Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife

We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some all purpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many.
Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious.

He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.
Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns we'd always lived in, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still.
Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.)
So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.

"It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong.
So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.

Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans.

Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way.
It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance.

I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knife thrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again.
It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go.

Dress Blues 1

Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30 30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30 30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30 06, and later, the M-1 rifle. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere.
We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me.

The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers.
The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform.
The man in the uniform was watching me with approval, it seemed handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world.
I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in.
"No," I said.
The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that."
The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained.
I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

"Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval.
I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are.
As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.
I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

Almost a Cowboy

Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy.
Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horse drawn sickle blade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around I remember a Massey Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes partly just to show off, Stan said Les would hitch a single horse to an old steel wheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horse drawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good.

After a field was mowed, the fresh cut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelve foot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twenty year lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again.
Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done.

Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.
But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields.

Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dump rake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.
The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbed wire fence when a horsefly an attack bomber of an insect spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my desperate whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine.
I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again.

Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbed wire fence in front of my nose.
Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses."

One Sunday when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans.
Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to be range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.
I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt.
I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella" and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it. All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.
I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner.
He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.

Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something!
Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.
Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.
It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys in the bunkhouse sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":

Last time I seen 'er,

ain't seen 'er since,

she was jackin' off a nigger

through a bob wire fence,

gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,

gonna tie my pecker to a tree.

We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.
"Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way.
We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little spending money out of it.