In Those Days Book 1 The Ties That Bind

By Dusty Kohl

Book 1 in the series:
In 1909 at the age of thirteen, Nellie camps with her family in the new State of Oklahoma. They fled crop failure at home in East Texas. She loved her parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. All of them believed they could pull through the worst of circumstances. Instead, they barely scraped by with enough to eat. The book provides detailed background of her family life in those days.

Her grandfather led the exodus with twelve other families from East Texas. He and her father felt responsible for their family and for those who came along with them. They knew only one man in the new state. He allowed them to camp on his land near Cement. Their struggle would have gone unnoticed except for the welcoming preacher from a local church. One affluent family hired her mother and grandmother. Their pay was what they needed the most, food.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dusty Kohl
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310015670

Dusty Kohl

Dusty Kohl taught as a classroom teacher and reading specialist for nearly two decades. He began writing poems and short stories during his own elementary school days. Dusty is one in a long line of storytellers of oral traditions from family history. When he isn’t remodeling, landscaping or kicking back with his dogs, he’s out people watching and interacting. His goal is to keep his storyline characters realistic while his plots take twists, turns, and surprises.

Book preview

In Those Days

Book 1

The Ties That Bind

First in the series

Copyright 2015 Dusty Kohl

Published by Dusty Kohl at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Excerpt: The Twister

Books in this series listed

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Camp at Cement

Chapter 2 Wash Day

Chapter 3 Brush Arbor Meeting

Chapter 4 The Sermon

Chapter 5 Sunday Picnic

Chapter 6 Working Hard Together

Chapter 7 Of Death and Grieving

Chapter 8 Life Goes On

Epilogue

About the Author

Connect with Dusty Kohl

Acknowledgements

Books from the series In Those Days

Novels from the series Swim Coach

Other books from Dusty Kohl

* * *

Excerpt: The Twister

The rain, or promise of rain, quit as slowly as it began. It made me think of the dead crops back home. The cane sprouted, withered and died. The corn sprouted, withered and died. Our vegetable garden tended with care by Grandma, sprouted, withered and died. And now this rain stopped. The eastern horizon cleared in bright sunlight. The west filled with dark clouds.

By-and-by we heard what we thought was a train in the distance. Grandpa told me there were fewer trains in Oklahoma than we were used to in Texas. We loved the trains! The sound grew louder and Bennie began to mock a train whistle. My brother was good at that. Grandma and Mamma looked around to see, from where this train was coming? When they realized it was Bennie, they each put a hand over their mouth and laughed. Ivan and Cullin joined in Bennie’s fun.

Then fun quickly turned to fear as they spotted a mile wide twister on the horizon. The ugly gray mass twirled and loped and seemed to be hopping in our direction. It moved faster than any train! The whole sky grew dark. Lightning stung out followed by the crack and retort of thunder loud enough to hurt my ears. Rain came down in sheets. It smelled like dirt. Grandma and Mamma herded us kids into the trench under the wagon. Papa and Grandpa dug that trench for more than one purpose. I laid Pearlie Mae and Buddyman under me to shelter them with my body. Aunt Hattie and Aunt Lotar crawled under with us and held a quilt over all of us. Above the noise of the wind, I could almost hear Grandma shout something to Mamma. Then as soon as it had started, it was over.

We were slow to be coaxed from under the wagon. The sky cleared and the sun shined brightly, just that quickly! That lean-to tarp took the birch poles with it, flew over the wagon and down toward the creek where it lay in a puddle of red mud. The canvas top of our wagon tore loose at the front and blew to fold in half at the rear.

Aunt Hattie was mad. She screamed, "I hate this place! I could’ve stayed with Billy back home. But, oh no! We gotta keep the family together! What good’s it gonna do us to be together if we all starve to death or get killed?"

I could see in Grandma’s eyes, she wasn’t happy about her daughter’s tirade. But it was never like Grandma to make a scene nor to give into one either. She cut her eyes at Hattie, who ran off behind the wagon to pout. I would have never talked to one of my parents the way she got into the habit of doing. Children respected their parents in those days.

Grandma and Mamma fixed the wagon cover first. They hung the mattresses and quilts from the crossbars to dry. Then they fetched the tarp from the mud. Not much we kin do to clean it right now, Grandma observed. They tied two corners to the wagon being careful to put the muddiest side up. Bennie and Ivan brought the poles and tied them into place. Ivan studied the rocks bracing the bottom of the poles. He adjusted the rock piles to his satisfaction. Ivan was like that, always finding a way to better most anything of workings. Twas he who wrapped the barbed wire around that cracked wagon wheel spoke. Mechanics, Grandpa called it. The mechanics of making things work.

* * *

Books in this series by Dusty Kohl include:

In Those Days Book 1 The Ties That Bind

In Those Days Book 2 On the Run

In Those Days Book 3 Hiding from the Great World War

In Those Days Book 4 Where Home Is

Other books in this series will be published soon.

* * *

Introduction from Dusty Kohl

In 1909, my grandmother was kidnapped and married. Nellie was only fourteen years old. She raised five children from a husband who never really did right by her. Yet she guided her family through World War I, The Great Depression of Dust Bowl Oklahoma, The Okie Migration to California, World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam. She was a fighter and a survivor. She had to be.

This is the first in what is becoming a series of books about the main periods of her life. Chapter 1 The Camp at Cement sets the background of her family life and their situation. The other chapters disclose the beginning of her mixed feelings about religion and the family’s survival of harsh times.

Grandma was a wonderful storyteller. Her stories are full of family history. Storytelling she came by naturally as a tradition passed from her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. When her family had little else, they had their oral history. Her stories always fascinated me. The times she lived, the things she lived through, and her feelings about all of it made deep impressions on me as a kid. Here, I don’t claim to retell all of her stories, nor that I tell them word-for-word. That would be an impossible task, as it took her over thirty years to tell me. I can only write stories based on the ones she told.

I spent a great deal of my pre-kindergarten years living with her. After that, I spent many weekends and school breaks, too. Grandma was already raising my cousin who was four years older than me. But it didn’t seem to matter to her. Many times she said, If I had a million dollars, I’d take in all the children who aren’t loved and I would love them.

The woman was well respected by all the neighbors. By the time I was grown, she babysat for three generations in the neighborhood. Elderly neighbors’ relatives rested assured of their loved-ones’ wellbeing as Grandma found time to look in on them. She always busied herself with yard work, housework, or tending to babies in her care. In her spare time she coordinated an exchange of welfare commodities among neighbors who received groceries from the Department of Agriculture. Food Stamps? No. In those days, The State of California’s Department of Agriculture doled out surplus flour, dried beans, rice, powdered milk, cheese-food, and canned mystery meat, almost anything that needed no refrigeration. Recipients didn’t get a say in what they got or how much. Whatever they received that wasn’t needed in their home, she found another who did need it.

Grandma, as most of the neighbors called her, wore a plain, modest housedress overlapped by a kitchen apron. The apron pockets held fix-it things like bobby pins, safety pins, clothespins, a needle with thread, and an occasional note of something to remember. Her long gray hair had never been cut. When let loose, it hung down to her ankles. She brushed it out faithfully every morning on the back porch as I watched and learned to count to one hundred. To finish, she wound it up into a bun at the back of her crown. Age lines etched her face and her forehead witnessed the sun damage of skin cancer. Her sky blue eyes always seemed to sparkle the moment before she raised a hand to her mouth to cover a smile or a chuckle.

Many of my good childhood memories come from those times with her. Grandma got caught up in telling me stories about her childhood, her children, and her life. I loved to listen to her for hours. She nearly always had a favorite song or poem to teach me, recalled from particular times in her life. I include most of those. Two gave me trouble as the texts were never published and I had to write them based on what she recalled. One poem I include, I wrote in tribute to her love and respect for her bother-in-law. I wish she were here to approve these three items. Somehow, I believe she would.

She lived through many an era, from horse and buggy to men walking on the moon. Grandma knew more than any history book could tell, from gunfights, train robberies, outlaw bands, Women Suffrage, and Prohibition to serial killers, government scandals, street gangs, Civil Rights, and the Hippie drug culture. She would pause from telling a story to acknowledge how things changed over the years. People, customs, behavior, science, and even religion, she explained how different these were in those days. Her first-person accounts seldom became preachy. She preferred telling her stories over explaining her opinions. Yet sometimes she amazed me with knowledge of things you wouldn’t expect from an East Texas country girl with an eighth grade education. The truth of history is most likely found in comparing views. Don’t believe everything you read until you’ve read what everybody wrote about it. As for historians she warned, Don’t put much stock in a body who never went through the College of Hard Knocks!

Once in awhile she would pause and ask me, What’s it all about? or What’s life all about? I thought she was searching, so I tried to answer her question with whatever stage of development I was in at the time. Only recently have I realized, she did know what it was all about.

Whoever said life is easy didn’t have to live it. Life is hard. We make it harder by dwelling on that. Most things in life are hard. But it doesn’t matter what we go through. What matters is who we become after we get through it. She lived a life of hardship, hard work, and hard times. Oh, she knew what life was all about, just trying to get me to think about it. Maybe she hoped to stop me from repeating lessons she learned the hard way. On the other hand, she would scoff at such an idea. Failure is the harshest taskmaster not soon forgotten, nor welcomed for many visits.

My grandmother was no saint. Neither she nor I would claim that she was. Sometimes she did things that weren’t necessarily on the up-and-up. But for the most part, she lived by standards she learned with time. And whenever she had to go against those standards, she paid a harsh price.

These books are based on the stories Grandma told me repeatedly through the years. It is not my intention to give an accurate day to day biography of her life. Some of the stories worked well together, so I combined them for the sake of text. I changed all of the names for the privacy of the descendants. Some characters became amalgamated among the stories. A few people I simply omitted as they did not play a significant role in her life. So any resemblance to people either living or dead should be taken as purely coincidental and not as fact.

Places and events she described to me prove to be historically accurate. I’ve visited and researched those. Not surprisingly, her accounts of detail were amazing. Her mind was sharp. Even at ninety years old, she could still recite the known family tree of her parents and her husband, giving dates and details of births, marriages, children, deaths, and burial places. She was a resource for the publication of her husband’s father’s genealogy.

Nellie was sixty-one when I first came to live with her. She lived to be ninety-four. Somewhere in between I left for college and a bad marriage several states away. After four years and frequent trips back home to my grandmother’s kitchen and front porch, I grew to miss her more and more, and began calling her each week.

My final visit with her in 1989 was in a nursing home. She didn’t have much to say, had trouble forming complete sentences, and obviously didn’t recognize me. She’d often remarked through the years that she did not want to live out her final days that way. I wept. She said, Now you stop that. You talk. So, I said what I’d come to say. I told her that I loved her and I was grateful for all the years she had taken care of me. I introduced her to my three children, an answer to my prayers that she would live long enough to know them. Even though we told her over and over again who I was, she couldn’t spark recognition of me until my seven year old son stepped up to her. Her eyes sparkled. She covered her smile with her hand and said my name. Then she looked at me and said my name again, Boy! She and I both laughed. When I told her I’d be back to see her the next year, she emphatically replied, "No. I thought she didn’t understand and I repeated myself. Again she stated firmly, No!" She died just four months later. It was then I knew what that No meant.

I can never go back to those wonderful years I spent with her. So many of her stories I’d love to hear her tell again. Here I am trying to write in relation to those stories so other people can learn about her life. Perhaps they can even learn a few lessons about life from her like I did. By the time you finish reading these books, you may come to know What’s it all about? from the life she lived, in those days.

* * *

Chapter 1 The Camp at Cement

The thick canvas popped and rose with each tug of the wind. The corners strained hard at the birch poles on the outside edge away from the wagon. Under this lean-to tarp, Mamma rocked tiny Pearlie Mae. That was her way. She rocked each of the babies to sleep every night. Mamma rocked and sent Ivan, Cullin, and Bud to bed. I’d carried Dottie and Buddyman into sleep on the mattress in the front of the wagon. Bennie turned in early, complaining of a sore throat. I heard Mamma humming a familiar tune, though I didn’t know the words.

The land we camped on sat sandwiched between a main road and a shallow crick. The owner was an acquaintance of Grandpa. Part of it was fenced pasture. A gradual slope from our camp to the other twelve camps provided good runoff for us. Our wagon angled nearly parallel