! Just think if it ever catches on with kids nowadays, no telling what might happen?
Now, as in every good story and most bad ones, there has to be a villain or that haunted spot where the Twilight Zone music could be heard playing if you listened close enough. Between the hay barn and the creek was just such a spot… the tire swing. Now, there really was nothing sinister about the tire swing, in fact there was only one thing the matter with the tire swing, it was huge! There is a rumor that frequently swirls around the males of the Smith family. It is that we can sometimes get a little carried away when we are working on a project. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not but I’m pretty sure the tire swing may have been where that rumor originated from.
Since I wasn’t around back in the day when Grandpa and Sons built the tire swing I don’t really know how they managed it. The design was simple enough. One giant tree with the first fork or limb about thirty feet off the ground. One great big tractor tire that was almost large enough a man could stand upright in the center of it and one big cable that came from some place in the oil field. The cable was close to two inches in diameter and made from wound steel wires. How the Smith men managed to get the tire off the ground and the cable up over the limb of the big Elm tree, is beyond me but how they bent the cable around the tire and the tree limb and got it tied off is truly a feat of strength not easily equaled.
The tire swing hung out there in the pasture, just below the hay barn, for generations until finally after all of the grandchildren were grown and gone, Dutch Elm disease killed the old monarch of a tree, there really was very little use actually made of the tire swing. It was just too big. Seemed like every spring we would try out our new and larger muscles on it, only to find out the swing was so heavy we still couldn’t push each other, okay we still couldn’t push the swing by itself let a lone with someone in it. Still, we had to try. As we grew, the tire swing did shrink, somewhat, but not nearly enough to make it practical as a form of entertainment.
So, now, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for; the start of the story of my one whuppin’ from Grandpa. Steve, Terry and I were all within a year of the same age. This made for a perfect troupe to go play on the creek and have a lot of fun, or as the adults used to say, to get in trouble. Adults usually don’t appreciate all of the vision and enginuity of young boys. Still we had a lot of fun, except when Terry’s two little sisters wanted to follow along. Mainly because they were two of the worst tattle tales in the world. “Grandpa the boys climbed up on top of the hay barn and they weren’t supposed to! You gonna whup ‘em Grandpa? Grandpa, the boys were trying to smoke grapevines and they would’ve too if they’d a had any matches to light them with! You gonna whup ‘em Grandpa?” I think you get my drift… besides we were never allowed to have matches.
So, anyway one fine and beautiful late spring or early summer morning, us three boys headed for the creek. We must’ve been around eleven at the time because starting when we were twelve we spent most of those summer days in the hayfield and thus ended the carefree part of our youth… more or less. So, anyway we were doing just great when we heard the thumping of small, determined feet charging up behind us just as we were passing the tire swing.
“We’re going with you boys, Momma said we could!” announced the girls in those high shrieky, shrill voices that still set my teeth on edge just thinking of them.
Now, I knew we’d never make them leave by just telling them to. That’s when I looked over and saw the massive steel cable holding the huge old tractor tire in the air. A moment of inspiration assailed my senses and I had an idea. We’d get the girls to go back to the house to tattle on us and while they were doing so, we’d beat feet so far down on the creek they wouldn’t be able to find us. Especially since we knew the creek so well and they didn’t.
“You guys either go back to the house or Steve and me will hang Terry,” I told Linda and Kathy in my most grownup and authoritative voice.
“Nuh-huh,” sneered Linda back at me. She was the oldest and getting harder to fool every year. “You can’t hang ‘im. You ain’t got no rope.”
Well, she had me there but I wasn’t going to admit to defeat so easily. “We don’t need no rope,” I told her. “We’ll twist the cable of the tire swing in a circle and then Terry can put his head in it. That’ll hang ‘im.”
Terry happened to throw in that he’d do it too if they didn’t go back to the house. Now, like I said that cable was the size of a man’s wrist and I’m sure, even without the weight of the tire pulling down on it, twelve grown men couldn’t have pulled enough slack in that cable to have even started to bend it, let alone two eleven year old boys.
But, it worked!
Linda and Kathy were flying on their little snitch feet back to the house to tell on us. Meanwhile us boys were headed the other way as fast as we could, to go play on the creek. We’d just watched an episode of Wild Kingdom showing a bunch of apes leaping from tree to tree and we were pretty sure we could do the same thing in the Persimmon grove and we couldn’t wait to try it out.
Now, as we were swinging back and forth in the tops of the trees and jumping from one tree to another like we’d been doing it for all of our ancestral lives, we’d forgotten all about the girls. Mainly because we were having too much fun and also because we didn’t think anybody would believe we could hang Terry with the old tire swing in the first place… when here come Grandpa! He was driving his old Ford tractor across the pasture so fast that when he would hit a bump it looked like all four wheels would leave the ground and fly off in different directions only to snap back in place an instant before they met up with Mother Earth again. Like I said, us boys had forgotten all about our little rouge to get rid of the girls, so we figured there must be something seriously wrong at the house, like Grandma had had an instant pregnancy or something and had to be rushed to the hospital (remember we were only eleven) so we left our tree tops and rushed out to meet him.
Grandpa slid the tractor to a stop in a cloud of dust and leaped off of it in a much more nimble landing, than I would’ve up to that point, believed possible. He grabbed Steve by the arm and whacked him about three or four swats on the butt and then he grabbed me and proceeded to do the same. Then he spun around and pointed his big index finger at the end of Terry’s nose and said, “I ought’a whup you too!” But he didn’t, he just jumped back on the tractor and tore off back to the house. After all, it was a Saturday and Championship Wrestling may’ve been on. Up until the day of his funeral I never knew what we’d gotten the whipping for.
By the time I’d told Dad what had happened we were both laughing pretty hard. We then continued to reminisce by telling more Grandpa stories. But, I guess Grandpa went to his grave believing Steve and I had tried to hang Terry… The stories adults will believe… it’s mind boggling. I still don’t know if Steve or I either one deserved that whuppin’… but there was that other time… Later
