Chapter 1

My name is John Tyler. It was a Tuesday morning just before noon when I stood and walked to the front of the regional bus. I stepped off the bus into a town I hadn’t seen in close to twenty years. As John Tyler I had been a guest of the state of North Carolina for the past three years. I had been sentenced to a five year bit, but I got out in three. The early release was due to over crowding.

I hoped to find directions to my late grandfather’s farm at the Diner. I really did not want to go to the court house to ask the sheriff’s deputies for directions. Best that I had no contact with them at all.

While I ordered my breakfast, for my lunch, I also asked the waitress to check around. She brought me the information, from a fellow customer, with the message she brought my coffee.

“It’s a pretty good ways out there, but if you will wait. The man with the directions will give you a ride,” she said. I ate my bacon and eggs, then had two more cups of coffee before the man walked up to me.

“You looking for the Tyler place? Nobody has lived there for probably ten years,” he advised me.

“I know I’m John Tyler, Harold’s grandson,” I explained.

“Well I’ll get you out there, but you are going to be on your own once you get there. If you need anything. I’m a long ways off,” the old man said. He drove a few minutes, then spoke again. “I knowed your daddy when we was both kids. He left to fight in the war, and never did come back.”

“That was a long time ago,” I suggested.

“Yes it was. I never heard anything about him after that. So, is he still alive?” he asked.

“No, he died when I was a kid. He never really came all the way back from the war,” I told him.

“That’s a shame. Your daddy was a little wild, but he was a good hearted man,” the old man said.

“Thank you sir. I didn’t know him well at all,” I said. “He was sick most of the time I was growing up, then he died.”

The old man shook his head. When he pulled into the yard of the rundown house, I took my large backpack from the bed of the truck. That pack held all the things that I thought I would need to start working the place. I opened the door to the rundown shack. It had been emptied and cleaned at sometime after Harold died. I could almost remember that time. I couldn’t quite remember it though. There were too many traumas since then. Some of them were physical traumas, and some were mental anguish. The fancy name was PTSD. It was all the rage now. Everybody claimed to have it. The clerks behind desks had symptoms according to the data reports. I wasn’t taking anything for it. I planned to go into one of the fields on my fifty acre farm and scream now that I had the room.

All the furniture was gone from the house. My sister had warned me about the emptiness of the place.

“There would be nothing,” she assured me.

I had a surplus winter sleeping bag, bought from the Army Navy store outside of Greensboro. It was also the place the pack came from.

I have about two hours before dark to collect enough to dead wood to keep me warm through the night, I thought. I carried my machete into the woods, behind the house. There I collected and cut dead wood. I carried it to the cabin and piled it on the porch.

The first thing I did was be sure the damper was open on the fireplace, and that I could see light out the top of the chimney. I hoped that meant that nothing had built a nest in the chimney. The chimney seemed to draw well enough, so I tried a small fire in the fireplace. The smoke seemed to go out the chimney as it should.

It also seemed to keep the room almost warm, close to the fireplace. I didn’t need any more than that on the first night. I sat in the light of the fire to relive the last three years of my life.

Even though I was in a bar fight, the judge considered a lot of things into his sentencing decision. The Veterans Administration Hospital recommendation, and my family’s pleas for leniency. I might have even gotten probation, if the man, whose arm I broke in two places, hadn’t been a cousin of the judge. Even with that he sentenced me to only five years on a state minimum security work farm. I spent my first year cursing everyone who was involved in my trial or with the prison farm.

Then something happened, the counselor called it an epiphany. Out of nowhere I decided to make the best of my situation. I stopped fighting the job that I was assigned. I learned to love making things grow. I still hated being inside, but I didn’t mind the work that I did. I began to look forward to it as a matter of fact. At the end of year two, I began to plan for my new life after my release. There had been one release for over crowding. I hoped for another.

That was about the time I remembered Grandpa Harold’s farm. According to Grandpa Harold that farm was worked out, and good for nothing but holding the earth together. Nobody wanted it, but nobody was willing to sell it either. During year three I began researching how to rebuild the soil and how to live on nothing while doing it.

Part of that was I had to decide what I would buy when I went to live on the rundown farm. Everything I bought had to be versatile. For instance my camp knife was a heavy duty machete. It could be used to clear brush, but it could also be used to cut down a small tree, then it could open a can of beans. Of course all the beans I bought had pull tabs.

I had two quarts of bottled water with me. I used them as drinking water until I could find Grandpa’s Spring. Even after I found it, I would have to test the water. Finding the stream was job one on day two. I went to bed in my sleeping bag by the fire. Even though it was cold outside during the month of March, I slept very well.

I was up with the sun the next morning. I used a little of my water to make oatmeal which I despised ordinarily. After trying it for the first time in five or six years, I found that I still did. But it filled me up. I walked behind the house where I vaguely remembered the small spring fed stream ran. The memory was from when I was a small kid. It was from the summer I spent with Grandpa Harold. I began the search for the stream at first light. It wasn’t hard to find. All I had to do was follow the plant life to the stream. Then I followed it up stream until I found the spring. It was almost choked off by natural trash. Dead plants were choking it.

I spent three hours working on the spring. I used the double thick blade of my machete as a shovel and hoe to dig out the stream bed. I had a canvas bag along which could hold three gallons of water, when it was fully expanded. Even though I was thirty years old and in pretty good shape, carrying that canvas bag of water through the heavy brush was a chore. It was early in the afternoon before I made it back to the cabin. I sat down to drink the last of the water from the first of the plastic water bottles. I filled it with water from the spring, which I had cleaned up. It was to be used for the testing.l

I planned to have it tested when I got to Sparta again. I had a five pound bag of navy beans. I also had a recipe for cooking them from a 1920 cookbook. I had hoped that there would be a cook pot which I could use to boil the water and beans. Unfortunately there was no cook pot anywhere in the house.

I looked at the canvas water bag and though that if I didn’t find a way to boil it, I would be in bad shape quickly. I decided to explore the barn before I gave up hope. The person who emptied out Grandpa Harold’s Kitchen had brought grandma Tyler’s cooking implements into the barn. The cast iron pots were rusty, but they were stacked up neatly. There also seemed to be a fairly new bicycle hanging on one of the walls. It had a lot of rust, but most of the it was surface rust. I figured there would be a can of motor oil somewhere. There usually was in a barn.

I found a bag of rags, mostly old towels. I used them and some of the creek water to clean the cast iron dutch oven. I knew that I was going to need an abrasive of some kind to deep clean the metal. I found a wire brush hanging from an exposed nail in the barn. It would do a satisfactory job on the cast iron. I found a lot of valuable, but worthless tools hanging on that wall. Those tool were a lot like me, I decided.