by Ladd Moore

He was the most solid man I ever knew. With stout Irish core, he was six-foot three and about 200 pounds, with hands like anvils. My Grandfather looked strongly opposite from the frail man in the Grant Wood American Gothic painting, standing with the pitchfork in his hand alongside the expressionless woman. I acknowledge they are classic surrogates for all the people that tirelessly toiled the soils of this country. My grandfather though, would have certainly been a more virile model, sans coat and with his knotted handkerchief around his wide brow. The contrast was as different as the message was similar; the rewards of farm life are meager if measured by wealth, but rich if a gauge of spirit.

My father was off again to India and Burma, and I was shuffled up to Arkansas for the school year that was my fourth, while my brother stayed behind. It seemed to me that there must have been a plan to share a little of the two of us with everyone in the family, so that no one had to endure a fatal dose.

Jack Hardesty was my mother's father, but his wife Stell was his second after losing his first wife, Zella, to suicide in 1918. It was a story that no one in the family would ever tell until my mother dragged it out of her uncle. She told him she had to know, before she had children of her own. " Was she in bad health and with a disease my children may inherit?" "Was it mental?" she begged.

It was instead a story of tragedy. When they lived in Oklahoma, Zella had been seen up in Enid with another man. Grandpa had seen her himself, so it wasn't hearsay; and she didn't come home until the next day. Grandpa told her she was to leave and go home to her mother, and that she would not take the two children with her. In those days, the scarlet letter "A" was worse than the worst of all other sins. So that night she drank poison and threw the empty bottle out into the living room where Grandpa and his brother were sitting. They rushed to her, but she did not live ten minutes. She was only twenty-one.

They told the children that she had just "gone away," the story they had stuck with until that day.

Grandpa was born in 1885, a Kentuckian, of staunch Church of England lineage. When they migrated to Kentucky from Maryland, some of the family married Catholics and were converted, and the lineage was broken. My Grandfather, though, became a Presbyterian. He didn't attend church when I knew him, but he read every night from a timeworn and use-withered Bible.

He came from the hilly part of Kentucky near Brandenburg, among what are known as 'The Knolls'---where the Ohio River is a dominant part of history and daily conversation. The river is 981 miles long, and flows at three miles an hour, except that around Louisville, it drops 23 feet in two miles. He liked to talk about how one January in 1946, eleven barges loaded with 406 hard-to-get automobiles were ice bound in the middle of the river below that point, a spectacle that caused citizens to line the banks for miles.

He was from a farm family as so many were, raising tobacco, oats, wheat and corn. He talked about how people stole their watermelons so often that they planted them out in the middle of the cornfield to hide them. Farm life was tough, and he had chores to do that lasted from daylight until lantern light and beyond.

When he got a little older, he had seen a wild-west show and the lure of that made him decide to go to Oklahoma. He went to work for a company making oil rig equipment, then for a while, did streetcar work in Tulsa. He told how he didn't like their system. It was ill planned and was not managed like he had remembered on his trips on the Louisville system. He returned to his first love, the oil business, and he moved from one company to another, and eventually locked arms with Continental Supply Co. It was about then in Tulsa that he met and married Stell.

Sometime after World War II he envisioned leaving the oil supply business and returning to the farm life. He and Stell did just that and landed in Altus, Arkansas, on a piece of ground staring right at Magazine Mountain in the Ozarks. He would toil that land for the next twenty years, churning the rocky soil into even more productive vineyards and peach orchards than it started with.

My first look at the farm was when the vines and trees were mature and bearing; I could not appreciate what he went through to get it that way. That is, except for the awe I had when looking at a rock fence two feet wide, three feet high, and a quarter-mile long. That fence had been tilled up a rock at a time from those fields.

I would go to school that year in Alex, the coal town about two walking miles southeast of the farm. The road was sand, but weather-safe, and always open and beckoning. I remember how Grandpa told me about his walking twice that distance to school in Brandenburg, with a "ciphering-tablet" and a two-gallon syrup bucket with one biscuit in it for lunch. As most "back when I was your age" stories go, it was always rougher. I already have plans to tell my grandchildren about how I had to endure an old Cushman motor scooter, and after that, a used '57 Chevy. I think it will be harder to convey my hardship and pain, unless they really have it good; like their own island with a helicopter.

I asked him why he wouldn't just put the biscuit in his pocket or in a handkerchief rather than carry that mostly empty bucket. He said, "Well boy, I had to fill it up with blackberries on the way home or get no supper." You have to give up all reasonable hope of winning any comparisons of hardships now, versus that famous and awful "back then."

I met a kid named Carl Oberman, from the first house just to the west. We were in the same grade, and walked together to Alex. They were really nice people, but also a little weird, I thought, based on one impression: They had a black and white throw rug just inside their front door, that was the tanned fur of their dead dog. When I went in Carl's house, I stretched out my legs about a yard apart so I wouldn't have to step on it---the thing seemed kind of holy. Carl had a Daisy BB gun, something I longed for every time he let me shoot it. On weekends we would line cans up on the rock fence and shoot for hours. Grandpa got me one for Christmas, the best surprise I ever had. Granny Stell had told me way back at Thanksgiving that they had no money, and that Santa could only bring fruit and nuts in a stocking that year. All along it had been on layaway at the Western Auto over in Ozark.

I was thrilled, and didn't even open my other two presents until after I went out on the front porch and shot it. It was blued-metal, with a brown wooden stock that had a Red Ryder figure carved in it. There was a genuine rawhide thong looped through the saddle ring. It was the deluxe model, a notch above Carl's. His only had a vinyl thong.

I got good at hitting every target I shot at. Grandpa's rules were simple. You were never to shoot at any animal except a snake---or aim at people even if unloaded, and never shoot toward the house. That left me plenty of targets and a host of potential inanimate casualties.

I think Carl got jealous, because after I got my Red Ryder, he came down a lot less. It's true too, I didn't seek him out; I was busy plinking down my inventory from the extra jumbo box of 2000 Bb's that had been one of my other two presents. I tested its range by cradling my gun on top of grandpa' s sawhorse and shooting at the tin roof of the barn. I learned elevation by backing farther and farther away, until it was hard to even hear the delayed 'thenk' of the Bb hitting the roof. It was sometimes difficult at long range to tell a 'thenk' from a 'think', which is a spontaneous sound caused when warming sunlight expands a tin roof.

When winter passed and spring started pushing itself out of the dirt to salute a new season, I was halfway into the box of Bb's. I had just about exhausted every test of marksmanship and invented every game of chance and mastered them. That dark day I crossed the Jack Hardesty Line. The jonquils, tulips, and wild garlic stalks were pushing up to greet the spring, .and as partners, the robins had come from nowhere to trumpet them to life. They were as fat as squirrels, and I saw one land quietly on the clothesline post between the house and barn. Before I even knew what happened.it wasn't planned.the bird lay with feet curled up on the newly greening grass.

Grandpa's breathing was the first thing I heard after my own heartbeat. I turned around and he was there, out of thin air. He took the Red Ryder from my hand, and pointed it like an extension of his burly arm right at the robin. "What's that laying there?" he asked.

I swallowed the huge lump way behind my tongue and then kind of gurgle-vomited out the name: "Robin". My red shame stretched out of the yard and down the dirt road way past Alex.

"Follow me" was the terse command that started the death march down to the barn. With his effortless heave, the Daisy cartwheeled up on to the roof, where it bounced just once and settled. "There it'll stay," was the sentence of execution that was pronounced.

It stayed. Spring turned to summer after the rains. Sunrises and sunsets tumbled on and school was out. Once a week or so I would stand on the tractor seat and look up over the edge of the roof. It was still there, but its blue steel was brown, and its brown stock was gray.

I was too young and had not yet earned the privilege of a dissenting opinion. It was also not the custom yet for people to analyze or debate whether or not the punishment fit the crime. It was a time of simple black and white. I violated one of Grandpa's only three rules of shooting, and that was that.

I somehow survived without Daisy Red Ryder and I never whimpered and I never pleaded. But I mourned that robin and visited the grave and its Popsicle stick cross that Grandpa made me dig for it behind the smokehouse.

My other main thought was to get back in good with Carl, who was still armed.

Lad Moore writes: "The author is a former corporate vice-president who left the boardroom in 1998 and returned to his roots in 'Deep East Texas'. He lives on a small farm near mysterious Caddo Lake and the historic steamboat town of Jefferson, the fountainhead for much of his writing. In the solitude of the piney trails amidst the muscadines, the spines of his stories emerge--stories that are said to "boil with raging imagery." The author enjoys more than ninety publishing credits, and many new stories await his first anthology "Firefly Rides," coming in 2001. His winning entry "The Firmament of the Third Day" has been published in the Univ. of Washington's Carve Magazine Contest Anthology. In addition, Mr. Moore is a 2000 winner of both The Wordhammer Award and the Silver Quill."