Truthful Lies of my Childhood

This time it was springtime 1946, I was six years old, and I was feeling really good – maybe cocky would express my outlook better.  I had found that shooting marbles was my game, a game that I was good at and getting better every day.  We didn’t play the way you see kids doing in the big cities, or on TV, using a popsicle stick and a string to scribe a circle and then trying to knock the other kid’s marbles out of it.  Instead, we would make a slick straight track with our shoe, the further end being slightly higher, and use our “bully,” a large marble equal in value to 15 or 20 regular sized cats eye marbles, to inscribe a target hole.  Then the competitors would take turns from six or eight feet away, rolling a marble up the track, hoping to land a hit inside the target hole.  If you did, you would inherit all of the previous misses.  And have bragging rights.

As I already stated, I was obsessed with the game and proud as a strutting peacock at my new found skill.  My Mother had sewn me a white cloth bag, equipped with a drawstring, in which I placed my bakers dozen of the prettiest marbles in all of  and my lucky bully, which was as ugly as homemade sin and black as a Halloween cat. My expertise soon became obvious, as now the bag was stretched, bulging with gifts from not so good classmates.  Only one competitor remained, that egotistical freckle faced strawberry blonde headed kid named Jimmy Maynard.  I challenged him that April Fools Day to what I knew was for the championship, or as the old cliché states, for all the marbles!

The last class of the day was spelling, and if I had known what a omen was, when the teacher returned my test paper marked with the big D, I would have immediately struck out for home.  Freckle Face had received, as you probably already guessed, an A.  But I had no worry for marbles was a game of skill, which was in my favor, and had nothing to do with brains.  At last the bell rang and 29 students whooped and headed for the door, down the hall, and down the 19 steps to the outside door, then out to freedom.  I had retrieved my bag from the shelf underneath my well worn and name carved desk, and was ready for action.  I headed for the battleground and was delighted to see that I was the first to arrive.  I put my jacket on the windowsill and arranged it so that Blackie could see my victory from his vantage point in my jacket pocket.  Confidence invaded my body, emerging as a smirk on my face.  I was ready.  I was more than ready.  I was thinking that my mother would have to sew me another bag that could hold more marbles.  Out of gold colored material, that was it!  Gold for a king!  Me, Edward John Emanuel, the Marble King!

My thoughts were interrupted by a tap on the shoulder and a voice that I could learn to hate, saying “Get ready to lose!”  Here we were on the southwest corner of our old red brick school building where my name was soon to go down in history.  World War II might have been over, but this more important battle was soon to begin.  My smirk once again emerged as I made the track to fame with my right foot and carved a hole in its dirt with “The Bully.”  Sometimes to make the game more exciting, the two combatants would ante up an equal amount of marbles, sort of like in the game of poker.  Today I suggested 20, and my suggestion was met with approval.  The stay behind line was scratched in the dirt, and I rolled my first miss.  That miss was followed by his success and my bag was getting lighter, much lighter.  I then managed to win a few times but I was still far behind, and so I suggested another ante of 25.  Blondie connected on his first roll, and it was all down hill from there.  Soon the contents of my bag evaporated, and so I urgently asked him to stick around, which he gladly did.  I ran the 400 feet to home and sneaked out my brother Dave’s marble bag which held exactly 41, more than enough to win back my losses and wipe out Freckle Face for the champion-ship, or so I thought.  This dream needed a happier, better ending, but to no avail.  I not only lost a total of 108 marbles that belonged to my brother and myself, I also lost face.  I got whipped, I whimpered, I sulked and gave up marbles for good…..in a few years it would be checkers.  But that is another story…..

A month of mornings later, when I was eating a breakfast of cream of wheat, milk, and white sugar, I asked my favorite playmate if he could recall the marble incident.   He answered that he had not thought of that day in a long while, and was sorry that I had brought it up as he was trying to blot it out of his memory bank.  It was probably because I had left him and my jacket there on the windowsill at the schoolhouse, not remembering them until after I was in bed.  And there they stayed, for I knew that my parents would not allow me to retrieve them, for it was after dark.  I had slept very little, blaming myself for this bout of stupidity.  I left for school extra early the next morning.   When I arrived at yesterday’s battle scene, a lump as large as Bob Larson’s goiter filled my throat.  They were gone!  Sheer panic swept over me for not only was my best friend missing, but also the new denim jacket that I was so proud of.  What to do, what to do?  I was at an all time low; everything I had was dragging as I crawled up to the first grade classroom.  With grief and despair in my heart, I forced myself to change my focus from the floor to my hook in the cloak room, and wonder of wonders, they were there!  Luckily for me the Marble King had taken them home the day before and brought them back in the morning.  Much to my relief, he had hung them both in the cloakroom without saying a word.  Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all, even if his mother was a teacher.  Maybe, just maybe, I had found a new pal!

The orange ball of the sun remained low on the horizon, as if it were on vacation.  Perhaps, it was ashamed of something, whatever the sun could be ashamed of, I couldn’t even guess.  Embarrassed kind of ashamed, trying to stay out of sight.  It definitely did not contribute much warmth to raise the frigid temperature that had been lingering well below freezing for nearly a month.  It was quite apparent to me on that January day that it was only there at all to aggravate my already sour disposition by reflecting off the piles, hills, and valleys of umpteen tons of powdered snow, dumped on the entire Midwest by Old Man Winter.  My bloodshot eyeballs rebelled against the intense glare as I asked myself the same question once again: why did we have to move to the farm?

I couldn’t sleep the night before, sinuses draining down my throat and pouring out my nasal passages made my life miserable.  I sat in the kitchen on a rickety old, indeed ancient, wooden chair, it’s seat as well as mine, softened by a tick covered chicken feather pillow.  I tilted it back, leaning against the wall a mere three feet from the cast iron wood-burning cook stove, listening to the flickering flames devour the sticks of oak, watching the firelight that escaped from around an ill-fitting lid.  My flannel pajamas covered woolen long johns, and above those two layers, I shivered in my fleece-lined denim coat and knitted stocking cap.  Every hour or so, as I would start to drift off with my chin resting on my chest, the burning sticks would make a clunking noise as they did their thing in the firebox.  That would be my signal to stoke the fire and add another chunk, or two.

The next morning, early, found me trudging through the drifted snow, pulling “the box,” which was another of my grandpa’s masterly built works-of-art, heading west up the short hill to the woodshed.  In actuality, it was a wooden rectangle, made of poplar boards, two inches thick, tongue and grooved together.  “The box,” was probably 48 inches long by 30 inches wide and 30 inches deep.  The sturdy runners had a steel strap nailed to their bottom, which enhanced their ability to glide across the snow covered tundra, and increased their ruggedness as well.  A sturdy rope was attached for pulling.
If I knew what cursing was back then, I probably would have been doing it.  My non-sun-glassed eyes were itching and burning with a wild abandon.  The knit scarf that mother had tied across my nose and chin, gave little relief from the cold and only served to make my breathing more difficult.  Blackie was smart and did not venture out with me.  Sam, my Heinz 57 dog, peeked out from behind the old towel that served as the door on his doghouse, and whimpered encouragement.  Indeed, I was suffering alone. . . alone, that is, alone with the creeping crud.

My gloves were thick, but not thick enough.  By the time I reached the woodshed door, my fingers were starting to freeze.  I shoveled out the door, using my hand-me-down black rubber galoshes as the snow mover.  The left one boasted three patches, permanently borrowed from the inner-tube repair kit, and glued there by my father, Hank.  My bib overalls were bloused inside my boots, yet the snow managed somehow to sneak inside anyway.  After an eternity, or so it seemed, the door could at last be pried open.  With as much speed as I could muster, I loaded the box full of various kinds and lengths, and headed down the hill to fill “the cavity” as we called it back then.

The farmhouse was indeed too little, even for a small family; ours was far from small.  Four years previously, Hank, in his infinite wisdom and with his tools of trade, had enclosed the back porch.  Voila!  The result was an 8 feet by 16 feet kitchen, with the southeast corner set aside for an enclosed 3 feet by 4 feet floor to ceiling wood-box, known to us kids as “the cavity.”  There was a butterfly-hinged door access both on the inside and out.  A new chimney was also constructed adjacent to the box along the outside wall.  The stove-pipe was then cut, adjusted, and connected.
After three trips up and down the hill, “the cavity” was filled to the overflowing, the excess was left in “the box,” covered with an old braided rug.  I stumbled through the back door.  My mother was at the stove, punching the bread dough in an earthen crock bowl that had been in the warming oven, allowing the yeast to rise.  She called out, “aren’t you cold?

Shivering, according to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, is “to undergo trembling: QUIVER.”  I was shivering, quivering, quaking, but only where it was not visible.
“No, mother,” I answered.  “I am quite comfortable.”  My hue was blue, but my training would not let me utter reality.
She said “Fine, that is good, very good.  Then you can help your brother, Dave, carry the water for the horses and cows.”

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Let me explain the situation to you in laymen’s terms.  The barnyard, as well as the entire area for miles around, was an expanse of ice, had been for about a week, ever since that ice storm blest our world.  On the front side of the barn was a concrete apron, dangerously sloped, especially with an inch thick layer of ice.  Livestock are not known for their gracefulness, and seeing that ours had no ballet training, they were ungraceful, also.  We were poor farmers which could not afford to have an animal with a broken leg, for it would have to be put down (killed).  Letting them out to drink from the stock tank adjacent to the pump house was definitely out of the question.

The pump house and well were 93 feet from the wooden stave tank in the haymow, just inside the exterior wall of the dairy barn. The tank was of medium size, capable of holding 450 gallons of water.  An enclosure, made of oak planking, surrounded the tank.  This was covered with an enormous  heap of timothy hay, so thick that even a Wisconsin winter’s cold could not penetrate it.  The chance of the water in the tank ever freezing was less than nil.  Piping connected pump to tank.  So why did we have to carry water?

Mainly, there were two problems: the designing engineer was from Miami, Florida and the plumber was a local drunkard who believed what the engineer told him to do, and explicitly, without question, obeyed those words.  The instructions arrived by mail, ordered from an ad that blanketed newspapers nationwide.  “It is so easy anyone can follow the words and picture illustrations” touted the large print.  Roy, always in a stupor, and his slightly retarded 33 year old son, completed the masterpiece in less than three days.

The 1½ inch galvanized pipe rose straight up from the well casing, extending five feet above the horizontal run that entered the tank inside the barn, four inches below the top of the tank.  The run itself was 18 feet above ground level.  The drop on the pipe was five inches, which was sufficient.  That and the vertical stack insured drainage – “no water would ever stand in the line,” as per the ad. The pipe was braced and supported, properly and safely.  So far, so good.

Now, let’s look at the barn itself.  It was built in the year of our Lord, 1910, as the numbers on the side of the copula proudly announced.  I can’t recall the exact size, but it was a small, yet typical, mid-western building, constructed of oak plank, 1½ inches thick, nailed on massive timbers and beams.  A hillside was carved out to accommodate the structure, allowing ground level access to both the haymow from the west side, and to the animal domicile beneath, from the east side, via the barnyard.  Cedar shingles adorned the roof; the paint was, naturally, barn red.  A silo, almost as tall as the barn itself, held ensilage, or i.e., chopped up corn, that became more and more sour and fermented as time went by.

The thirst of the livestock was to be quenched by a practical and simple means.  Plumbing was run from the tank via a network of ¾ inch galvanized piping, terminating in fairly large cast iron drinking bowls that were mounted between every other stanchion.  The cows, using their nose, could get as much water as they desired by simply depressing a metal pretzel that actuated a valve, allowing gravity to fill the bowl.  The flow stopped when the nose no longer depressed the pretzel.

A thin hemp rope was attached to a cedar 2” X 10” about 12” long that floated on top the water.  The rope was threaded through a hole in the tank’s cover and, by utilizing a couple of 2” pulleys, the rope’s other end appeared in the livestock hotel below, providing a means of measuring the depth of water in the tank.  When the level dropped to a certain point, someone would start the pump, filling the tank until water came out the overflow pipe.

Testing of the system was concluded by Roy and his boy at dusk that Thursday evening in June.  It had worked beautifully!  Flawless!  That engineer was to be complimented!  Payment was made for materials and services rendered.  Roy argued with himself over which bar he should frequent, for definitely a celebration was in order!

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How much water can a cow drink?  How about a horse?  How much water can two young boys carry?  The boys can, or rather will, carry all that is required.  All that the cows want.  Likewise, the horses, too.  Hank said so.

Four galvanized buckets awaited us, Dave and I, stacked upside down, just inside the entrance door of the pump house.  They each have the number 10 dimpled on the bottom, the same ones that in the summertime see unlimited action in the green bean patch.  A four-pound sledgehammer with a long handle is used to smash a hole in the ice of the tank, large enough so that water can be dipped out.  The cold weather ritual begins anew.  The buckets are filled nearly to the brim, and the trek to the barn begins.  The icy path causes an occasional slipping, and with that, the water in the buckets starts to slosh around, spilling some of it.  Needless to say, it drenches the legs of my bibbies, and some of which finds the seclusion of my rubber boots.  By the time I slip and slide to the barn door, my pants legs are frozen.  The frigid cold water in my boots soon becomes two blocks of ice.  Frostbite, actually ice-bite, evolves, numbing my legs and lower body.  Worse yet, the more that is spilled, the more trips are required to complete the watering chore.  Morning and evening, twice a day the buckets of the frigid liquid are placed and held in the concrete manger in front of each of those bovine critters.  And don’t forget the three work horses.

Why is this water carrying necessary?  Cows need water to produce milk.  That is a given fact.  But why not utilize the water system already in place? The answer to the question became obvious that first year of the systems existence when that wintertime rolled around.  The story goes something like this: the rope gauge told the farmer that his tank was nearly empty.  The pump was started.  The thermometer, as if one was available, registered 3 degrees Fahrenheit.  The galvanized water line, 18 feet in the air, registered the same amount of coldness.  The diesel engine coughed and sputtered, then died.  By the time the farmer got back to the pump house to restart it, the water in the pipe had become frozen.  The partial blockage caused the water to geyser out of the stack and rain down on the pump house.  The result was a spectacular cascade of water that froze instantly into a remarkable likeness of the Patron Saint of Ice Sculpture.  It truly was a spectacular event, but mostly, it was heartbreaking.