Back in the mid-1970's I took my father to Hickory Creek Community just east of Celeste, Texas. That's where my family lived in the late 1930's. In fact, that is where my Dad left for World War Two in 1942 and to where he returned in late 1945. It was the place to where my English mother came in 1946 and where I was conceived.
This was my father's first trip back of which I am aware since he left for Orange, Texas in 1946. In reality we were taking a trip back in time to the days before he went to war in 1942 . . . to the place where he lived and worked and where many of the stories I had heard all my life were lived out.
The road was gone where the Appleby house was located. So were the row houses where many of the people I had heard about and some of whom became members of our family lived. Well, it wasn't exactly gone but it was lost beneath the two to three foot high Northeast Texas Prairie grass. But we navigated it perfectly as he pointed the way relying on memories from "back in the day." I suspect he had walked those roads, drove mule teams down those roads and drove the old Model A down those roads so often they were burned in his brain.
With the exception of one, pretty much worst for the ware, house it was just a big unworked field. But there it sat, weathered and worn. I remember saying to my dad, “She’s pretty much showing her age and neglect.” He replied, “Shoot, this is the way it looked when I walked away for the last time.” I began to walk around leaving Dad to his thoughts as he was transported back to a time I really knew nothing about. I could see it in his face and his eyes seemed to see the ghost of days gone by. I wondered what he was seeing that I couldn't see. How I wanted to see it but it was not mine to know. At least not with the intimacy and detail he was now experiencing. I just elected to enjoy him as he made that personal journey back in time . . . . a trip back to when he was a young man
I once asked my aunt Edna Mae, Dad's younger sister, about his social life. After all, we all have a social life even back in the late 1930's and living on a farm. Her response as, "Did he have a social life, I'll say he did." Oh, I knew about singing bass in a regional Stamps Music Company quartet and playing fiddle at the Saturday dances in Celeste. But that wasn't what she was talking about.
I have a photos of him and a lady named Edith Gilbert at the edge of the cornfield. In my mind it was just behind the house. I wondered if he could see that scene captured in the photo. Edith was his prewar sweetheart. All his family thought she’d be Mrs. Appleby one day. Lucky for me it didn’t workout. That war changed a lot of things and one of them was me.
If I'd have known about this photo when we were at the old farm house I'd have probably ask. After all, I do recall as we turned off the highway and made our way down the county road that would twist and turn until we came to the family farm house he kept pointing out where people back in the day lived. I especially remember him mentioning at one old dilapidated house, "And that's where the Gilbert girls lived" as though I should have known about them.
As I walked through the tall grass that had swallowed up everything but the house he suddenly was back with me as he shouted, “Be careful over there! That’s where we dug a cistern.” Sure enough a couple of feet from where I stood were some rotted boards and beneath them was that really big hole in the ground. It reminded my of the time, and I told him about it for the first time, when we lived in Vinton, Louisiana. A kid from down the street was chasing me around the house and I jumped some rotted board covering the open top of our septic tank. The kid behind be stepped on the boards . . . the collapse, and yer your got it, he went down into the septic tank. Dad, as he snickered in his own pecular way said he could have lived out his life without learning that. I think he knew since my Mom had to help me get the kid out of the, well grey water is putting it lightly.
We poked around outside as he pointed out where on the porch he and the boys slept during the summers. Finally we went inside. I was astounded how they lived in such a confined space. It was pretty much two rooms with one divided by a blanket. It was physically better than the house in the photo that started all this remembering but it I frightfully similar in size and design.
I remember looking over in one corner and seeing an obviously old tool box tray with tools in it. I said, “Hey Dad . . . . there’s some tools over here.” He walked over looked at them for a long time and after what seemed a forever he said, “Well how about that.” “How about that what?” I asked. He said, “Those where my tools.” When I left for the army that is exactly where I left them. I could tell again, that he was back in 1942. I wish I could have seen whatever it was he was seeing in his mind. Directly I said, “Well, Dad, if their yours I am going to take them with us.” I am sentimental that way. He quickly said, “No, just let them be. They’ve been there this long just let them be.
Years later I would take my sister there to see the old place and if the tools were still there I was going to get them. But as fate would have it everything was gone on the second trip to Hickory Creek and the tools with them. The land was fenced and plowed and no sign that anyone ever lived in that place. And yet that little spot, now part of someone else’s farm, was the center of the universe for the Appleby family.
But I digress, As we stood on the porch . . . . Maybe the porch in the photo of him holding his guitar he painted a picture of the houses that use to be along the road across from where we were. He not only described them but he told me who lived in each of them. Some of those people became my aunts and uncles by marriage . . . especially the Grace family. He also pointed out where the Caplinger’s lived and indicated that the old Caplinger cemetery was down the side road a bit. Sure enough as we left I espied the Caplinger Family Cemetery sign pointing up a dirt road. All our folks he said are buried in the Leonard Cemetery. By our folks he meant his grandparents, an aunt and a great uncle.
I have thought about that old house and all the stories it was hiding and am glad I got to see it before it was gone. Unfortunately the 1970's was before phones that take photos and I left my camera back home in Kilgore.
When I look at that old shack in the photo above and the people in it my first response is nostalgia and romanticism. But then I remember what my Dad said when I asked him if he ever met Audie Murphey, the most decorated soldier in WWII, who was from Wolf City just across the fields. He said, “Naw, first of all he was a lot younger than me and besides that back then he was just another bare foot boy running around here.”
I also remembered something else he said to me years before we took this little tour. His brother, my uncle Melvin, used to write an article for the church newsletter called “The Good Old Days.” It was sort of a romanticized telling of the family’s growing up in North East Texas. Dad would pick it up and say, “My brother sure can spin a tale but I’m here to tell you that the only the only good thing about the Good Old Days is they’re gone.”
Life on that farm was hard. Oh to be sure they had a good upbringing by my grandparents. They were both good and godly people and there are indeed stories to be told about them. Growing cotton and corn as tenant farmers was a hardscrabble life. The more you look at that photo the more you begin to realize pictures really do tell a story. What story do you read in that photo.
Stuart Hamblen’s song “This Ole House” tells the story . . .
This old house once knew my children
This old house once knew my wife
This old house was home and comfort
As we fought the storms of life
This old house once rang with laughter
This old house heard many shouts
Now she trembles in the darkness
When the lightnin' walks about
This old house is a-gettin' shaky
This old house is a-gettin' old
This old house lets in the rain
This old house lets in the cold
Oh my knees are gettin' chilly
But I feel no fear or pain
’Cause I see an angel peekin’
Through a broken window-pane
Now this old house is afraid of thunder
This old house is afraid of storms
This old house just groans and trembles
When the night wind flings its arms
This old house is a-gettin' feeble
This old house is a-needin' paint
Just like me, it's tuckered out
But I'm gettin' ready to meet the saints
Now my old hound dog lies asleepin'
He don't know I'm gonna leave
Else he'd wake up by the fireplace
And he'd sit there and howl and grieve
But my huntin' days are over
Ain't gonna hunt the 'coon no more
Gabriel done brought in my chariot
When the wind blew down the door
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