MEMOIRS--Chapter 19--Moving back to Boulder when I was 9

DAUGHTERS OF THE SHADOW MEN

Chapter nineteen

Oh what a busy bunch we were when we moved to the new house in Boulder, in a place Grandpa King always said was 'God's Country'. Daddy seemed glad to be living back home. He got busy building corrals and the barn after having fenced his share of the pasture off. I thought he seemed very satisfied about what he had been able to get his dad to agree to him taking. Mother said, however, that Cecil who was now working for Grandpa King was angry over having the pasture divided up, only another way a rich man's son was given the chance to get ahead while a poor hired man had to labor away at the King ranch taking all kinds of responsibility, unable to earn anything but a wage he could hardly live on. When he was drinking, Mother snorted Cecil liked to call himself Cecil 'King,' but he would just have to accept that he wasn't a King. Mother was after all the rich man's son's wife, and Grandpa had given her the land free and clear she said in case she had to divorce Clyde. At least she thought that's what he had done. Years later, it was discovered that Grandpa never recorded the land at the court house as having change hands, but since it had long been in Clyde's possession it was transferred because he had sold out to an out of town buyer when his lungs got so bad he could no longer work hard.
As far Mother, she seemed beside herself in a new situation alive with all kinds of possibilities. In fact, she could not get her store building constructed fast enough and decided to open a one room store as had existed at the cheese factory in hers and Daddy's bedroom down stairs. Daddy when he heard about this plan, shouted as was his wont when he heard something that greatly disturbed him, for a couple of days. I was not happy with this plan either, as Mother and Dad were going to have to move upstairs where we girls slept. That was like sharing our sleeping space with two giant ogres apt to break into horrible roars at any given moment. In fact, I recall a most disturbing dialogue taking place up there the night before Mother was to go out to Richfield to have some some sort of medical procedure. I heard her shouting to Daddy, “Hurry up and get it over with!” Conversations coming from my parents of this nature were very disillusioning but I hoped that the store building would soon be finished and they would move back down stairs far enough away from me that I could not hear any noises whatsoever resembling sex.
In fact for years, if I woke up and heard any noise that sounded like sex to me I would not be able to sleep even though it was very unlikely I could have heard anything from my bedroom coming from theirs down stairs. It might be from the wind blowing a branch of a tree strong enough against the window to make a rubbing noise. Once you have been traumatized by sounds of sex emanating from your parents accompanied by curses you are not going to recover very fast, probably not until you leave their home.
Anyway, Mother said that Daddy was spending so much money drinking she had no choice but to open a store as fast as possible to earn some money.
And she also had to earn money to employ a local carpenter practically full time for the next three years. Mother decided she did not like the staircase ascending to the top of the stairs in front of her and Daddy's bedroom, so she ordered it turned around. The carpenters were weeks doing that job. They also fenced off the front room, as Mother said the big long open room into the dining area was too cold. Eventually the staircase started in the dining room to the side of the bathroom door and was enclosed instead of open. All the spaciousness of the big open room with a visible staircase was gone, but Mother was happy with her decision--for a while.
Daddy fenced in a garden plot and fertilized it and also an orchard spot, all with Mother prodding him. She said he wouldn't have gotten around to all this for weeks without her insistence he do it now! Mother ordered trees. They built a shed eventually for machinery and a cellar to store potatoes, apples, and winter squash.
I hadn't lived there very long at all when I took a little walking tour of the pasture and over the fence saw a neighbor, a big kid about four years older than I was, who spotted me and walked toward me as fast as he could. He called, “Do you want to fuck?” I whirled around and hurried back home as fast as I could go. Another SOB molester! I knew I was going to have to watch out for that kid!
The worst damn thing about the place was the fact that we had no water running into the house yet, and we had to start carrying it from the ditch from past the front yard. Washing was an all day job, carrying buckets of water from the ditch, filling an outside tub, and heating the water, then carrying it onto the back porch where the washer was set up. Then we would carry more water from the ditch to the porch to fill the rinse tub. After Mother had taken us through the process a few times, she told Margie and me that would be our job from now on every Saturday!
By the time we had done it a few times, I came up with the plan of taking turns so we could not quarrel so much. By the time I was ten and Margie was nine we did the family wash all the time, with no help from Mother thank you, sometimes as high as eight batches of clothes, and carrying all the water.
Mother had plans for a cistern and promised us little hardworking washerwomen that soon we would be able to use a hose to fill the tubs instead of carrying the big heavy buckets.
Incidentally I knew that no other woman in town would have expected such young kids to do the family wash, but Mother meant it when she said that with five daughters she should not have to do any house work at all! All the other mothers worried about tattle tale gray sheets, but Mother did not care as long as they got washed.
Since Linda was still a toddler and Ann a year and half older than she was, and LaRae, two years older than Ann, it looked like Margie and I were going to get worked about to death before the other three could earn their keep.
What made me the maddest was Mother not washing the dishes from the big noon dinner. There they would be when Margie and I came home from school, and we would have to wash those before we could start supper. Mother cooked breakfast. I guess she washed the breakfast dishes when we went to school. And she would iron most of the clothes. We used heavy stove irons and did the 'easy' flat stuff. She always ironed Daddy's shirts. After a while she got so sick of the old stove irons, she bought an iron that ran on white gas. When she lit that thing a flame would shoot up clear to the ceiling. I would run outside! I would not touch that iron, and Mother could not get me to.
Now other than these chores Mother was not a fussy housekeeper. In fact, we used to joke that the kitchen floor often looked as though chickens had the run of the house. Stuff would be spilled all over the floor, and apparently everybody was too tired to mop most days. Upstairs, after Mother and Dad moved back into their bedroom, would usually be one unholy mess with clothes scattered everywhere. Mother had this one storage closet where trunks of old clothes were kept that the little kids loved to drag out to play dress-up. Mother never even looked upstairs most days. Once in a while she might go up there and scream and holler at everybody while she cleaned it up, with our help of course.
Eventually the carpenter finished the store building enough for Mother to move in and the cistern really did get built in another year or so, only it was another big chore to fill it. Somebody had to sit there most of day and watch it so they could turn it off when it was full. Only another task to do among so many more.
I preferred to water the garden and orchard to working in the house. I always liked the outdoor work the best. I preferred Daddy as a boss rather than Mother because he wasn't so prone to run off. Mother would no more than get us started on some big job and someone would ring the store bell and she would be gone until it was done.
I know as soon as we moved to Boulder I was just as hot to trot as Mother was to get everything done I had planned. I asked Daddy if he would let me and Barbara Coleman ride horses to camp out over night to our pasture. I was nine. I thought I had enough experience by now handling horses. I had only been up there once helping to drive cattle, but I was sure I could find it again. He said we could, so I went down and got Buttons, a big tame gray horse they were now using for a pack horse. I rode Old Don I believe. Barbara and I set out riding the eight miles to King's pasture. We forgot the matches and had to go back a mile, and then we stopped for some worms along a ditch bank Daddy showed me. I loved the neat summer camp the Kings kept at the pasture Grandpa said we could use.

We did just fine until we discovered when morning came that Buttons had pulled loose from the tree where we tied the horses up, as Daddy said to do, and was gone. We finally found him down to the bottom of that 460 acre pasture running around with some other horses. We chased him and chased him but we could not get close enough to grab the rope he was dragging. I knew Daddy would just kill me if we did not come back with Buttons. I finally thought to go look for some oats, and sure enough there was a nose sack there I filled with some oats. Buttons just loved oats and let us walk right up to him shaking that nose sack.
After such a stressful morning we did not even want to try to catch any fish, so we just went on back home.
I think that is all that happened of interest when I was nine.

God's Country header made by Connie. A green Boulder taken some years after we moved back. My sister Linda sitting in a wagon in front of the new house. (It is labeled my sister Margie, but that is a mistake) Linda was down by the ditch. This picture by my sister LaRae looks as though it could have been painted in King's Pasture.

MEMOIRS--Chapter eleven--Working ourselves to death in Salt Gulch

DAUGHTERS OF THE SHADOW MEN

Chapter eleven

It is always difficult to get to the downside of molesting which is its bad effect on you. I became a rabid little masturbator which I was sure nobody else my age was. The only one I could think of who might have shared this habit with me was my cousin Ray two years older. He had taught me how to do it on the fence a few months before he had to leave town with his disgraced father. I was sure that he had some older teachers of sexual activities just as I did. He was too obsessed. His mother found his behavior very disturbing, and I was sure that his father's behavior with the young neighbor girl while drinking would not do him any good either, any more than my father's behavior while drinking was doing me. I pretty much attributed my interest in masturbating at the age of six to being awakened by the intimacy of my sexual encounter with Bill. Well, he actually had not hurt me as in pain, but the abduction had certainly been violent. I had no choice in the matter.
But I had made up my mind that if Bill ever bothered me again I would have to tell to save my own life. He had just gotten extremely scarey. I was sitting there thinking that last day in the corn this might be the day I died. I thought of stories I had heard of other little girls who had been similarly abducted but were never seen again. If I ever got home, I was going to have to do something different and I had done that, at least, but now I was masturbating on a regular basis.
I hoped I could keep it a secret because surely only little girls driven mad by bad men did it. I was probably as bad or worse than some of the older boys at school who would run at you and say words like 'fuck.'
LaRell, the only boy in the first grade who come to think of it might have been held back because he had been such a slow reader, did not do it. He came from a religious family. I knew my religious cousin, Winolia, a year older, probably did not even know what the word meant. I stayed to her house a time or two and every night, her dad, my Uncle Joel, who eventually became the bishop, would kneel down and pray the longest time. It was almost laughable to think of my dad doing such a thing.
Uncle Joel moved to Boulder at the behest of his brother, my Grandfather Wilson. Grandpa's dad had died when he was eighteen and he had always kind of looked after his younger brothers. My Aunt Ira, his wife, did not much care for Boulder, but recognized that her husband Joel was such a good man, he was needed among the outlaws of Boulder, including my dad, the husband of his niece, Irene. Mother could almost shed tears over her Wilson relatives and their religious calling as compared to the skeptical King sons who were all rapidly coming to a bad end.
Grandpa Wilson was not as earnest and good as his brother Joel. He had been very handsome as a slender young man, and had an eye for the ladies as they had for him. Grandmother Wilson acted like she was still trying to fight off the ladies, especially now that he was in such demand as the 'Doc' who could deliver babies even better than the local midwives.
LaRae was going to be a year old that winter. She was so cute and smart, and was already making us laugh so hard with her witty remarks as she was to do all her life. And such thick hair she had, everyone marveled over it. Her eyes were bigger and her eye lashes longer than mine. And she had kind of a roman nose, but forever elegant. I was afraid she was going to be the beauty of the family. I did have blond hair which kept me in the limelight, just barely, but I could see my nose was going to be kind of fat and snub like Grandma Wilson's and Margie's was going to be long and sharp like my Grandmother King's nose, which people said was a witch nose. Grandma had a sharp tongue like a witch, too, but was very kind to her grandchildren. She only spoke sharply to Daddy's drunk buddies who she hoped were to blame for leading her son astray, who was older than they were, for gosh sakes! If anything it was the other way around. Daddy was the bad influence. But you cannot reason with mothers who cannot see faults in their sons. Margie's tongue was rather sharp, too, she loved to quarrel with me, but my temperament was more like my Grandma Wilson's. I was always the last one in the crowd to get mad. I always thought about whether I could afford the price I might have to pay.
I could not help but overhear all my mother's worries about getting pregnant again too soon. I hoped that she and Daddy would be able to control themselves as much as she did because you cannot imagine the work she had to do in Salt Gulch while Margie and I tended LaRae. Daddy and she decided to plant a huge garden every year. You could hardly restrain Daddy from planting stuff to cause the ladies in the family a lot of work, a big potato patch, but Mother was just as eager to keep him busy with a big patch of field corn, and when Daddy found out how well alfalfa grew in Salt Gulch he and Mother were improving the land until he had nothing but work, work, work from dawn to dusk. Nobody else could set the irrigation water well enough to please him. He hardly had time to get drunk on the weekend.
That fall I was in school when they had the threshing crew over. I was very sorry I had to miss the threshing because it was fascinating. In those days the men would use something called a binder to put the grain into sheaves which were stored in a stack. When the thrasher came and was pulled in place by two teams of horses if I remember right, there would be an awful racket coming from the engine of the thresher and straw would be flying out one end of it as a man sacked the threshed grain which was hauled to the grainery and poured into bins.
This was when Mother really found out Margie was so allergic to grain, hay, and such, it was not even safe for her to be out around it. If her wheezing even scared Mother, you can believe it was bad. You had to be about dead to scare Mother. She would still act like, well, if you die, we will bury you and go on. I have never seen such a tough woman.
Anyway, Mother had to outdo herself with a delicious meal to feed the hay and the thresher crews. Daddy had to hire an extra hand when I refused to drive the team. I hated to let him think I had turned chicken but I just was not going work anywhere with Bill.
We had the flood the last of May which I already wrote about. I did so hate to write about the molesting. And even worse have to admit I became a masturbater. I doubted if any mother would have let their children play with me if they had known it.
And Bill was still hanging around working for Daddy I suppose hoping he might stumble across me out of sight of my mother or my dad but he never caught me again. I made sure I was as safe as possible with such a devil on the place. Even if I had to stay in the house and wash dishes instead of driving the team when I was six.
I don't know when I found out that Mother was pregnant again!
It must have been a black day for everybody. Margie and I already had to tend LaRae for hours while Mother filled what seemed to me like hundreds of bottles of corn, string beans, tomatoes, peaches, apples, apricots, and pottawatamie plum jam out of the wild ones that grew in Salt Gulch. Oh, if they did not chop her enough wood she would even give the hired men hell. She told Daddy not to plant as many tomatoes next year as she was not going to bottle all the ones that were going to waste ever again! Course she had to make extra bread to feed the hay crews. I will tell you the job of a country woman with no electricity or running water in the house never ended.
She would even send Margie and me to carry big buckets of water from the ditch, and she about came to blows with Daddy because he did not build her a trough to carry the water a little closer to the house. She hardly even had time to jump in a vehicle and go to Boulder to get the mail, which Daddy complained she liked to do for hours. But he somehow always found time to disappear on the weekend to drink. I could see that Daddy thought the only way you could get any time off as a country farmer and rancher was to get drunk. That is the way he had been defying his father for a day off for years and he continued to do it, especially after he was married, acquired a ranch, and was his own damned boss.



The top painting of Salt Gulch is the dream one my Aunt Neta painted, whose dad homesteaded the ranch. The second one is how the house looked when we lived there, a dose of reality.

The little cowboy made by the talented Connie is how people picture the innocence of all little cowboys and girls everywhere.

The last picture is of steers getting fat in green pastures to be sold in the fall, how Daddy made his money, painted by the little baby, LaRae, in the memoir when she grew up to be a good artist until she up and died over twenty years ago. She was a victim of that hard life too. She died, didn't she?