Three
____________
Oklahoma
Summer
My clearest memories
are from our warm Oklahoma summers. Those days were a wonderful time for
playing outside. My brothers, Richard and Teddy, didn’t always want me to tag
along. A lot of things happened during the summer months. Richard took my
favorite doll away once and put it high up into an apricot tree. My Pa went out
after dark to retrieve it after he’d already worked many long hours under the
hot sun. It was harvesting time for wheat and my Pa was working with the
threshing team that day, so he was extra tired.
The threshing team usually consisted of between
ten and twelve men who went from farm to farm with one or more combine
harvesters, each being pulled by a team of between twenty to thirty-five
horses, depending on the size of the combine. The sunup to sundown hours were
long and hot.
Another time Richard tried smoking one of our
Pa’s cigars and set the wallpaper behind the kitchen stove on fire. I ran as
fast as lightening to a nearby neighbor’s house, but our Ma was able to
extinguish the fire in time so that there was only minor damage. Needless to
say, Richard got a tongue-lashing and a visit to the proverbial woodshed.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Can we sleep outside tonight, Mamma? Please
Ma!” Rae Ann begged.
Her mother continued stacking freshly washed and
dried plates without a reply.
Rae Ann lifted her tone of voice and asked, “Why
not?”
Turning around abruptly, Mrs. Charlton replied,
“Don’t you lift your voice to me, young lady, or—”
“I’m sorry, Mamma, I’m sorry. I just… I just
get—”
“I know, dear, I know. Anyway, I don’t see a
reason why not, but we’ll still run it by your Pa when he comes home for
lunch.”
“He’s comin’ home for lunch today, Ma?”
“Sure is. Well, if all goes as planned the crew
will finish up threshing the Pritchford’s fields by about midday, maybe sooner.
He took Richard with him today to help with some kind of tractor work.”
“I wish I could drive a tractor,” Rae Ann
pouted.
“That ain’t no woman’s work, dear. You better
just be glad you can be inside workin’ with me on hot days as these be.”
Running into the kitchen, little Sarah Jane
interrupted, “Teddy’s ridin’ the cow again and Mary can’t get him to stop,
neither!”
Teddy had a habit of jumping up onto the back of
the family milk cow from behind and riding it as long as he could. His parents
did not approve of his adventurous rodeo style practice, since it hampered the
beast’s milk production.
No sooner than the group had exited the house
and approached the field, Teddy suddenly jumped down from the cow and ran up
the dry grassy hillside, hopping over the barbed-wire fence like a dear.
Unfortunately, Teddy caught a barb jumping over and scratched up his calf a
bit, tearing his pant leg in the process. His mother sowed it up later and
nobody was none the wiser. Their father was not one to show an undue amount of
compassion for accidental childhood injuries. His usual comment was to either
‘work it out’ or ‘sweat it out’ depending on the circumstance and injury.
Looking back toward the long dirt road into
their farm, Rae Ann could see billows of dirt dust in the distance, “Pa’s
home!”
“Papa?” Sarah Jane questioned.
“We ain’t even started lunch yet,” Mrs. Charlton
lamented. “C’mon girls, never mind Teddy, we got lunch to make. And don’t be
tellin’ your Pa about Teddy and the cow, you’ll only get him riled up about
nothin’, ya hear?”
“Yes, Mamma,” they agreed.
Once Mr. Charlton and Richard had secured the
horses and wagon they entered the house by the back kitchen door. Mrs.
Charlton, Rae Ann, Mary, and Sarah Jane were all working frantically to finish
lunch preparations. They all knew how hungry and thirsty hard working farmers
get during a day under the hot Oklahoma sun.
“What were you all doin’ out with the cow? We
saw you from the roadway,” John Charlton inquired.
Hilda Charlton was amiss as to how to answer
that question. None of the Charltons ever willingly or consciously told a lie,
and this was not going to be the first time.
“Dad… Pa, we kids were wonderin’ if it would be
ok for us to sleep outside tonight. I asked Ma, but she said we would run it by
you when you got home for lunch. We almost got lunch ready, but can we sleep
out tonight, please?” Rae Ann had gracefully changed the subject in hopes of
curtailing any further questions pertaining to the cow, the field and,
possibly, Teddy.
“Yeah, Pa,” Mary and Richard joined in.
“I don’t see as to why not. What’s your thinkin’
on this, Hilda?”
“Fine by me,” she replied, “and you men ought to
be gettin’ washed up for lunch, after you pick the stickers outta your socks,
that is.”
John looked around at his children with a smile,
“I guess that’s settled. Sleep out tonight.”
While the children cheered, Richard and his
father went out on the porch to pluck thorns, stickers, burs, and all else from
their socks.
“Pa?” Richard muttered softly.
“What is it, boy… speak up, like a man.”
Looking a bit embarrassed by his father’s words,
Richard continued, “I was wonderin’ if… if one day I’ll be able to go to
college and all that.”
John Charlton’s dream was to send all of his
children to a college or university one day, but he knew that a man’s dreams
were often hindered by the harshness of life and its circumstances,
opportunities, and by the abilities a person has.
“I was just wonderin’, that’s all,” Richard said,
continuing to pluck the stickers from his socks.
“Well, son,” Mr. Charlton took a deep breath
before continuing, “that’s your Ma’s and my dream. If this country gets back on
its feet and the rains come back, so we can make a better livin’, I don’t see
why not. We just need to keep on prayin’ about all these things.”
“I know, Pa. I be prayin’ almost every night for
folks I know, money stuff, farmin’, world leaders… at least the ones I learned
about in school, and even my enemies, just like the Bible teaches us to do.”
“What enemies you got, son?”
“None really, but, you know, the kids who act
out in school and try to be tough, them kind.”
“I see,” John replied, “I remember those kinds
of boys when I grew up. Some of ‘em turned out ok later on in life, but many
just never amounted to nothin’.”
“I guess I will just keep on dreamin’ and
prayin’, Pa.”
“Me too, son… me too.”
Poking her head out of the door, Hilda
announced, “Lunch is ready, men!”
“I’m starved,” Richard affirmed.
What appeared on the lunch table to have taken
hours of work to prepare consisted of leftovers from the day’s previous meals,
the family’s hungry stomachs did not complain.
Teddy arrived for lunch just in time to join the
others before all of the food disappeared faster than a coin does during a
magician’s trick. Nobody thought to ask him where he’d been because they were
too busy eating, and that was just fine as far as Teddy was concerned.
“Check out them stars,” Rae Ann commented.
“Ain’t they beautiful?”
The five Charlton children stared intensely into
the black night sky overhead. The celestial blanket spread across the visible
universe like colored sugar crystals across the top of a chocolate birthday
cake.
Rae Ann continued, “You ever think about
eternity?”
“Who you askin’?” Richard barked.
“Any of you, all of you, I don’t know.”
“I do,” Teddy happily answered, “all the time.”
Rae Ann was happy to hear her brother’s
response, “Like what, Teddy?”
Teddy thought hard for a moment before replying,
“About how complex the universe is, how complex all the stuff in our bodies is,
how the stars out here just go on and on, how God just created all of this like
it was nothin’, and stuff like that.”
Richard commented, “You ever think about how
endless work is, Teddy?”
Richard was a might bit tired from his day
working in the fields, household chores, and all of the talking. He preferred
to just stare up into the heavens in silence and enjoy looking at the stars and
searching for shooting stars.
Rae Ann sparked back to Richard, “God rested on
the seventh day, so maybe you should be restin’ your mouth a bit.”
The siblings giggled.
“Ok, ok,” Richard humbly agreed. “Go ahead
Teddy, tell your story.”
“Well, that’s about it, I recon. I read a lot
about things and all and that musters up my curiosity.”
“You was readin’ a book the other day, Teddy,
was that one of them books?” Mary asked.
“Yep” Sure was!”
After a moment of silence that felt like an
hour, Rae Ann prodded, “What was the book about, Teddy?”
“About the intricate balance of things,”
“Intri… what?” Sarah Jane asked.
“Intricate balance of things. Intricate means
sort of complicated and detailed.” Teddy informed his siblings.
“Where you be learnin’ all these fancy words
from, anyway?” Richard prodded his brother.
Teddy replied matter-of-factly, “From readin’
and lookin’ up words in the dictionary.”
While Teddy explained details of the intricacies
found in nature, particularly the Earth’s distance from the sun, its gravity,
oxygen, water supply, the human body’s vascular system, brain, muscular and skeletal
anatomy, Richard, Mary, and little Sarah Jane fell asleep to the smell of the
pleasant odors of harvested grasses gently swirling through the warm summer
night’s air.
After her brother’s long discourse ended, Rae
Ann commented, “Ya know, Teddy—”
“What, sis?”
“I think I can see you becomin’ a doctor or a
scientist or somethin’ one day. You gots the smarts for all that.”
Teddy stared up into the starry clouds overhead
and replied, “That’s my dream, Rae Ann, that’s my dream.”
“Sometimes I like to pretend I see animals,
people, mountains, rivers, and all kinds of things made up of stars.”
“Me too.”
Rae Ann fluffed her pillow to raise her head up
and commented, “God is blessin’ us during these hard days.”
“That’s for sure, sis, that’s for sure.”
Chapter Four: Picture Day
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