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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Sweet Horn Creek
Lee Landers
When I think of my Grandparents, I hear a sound in my mind: a haunting solitary note than says, “Come home, Come home.” I think of it as music from Sweet Horn Creek.
Grandma and Grandpa, Earl and Mildred Butts, were residents of the micro-town of Oakwood in western Oklahoma. In 1957, the Oklahoma City Independent School District delivered me into the clutches of old Mrs. Garret and her fifth grade mob of flying monkeys. Every summer, and several times during the school year, I escaped with my single mom and my older brother. Rocki wanted a brain, Mom needed a man, and I just had to get away. During spring break we fled the one hundred miles northwest to Granny’s hideout.
Somewhere between the setting sun and Oklahoma City, the West began. I knew we had crossed over into it, but not exactly where. There wasn’t a sign or a line across the yellow brick road to let you know. The people changed, though. They seemed to walk and talk a little slower. I could see more cowboy boots if I were looking down, which I usually was, and cowboy hats if I looked higher. Maybe we entered the West between Kingfisher and Okarche on Highway 3, because the Kingfisher High School mascot was a Yellowjacket and, on down the road, Okarche High School’s was an Indian Warrior.
Mom’s parents owned the barber and beauty shop downtown and did shaves, haircuts, and perms for anyone in eastern Dewey County who might mosey into the shop.
Gramps said, “There’s two Earls: one tame, that wears a green visor and cuts hair, and another one, wild, that wears a floppy hunting fedora and stalks beasties.” Barber Gramps used his tools in the shop: a sharp-as-hell straight razor, red leather barber chair, shaving-soap cup, and hair clippers. Hunting Gramps used a different set. His favorite tools were guns.
Most of the pictures of Gramps in the family album had him with something he had just brought down with one of his trusty weapons. I saw pictures of a young Earl proudly showing off trophies: ducks, geese, quail, deer, and every manner of game the Great Plains could produce. He always had that proud smile, and the prey was strung out on the hood of his Model A Ford. He would have one foot on the running board, his favorite gun across his knee and the fedora shading that wild smile across his face.
Many of those pictures showed hunting dogs; dogs were tools to Grandpa, not pets. Grandpa explained, “There is a difference between a pet dog and a tool dog. Pet dogs lie around the house, get hair on the couch, pee on your foot, and eat your shoes. Working dogs earn their keep like a Seeing Eye dog for the blind.” Grandpa’s critter and bird-dogs were Smelling Nose dogs for the odor impaired. He said, “Bird-dogs point out hidden birds and flush them out so a hunter can plug them. Then they will fetch the birds back to the hunter like my youngest grandson, Lee, getting a jar of preserved green beans from the basement. Fetch. Good boy!”
The critter dog’s work was more dangerous than the bird-dog’s, as coyotes, badgers, and raccoons are crafty and don’t like dogs or hunters with guns. My grandpa claimed, “No matter how feisty the birds get, I’ve never lost a bird-dog to a quail.” The critter dog’s job was to find and chase down game while bark-telegraph-reporting their success back to the hunters without over-aggrandizing. A hunter’s prestige rested upon his dog’s ability to round up these desperadoes. Grandpa kept all his dogs in a big doghouse up the well-beaten, sticker mined path from the garage. He always kept three or four.
“I like breeds like Red Bone, Blue Tick, Black and Tan or mixes, and a pointer, setter or spaniel for bird hunting.” They did all that hard, hazardous work for an occasional flea and tick bath, room and board. Grandpa gave them an empty flour sack to curl up on, and he built the outside dog run for exercise. We gave them two cups of Purina Dog Chow every day. The dogs ate as if there was a serious worldwide shortage and the Ralston Purina Checkerboard Square Company’s plant suddenly burned down and wasn’t ever going to make any more. They also got a pair of boots from the A-I Dog Boot Co. that Grandpa ordered from an ad in Field and Stream magazine:
“These dog boots were originally designed for hunting dogs, constructed for fast moving action on the field, sudden stops, quick turns and fast take offs in the harshest terrain with burrs, stickers, ice, snow, sharp rocks and glass.
Please note: our boots will not fit short legged dogs; Dachshunds, Chihuahuas, etc. Check back in the near future. We are working on smaller boots.” I had a mental image of a wiener dog stumbling around in those boots. I knew what it was like when I tried Grandpa’s big cowboy boots on. They came up almost to my knees, and my feet rattled around like a black-eyed pea in a walnut shell.
I asked, “Grandpa, how do the coyotes manage out there in the harshest terrain, barefoot?”
A stray dog appeared on the porch during our second day there and followed Grandpa and me up the hill when we went to feed his dogs. The stray was hungry, having heard rumors about the terrible Purina disaster and the shortage plaguing our world. Grandpa knew all the breeds.
“That black and white dog looks like he is part greyhound because of his size and shape. He has a big, deep chest, an elongated snout, a wasp-waist and a narrow head. That skinny skull doesn’t give them room for many brains, allows them to chase mechanical rabbits and cuts wind drag to a minimum. He’s someones’ discarded pet.” That was a big putdown coming from my Grandpa. But, he was a friendly dog and I liked him. Fido hung out around the house and I had to sneak scraps of food out to him to supplement his cottontail diet.
Roc said, “We should name him something more special.” We didn’t though, because we figured that since our stay was ending in a week and with Grandpa’s negative attitude about him, that we would become too close.
Fido, understandably, had some serious abandonment issues, because when Grandpa took Roc and me for a drive he followed us down the dirt roads like the Model A was a mechanical rabbit. Grandpa was fascinated by how he could keep up with us, and he went faster and faster calling out the speed: “Twenty, twenty-five, thirty!” Fido got up to thirty miles per hour. Roc and I hung out of the windows, flailing our arms and cheering him on like we had bet all our allowance on him. Grandpa tried to outrun him.
Roc said, “Oh no, I can’t see him anymore!” We finally lost him at thirty-five miles per hour with the help of two long, tiring, hills.
“He probably died of a heart attack,” I said. Fido got some grudging, hard-earned respect from our Grandpa. We finished our drive and went back home the same way we had come. Roc and I kept our eyes peeled for a black and white pooped pooch. Fido was sitting by the road with his un-aerodynamic, one foot long tongue lolling and dripping, making a little mud puddle in the dirt. He was waiting for us at the same spot, on that second long hill, where we had lost him. Grandpa wouldn’t give him a ride even though we begged. The tired dog followed us back and proved that his streamlined head contained more than tongue and had room for some brains. Fido outsmarted Grandpa. He knew that all he had to do was to wait for a little whilethe mechanical Earl-rabbit would come back around.
Coyote hunting was Grandpa’s favorite, if you go by the amount of time he spent doing it. He said, “They are the slyest animals in the Wild West. All cowboys and ranchers hate them for the damage they do to livestock.” We were allowed to go hunting with him, and it didn’t seem so wonderful to us. Grandpa would put a trunk kennel into the back of his Model A and put three dogs in it. Those dogs got so excited when they saw him move the kennel that Rocki and I knew something momentous was about to happen. They were so jacked up that he had trouble getting their new rubber hunting boots taped on.
Just after dark the three dogs and the three guys went off to the back country and into the boondocks over rutted, red dirt roads that alternated with putty-colored sandy ones until they weren’t much more than two-wheeled, messy S paths. The Model A’s lights threw a shaky beam out in front, reflecting pairs of furtive eyes lurking in the weeds off to the side. That night sky cast dark moon shadows on the earth, and the earth sent fence posts upcrooked branch-fingers of black-jack oak and bois d’ arc, right back at the moon. Fence posts were strung with three strands of barbed wire like a big orb spider starting a web. Once in a while you would see a post with the tail-less carcass of a yodel dog that bragged that some hunter or rancher had collected the five-dollars-a-tail bounty from the State Fish and Game Department. Now I understood the cowboy’s saying, “Luckier than a three-tailed coyote.”
This prelude would, of course, get Roc and I as jacked up as the dogs. Roc said, “We’re going to witness a showdown between some wild-assed critters and the dogs, men, and guns. Action on a scale like this is only seen ‘made up’ on TV. We’ll be an eye-witness to a life or death struggle on the Great Plains between man and beast of Disney proportions not seen since the Conestoga’s rolled into the frontier and Davy Crockett killed him a b’ar when he was only three.” Roc started singing, “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier. Born on a mountain top in Tennessee….” The dogs howled.
Gramps met up with the other hunters and their dogs at a previously agreed spot. It was past Duke’s place on the east side of the creek where the big boar-coon drowned Duke’s Cocker Spaniel two years ago. The coon lured the dog out into the deep water by resting on a floating log, waited for him to tire, and then sat on the worn out spaniel’s head. That’s how country people give directionsby past memorable events, not signs or markers. The poor pup’s mishap was unfortunate, but geographically Greek to me. They called it Coon’s Creek.
Out came the dogs who circled the cars in a fever-pitch of canine enthusiasm until they picked up the scent of some hapless prairie wolf whose evening was about to get real interesting and whose days might be numbered. The men stood around and could tell whose dogs were doing what just by the sounds of the baying. Every dog raised his voice to the hunters and God and gave a careful, itemized reckoning of the state of the hunt as it applied to him. Grandpa’s Buster was an accomplished singer with full resonate throat and a great facility of range and nuance. Each dog had a signature sound that his master could interpret like prairie Morse code. This bay means, “I found a coyote.” That sound means, “I lost him.” This bark at this pitch means, “it’s cornered,” and that yelp means a fight. It was just yapping to Roc and me and all we heard from the quiet hunters was, “sshhhhh.” Boring! Gramps was bonding with the other hunters and his dog tools, as hunters have done for eons.
Soon the men sat on their heels in a country squat around an informal circle and handed around various goodies, including a foil bag of moist, neat-smelling Beechnut chewing tobacco, which was wordlessly passed to me. This was a cowboy version of braves passing around a peace-pipe, and I wasn’t going to miss out. I tried it, swallowed some, puked, and swore off of it, evidently to the entertainment of some chuckling voices in the dark. The squatting, spitting hunters always had something in their mouths: chewing tobacco, snuff, Bull Durham cigarette, a wooden match or toothpick that they could work from side to side without using their hands. If they couldn’t come up with their usual mouth toy, they would pull any old weed from nearby and use that.
”Buster’s got somethin’!”, “Blue’s got ‘em, too!”, “Jig’s a comin’ up,” they whispered. We had to have prairie Morse code translated, and a running commentary on the mysterious happenings one-quarter mile away was irritating to the spitting squatters, so we shut up. We couldn’t talk, ask questions, or listen to the radio. Hunting with Gramps meant working on our “quiet skills” real hard. We couldn’t see anything except a hunter’s face glowing dull orange from a drag on a Bull Durham cigarette. I had seen too much of that cowboy’s face before, anyway. In the barber shop getting a shave last week, I had stared up his nostril grottos practically to his brain. Those black holes ripped twin gaps in the portrait of his face.
Roc said, “This great hunt thing is fizzling fast!”
Nostril Grottos rolled his own cigarette that day in the barber shop. It was unbelievably cool, and boy, was he nimble. His hands moved with the precision of a concert piano player, which was surprising in itself, because he had rough, thick-calloused hands, and all his fingers looked like thumbs. I asked him, “Can I make a rollie for you?” He looked at Grandpa, who nodded. He gave me the little sack of tobacco, and a piece of paper. I loosened the draw-string tie at the top of the cloth bag and dumped a spoonful of tobacco on an onion-skin thin piece of paper about the size of a big postage stamp. I was able to show Nostril, Grandpa, and the rest of the waiting customers the ept of a blind midget juggling chickens; ending up with a way over-moistened spit wad-looking cigarette that a blow torch couldn’t light, with most of the tobacco on my shoes and socks. Pulling the draw-string closed with my teeth, just like he did, I handed the pouch back to him, and brushed what looked like fleas off of my white socks. Nostril said, as he looked at my soggy cigarette, “I’d rather smoke a frog.”
We got bored on the hunt. When we checked the glove compartment of the Model-A for Chiclets or peppermint Life Savers that he kept there, we found a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels that Grandma had said was a tool Grandpa used for hunter bonding glue. When we asked him about it, he wild-grinned and said, “For snake bite.”
There were a lot of sidewinder rattlers in the area. On hunting trips by myself, I saw their squiggly, impossible tracks going across sandy stretches. With my BB gun, I tried to shoot the fast road-runner birds darting up and down those lonely back roads looking for the snakes to eat, but never couldthey ’re way too quick. They would run real fast, low, and parallel to the ground, and come to a sudden stop, like momentum is just a made up man-word. Then they would thrust their heads high and stretched, snake watching with their brown crests sticking up showing off their reptile radar.
I saw a road-runner catch a snake one time, and I never shot at them again. Using their outspread wings like a matador uses a cape; they’d sidestep the snake’s strike, grab it by the tail and whip its head against the ground. It reminded me of a Mexican lady washing her laundry on the rocks by the riverside. You had to respect such skill.
I whispered to my brother, “Maybe the hunters use the Jack to keep the sidewinders away like mosquito repellent, because the whiskey has a chemical stink, and I can smell it on them after a hunt. It works good too, because even with all that hunting and squatting, they never do get snake-bit. Jack Daniels must smell like road-runner to a snake.”
The week before the hunt I had hoped for the chance to do the call-in. It was time to pester Grandpa before the upcoming event for the honor of doing it.
“Can I? Can I? Can I?” I pleaded.
“If you can do it right, the job is yours,” he said.
The call-in is made when the hunters blow into a steer’s horn like a Viking making a war signal across the fiord.
“I can do it, Grandpa.”
He said, “If blown well enough, the sound carries across the flat land a long way, and tells the dogs it’s time to come back in.”
Grandpa kept his horn hanging on a nail in the sacred garage. It was made of a thick, fingernail, boney-like material that grew in a long, grainy texture from base to tip, and was a mottled light amber, chocolate, and cream. It had an aged, cracked, brown leather strap long enough to carry over your shoulder. The horn looked old enough to have been used as a powder horn by Lewis or Clark. It had a mouthpiece carved out on the pointy end and grew in diameter for its foot and a half length as it went to where the Long Horn’s head should be, but wasn’t.
“Am I supposed to put my lips on the tip of that horn that he used to gore his bull rivals, and maybe poke a cowpoke or two?” It was big enough to hold about a quart and a half of Meriwether Lewis’s black powder, or one lung full of my air.
Grandpa told us about the steer. “This old beef, maybe, had come from North Texas years ago on the way to Dodge City, Kansas, through Oklahoma’s Chisholm Trail not far from here. On the trip he avoided breaking a leg in a prairie dog hole and getting eaten by coyotes. He somehow kept from being rustled as a ‘white-man’s buffalo’ by the Comanche. Little did the steer know that dodging holes, carnivores, and Indians would end him up here.
I followed a similar route from North Texas when I was a young man, ending up in Oakwood for a reason named Mildred. Maybe me and this steer’s paths have crossed before.”
“Is that why you like the longhorns, Grandpa, you’re from Texas?”
“Reckon so.”
I owed a favor to this steer for his total commitment in providing the settlers with protein, and half his head rack for the horny tool of communication. The least I could do was to practice until I could give him a proper tribute with my bovine-flavored call-in call of the wild.
On TV I’d seen the Pacific Islanders make a similar earthy signal call with a conch shell and was determined to make that heart-stirring sound. I dreamed of being a Dewey County Gabriel who’d pipe in the hounds with a clarion call that the hunters would marvel at and discuss around spitting circles for years. Then the area would be known as the place where Earl’s youngest grandson blew a horn that sounded as pure and sweet as clover honey. They would call it Sweet Horn Creek.
The resonant call could strike a caveman nerve in all men, stirring juices that needed stirring and testosterone that needed testing. The sound excited something deep that had been active in man since he decided that meat was good with potatoes, and the grass on the other side of the hill had more green. What could be manlier than blowing with all your might into a dead bull’s horn to talk to your hunting tools? It brought us close to nature, and was so studly that I thought that I could feel my peach fuzz getting tougher by the minute just thinking about it.
Making loud sounds in the boonies with a horny tool was what boys live forif they can’t get their fear-mongering mom to upgrade their BB guns to a .22 or a .410 or get their hard-headed, stubborn mom to put a drum set in the garage. Did she really expect my latent musical gift to fully flower with a plastic flute in music class? After all, the main difference between men and boys is the loudness of their toys.
We had plastic recorder flutes that had seven holes. At school I fingered that spitty rascal with enough skill and lung power to play several songs for the Christmas show.
I told Rocki, “If I can learn ‘Silent Night’ on the spit-o-phone, I can learn to blow one ultra-fine solo note on the no-holes steer horn with one lip tied behind my back, and the other one on partial pucker.” That would show Grandpa and his chaw chomping, country cousins a city trick. “I can’t find my way around by historical local events, eat tobacco, roll a Bull Durham cigarette, or do dog code, but I can, at least, toot a horn, by God!”
I practiced on Grandpa’s horn a lot that week and blew my brains out trying to make that beautiful, clear, call-in sound. But I only got out a weak, sick bleat like a yak with the flu, a bunch of slobber, and painful, wounded, Dizzy Gillespie cheeks. It felt as though I had been trying to blow up a dozen hot water bottles for birthday party balloons. I didn’t feel as testosterony now, as I must have lost a lot of it blown out with my slobber. City boy. Maybe we could find something more my speed; a Crackerjack prize Little Orphan Annie tin whistletweet, tweet! “You-hooC ’mon back in you doggies, right now!”
The hunts went on until the wee hours of the morning. Roc and I would get so bored we’d fall asleep in the car while the men bonded until they couldn’t walk straight. Dogs coursed through the cool night, baying their coded signals, and sniffing out Oakwood’s version of Wile E. Coyote. I woke up the next morning in my bed at Grandpa’s house, swearing to myself that I wouldn’t go with him again, even though I didn’t keep the promise.
Gramps got up late for breakfast and said, “Buster didn’t make it back after the call-in last night.” He was worried as if Buster was a teen-aged daughter still out on a hot date. I was worried, too, but Gramps said, “He’ll probably show up.” Maybe the tick-magnet missed his quota of parasites by call-in, and had to stay late for make up. Sometimes a dog got killed, injured, or was never heard from again. Gramps didn’t like losing tools.
He got a call later from Nostril Grottos who said, “I just saw Buster limp past my place.” Gramps went after him and brought back a real tired Buster that looked like something the cat started to drag in, but rejected. He seemed sorry with his head down, his tail between his legs, two boots missing, and limping on one bloody foot with a half-dozen stickers jammed up between his sore toes, but otherwise in one piece. Buster had a fun date. After a few days rest, and a tick dip, Buster was ready for another night out. Whenever I hear the term “hang dog expression,” I get a mental picture of bootless Buster dragging home that morning.
Grandpa’s Model A was the first car I ever drove. He said, “This car has a distinctive sound and nothing else ever smelled like a Model A. It must have been something special old Henry Ford put in back at the Dearborn plant while he was stamping out a zillion of them: a pinch of leather and rubber, just a hint of gas, a bunch of ‘ahooga’ in the horn and a dash of ‘essence of assembly line.’” It had a three-speed column shift-lever and a clutch that was tricky to learn.
“Clutch. Shift in an ‘H’ pattern from first through third. Brake! Accelerate. Steer,” Grandpa said. When you’re ten, you wonder if you will ever learn to drive.
He tried to teach us about the engine parts under the car’s hood: a dark, smelly foot-locker jumble of greasy Ford, Delco and Motocraft guts. He pointed to them and made us repeat their names: generator, alternator, distributor, and carburetor. “They’re Chinese! They all look the same to me!” I said. And he might as well have been talking Mandarin: too many syllables, and too many ending in “tor”, not making themselves distinctive enough. And what all those “tors” did in the symphony that was the hum of that motor was muddy and mystic to me.
“Grandpa, I can’t tell a Ford from a Chevy, or a Studebaker,” I said.
He said, “That’s like confusing a Black Angus bull with a bullfinch.”
Rocki and I took turns “driving” we called it, but really, it was just steering the Model A. Grandpa would put us on his lap. He would work the brakes, clutch, and the gas while we guided the old car past the farms and ranches that survived the dust bowl and he knew so well. When he would meet someone while he was driving, whether they were in a pickup, car, or on horseback, it was a rule that you would wave, or at least show some form of acknowledgement of their existence, that you shared the same planet with them. A practice that was new to us. They were his customers in the barber shop, and a number of them were our relatives. When I drove/steered, I tried to copy his style and raised my forefinger off of the steering wheel in a hi-sign to show them that I recognized a fellow earthling. I had a white-knuckled death-grip high on the steering wheel, and was not totally sure I could do without that finger for long, but had to risk it anyway. “Fingery union with the local yokels,” mom called it.
Some stretches of those old, dirt back-roads had that fine, gray sand so deep that when I tried to steer through, it felt like something alive had grabbed the tires and wanted to pull us down to a dusty other-world. Grandpa said, “That gray sand is from West Texas, blown here from around Amarillo, Pampa and Lubbock by the west wind during the Dust Bowl.” Grandpa had the accelerator and slowed down when we came to a dip in the road that was a bottomless sandy pit. With that as a warning, my fingers got tighter on the wheel, if that was possible, and the dust devil made a grab for our souls. Grandpa would put his big, steady hands on top of mine and that demon went back to dirt.
Later, when our legs finally got long enough to reach the pedals, he let us brake, clutch, and shift. Clutching and shifting were the hard parts, fiendishly invented by some mad social scientist to separate men from boys. It was easier than an African man-wannabe killing a lion with a short, dull-point spear, but not much. Did they get to use all of their fingers?
On a drive during the last day of our vacation, Grandpa asked me, “What’s this I hear about you not liking the fifth grade, Lee?” Mom had mentioned what she called my school phobia to him.
“School’s okay. I like learning. It’s some of the teachers and students,” I said.
“I know what you mean. Some of my customers are like that. But they give me six bits for a haircut and two bits for a shave just like everybody else. And when they do, I say ‘Thanks,’ and mean it. People can help you get to where you need to go even if they’re not your best friends. Like a hunting dog or a horn, they have a purpose and a place.” I’m not sure I understood what he meant then, but it made going back easier.
Earl Butts was a barber for thirty years until Parkinson’s disease made his straight razor hand tremor so that it scared hell and the two bit desire for a close shave out of his customers. It must have scared their hair too, because it grew a lot slower after he got the shakes.
When I was in junior high Grandpa couldn’t hunt or drive anymore. We went to see him at the hospital in Okeene where he was getting some medical treatment, and saw those steady hands that had dusted the devilnow, shake so. He asked me to take some long florist’s boxes of flowers home with me. Some sweet smelling yellow roses, his favorites, were in one, his hunting horn was in another.
The Model A was one of his favorite tools. Earl wore the fedora and that smile when he drove. He kept the car for years and babied it like it was family. It was black, of course, and had tar on the roof that bubbled a bit when the summer days got to one hundred degrees. It was his work truck, hunting wagon, game hauler, pride, joy, and liquor cabinet. We could have buried him in it and made a wild smile one more time.
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