Barefoot Missouri Days

By Baylis Glascock

Filled with Americana that is folksy, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Barefoot Missouri Days is filled with a sense of wonder and a wry wit as Baylis Glascock explains his bafflement with all things sexual and his equal confusion over racial, ethnic, and economic disparity, realities that he treats with sensitivity. 

Filmm

• Language: English
• Publisher: Birchwood Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737806509

Baylis Glascock

"Baylis Glascock was born and raised on the family's farm in New London, Missouri, ten miles from Hannibal, where Mark Twain lived and wrote. It had been purchased by his great-grandfather in 1875 with proceeds from the Gold Rush. Baylis's stories are filled with Americana that is folksy, funny, and at times heartbreaking. With a sense of wonder and a wry wit, he explains his bafflement with all things sexual and his equal confusion over racial, ethnic, and economic disparity, realities that he treats with sensitivity. After two years at the the University of Missouri, Baylis moved to Los Angeles, where he took filmmaking courses at USC and worked for Walt Disney. Later he worked on numerous projects as a filmmaker, editor, and director alongside Robert Snyder, documenting Henry Miller and Buckminster Fuller, and he made his own films of artist Sister Corita. His experimental film of the Watts Towers is preserved by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences."

Book preview

The Farm

My childhood was not without good moments. It is perhaps the nature of the growing child to simply make the best of what may be given. And for all that I might have lacked or later thought I lacked, I did have the farm. The piece of land that seemed to have been there forever and that I was free to roam as often as I wanted.

In winter, though, I wore extra layers of clothing, never really feeling warm enough. But I marveled at the absolute beauty of ice covering the trees. Coating every twig and blade of grass. And when the sun shone, I could walk through the small pasture that lay between the house and the dairy barn and see, among the blades of dead grass, among the tiny divots and rivulets in the snow, a vast terrain of hills and canyons traversed by my own tiny railroad. A railroad with bridges and trestles of immense complexity. The trip from house to barn, a mere three hundred yards, could take the better part of an hour.

Or I could walk near the highway along the fence in the early and brief winter sunset and listen to the crackle of ice under my feet. Clapping my hands, I could hear the sound strike the power lines and ricochet along them into the distance, a phenomenon that filled me with awe. Again and again I clapped my hands to hear that strange doppler.

In the summer, there could be cloudbursts. An inch or more of rain in five or six minutes. All the space around a wall of water. Once, when we were in the family car, it was necessary to pull off the road and stop. When we got home, the rain had ceased, and every surface was alive with flowing water: the road, the fields, the ditches. My brother and I ran barefooted through the grass and mud, following the flow of water. Our whole farm magically transformed into a realm of streams and tiny waterfalls. A place for splashing and throwing rocks. A place for yelling at the sky, a place of unbounded joy.

The woods were thicker then, with a dense blackberry patch not far north of the abandoned short-line track. No track left, just the roadbed. In the low places were concrete culverts six or eight feet wide, the ceilings caked with colonies of mud-dauber wasps. And on the walls, the mud nests of swallows. My brothers and I rested there on hot summer days. But often I came to the woods alone. I loved the mosses that thrived at the bases of trees. The occasional tiny flower.

That’s a jack in the pulpit, Mom said as we walked together once. There it was, delicate and alone under the canopy of trees in a shaft of afternoon light, a jewel to be left as it was found. Sometimes we would hunt mushrooms, Mom and I. Morels. Finding one here, one there. And once, dozens and dozens in a small area no bigger than the back porch.

On the fence at the northeast edge of the farm was a solitary gooseberry bush. It stood there unbothered in the fence line, waiting for the birds to enjoy its fruit.

If you climbed the silo, you could see trees and hedgerows, fields, houses and barns of neighboring farms, all in one sweep, the breeze blowing in your face. The smell of rotting silage and manure ascending the shaft. From this height, the surrounding ground seemed to revolve, the Earth to spread out in all directions. The tall silos looming over barn and milk parlor, feedlot, and bullpen. Something ancient, forbidding, and mysterious. Once functional, now standing like blind lighthouses, sightless beacons to those passing on the highway, ploughing in a distant field. A roosting place for pigeons.

This land at the edge of the prairie. This small farm in the center of the country was the center of my father’s world, as it had been for his father and grandfather. Land that had succored generations of my family. Land they had served, as it had served them. Clearing, planting, harvesting, fertilizing, always demanding toil. In good times, the land gave bountifully. Its true wealth, a place to be. A place to live in communion with nature. This communion, the very ground of their being. Understood deeply, but they had no words for it. As if, like the true name of God, it could not be spoken.

The Road West

The road leading west from town had been paved in 1934. State Highway 19, a concrete slab bisected by a stripe of black tar and segmented at fifty-foot intervals so that tires made a kathump-kathump traveling over it. Dad’s car moved toward his house almost as though it knew the way, a mere two miles that Dad had walked hundreds of times going to and from school as a boy. He had traveled it on horseback, in buggies, on hay wagons, on tractors pulling combines, in trucks loaded with grain. The road was a part of him like the cartilage between his bones. He knew the road, its inclines and curves, the way a musician knows music: without thinking of the piece as a whole, when a part of a melody is sung, the succeeding notes come forth as needed.

Our farm appeared on the right at the top of a small rise. This field is the highest ground in the county, Dad said as he rode the tractor with me one day. The fields and the boundaries of the farm were defined by fences, woven wire fences on wood posts, with two strands of barbed wire on top. Dad had built plenty of fences. That was a basic farming skill. It was work that I did helping my Uncle Harry one summer. Dad said that good fences were basic to farming. They had to be built well and maintained. Dad tended to be generous and forgiving but seemed to remember when people had tried to take advantage of him or renege on an agreement. There were people who had difficulty remembering their promises. Fences were shared responsibilities. Each farmer was responsible for building and maintaining half the length of the fence between them, the half on the right as viewed from his own field.

Our house was a simple structure. Dad had been born in it in 1909. His parents had come to the house directly from their wedding in Perry, eighteen miles to the west. The short-line railroad crossed the length of the farm from east to west, and they’d had the train stop right there in the middle of the farm and had gotten off and walked the three hundred yards to the house in their wedding clothes. The house was surrounded by elm trees and pasture, with several small sheds, a smokehouse, and a horse feed barn behind. Dad often talked about how his Aunt Betty had spent her final months in that very house in the summer of 1924 as she was dying of throat cancer.

His mother had cared for Aunt Betty until her death. The house was full of memories of his childhood and teen years. Memories of the meals cooked on the wood stove in the kitchen. Thousands of meals had been cooked in that kitchen. Dad always bragged about Grandma’s sourdough biscuits. Always a jar of clabber, sour milk, in the kitchen kept just for making biscuits. He would brag that she never used a recipe, never seemed to measure the ingredients. They were simply without compare, he would say.

Dad was a person given to superlatives. There was a cousin in Detroit who was a theater organist. Best in the world, no one like her, he would say. There was his friend George, who could outrun just about anybody even in full football gear and uniform. There was a famous relative named Al the Answer Man, had a radio program for White Owl cigars. Could answer absolutely any question. No one ever stumped him. It was just uncanny, Dad would say. Dad’s friend Razor was one hell of a carpenter, though Razor always smelled of whiskey and had blazing red eyes. Dad would brag that his friend W. L. was a national skeet champion for three consecutive years. Dad had a generally high estimation of his friends, men with extraordinary abilities. Charles Lemon was as good a judge of cattle as you could find anywhere. Except for Charles, most of Dad’s friends liked a good drink of whiskey now and then.

Dad didn’t smoke, never did, and was proud of it. Granddad had given him a gold watch for not drinking or smoking until he was twenty-one. But after that he more than made up for the drinking he had not done before. I wasn’t aware of Dad’s drinking until about the time I was in the first or second grade. Mom never understood what it was that made Dad drink. She cooked supper every night, but often we would eat without him. As we got older we would hear him come home late at night.

At 5:30 a.m. Dad would rise in the dark, shower and shave, pat his cheeks with Old Spice aftershave lotion, comb his hair with Wildroot Cream Oil, don a starched white shirt and tie, suit, overcoat, and galoshes, and be out the door without a word. Mom would have a couple of hours rest without Dad’s snoring.

Outside Dad starts the Hudson, lets it run for a couple of minutes to warm up. The exhaust glows red in the dark, chill air illuminated by the taillights. Dad slowly eases the massive gray Hudson onto the highway and cautiously navigates the ice-coated road toward town. He glances to light beaming from his dairy barn, two hundred yards off the highway and standing out in the darkness like a beacon on a distant shore. Frank, the hired hand, is already milking the herd of thirty-two Guernseys.

In the back of the post office, rural carriers were already sorting mail for their routes. There was a big stack of Sears Roebuck catalogs for each carrier. The smell of two new tires to be delivered to Albert Scott, R.R. #3, permeated the room. A radio played country music and would soon be giving the cattle and hog market prices and corn, oat, and wheat prices. By 7:00 the rural carriers were gone, and Dad and his clerk would finish putting up the mail in the lobby boxes. At 8:00 a.m. the window would open for the day’s business.

The post office in a small town is a vector of information. Letters, postcards, parcels, publications, money orders, bank statements, notices: working in the post office, Dad knows a lot about each person who comes and goes through the lobby door. But he regards his position as a public trust and does not traffic in tidbits of gossip gleaned from this flow of data, nor does he permit his clerks to do so. He is not stiff or prudish about it. He simply follows official Post Office policy, thinking it is plain good sense.

Granddad

When I was three, Grandma and Granddad Glascock moved from the farm to town. For a while, they lived in a house that belonged to Uncle Tubby and Aunt Lucy. That was during the war. Uncle Tubby and Aunt Lucy had moved to Kansas City, where Uncle Tubby had a job.

The back porch on the other side of the house had an awning with large dark green stripes and small orange stripes. The awning could roll up to be out of the way or rolled down to make shade. This was the only awning in town. It seemed more important and interesting than any other part of a house I had ever seen. On the living room wall of that house was a large framed print: a scene of a wolf howling in the winter night with a log cabin in the valley below. I looked at it for a long time. It was a lonely picture, and it bothered me. What were the people in the house doing? Was the wolf going to eat them?

It was a dark winter night when I stayed one evening with Granddad while Mom and Dad went somewhere to a club meeting. Grandma must have gone too, because she wasn’t home. Granddad sat in his big rocking chair reading a newspaper under his reading lamp. He was barefooted, and the nail of the big toe on his left foot was split down the middle. It looked just like a cow’s hoof. For some reason I couldn’t understand, he was teasing me with the toe. He would reach out with his foot and pinch me with the toes of his left foot. It hurt. He did this several times.

The only toy in the house was a metal Greyhound bus, large and sturdy enough that I could sit on top. I rode it back and forth in the living room. Granddad didn’t talk to me or read to me. He just read the paper to himself. The rest of the house was dark. The only light was his reading lamp.

In the summer, my half-brother, Stevie, would visit Granddad and Grandma. Sometimes I would go to Granddad’s to play with Stevie. This was during the war, and there were cut-out toy military vehicles on the back of Kix cereal boxes. One afternoon, Stevie and I played in the yard in the grass with some of them. A cardboard tank, a jeep, and a howitzer. We placed them on a large sheet of paper with the layout of a military base, which came inside the box as a premium. A large bug crawled from the grass onto the paper and waddled across in front of the tank.

I went with Stevie up the street to Careverly Ann Scott’s house that afternoon. She had her own room in the garage. It was her childhood clubhouse, she said, and two of her friends were there with her. She had a small keg of hot, flat ginger beer. She offered me a cup. I was thirsty, but it tasted awful. I was so disappointed. They all laughed.

From Granddad’s house it was only a block up to the Christian Church where I went to Sunday school every week. Granddad never missed Sunday school, and neither did I. Granddad was an elder, and if we stayed for church services, I would see him go to the front of the church with the other elders to serve communion. I was little then, so I didn’t get any of the grape juice or the cracker. When I was a little older, I went to the church with Granddad on a weekday afternoon. There were wasps making a nest over one of the main doors. Granddad made a torch with a roll of newspaper