Family and Brothers

Uncles

Our Mother, Alice Josephine (Davis) Jackson thought uncles were "a necessary evil." We Jackson boys ranked them much higher, just a rung or so below the Greek Gods.

Mom Jo's brothers, Arthur and Woodruff, stayed with us for a short period in the early 1930s when they were unable to find work. This proved to be a learning period for her boys on subjects that weren't taught in schools. They taught us how to roll cigarettes with little papers and Bull Durham tobacco, then several lessons in how to strike a kitchen match with your thumbnail to light the cigarette and burn your thumb. Uncle Woody taught Joel the riddle "what is the best way to find a rabbit's hole? Just look under his'tail." Joel shared the riddle with his teacher and classmates and was nearly expelled from school.

Joel and Arthur were whetting a pocket knife that Joel would later use to puncture the palm of his left hand in fashioning a "beanie shooter" from a forked branch that could zing a rock through a window like a bullet. Joel was complaining because Mom Jo needed some firewood and had asked him several times to carry in an armload. Arthur told him, "Tell her to tend to her knitting, you have more important things to do." It worked the first time and she laughed. The second time he got his rear end blistered.

Toilets were crappers to them so they became crappers to us. A gentle lady, Mrs. Eva Snow, was visiting one day when Scooter had made a run to the outside toilet. When he came in Mrs. Snow asked him, "And where have you been, young man"? Scooter answered, "I was in the crapper." Mom Jo nearly fainted but recovered enough to slice a small piece of dish soap from a cake and force it in Scooter's mouth. "Now you chew that right here and I want to see you swallow it," Mom commanded. Scooter knew he had two problems and the second surfaced within an hour to force him into several runs to what had once again become "the toilet" to us, or as Mom Jo preferred, "visiting Mrs. Jones."

I have tried to be a good uncle to the nieces and nephews and not cause problems with their mothers. My only "necessary evil" infraction was when I taught Matt and Dan Bartlett, great nephews, the best way to eat spaghetti when they were having problems getting a mouthful from the plate. "Get an end hanging over the edge of the plate," I advised, "then pick the plate up to mouth level and siphon it. Niece, Marcy, was very unappreciative.

Childish

The truthfulness a child exhibits
we crave but adult life prohibits
in ruthless quest for wealth and fame
that brings us naught but grief and shame.

And we absorb the infant's trust
its thoughts so pure we surely must
but do we change... not for a day
caught up in this charade we play.

That precious soul, in innocence
ignores our gross incompetence
and dreams that someday, he or she
will grow up just as wise as we.

The lovely mystery of a child
with naiveté fresh and undefiled
doth charm us all and tantalize
until we teach it otherwise.

Thundermug 2003

Sibling Love

So much as we knew, we were a normal family. Scooter and Joel only tried to kill me three or four times and our parents were always threatening to leave or kill each other, which was the general atmosphere of a majority of the families in Creede as we were growing up. Since it was pervasive, we accepted it as normal and part of life in a general sense. It scared us a few times when mom Jo ran to a hall closet and jerked Dad's .44 revolver from the holster it rested in, between battles, with the full intent of stopping his clock. He was usually just a step or two behind her and managed to wrestle the gun away before she could cock it. Other parents we knew slugged it out and scattered a little blood without resorting to lethal weapons to settle their disputes. Mom Jo was not a fighter, and Dad would never strike a lady, which made a knife or gun their last refuge to win or lose a profound argument.

Joel and I were rabbit hunting near Mr. Bessy's mine east of Creede in the fall of 1937. Rabbits were plentiful and we should have had more than enough for a meal but I kept scaring them into holes with bad shots to jump the gun on Joel. He was getting pretty hot under the collar when we stirred a cottontail from a bush where it scurried upward to another bush beside a large boulder. I ran higher, yet, and sneaked down, eased onto the rock where I could aim down and hit the rabbit right in the top of the head. Joel could see it plainly, aimed and fired. I was bowled over when my right knee snapped back. I lay on the ground screaming my head off and swearing at Joel who was there in a second hugging me and telling me how sorry he was. I didn't give a damn how sorry he was; he had shot my leg in two and I was going to die. When he was able to quiet me down he pulled up my pants leg and there was his bullet stuck to my kneecap. It had ricocheted off the rock and barely broke the skin.

With Scooter it was different. He deeply resented me because I was a slightly better student than he and had won a spelling bee. He was much better at everything else but because I got A's on my report card, he felt I was excess baggage and they would be better off without me. He had acquired a Quackenbush .22 rifle that spit both metal and fire out the rear with modern cartridges, more so with .22 long rifle shells. Scooter was sure if I shot it enough times it would eventually kill me. It was the only firearm he owned that he let me shoot and he even bought me long rifle cartridges. When that failed, he tested a compressed spring-type pellet gun on me that produced red spots but lacked enough oomph to penetrate flesh. He was persistent if not a good scholar.

Yesterday

Let's take a walk in old time Creede
that hosted every frontier breed
and Rocky Mountain Haired Canary*
its stocky build designed to carry
prospectors' gear and bags of ore
on narrow paths hoof worn before
the roads were built and tramlines hung
as shafts were deepened, rung by rung

a metropolis, ten thousand strong
those figures surely must be wrong
sheer canyon walls could not contain
such magnitude of human strain
in clapboard shanties, tents or huts
by streets of mud with kneedeep ruts
gouged by rims of eastern steel
surrounding every wagon wheel

supporting beds of loaded drays
that helped to fuel the boom town craze
human flotsam drifting West
poorly fed and poorly dressed
mingling with the lucky souls
that carted silver from the holes
they blasted into nature's treasure
an El Dorado beyond measure

misery etched in mothers' faces
remembering the other places
where husbands staked their barren claims
and graveyards claimed their children's names
where whores so tired of man's desires
they stilled their hearts and sexual fires
with killer doses, morphine, liquor
relieved and relishing life's last flicker

but time erases grief and pain
as springtimes learn a new refrain
of homes with laughter, new growth sprouting
mothers baking, children shouting
men content to take up roots
where once they trod in restless boots

Thundermug 2003

*humorous term for a burro

The Magic of Peanuts

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, my Dad, Bill Jackson, worked part-time for the A. H. Major Grocery Store as a butcher. Every Saturday night he brought home a quarter's worth of unshelled peanuts. This was our quality time as we squatted by the living room heater and ate peanuts with the shells on a sheet of newspaper Mom Jo would bundle up, later, and throw in the old woodstove. It was also a classroom and it was there that Dad taught us Arithmetic. I was the youngest of his boys and it was my turn to get the jump on my classmates when I started school. He would count out ten peanuts and place them by me, then he took two from the pile and gave to Scooter followed by three of my peanuts that he gave to Joel. "Now, Johnny, how many peanuts do you have left?" I could count to ten, he had already taught me that, and I would answer, "five." "And how many peanuts do Scooter and Joel have?" I would count them and answer, "five." "Five is half of ten so five will go into ten two times, that is division, two times five is ten and that is multiplication, ten take away five leaves five and that is subtraction. We will return Scooter's two peanuts to your pile and that will give you seven, now we'll return Joel's three peanuts to your pile and that will give you back all your original ten peanuts, that is addition." Simple, most assuredly, but a method of teaching a five-year-old mathematics that was fun and would stick in his mind for the rest of his life. My Dad could add a column of figures faster in his head than most bookkeepers could total with an adding machine.