Short & Tall Tales Read online

  Not every medical adventurer was willing to tolerate the hardships. He left after a year or two, and another fresh graduate took his place, arriving from the metropolis in a frock coat and top hat, befitting the dignity of the profession. He soon exchanged that garb for a rough cloak and frontier hat, with high boots and a stout stick for tramping through woods and bogs.

  Some doctors elected to stay in Moose County. The population of the area was increasing, the lumbering towns were thriving, and roads progressed from muddy ruts to decent dirt. The physician now used a cart or a horse and buggy for house calls, and a sleigh in winter. Saddlebags were replaced by the modern badge of the profession: the little black bag, in which babies were said to be delivered.

  The general practitioner’s office was in his front parlor. Counting office hours and house calls, he worked a twelve-hour day—more if there was an emergency in the middle of the night. Yet his patients did not always take his advice—as in the case of vaccination for the dreaded smallpox. In some towns not a single student answered the school bell on V-Day. Families clung to their old remedies: goose-grease plasters, onion poultices, catnip tea, beefsteak broth, and the trusted bottle of whiskey reserved for medicinal purposes.

  * * *

  4.

  Hilda the Clipper

  She Put Fear into the Male Population of One Small Town

  Brrr happens to be the coldest town in Moose County. Is it a coincidence that it also has the largest number of “characters”? Hotelkeeper Gary Pratt tells about Hilda, and I believe every word!

  —JMQ

  * * *

  My grandfather used to tell about this eccentric old woman in Brrr who had everybody terrorized. This was about seventy years ago, you understand. She always walked around town with a pair of hedge clippers, pointing them at people and going click-click with the blades. Behind her back they laughed and called her Hilda the Clipper, but the same people were very nervous when she was around.

  The thing of it was, nobody knew if she was just an oddball or was really smart enough to beat the system. In stores she picked up anything she wanted without paying a cent. She broke all the town ordinances and got away with it. Once in a while a cop or the sheriff would question her from a safe distance, and she said she was taking her hedge clippers to be sharpened. She didn’t have a hedge. She lived in a tar-paper shack with a mangy dog. No electricity, no running water. My grandfather had a farmhouse across the road, and Hilda’s shack was on his property. She lived there rent-free, brought water in a pail from his hand pump, and helped herself to firewood from his woodpile in winter.

  One night, right after Halloween, the Reverend Mr. Wimsey from the church here was driving home from a prayer meeting at Squunk Corners. It was a cold night, and cars didn’t have heaters then. His Model T didn’t even have side curtains, so he was dressed warm. He was chugging along the country road, at probably twenty miles an hour, when he saw somebody in the darkness ahead, trudging down the middle of the dirt road and wearing a bathrobe and bedroom slippers. She was carrying hedge clippers.

  Mr. Wimsey knew her well. She’d been a member of his flock until he suggested she quit bringing the clippers to services. Then she gave up going to church and was kind of hostile. Still, he couldn’t leave her out there to catch her death of cold. Nowadays you’d just call the sheriff, but there were no car radios then, and no cell phones. So he pulled up and asked where she was going.

  “To see my friend,” she said in a gravelly voice.

  “Would you like a ride, Hilda?”

  She gave him a mean look and then said, “Seein’ as how it’s a cold night . . .” She climbed in the car and sat with the clippers on her lap and both hands on the handles.

  Mr. Wimsey told Grandpa he gulped a couple of times and asked where her friend lived.

  “Over yonder.” She pointed across a cornfield.

  “It’s late to go visiting,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather I should take you home?”

  “I told you where I be wantin’ to go,” she shouted, as if he was deaf, and she gave the clippers a click-click.

  “That’s all right, Hilda. Do you know how to get there?”

  “It’s over yonder.” She pointed to the left.

  At the next road he turned left and drove for about a mile without seeing anything like a house. He asked what the house looked like.

  “I’ll know it when we get there!” Click-click.

  “What road is it on? Do you know?”

  “It don’t have a name.” Click-click.

  “What’s the name of your friend?”

  “None o’ yer business! Just take me there.”

  She was shivering, and he stopped the car and started taking off his coat. “Let me put my coat around you, Hilda.”

  “Don’t you get fresh with me!” she shouted, pushing him away and going click-click.

  Mr. Wimsey kept on driving and thinking what to do. He drove past a sheep pasture, a quarry, and dark farmhouses with barking dogs. The lights of Brrr glowed in the distance, but if he steered in that direction, she went into a snit and clicked the clippers angrily.

  Finally he had an inspiration. “We’re running out of fuel!” he said in an anxious voice. “We’ll be stranded out here! We’ll freeze to death! I have to go into town to buy some gasoline!”

  It was the first time in his life, he told Grandpa, that he’d ever told a lie, and he prayed silently for forgiveness. He also prayed the trick would work. Hilda didn’t object. Luckily she was getting drowsy, probably in the first stages of hypothermia. Mr. Wimsey found a country store and went in to use their crank telephone.

  In two minutes a sheriff deputy drove up on a motorcycle. “Mr. Wimsey! You old rascal!” he said to the preacher. “We’ve been looking all over for the Clipper! Better talk fast, or I’ll have to arrest you for kidnapping!”

  What happened, you see: Hilda’s dog had been howling for hours, and Grandpa called the sheriff.

  Eventually Hilda was lodged in a foster home—for her own protection—and had to surrender her hedge clippers. The whole town breathed a lot easier. I asked my grandfather why they put up with her eccentricities for so long. He said, “Folks still had the pioneer philosophy: Shut up and make do!”

  * * *

  5.

  Milo the Potato Farmer

  As Thornton Haggis Heard the Tale from His Grandfather

  Thornton is a fifth-generation stonecutter with a degree in art history and a keen interest in Moose County’s past. Now retired, Thorn spends countless hours at the Art Center as a volunteer.

  —JMQ

  * * *

  Milo Thackeray and my grandfather were good friends. They played checkers and went hunting together—varmints and deer. Hunting was not a sport in those days. For many struggling families it was a way to put food on the table. Hard times had come to Moose County in the early twentieth century. Yet this had been the richest county in the state when natural resources were being exploited.

  Then the ten mines closed, leaving entire villages without hope of work; the forests were lumbered out; there was no market for quarry stone; the ship-building industry went elsewhere when steamboats replaced tall-masted schooners. Thousands of persons fled Down Below, hoping to find work in factories, and those who remained had little money to spend on potatoes and tombstones. Milo was a potato farmer, and Gramps was a stonecutter.

  It had been a year of tragedy for the potato farmer. His eldest son was one of the first casualties of World War One; two younger children died in the influenza epidemic; and now his wife died while giving birth to twins, Thelma and Thurston. They were his salvation! Gramps was there when Milo swore an oath to give them a better life than he had known. A sister-in-law came in to care for them, and eventually Milo married her. Eventually, too, his life took a strange turn.

  In 1919 the Volstead Act went into effect, and thirsty citizens provided a large market for illegal beverages. Somehow, Milo learned he could make hard liqu
or from potatoes. Gramps helped him build a distillery, and it worked! Customers came to the farm in Model T cars and horse-drawn wagons. Unfortunately for the jubilant farmer, revenue agents also came. They smashed the still and poured the liquor on the ground. (Even to this day the belief persists that the act accounts for the superior flavor of Moose County potatoes.)

  Milo was undaunted! His twins were growing fast, and he had sworn an oath.

  Across the lake, a hundred miles away, was Canada, famous for good whiskey. On the shore of Moose County there were scores of commercial fishermen who were getting only a penny a pound for their catch. Milo organized a fleet of rumrunners to bring the whiskey over under cover of darkness. Soon a steady stream of Model T trucks was coming north to haul it away, camouflaged in many ingenious ways.

  The poor potato farmer became the rich bootlegger.

  Transactions were made in cash, and Gramps held the lantern while Milo buried the money in the backyard.

  Every weekend Milo took his family and their young friends to Lockmaster for a picnic and moving picture show. The back of the truck was filled with kids sitting on disguised cases of contraband. Milo never attended the show, and the seats were never there for the return trip.

  There was no such entertainment in Moose County. The twins begged their father to open a picture show in Pickax.

  Prohibition ended in 1933, but the potato farmer was in a position to indulge his twins. He bought the old opera house, long boarded up, and made it the Pickax Movie Palace. He financed their chosen careers.

  Besides their sex, the twins were very different. Thurston was slight of build and more sensitive; he loved dogs and horses and wanted to be a veterinarian. Milo sent him to Cornell, where he earned his DVM degree.

  Thelma was taller, huskier, and bolder; she wanted to be “in pictures”. Milo sent her to Hollywood with her stepmother as chaperone. He never saw either of the women again.

  Thelma obtained bit parts in two B films and decided she would prefer the food business, playing the leading role as hostess in her own restaurant. Milo first financed a snack shop (the Thackeray Snackery) and then a fine restaurant called simply Thelma’s. She did very well. When Milo died he left his fortune to Thurston, to establish the Thackeray Animal Clinic in Lockmaster, and to Thelma to realize her dream of a private dinner club for connoisseurs of old movies.

  Milo was buried in the Hilltop Cemetery, with Gramps as the sole mourner. And Gramps chiseled the headstone the way his friend wanted it: MILO THE POTATO FARMER.

  * * *

  6.

  The Little Old Man in the Woods

  As Told by Dr. Bruce Abernethy, Black Creek Pediatrician

  He doesn’t mind if you refer to him as “the doc”. Kids like to go to the doc for shots. Adults look forward to reading his letters to the editor. When he asks to say a few words at a city council meeting, everyone sits up and listens. Here he talks about trees.

  —JMQ

  * * *

  When I was eleven years old, we were living in a wooded area outside Fishport, and behind our property was the forest primeval—or so I thought. It was a dense grove of trees that had a sense of mystery for an eleven-year-old. I used to go there to get away from my younger siblings and read about flying saucers. A certain giant tree with a spreading root system above ground provided comfortable seating in a kind of mossy hammock.

  I would sneak off on a Saturday afternoon with the latest science fiction magazine—and a supply of pears. You see, the early French explorers had planted pear trees up and down the lakeshore. To own a “French pear tree” was a mark of distinction. We had one that was still bearing luscious fruit. Before leaving on my secret Saturday reading binge, I would climb up into the tree and stuff my shirtfront with pears. Then I’d slink away into the forest.

  One day I was lounging between the huge roots of my favorite tree and reading in pop-eyed wonder about the mysteries of outer space, when I heard a rustling in the tree above me. I looked up, expecting a squirrel, and saw a pair of legs dangling from the mass of foliage: clunky brown shoes, woolly brown kneesocks, brown leather breeches. A moment later, a small man dropped to the ground—or rather floated to earth. He was old, with a flowing gray mustache, and he wore a pointed cap like a woodpecker’s, with the brim pulled down over his eyes. Most amazingly, he was only about three feet tall.

  I wanted to say something like: Hello . . . Who are you? . . . Where did you come from? But I was absolutely tongue-tied. Then he began to talk in a foreign language, and I had seen enough World War Two movies to know it was German.

  Now comes the strangest part: I knew what he was saying! His words were being interpreted by some kind of mental telepathy. He talked—in a kindly way—and I listened, spellbound. The more I heard, the more inspired and excited I became. He was talking about trees! That the tree is man’s best friend. It supplies food to eat, shade on a sunny day, wood to burn in winter, boards to build houses and furniture and boats. The greatest joy is to plant a tree, care for it, and watch it grow. What he did not say was something I had learned in school: that trees purify the air and contribute to the ecology of the planet!

  Then, before I knew it, he was gone! But I had changed! I no longer wanted to be an astronaut; I wanted to grow trees!

  I ran home with my two remaining pears and my magazines, which no longer interested me.

  My father was in his study. “What is it, son? You look as if you’ve had an epiphany.” He was always using words we didn’t know, expecting us to look them up in the dictionary. I’m afraid I never did.

  With great excitement I told him the whole story. To his credit as a parent, he didn’t say I had fallen asleep and dreamed it . . . or I had eaten too many pears . . . or I had read too many weird stories. He said, “Well, son, everything the old fellow said makes sense. If we don’t stop destroying trees without replacing them, planet Earth will be in bad trouble. Why don’t you and I do something about it? We’ll be business partners. You find a forester who’ll give us some advice about tree farming. I’ll supply the capital to buy seedlings. And you’ll be in charge of planting and maintenance.”

  My father was a wise man. One thing led to another, and I became a partner in his medical clinic, just as he had been my partner in growing trees. But that’s not the end of the story. In med school I studied German as the language of science, and that’s where I met my future wife. We went to Germany on our honeymoon—to practice our second language. I particularly wanted to visit the Black Forest.

  In a shop specializing in wood carvings, I suddenly looked up and saw the little old man who had communicated with me in the woods. He had a long flowing mustache and a Tyrolean hat with the brim pulled down over his eyes, and he was carved from a rich mellow wood with some of the tree bark still visible on the hat.

  “Was ist das?” I asked.

  “A wood spirit,” the shopkeeper answered in flawless English. “He inhabits trees and brings good luck to those who believe in him. This one was carved by a local artist.”

  “How did he know what a wood spirit looks like?” Nell asked.

  The shopkeeper looked at her pityingly. “Everyone knows.”

  I wanted to tell him I’d had a close encounter with a wood spirit but held my tongue—to avoid another pitying look. The carving now hangs over my fireplace, reminding me of the day that changed my life. Was I hallucinating? Or had I eaten too many pears? Or what.

  * * *

  7.

  My Great-Grandmother’s Coal Mine

  She Wore a Little White Lace Collar and Carried a Shotgun

  How many mining buffs know that one of Moose County’s ten coal mines was operated by a woman—more successfully than some men were doing? She said she was only carrying on the work of her late husband. Maggie Sprenkle tells this story regarding her great-grandmother Bridget.

  —JMQ

  * * *

  This story about pioneer days in Moose County has been handed down in my family a
nd I believe it to be absolutely true. There were heroes and villains in our history, and many of them were involved in mining.

  As you know, there were ten mines in operation—and enough coal for all—but most of the owners were greedy, exploiting their workers shamefully. My great-grandfather, Patrick Borleston, owned the Big B mine. He and another owner, Seth Dimsdale, cared about their workers’ health, safety, and families, and their attitude paid off in loyalty and productivity. Their competitors were envious to the point of hostility. When Patrick was killed in a carriage accident, his workers were convinced that someone had purposely spooked his horses.

  They suspected Ned Bucksmith, owner of the Buckshot mine. Immediately he tried to buy the Big B from the widow. But Bridget was a strong woman. She said she’d operate it herself. The idea of a woman mine operator shocked the other owners, and when the mother of three proceeded to do a man’s job better than they could, their antagonism grew—especially that of Ned Bucksmith. She was twice his size, being tall, buxom, and broad-shouldered. She always wore a long, voluminous black dress with a little white lace collar and a pancake hat tied under her chin with ribbons.

  Folks said it was the lace collar and ribbons that sent Ned Bucksmith over the edge. He and the other mine owners met in the back room of the K Saloon on Thursday evenings to drink whiskey and play cards, and he got them plotting against Big Bridget. One Thursday night a window was broken in the shack she used for an office. The next week a giant tree was felled across her access road. Next her night watchman put out a fire that could have burned down the office.