The Homeplace

December 21, 2007 08:57 am

— By Karen Mitchell Smith
If you turn south at Caddo, Texas, onto the dirt road there and follow that road as far as it goes, you will come to The Homeplace. At least that’s what my father has always called it. He grew up there, and his father did, too. To go there is to journey into my family’s past. It’s taking a break from the hyper-cyber world and stepping into a sepia-toned movie vignette. The props are all there, but the actors live only in our memories.
The road leading up to the rusty cattle guard winds through thick cedar trees intermixed here and there with scrub oak and mesquite. Limbs brush the sides of the pickup as you go. The log house you come to first fell down a few years ago. A colossal rock chimney stands over the collapsed structure, and even the chimney is ready to crumble into the past as it strains against the chain that holds it at a tilted angle. Behind the house sits a water well, covered and dry now, a derelict wagon and silent barns.
The scene was not always so devoid of life. My great-grandfather, Dave Mitchell, made boots and shoes in this two-story homestead at the turn of the century. I close my eyes and imagine how different it must have been in the late 1800s when the house bustled with activity, customers coming and going and Dave’s seven children playing on the lawn or helping in the field. I’m told that customers came from so far away they often had to spend the night. My great-grandmother served hot meals in the kitchen, and Grandpa Mitchell, as my family calls him, served up entertaining stories on the front porch.
Dave Mitchell was somewhat of a larger-than-life man, a local tall tale hero, who loved to retell his own adventures. He stands out in the minds of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren as a symbol of the past, a reminder of the family as it once was, like that rock chimney towering over the collapsed house. The man himself died long before I was born, but he seems familiar to me because my father has continued his story-telling tradition. The stories came to him from Grandpa Mitchell, himself, and their lack of verifiable details in no way diminishes the fun of hearing them. Daddy loves to tell them, even more so now in his senior years. My dad has a huge, wheezy laugh that just begs for knee slapping , which he indulges in as the action becomes more exciting. His voice builds with the drama, and he punctuates with his hands. By the time he reaches the end of the funniest tales, tears roll down his cheeks as if he hadn’t told that same story countless times before.
I love all the stories, but my favorite one recounts Grandpa Mitchell’s legendary snake-killing method. Daddy is already laughing before he begins. “Grandpa killed rattlers (Daddy pronounces it “rat-lers”) by picking them up by their tails and swinging them around and around then jerking back hard, like snapping a whip, to make their heads pop off. Well, one day Grandpa was riding down to the cattle guard when he came up on a traveling preacher, standing in front of his wagon and throwing rocks at a big old rattler. The preacher was hitting all around that snake raising up dust and just making it mad. Grandpa laughed and said, ‘Let me show you how to kill that snake.’ Grandpa picked that snake up by the tail and went to swinging it around and around, but when he jerked the snake to pop his head off, its body flew out of Grandpa’s hands and wrapped around the preacher’s neck.” Tears are streaming down Daddy’s face, and he has to pause to catch his breath. “I don’t think they ever saw that preacher again,” he finishes. No, I wouldn’t think so. I hope the lack of good preaching beyond the cattle guard didn’t affect my great-grandparent’s eternal souls.
These days that road is seldom traveled, and certainly not by preachers and snake doctors in wagons. Only the descendants of Grandpa Mitchell raise clouds of dust on that old road, heading on across the mostly dry creek-bed at Wimberly’s Hollow and around the bend to another house. This one is falling down now, too. My daddy and his father moved there from the other house when Daddy was seven. There are two small feed barns, one with the faint memory of red paint, a broken-down cow lot, various chicken coops and an outhouse that is on its side now. Before it fell over, once when I was a little girl, I opened the door and a red wasp chased me away. The dilapidated out- buildings and the deserted house are rustically peaceful. To the side of the house, a small wooded hill slopes gently. The spongy ground, carpeted with cedar needles, is dotted with cheerful white and brown toadstools, and as you walk over the hill the sound of birds telling secrets in the wind is all you hear.
When my grandpa was alive, we went to The Homeplace often. He used to sit me in front of him on Old Bill, the biggest roan gelding I’ve ever seen. We would ride until my eyes swelled up like snakebites, and I would start wheezing because of my horse allergy. But I loved to ride with him. He called me Sis, and told me wild tales, laughing and slapping his knees, just like Daddy. That horse was his life. He was a cowboy, and up until his last few years on The Homeplace, he rode Bill everywhere, even into the little town of Strawn to eat dinner. I’m told that when he worked for local ranchers, he would get up way before dawn to take care of his cows and chickens, then ride to the rancher’s place, work cows all day, and come riding home long after dark to feed his own stock. Sometimes Old Bill led the way home while Grandpa slept in the saddle.
I wish I could remember more about my grandpa. I was only twelve when he succumbed to dementia suddenly and had to be committed to a nursing home; he was in his early 70s. To me, he died then, but in reality he died five years later of a heart attack. I couldn’t accept him like that, shambling around in death’s waiting room, feeding invisible cows. I prefer to remember him as he was before, a feisty, short man who, to me, looked very tall, sitting on that horse. He scoffed at the luxuries of life. He had a pickup, but preferred his horse. His house had no bathroom; he bathed in the creek, and the outhouse served his purposes when nature called. The water faucet in the kitchen gave only cold water. Although he had electricity, his only heat source was a wood-burning cook stove. I remember backing up to it, close as I could bear, feeling the heat against my cold legs, smelling the pungent odor of crackling mesquite.
He led a lonely life. His wife died of blood poisoning when my father was only thirteen days old. She was eighteen. Grandpa was happy, though, and like my dad, he could make you laugh. In the evening we’d sit on the porch, and he’d tell us stories we’d heard over and over. We would laugh and listen to the owls and coyotes, and it was sad, knowing most nights he listened to them alone.
There aren’t many men like him left. He was a rare breed that now faces extinction. Like the buffalo, real cowboys had their hey-day, but the forward swell of modernization has put the old-time cowboys onto four-wheel ATVs and into cyberspace. The word urban precedes cowboy for many Stetson wearers. Whereas cowboy used to be a way of life, now it’s a fad. Something people put on when they take off their nine-to-five suits. My grandfather and those like him were called cowboys, because they worked cattle. To them, being a cowboy didn’t have anything to do with clothing or talk, but it was a living and how you went about living. He didn’t carry six-shooters like the Old West cowboys, but he believed a good horse let’s you shoot from the saddle. When he came in at night after taking care of his animals, he didn’t put on a starched shirt and clean hat to go to the nearest dance hall. He went to bed early because before dawn he would be up milking and feeding the stock and gathering eggs for his breakfast.
Maybe it’s a form of flattery that so many young men want to copy the old way of life, or at least the accoutrements of that life, but I know my grandpa would have laughed at them. His boots were handmade by his own father, and later by Leddy’s in Fort Worth. His hats were stained and crunched, not by mechanical bulls, but by the real, snorting thing during the course of a normal workday. Spurs were not accessories to his wardrobe, but necessities to his life’s work.
His spurs still hang in the old house, jingling lightly as they twist in the breeze coming through the broken windowpane. There’s an old radio on the shelf where he left it, and after all these years, there is still some mesquite left in the woodbin behind thecook stove. Even the refrigerator is still there, and the taste of the fresh cow’s milk he kept there lingers on my tongue. Mamma always told me not to drink it because I might get stomach parasites, but he drank it, so I did, too.
We still go to The Homeplace, and sometimes I almost expect to see him standing on the front porch. But he’s gone now, and the cows and chickens, and even Old Bill are, too. We get out of the pick-up and walk the land like we always did, breathing the cedar-spiced air, feeling the pressure of everyday life dropping off like saddlebags. I watch my children in their hilarious chase to catch frightened armadillos, and we laugh and say how much Grandpa would have loved it. Sometimes we walk down to Wimberly’s Hollow where the trees and briars are so thick you can barely get through to the creek’s edge. I look at my children, four generations removed from Dave Mitchell, standing where their great, great grandfather once stood, and listen to the whispers of the past in the treetops. I feel Daddy’s hand slip into mine as we watch the birds coming home to roost, and my heart tells me I’ve come home, too.