"Third Stool from the Rear": Part I

The Perils of Adolescence

Friends recently learned of the death in Chula Vista, California of Millicent McCarthy Crabtree. The McCarthys lived in Creede prior to World War II and moved to Chula Vista in 1942. (newspaper item)

They came to Creede with a mattress and two spare tires on the roof of a 1931 Chevrolet and rented a house on the west side of town from Bill and Bessie Lewis for $15 per month, payable when Brent found work. The Lewises helped nearly all the dustbowlers with food and shelter during the depression of the 1930s.

Brent had lung problems when they arrived. After five years in the silica laden air of Creede's mines he came down with miner's consumption and was shackled to an oxygen tank by a long hose connected to a breathing mask. His wife and eldest daughter became the breadwinners.

Millie was a grade behind me in Junior High School. She wasn't a pretty girl but she had a cheerleader's figure and was the subject of much discussion among the boys flirting with puberty. We dated several times, mainly small town socials or chaperoned school dances, culminating with a small peck on the cheek as she said goodnight. Gradually, we warmed to each other and got close enough to tell if either had been eating onions or didn't change our socks before the date.

I had an empty, Old Quaker Whiskey, half pint bottle hid in the wood shed I was saving for something or other and with the first, safe opportunity I poured it full of Dago Red from a bottle of wine Ford Davis had given my father. I didn't consider it stealing since it was a gift to Dad and I only borrowed a half pint.

We were snuggled up, pretending to be in love, when I produced the Dago Red from a hip pocked. We tasted it, then we sipped it after which we slugged it down like pros. With Dago Red coursing through our veins and caught up in the throes of juvenile passion I began fumbling around where I had never fumbled around before with more than a little help from Millie. We were so engrossed in playing house we completely forgot the time. Not so for her older sister. Beth surprised us before total and non-reversible commitment and took Millie home on high.

Word travels fast in a town of 376 humans, 9 milk cows, 12 horses and 41 dogs. Before the end of the next school day Mother Jackson knew most of the details of her son's ill fated adventure with Millicent McCarthy. There was a pall over the household the sun's rays wouldn't be able to penetrate for several days. Aunt May Lucette visited to fill in a few blanks and offer a word in my defense.

"You worry too much Josie, he'll grow up some day and make you proud."

Aunt May was wrong. I never grew up and I never made Josie proud. She died at 76 years of age and I feel she never really gave me enough time to make her proud.

Total maturity surely, is when you stop learning. I have never stopped learning though most of the knowledge isn't worth the paper it's written on or the electrical impulses required to store it in my gray matter. I won't be totally mature until I close my eyes for the last time.

Printed pages 1–2. "Pocked" for "pocket" is printed as shown.

Third Stool from the Rear

"Just a short beer, Al, I gotta take the old lady to Sunnyside to get some buttermilk or she'll throw a hissy...they have Art's truck out of the way when you come off shift, Roy? Bill and Clinton went up to pull it off the log...good thing he had a load on or he'd of put it right through the mule barn at the Amethyst.

"He had his chains on but it was slicker than hell...we like to never made it around tower turn with four of us pushing...then, too, old Curly drives like a Wyoming sheepherder...ran off and left us when he got traction and we had to hoof it on to the tunnel.

"They better put that old turd back behind a team of horses before he gets hisself killed...it's a wonder he made the first switchback then, when he come to tower turn, the front wheels wouldn't grab ahold and he slid right out and straddled that red spruce log they got cabled for a backstop...the whole front end was hanging out in open space and he had to hoist himself over the cab and crawl to the end gate before he could get on solid ground.

"Scared hell out of Clinton when he saw how close the truck was to goin' on over...the old coot just laughed when he asked him if he was okay...said he held a tight rein and told it to whoa four or five times but it wouldn't stop or gee or haw...only thing that scares Art Fairchild is Cora and when she's on the peck he tiptoes around her."

Printed page 3.

Brotherly Love

It was morning recess at Creede Grade School when the gentleman stepped from the kitchen door of his house, walked to the top step of the back porch where he sat and ended his life with a single shot through his heart from the barrel of a .44 caliber pistol. He had suffered from silicosis and hard winters for too many years.

All the children heard the shot, two boys saw the actual suicide and ran to tell their teacher. He herded the students to their respective classrooms before hurrying over to determine if the fellow was dead. He was beyond help.

The teacher chose one of the older boys who had seen the shooting to try to find the man's brother or the town marshal. There were two places the brother was likely to be at that time of day and the boy found him engaged in a poker game in Sis Parsons beer parlor.

He had a hard time getting his attention but when he cleared his throat for the third or fourth time the poker player asked him what was so important. "Mr. Osborn, your brother just shot himself," Arthur informed him in a quavering voice.

"Hell he did, did he do a good job of it?

"Yes sir," Arthur replied, "my teacher said to yell you that he's dead."

"Well, I guess there's not much I can do about it then, is there?"

Printed page 3. Neither Osborn brother is given a first name; "Osborn," the surviving brother, and "Arthur," the boy who carried the news, are the only names given.

"Sure He's Okay, I Saw Him a Couple of Months Ago"

In this period Mineral County was full of lonely bachelors but most were able to cope with the changing times and illnesses. They weren't really old, just damned well used and too far over the hill to even think about another start in a different camp.

Hanford Lyons watched the snow pile up at his ranch on Fir Creek without having to hear the sound of another human voice. Louis Oppey spent winters on the Roaring Fork or at Red Mountain with only an occasional snowshoe trip out for supplies.

Bob Pinkley did battle with hard winters and emphysema from a little cabin near Spar City.

Peter Weiss, renowned stone mason, spent many winters on Palo Alto Creek driving a tunnel toward rich silver ore exposed in the Emma Shaft to the east of his claim. One winter he hired Roy La Font to help break the hard rock, a tertiary latite. This was all hand mining and progress was slow but with a good temper on the steel they could get six inches closer to the bonanza each shift.

My father and I met Roy near the post office in Creede on one of his infrequent trips from the wilds in a 1930 Chevrolet coupe. He had gathered up supplies and his next stop was the barber shop when Dad asked him how the work was going. "Getting a little cold up there, isn't it Roy?"

"Oh God, Bill," he replied, "for two weeks runnin' I've had to heat the pisspot on the stove before I could dump it."

Raymond Lane delivered milk to several customers before the school bell rang and was on his route when he found Thomas Reardon partially out of his cabin with his face frozen in what had been a puddle the night before. Mr. Reardon had been afforded few pleasures in his life and he had even been denied the clasp of a friend's hand or a makeshift prayer as he ventured into the "Valley of the Shadow".

Ed "the barber", a distinguished looking gentleman with a handlebar moustache, journeyed from the Spar City area to Creede in a fine buggy powered by a white mare. We knew very little about Ed and I'm not sure he was a barber in his younger days. I remember that he was a good friend of Peter Weiss and he held the distinction of owning the last still to be confiscated and destroyed by law officers in Mineral County.

Printed page 4.

"The Last Straw on the Camel's Back"

Neither of the men were overly healthy and neither of them had steady work. Cal worked mostly around the ranches, branding, castrating and fixing fence. Robert worked with a crew putting up ice for the fish hatcheries, off bearing slabs when Tingley was sawing and helping his father-in-law make whiskey when the market was good.

Late one night, after a few drinks of a new batch at the still, they swung a Durant automobile in a vacant triangle behind a grocery store in Creede and loaded the back seat with sacks of flour, slabs of bacon, a couple of cases of canned goods and a whole round of cheese. A little over $50.00 retail but legally worth one and one half years behind bars. They were good men. Thievery was entirely out of their line and most of the staples were recovered but there were eye witnesses and Judge Joseph Thomas had to comply with the statutes and sentence them to the care of the state at Canon City.

Robert had been out for over a year and keeping meat on the table for his wife and five kids was as much or more of a problem than before the burglary. That was why we were slogging in deep snow on a cold December day to the mouth of Gardnier Gulch where the going would be easier and we would hunt the parks between Gardnier and Sawmill Gulch. Granddad Lane was in the lead on Nig, the black horse, Dad followed close behind holding the tail of the horse with one hand and his Krag Jorgenson rifle with the other making an easier trail for Robert and me. Robert had a Krag Jorgenson rifle, too, though it had been shortened by a gunsmith and was lighter than Dad's. I carried a .30-.30 Marlin with a taped up stock Granddad loaned me on hunting trips.

Robert was having trouble keeping up. He motioned me by and stood out of the trail but Dad had told me to stay behind and help him if he had to turn back. He coughed a couple of times and brought up phlegm before going into coughing spasms that brought up bright red blood. When he could speak he told Granddad and my father to go on. "I'll keep the coffee hot for you and sharpen the skinning knives, you go with them, Johnny, I'll make it back okay."

We went on and Dad killed an elk for Robert. They cut the head off near it's jaws, slit the tough hide of the neck and threaded a log chain through the slits and around in a half hitch before hooking a link to the single tree. Dad had a rope on one hind leg to hold it from running into Nig on the slopes. When we reached open trail to the corrals I followed behind covering the blood trail. Clarence Goade of Alamosa was the game warden and didn't take kindly to farmer's season though elk and deer meat hung the width and breadth of Mineral County and he knew it.

When we were home I asked Dad about the blood Robert was coughing up. It had scared me and I thought he might die right there on the trail. "He has tuberculosis," Dad replied, "and he has had it for a long time so there's no use in worrying about it."

In spring of the next year Robert placed the barrel of the Krag Jorgenson rifle he had carried on that hunting trip under his chin and pushed the trigger with a stick to end his life, or what was left of it.

Printed page 5. Cal and Robert are given no surnames.

Third Stool from the Rear

"Archie tell you he's gonna be a daddy again?

"Yeah, he took Goldie to Doctor Gorsuch last week and he thinks she's three-four months along...he'll have to take a double shift sorting if his family keeps growing...old Sprecher delivered the last one and it was nearly out of the chute before they learned she was pregnant.

"Don't know why she wanted to go to Gorsuch but they were sitting there giving some family history and Doc asked Archie if he was the father...he hadn't ever met him...Arch looks him right in the eye and says 'Oh, I probably am but I thought I just had it in a wrinkle'...the nurse laughed but Doctor Gorsuch didn't crack a smile...he's a straightlaced old bastard, I been to him a couple of times and he don't like miners. Well hell, Goldie's always been fat an' she don't put on no airs so Archie didn't think he was out of line.

"They took Tingley to Doctor Gorsuch when he got blowed full of cast iron...remember when he blew up that crusher? Doc made the nurse give him a bath before he'd examine him...like old Bill might give him the plague or worse...a little dirt never hurt nobody...Bill told me he's never even had the clap...hard to believe as much time as he spends on Larimer Street in the winters."

Printed page 6. The Tingley named here and in "Didn't Have to, the Boot Had a Hole in It," further on in this Part, appears to be the same Tingley who sawed ice slabs in "The Last Straw on the Camel's Back," earlier in this Part; the book gives him no first name in any appearance.

"To Honor & to Cherish"

Vern was a good miner. He came to Creede from Bonanza where he had worked his way up to shifter. Within two years he was a shifter at the P & E Mine and was well liked by his crew. He and Leona had three kids, one of school age and two younger. They lived two blocks south of us and staged dust raising, window rattling battles from time to time that delighted their neighbors but scared hell out of the kids.

If just Vern was drunk they swore and hollered and ran in and out of the house until he got tired or passed out. If Leona was drunk too, she was liable to think she could whip his butt and try to duke it out. She never won. Even when Vern was so drunk he had to hang onto something with one hand and swing with the other she always ended up in a bloody heap. I had seen her when she had to pry her eyelids open with a thumb and forefinger to see where she was going. Through it all, in spite of the beatings and hand to mouth existence, she loved her kids and tried to give them every happy diversion she could afford.

A younger couple lived uphill from us in a drafty house trying to make the best of the hard times plaguing nearly everyone in Creede. They had lost one child shortly after birth.

Bernice suffered severe abdominal cramps early one morning after Carl left for work. The pain and nausea became worse. She was hurting too bad to make a run for the outside toilet so she drug out their thundermug from a closet wherein she deposited an aborted fetus.

She cleaned up as best she could, stopped the flow of blood with a towel and went to bed. They didn't have a telephone and there was no one within earshot to help. When the pains got worse she took some aspirin. Later she took some whiskey.

When Carl came home from his shift at a newly opened mine she was still in bed and she was both drunk and sick. He fired up the wood range, heated a teakettle of water and washed up in a basin on a stand by the rear door. He threw the soapy water out the door and poured more in the teakettle from a galvanized bucket. There was no indoor plumbing in Creede.

He went to the bedroom door, mad as hell, and ordered her up. "I'm going to do the chores and when I get done I expect my supper to be waiting."

Drunk, hurting and sick, she rousted herself from bed, got a platter from the cupboard and returned to bedroom where she fished the miscarriage from the thundermug. When Carl finished restocking the woodbox and emptying ashes the platter, with the fetus, was waiting by a knife and fork on the table. Such was the first inkling he had that he had lost a son and heir that day. It was to be his last chance for a son and heir.

Mothers who suffer and struggle to develop well adjusted children who will be a credit to their family and nation, deserve early retirement and all the benefits a grateful nation can offer.

Printed page 7. Vern, Leona, Carl and Bernice are given no surnames; these appear to be two separate couples, not one.

Third Stool from the Rear

"Howard said he got Uncle Bud sobered up an' cleaned up and thinks he'll be back on his hoist on Monday.

"The coil went dead on his Model A so he walked up town...just for a beer or two he told Howard...hell, you get with George and Zero and you ain't gonna have just a beer or two.

"The old bugger shot a rutting buck last month an' they'd eaten most of it but the neck...Howard told him to throw the neck away but Uncle Bud boiled 'er up and made them a stew...you ever eat meat from the neck of a ruttin' buck? I'll tell you there ain't a physic like it...Pearl made some mince meat pies from one once an' I could put 'er through the eye of a needle at 10 feet.

"Give me a Walters, Al, if it's good enough for Bill I'll try one...so Bud an' George an' Zero are just gettin' mellow when his stomach starts rollin'...they have another an' Uncle Bud's getting uncomfortable as hell an' thinks he'd better head home...he told Howard he was perty near the red church when he got to hurtin' so bad he thought he'd better ease a little bit out...'bout half a tea cup in his words...said it felt so good he just let it all go.

"Howard was taking the coil off his pickup and saw him staggerin' past John Nelson's house...said he smelled him before he saw him an' when he come by him the crap was still rollin' off his shoes...Howard made him take his clothes off outside an' poured a bucket of water over him to get the worst of it off...it was cold water an' he said old Uncle Bud was really a'squealing...then he put him in a tub on the back porch...had to empty it twice, he said, before it began to clear up.

"He fished his wallet an' pocket watch out of his pants with a pair of pliers an' when he got the old bugger in bed he poured gas over his underwear and trousers an' burned 'em. Uncle Bud will throw a fit when he finds out...those were his town clothes."

Printed page 8.

"Didn't Have to, the Boot Had a Hole in It"

I have always felt that the persons who most influenced our lives deserved to be remembered and those who put forth a little extra effort in behalf of their fellow man were deserving of being remembered each and every day. The problem is, when the last shovelful of dirt is patted down on their graves we go on to other things and seldom recall just why we thought they were special people.

Before I went in the Army I worked at the Commodore Mine with a wonderful crew of oldsters who probably taught me more than any learning institution or instructors since that year. My dad was foreman of tunnel reconstruction and Charles Johnson supervised all outside work consisting of restoring buildings, cribbing, trestles as well as design, estimate of materials needed and construction of a new, multi-partitioned ore bin. Charlie performed all assignments capably and well with knowledge he had stored from a lifetime of hard work, using tools at hand.

John Slater was our blacksmith with sidelines as carpenter, timberman and track layer when the need arose. John and I worked together much of the period I was employed and rarely a day went by that I couldn't laugh at some trick he played on one of the crew. I wasn't excluded. We were notching and spiking cribbing one day when tourists appeared looking for quartz or ore specimens along the creek bordering the waste dump where we were working. A big bruiser of a fellow and a pretty lady in shorts separated from the group and crawled over large rhyolite boulders where they stood looking down canyon marveling at the view. John threw a small rock near them, let out a shrill wolf whistle and ducked behind the cribbing. The bouncing rock scared hell out of the big guy and John's wolf whistle added fuel to the fire. I was straddling a timber in full view when the gentleman turned his head and immediately lost all the fear he had just experienced. He started scrambling toward me. Trying to get footing on a loose mine dump is a lost cause and that is all that saved me as he slid back further than he gained ground shaking his head and roaring, "You smart little bastard, I'm going to put lumps all over you."

The others laughed with John as we waited for Travis McAtee to haul us to town and John related every detail but I was still smarting from the tongue lashing by the tourist and had to force a smile.

A few days following the incident John was busy at the forge with several picks to sharpen and hand steel to temper. There was a small gate valve on the airline under the forge he adjusted to bring blacksmith coal from glowing coals to a roaring fire that could melt steel. There was another valve under the table where I was lopping off ties for the tunnel with a swinging saw Charlie had fabricated. The degree of forge heat and colors produced in the steel at high temperatures are the two most important factors in blacksmithing. From where I was working I could see through gaps of the vertical boards on the old shop building and knew when John turned from the forge to the anvil. As he turned away I shut the valve near me off enough to reduce the air pressure. On his return to the forge he noticed his fire cooling, opened his valve more and rummaged around the holes with a piece of steel to see if anything was plugged. That was my cue to open my valve and giving his line a sudden surge that blew hot coal and dust all over the place. After the second shower of cinders and sparks John smelled a rat and came storming out a side door where he caught me doubled over, laughing, just as my old dad cleared the portal behind our mule skinner and six loaded tunnel cars. He waited until Dad had emptied stale carbide from his lamp and was within earshot before bellowing, "You must have been diddling for fun when you made this kid, Bill, he doesn't have sense enough to pour piss from a boot.

Printed pages 8–9. The closing quotation mark on "boot" is missing in the book; kept as printed.

"A Rude Awakening"

We were usually sweat wet as well as soaked from muddy drill water when we walked from our various working sites, nearly a mile through drifts, to the straight lower Amethyst tunnel where brisk ventilation would freeze our pant legs before we reached a 55-gallon barrel converted to a wood heater kept stoked by the ore sorters.

Two of our crew had worked in other camps where the men had change rooms and showers. Creede miners were not pampered. In winter we were cold most of the time but the 30 minutes on benches by the barrel heater afforded us a chance to thaw out and trade stories as we waited for Glen Archer, foreman to gather time cards and samples for assaying before we were hauled off the hill.

There were three horses to pull the trains of tunnel cars to and from loading chutes in the mine. Two would already be in the barn 200 yards from the ore bins while Teddy, the bay stud and our favorite, would have his neck curled around the hot stove pipe with steam rising from his body as he waited for John Van Buskirk to walk him to the barn for a rub down and graining.

On this day Woody Wintz was on the end of the bench on the east side facing Teddy who was dozing with his penis unsheathed and his halter rope held between John's knees. I sat beside Woody, Frankie Davis and Paul Murray were to left of me with Bob Oates, Shorty Dunkel and Gene Dooley facing us. From time to time Teddy would slap his penis against his belly to show us he was all stud and a yard wide.

John held our attention with an arm waving story and Teddy's head was drooping as well as his penis when Woody flipped a small rock at the organ. He missed, flipped a couple more that missed then connected with one that tightened every muscle in Teddy's body. There was a flash of black mane as he clamped his jaws on the collar of Woody's sheepskin coat, lifted him from the bench and shook the hell out of him. When he was satisfied they had an understanding he dropped him and nickered a stern warning, "Let's have no more of that." Old Teddy was never again disturbed in his evening reverie and later retired on the ranch of John Albert Dabney, another old friend.

Printed page 10.