All my life I’ve seldom dreamed, which hardly mattered because I would always forget the details before my feet hit the floor. But recently I’ve been dreaming more and, amazingly, remembering the dreams past my feet hitting the floor. Interestingly, these recent dreams are enjoyable recollections of childhood. The story I’m about to share is one such recollection that came to me night before last. Of all the stories I’ve shared about my childhood I can’t believe I’d forgotten this one.
Miss Harris had rung the bell calling the stragglers into the one room schoolhouse I and my older brothers and sister attended along with 20 or so other scholars, as students were called back then. Being a first grader with a last name near the beginning of the alphabet it was my lot to sit in the first seat of the first row next to the door. It was a prime spot on warm days because Miss Harris would leave the door open to catch a breeze, and I would be able to watch Harvey’s white mule tethered to an old cedar tree in the schoolyard. (Yes, the same white mule I wrote about some months ago.)
Tapping her pointer stick lightly on her desk, Miss Harris announced, “Class, I’ve invited Clem Hawkins to come and share some stories about the early days of Fairview School.” This was a ritual Miss Harris had been doing since she arrived at Fairview 14 years earlier, back in 1938. Students looked forward to hearing Clem even if they’d heard him before, and being it was my first time I was especially excited. With the last tap of her stick Clem slipped through the door, took a seat by Miss Harris’ desk, and began to speak.
“My Great Grandpa, Sam Hawkins, helped build the first Fairview school not long after the Civil War. It burned to the ground in the spring of 1918 – struck by lightening and gone before there was time to fetch a pail of water. To prevent that from happening again the men folk, including my Pa, decided to build a brick schoolhouse. The pond out yonder was the pit where they dug clay for the bricks. We boys packed the clay in molds to dry, and Pa and the other men built a small kiln to fire the bricks. When enough were made the men built the schoolhouse but they let us boys build the outhouses, one for the boys and one for the girls, the very same brick shi…” Clem caught himself in mid-sentence and glanced at Miss Harris. She had a slight frown on her face but nodded for Clem to continue. “As I was saying, the very same brick outhouses you’re still using today.
“One night a polecat got into the girls outhouse and couldn’t get out. Marylou Kittle had the misfortune of being the first girl to visit the outhouse the next morning and when she opened the door the polecat sprayed her from head to toe. Her Mom went through three bars of Fels-Naptha soap and six gallon jugs of vinegar trying to scrub the polecat perfume off Marylou. When the poor girl finally returned to school her hide was as red as a scrubbed hog and she smelled like a polecat soaked in lilac toilet water.
“Back then most of us walked to school just like you do, but we had a kid hack for the ones that lived three miles or more away. A kid hack is what you call a school bus today. It was a horse drawn wagon with benches inside for children to sit on. Steps dropped down from the back so as not to disturb the horses when the boys and girls got on and off. One time a copperhead spooked the horses just as a little fellow was about to step off the hack. When the horses lurched forward one strap of the boy’s suspenders got caught on the bottom step, and before the driver, a fellow named Barney Bartley, could get the horses stopped the boy had been dragged a quarter mile. He wasn’t harmed much, praise the Lord, but he was stripped butt naked except for that one flapping suspender.” Clem cast an eye toward Miss Harris as he said the word “butt”, but this time, instead of a frown, Miss Harris smiled and nodded for Clem to continue.
“Not to be giving you boys any ideas but one of our favorite pastimes before the first winter freeze each year was to see whose dog could raise the fattest tick. We’d all bring our best tick to school on tick day, then at morning recess we’d lay them side by side on a piece of white paper with their legs up so they couldn’t waddle away. One year a boy named Bubba Brown produced a tick that was near double the size of all the others. His family had just moved here from somewhere down south and he claimed the tick had come on his dog, a bloodhound no less. Bubba called it a Lone Star Tick. We swore there wasn’t no such thing and that he had somehow injected it with extra blood or maybe it was off a sheep or some other farm animal that had richer blood than a dog. But one of the girls looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and sure enough there it was with a picture and all. Bubba was declared the all time champion tick grower and we all made plans to have our dogs run with Bubba’s bloodhound in hopes of getting our own Lone Star Ticks.
“With the contest over we put all the ticks in a fruit jar, including the extra ones we’d each brought to school in case our fattest prize ticks popped before we could compare them at morning recess, and placed the jar on a shelf in the cloak room for the ticks to await their fate at afternoon recess. Meanwhile, our teacher, Miss Lily Hunter, had us boys each write a 100 word essay about what we’d learned about ticks that day.
“Afternoon recess finally arrived so we fetched the tick jar from the cloak room and headed across the road to Ma Perkins’ chicken run. We only had to throw a couple of them ticks for the chickens to realize what was being served and they commenced to catching the ticks before they could hit the ground. Well, Bubba had saved his Lone Star Tick to the very end and threw it high in the air above the chickens. Wouldn’t you know it was Ma Perkins’ best brood hen that caught that tick, except the tick was so big and fat it lodged in the hen’s throat and she suffocated and died right there on the spot. Ma Perkins heard the commotion and ran us off, declaring we’d better never feed ticks to her chickens ever again.
Clem started to tell another story, but Miss Harris kindly cut him off and thanked him for stopping by. This was a big disappointment to me and still is to this day on account of that’s the same spot where my dream ended the other night. But, if I happened to have another dream about childhood, I’ll be sure to tell you about it.
George Brown is a freelance writer. He lives in Jackson Township with his wife Yvonne.