Chapter 6: When it's Smokin' its Cookin'...

My pa was a man of many talents. He could fix things most people would throw out and have whatever he fixed working almost like new. He could hunt rabbits, pheasants and quail with a gun or a slingshot and rarely miss. With a rifle he was in a class by himself. After he got back from the war in France the Army wanted him to stay in as a training officer.

He worked harder and better than any other man I ever saw. He even had a passable baritone voice. It sounded great when he and Ma would harmonize at church sometimes. Oh, I could go on for a long time telling of my Pa's many abilities and achievements. He did have one shortcoming though, he could not cook. I believe whoever said, "He can't boil water without burning it," was talking about my father. My Pa was the poster child for such a saying.

Ma always shooed him out of the kitchen every time he took it into his head to help her with the cooking. Sometimes his feelings got hurt because he always seemed to forget what happened the few times he did help Ma prepare a meal

Finally Pa learned his lesson and never offered to help cook again. It was then he started saying to Ma, "I'll grow it and you cook it, Darlin'."

I was about ten or eleven years old when Ma's widowed sister, Aunt Maude, got married for the second time. Uncle Harold, her first husband turned out to be a drunk. Over the course of ten years of their marriage he simply drank himself to death, one quart of corn whiskey at a time

Aunt Maude, after burying him with few tears, said, "Once is enough for any woman to suffer through a marriage. She went on about her life as a not too grieved widow. She was a good-looking woman, somewhat "Junoesque" in size, but not fat.

She was a big, healthy, good-looking blonde woman who was able to do a man's work and did it on her small farm. Because most men found her almost six foot height a little daunting, suitors were few and far between.

Then along came Oscar. Five feet five inches tall, muscular and on the go continually is the only way to describe the man. He moved to Enid and bought a failing creamery for pennies on the dollar.

Then he worked like he was demon possessed, up at four in the morning and busy almost from the time he opened his eyes until he could no longer keep them open at night. In a year's time he turned a failing business into a model of what hard work and intelligence can accomplish.

Then he met my aunt Maude. His eyes lit up and he told her the first time they met, "By God, Lady, we are goin' to get married."

"Little man," she told him, "I am just too much woman for a little shrimp like you." She said later she wasn't trying to be cruel. However, she intended to nip his unwanted attentions in the bud.

The way they met was enough to make a person believe in destiny. The route man who drove the "butter and egg truck" for Oscar got fired for drinking on the job. Oscar took over the driving himself while he looked for another driver.

One day his third stop was Aunt Maude. He came tooling up the driveway from the dirt road past Aunt Maud's, stopped by the back door and hopped out, all electric energy, seeming to move in every direction at once. From the moment he parked the truck he quickly drove her to distraction.

"By God, Lady, we are goin' to get married." He looked up at her Viking like features, blonde hair all braided and wrapped around her head like a golden crown and said, "I have been looking for you all of my life and it would take more than the devil himself to run me off. You are the most beautiful creation of the Lord himself." Oh how the man did go on.

She called him a shrimp because he got on her bad side right from the very start. No matter what she said, he didn't let up. He dogged her around, loading the cream can and the eggs on the back of the old truck by himself. She saw right away how uncommonly strong he was. "He almost wears me out just watching him," she said once at church right after they met.

He followed her around the farm for hours as she did her chores until finally she told him, "If you don't get off my property right now, I'm going to shoot you dead." She was serious, too. Twice there had been problems she took care of by grabbing her old twelve gauge single shot and blasting away at the intruders. The first time it was a drunken Indian who ended up with his rear-end full of birdshot.

The second time it was an escaped convict from the McAllister, Oklahoma prison. He had been serving life for murder and escaped. Aunt Maude telephoned the sheriff and told him, "Some terrible person tried to molest me. I shot him. He's here waiting for you." The man was hauled off, fatally shot with but hours to live. No one ever bothered Maude Barnes again, at least until Oscar Broome came along.

When she threatened to shoot him, Oscar answered, "Well, by God, I hope you are a poor shot because if you don't kill me, you will have to have to marry me and nurse me back to health." He looked up at her and exclaimed, "You are so beautiful!"

She looked down and the man who barely came even with her chest if he was standing straight and stated in no uncertain terms, "You stop cussin' around me, you go to church with me and at the end of one year, we'll see."

"Done." the elated man told her. "What church we goin' to?" She told him and he got back in his truck and made the rest of his rounds.

Sunday rolled around Oscar knocked loudly on the door. "I didn't know what time the services was so I figured to get here early." Early for Oscar was five AM. She slammed the door in his face and went back inside to get dressed. When she came out a half hour later, there he was still on the front porch.

"Since I am a little early, I'll help you with the milkin' and other chores. Tell me what you want done." The cows were driven in to the barn and milked, all four of them. Aunt Maude barely got one cow milked and Oscar had the other three finished off. The milk was taken in buckets to the cooling cellar, a damp place where it was much cooler than the surrounding area. There the milk was left until the cream rose to the top to be skimmed off. The skim milk was fed to her hogs and chickens.

"Well, maybe inside you ain't so little after all," Aunt Maude told him. He grinned. "Well, come on in and I'll feed you." She made a big show of reluctance, but the man had started to get to her with his full speed ahead attitude.

She fried up ham and eggs and whipped up some biscuits. With ham gravy over fried potatoes to top everything off. She figured there was plenty for any two people. He all but inhaled his, drank a pot of coffee and polished off the rest of the biscuits and potatoes she had planned to have asr an after church snack.

"Little man," she marveled at him, how come you're not seven feet tall, the way you eat"

"Well, my future wife," he answered, "My growth got stunted from eating so much." They both laughed at his joke.

"It was then, right then on the first Sunday after we met, I realized for sure he and I were going to get married," she confided in a letter to Ma. Instead of a year, there were only six months of courtship. The date was set and the announcements were sent out.

Only one man ever made fun of Oscar and Maude in his hearing. Oscar broke his jaw with a single punch. After the story was told about the little man with the big punch, remarks were not made in Oscar's presence.

When the letter came, Ma told Pa she wanted to attend her older sister's marriage. "I know it is going to be just one more thing, but could you keep Davy with you? I don't think it would be a very good time for him to go to Maude's with me." That was fine with me. I for sure didn't want to be around all those women.

"We'll be just fine, Hon. Davy and me can just batch it for a few days." Pa smiled confidently. Ma smiled back at him not so confident as he. I guess she was thinking of Pa loose in the kitchen. Because her older sister was to be married, she put her reservations aside and made her plans to go on the trip.

Ma cooked up a big rib roast and three chickens and a meatloaf. She figured she had prepared enough so our main meals for the week were taken care of while she would be gone. She also left us five loaves of bread.

Ma brought canned fruit up out of the basement and arranged everything so all Pa had to do was to open a jar of preserves for our desert at the noon meal. She also baked up three apple pies "just in case."

Ma packed and we took her into town in our old Ford truck. We waited inside the depot until the local train to Enid pulled in. Pa and I saw her aboard and watched the train pull out of the station. "I hope she'll be all right, Davy, going off all by herself. I truly hate to see her off on her own without me there to watch over her."