“We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us .  . .”
2 Corinthians 4:7-9. I suppose Dad loved Mom, or thought he did, but he had a strange way of showing it.

He was raised in New Hampshire and he and his brother, Herb, had to walk a long distance to school.  An old man along the route gave them home brew when Dad was five years old. He soon became addicted and bought or stole liquor any time he could.  As a young man he drove an ambulance and lived a rough life, drinking, fighting, rum running, and gambling. It wasn’t long until he had a run-in with the law and John Joy, who lived in Corinth, Maine, had him released in his custody.

Of course Mom didn’t know he was on probation, or even that he drank. Still, I have never been able to figure out how she came to go out with him.  She was genteel and refined and was raised by fine Christian parents. She received Christ as her Saviour when she was only a child, but was sheltered and naive. In high school she had a crush on a tall, handsome blond classmate but he wasn’t interested in her.

Maybe that was the reason she dated Dad. Or, like many Christian girls, she may have found it exciting to be with someone who lived the way Dad did. She dated him off and on for a period of two years. In her last year in high school he conned her into marrying him and they moved to a small place near Tatnic, a rundown, backwoods community in southern Maine.  She soon discovered that life in that arena wasn’t what it appeared to be. After they were married, Dad told Grammie he was going to raise a crew and put them in the woods to work so he could take it easy.  She thought he was just talking but that was once he told the truth. As soon as one of us kids was five years old or so, he had us working in the woods, driving horses and doing other small jobs. I got knocked off the back of the skid horse by a low hanging branch more than once when I was that age.  Having us out there was more work than he got out of us at first, but he knew what he was doing. We were being trained to do the work for him.  We kids weren’t the only ones who suffered at Dad’s iron fist. I can still see Mom on one end of a crosscut saw days before she was to have the yearly baby. Knowing what I know now, it’s hard to understand how she lived through it.  If you have read anything about slave drivers in the southern United States before the Civil War, you know what Dad was like. He was about as tall as I am; a burly, hard-bitten taskmaster who thought only of himself. He did a lot of boxing and on one occasion, whipped the champion of New Hampshire.  My earliest memory of him was taking us out in the woods to work. He wore his battered felt hat pulled over one eye and had a menacing handlebar mustache that gave him a hard, angry appearance.  He often carried a whip in his big fist, ready to use at the slightest provocation. If he didn’t have it close, he grabbed the nearest stick when something went wrong and whaled away. The kid within reach was beaten, whether he was guilty or not.  You have to remember Dad came from a very different family than Mom’s. They were rum runners during prohibition and he grew up with the philosophy that’s so popular now. Look out for Number One. If someone else is hurt it’s just too bad.  Our family was hard up in those days. Dad always had whiskey or rum within arm’s reach and made home brew by the barrel. Like I said, he was an alcoholic and bought booze with every cent he could get his hands on. That didn’t make life any easier for my brothers and sisters and me. Mom had to hide money so that she could buy food and clothes for us at the store.

Years later when the doctor forbade him to drink any more he took to drinking Coke. He used to bury his pop in the sand along a creek or in a spring to keep it cool. Every once in awhile one of us would slip down to his cache and snitch a bottle, burying it in another spot some distance away, then wait a few days to see if he’d miss it before we would drink it. If we got caught it meant another beating but we did it anyway.

When I was born in 1939, the fourth in a family of eleven, we lived in the country. Dad was drunk and in a bad mood when the time neared for me to make my entrance into the world. Grammie had trouble getting him to take Mom to the hospital from our little backwoods farmhouse ten miles away. The road was crooked and rough and full of pot holes, and had much to do with hastening my arrival. I was the first one in our family to be born in a hospital.  At the hospital Dad tried to order the doctor around like he did us kids. They got into a violent argument and the doctor threatened to leave the case. It nearly ended things for me before they began, but the Lord had plans for my life. I was a stubborn character and was healthy and strong in spite of their ruckus.  The next spring Grammie came down state to see this new boy. When she arrived, Dad and Mom were plowing the garden. He had the britchin’ strap of a harness around Mom’s chest and the tail piece around her neck. She was pulling a cultivator in the garden while he walked behind; the whip in his hand to use if she made a move that didn’t suit him. I know the feeling because years later when I drove the tractor for him to hill up the potatoes, I cut off the end of a row and got a rock on the back of my head that nearly knocked me out.

Grammie was upset and went straight into the house. Dad wasn’t too happy to see Grammie, but when he realized that she was furious he unhitched Mom and brought her into the house. Grammie was usually quiet but that day she let him know what she thought of a man who would treat his wife so shamefully. He stormed into the other room, snatched up his revolver and pointed it at her temple.  “Another word out of you,” he raged, “and I’ll blow your head off.”

Grammie didn’t say anything more to him and stayed for two or three days. Finally, she couldn’t take it any more so she went back home. Mom- said he often threatened her with the same revolver, the way he did Grammie.

When I was about a year old, Dad moved us north to Corinth, where Mom’s family lived. I was just a little shaver when one of the neighbors reported Dad for beating us kids. He hammered on us pretty bad and I guess they could hear the screaming from where they lived. Finally they called the cops who came and took him in.

When he saw that they had come to arrest him he snatched up my little sister, Becky, and a .45 revolver.  The police chased him into the barn and we thought there would be a shoot-out. But when he showed himself at the open haymow he had Becky in front of him so they couldn’t shoot. Finally they talked him into giving up and he was taken to jail.  I don’t remember how long he was locked up but Mom divorced him, and we stayed with her folks a good part of a year. The months he was in jail were the most peaceful I knew as a kid. It was great not being knocked around and not having to go out in the woods to work. When he got out of jail he came back and sweet-talked Mom into remarrying him. He made her a lot of promises but, when they were married again and he was back in the house, things soon got worse than before. Our holiday was over.  He got ready for his big family by buying a farm with a 500 acre woodlot and a fourteen room house on it. He and Mom cut enough pulp and logs on the wood lot to pay the $800. In those days there were no chain saws so they did the work with crosscut saws and buck saws.

The farm buildings were typically New England with the barn and house joined together with a shed between them. There was a big kitchen with a wood cook stove and a row of old fashioned cupboards.  We couldn’t understand why it took so much fixing until Grammie told us that the farmer who sold it to Dad had used the kitchen for a harness shop. There was no running water, just a well in the yard.  The dining room was large. It had to be, as our family grew to eleven kids. I still remember the thirteen of us around the table at mealtime. The living room was smaller but it was my favorite. I looked at it as a sort of haven, where I could get away from the anger and turmoil around me. I usually felt safe from Dad when I was in that room, though it wasn’t very often we got time to spend there.

At the time we were living in a place the locals called Jungle Town and those of us who lived there were called swamp rats. I don’t know how the place got its name. As kids we did climb trees a lot and jumped from tree to tree and played Tarzan. I remember riding down the old woods trails on a pulp rack, jumping from the top of the rack into small withy trees. It was a little daring. We even set up a trapeze in our barn once. There were two swings on separate beams twenty feet up. Two of us would hang by our knees and get synchronized and throw one of the little guys back and forth. We asked Mom to come watch the circus. We only requested doughnuts for pay.  We planned it so she would walk in just as little Freddy was airborne between us. I can’t imagine why she got so excited and I’m not sure if we got any doughnuts.

Not many people lived in Jungle Town. The Campbells, the Ossurs, and old Friday, whose real name was George Turner.

For one thing the road was impassible in the spring when the frost went out. We had to walk out until the ground dried up. For another, we kids were wild and must have seemed impossible to the more civilized neighbors. We didn’t have a lot going for us that’s for sure.

Dad came home drunk one early spring night, carrying a bag of rice on his shoulder. A hole popped open but he was so drunk he didn’t notice. He strewed rice all the way from the main road to our place. For a while they called our road Rice Avenue.  We never knew when we were going to be dragged out of bed to work or to be beaten for something we may or may not have done. Once, I think it was before he went to jail, he woke us up in the middle of the night, one by one. He gagged and tied us up and took us out on the sidehill where we would know what he was doing. We could see through the window that he already had tied up Mom and had her in a chair in the dining room.

I Then he poured kerosene all over the house and lit it. It would flare up and go out. Humanly speaking, it should have burned. It was dry as a cork, but God was protecting Mom. I can see God’s hand was on us all through those years.

There were two bedrooms on the main floor and the rest of the bedrooms were upstairs. My room joined the shed that led to the barn. As I remember, the shed always held an ample supply of split hardwood for the cook stove and the barn was large and had stalls for the cattle and horses, with pens for the pigs and chickens. For several years we kept goats, too.

Our farmyard was big and most of the time it was well kept.. We had a deep, rock-lined well in the middle of the yard and a big iron tub for watering the cattle. We had no electricity or running water.  Mom was a remarkable woman. In spite of taking care of a large family and having to spend so much time working in the woods, she loved flowers and had the sixth sense of an artist in arranging the plantings.  Our yard was prettier than some of the pictures you see in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens.  We kids helped her as much as we could. I still like flowers.

Most of the flowers she used were perennials so she wouldn’t have to replant every year. She had hollyhocks and morning glories close to the house.  Woodbine covered the trellis by the front door and locust trees were as high as the gable-end of the roof, providing shade in the summer.

The farm yard was dotted with rock gardens, grape vines and a variety of perennials. The apple trees we planted in the front yard began to yield their fruit.  There were some elms down by the pig pen and a row of huge maples lined the dirt road. Some of those old giants are still there.

In the shaded areas at the back of the house we planted lilies and a variety of wild flowers that we gathered from the woods where we worked. In spite of working in the woods and caring for her flowers Mom managed to have a big garden to help feed our gang. There were years when she and my sisters canned as many as 500 quarts of berries and vegetables.

One day, after chain saws became popular, she decided to enlarge the living room. That morning, after Dad and the rest of us went into the woods, she fired up the chain saw and cut an archway into the living room from the huge dining room. She finished it off so well by the time we came in for supper that it was several days before Dad even noticed what she had done.

Like most mothers, Mom had to be both a doctor and a nurse when we were growing up. Only with her, she had to do a lot of things most others wouldn’t have to do because Dad wouldn’t let her take us to the doctor.

When I was so young I can’t even remember it; I fell on something and tore a chunk out of my lower lip.  (The scar today indicates the piece was semicircular about the size of half a dollar.) When I came in the house crying Mom cleaned it off, put fir pitch on it and glued it back.

But that isn’t the end of that story. It was just beginning to heal when I tore it again. I was running in the stubble to catch up with the hayrack and climb on when the wheel hit me and tore the lip again. That time she used a needle and thread to sew it in place.  Doctors, who have seen it since, have been surprised that I have feeling in it. I’m sure the Lord had something to do with her having the courage to sew it back in place.

Another time, when I was nine years old, a log rolled off a bobsled we were pushing up a hill. The stick flattened my finger on the bunk. It really hurt and I wanted to go home, a mile away, but Dad wouldn’t let me.

“That’s nothing. A little thing like that don’t hurt,” he said. It throbbed for an hour or more and it was tough to keep from crying, but I had to. I was afraid I’d get slugged, if I cried. I lost the fingernail and still have the scars.

The next summer we were having trouble with the crosscut saws. We were cutting pine and some were four feet on the stump. There was so much pitch in the trees we were sawing; we had to keep putting kerosene on the blade so it wouldn’t stick. We had to split the blocks that were too big for the mill.  Dad was doing the splitting and, as usual, he was mad because the work wasn’t going as fast as he thought it should. He was cursing with every breath and we were scared to death that he was about to start pounding on one of us.

He had the wedge in one hand and the splitting hammer in the other. I guess he was so mad he wasn’t careful and let his thumb slide over the top of the wedge. He hauled back with the splitting hammer and flattened his thumb right on the top of the wedge.  You should have seen him. He took off through the woods, squealing like a turpentined hound with every jump. I beat it for the bush the other direction. I knew better than to stick around and let him see me laughing. I felt that he was getting what he deserved.  Still, he made me keep working when I flattened my finger but he went to the doctor to get his sewed up.  When I was five I was working regularly with the three older kids in the woods. Shoes cost too much so we trudged barefooted up the skid trails most of the time in the summer. I won’t say that we didn’t have fun, but the work was hard and that old house looked mighty good when we got home at night. In the winter we hauled the pulp out of the woods on sleds. We converted old riding sleighs, called pungs to haul pulp on. Sometimes we used horses and sometimes we pulled and pushed them by hand. We carried a lot out on our backs. It was in four foot lengths. The bigger we grew, the bigger the loads.  Even my sisters carried wood out on their backs.  In the summer it was sweat, flies and pitch from peeling pulp in the heat. In the winter it was cold and wading in the snow. Twice I froze my toes to the point of losing all my toenails, but there was no stopping. I had rheumatism in my legs by the time I was twelve, probably from the snow melting and freezing on my pants while kneeling in the snow to cut down trees with the crosscut saw.

When Dad was out of the woods, we were left to work. Sometimes I would put on like a slave driver. I would grab a whip and start giving orders just for fun to boost the morale.

The other kids were afraid I would get caught as Dad would sneak in sometimes to check out whether we were working or not.

At times when we were alone cutting in the summer covered with pitch, dirt and flies, we would jump, clothes and all, into a brook or swamp if there was one handy. I’m sure at times we looked more like animals than kids.

Dad not only kept us busy in the woods, but when the wild raspberries were ripe he gave each of us several empty boxes and sent us out for berries.  Except for the high demands, this was a break from cutting or peeling pulp in the heat of summer.  “And don’t come back till they’re full,” he ordered.

We knew we would be beaten if we didn’t meet our quotas so the girls, who could pick faster than us boys, helped us. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad treating us the way he did caused us to draw close together, protecting each other as best we could.  In those days beans, blueberries, potatoes and other crops were picked by hand. Dad used to take us out to help with the harvest in the fall. We worked like slaves trying to please the slave master. If we didn’t do as much as he thought we should, we’d get hammered.

Picking potatoes in the fall was a big thing in the area where we lived. They even closed school sometimes so everyone could work. We only got twenty five cents a barrel but one fall our family made $3,300. We’d be there first thing in the morning when the tractor started and would work until it stopped at night.

I remember pulling two acres of beans a day by myself. As a family we would sometimes pull fourteen acres a day and Dad would get twenty dollars an acre for our work. Of course we kids never saw any of the money. We took in as much as $6,000 in five weeks raking blueberries. We would haul in almost 5,000 pounds in one night. We were known all over for our hard work. Farmers were glad to have the Hill tribe work for them.

We had our own cider press and made our own cider and vinegar by the barrel. Meat was no problem when we grew up. Dad was good with his rifle and taught us to shoot, as well.

Today he would probably be called a gun collector or enthusiast. He had guns all over the place. There was a rifle over every door in the house-seventeen of them. He taught us to shoot almost as soon as he started us working in the woods. And when we went into the bush we always carried a rifle. When I started trucking I carried a .45 or .22 automatic.  He didn’t make a practice of hunting deer with lights at night, but if we needed meat he’d do, it. We raised hogs and smoked the hams. We usually had plenty of chickens for eggs and eating and we kept a cow to provide milk and butter. I remember those cows well. Most of the time I had to milk. I kind of liked it.

So we ate well. I guess Dad figured he had to feed us good if he was to get the work out of us.  The spring I graduated from 8^th grade we moved to South Twin near Millinocket. My Dad ran a lumber camp for the Great Northern Paper Co. We were just starting to use chain saws. It seemed to make cutting a lot easier. We had a crew of men and my Mom cooked for them plus our family. There was no running water but a beautiful spring next to the kitchen. The camps were built of logs. I remember the wooden sinks, etc. One thing that impressed me was that as hard as Mom worked, she still had time to sit and read her Bible in the evening behind the old stove.

I liked horses especially because they took a lot of the load off us for carrying pulp on our backs. This camp had a large horse hovel big enough for twentyfour teams. Sometimes on Sunday we would ride the big horses bareback up and down the trails for miles.  Thinking back, those creatures never got many breaks.

We did some trapping on our way to where we were cutting, sometimes two miles from camp.  One fall, Dad took Isaiah and me twenty miles from home to a woodlot he had bought. I was fifteen and Isaiah was thirteen. We built a lean-to for the horse and another for ourselves, using poles and boards, with tar paper for siding.

He left us alone out there to work for the winter and would come out to check on us from time to time. But we never knew when he would show up. He’d come at odd times and we’d better be working when he got there. If we weren’t, we got knocked around for it.  And we’d better have as much wood cut as he thought we should have or we’d catch it for that. We did enjoy hauling wood by moonlight with our horse and bobsled.

But it wasn’t all work around our place, we did have some fun, especially on Sunday afternoons. We used to love the haymow and it wasn’t long until we were daring each other to jump off the high beams into the hay. I remember jumping off the peak of the thirty foot barn with an umbrella for a parachute. I landed in the manure pile, sinking up to my waist.  We used to pretend to be camping in the woods, building fires. I learned to snare rabbits at an early age. Thanksgiving Day was special and we usually all went rabbit hunting. We were like an army. The rabbits didn’t stand a chance. It is a wonder we didn’t accidentally shoot each other some of those times.  One of the neighbor kids did shoot my older brother through the jaw with a .45/.70 at close range. That was an accident and he did live, but has the scars today to prove it.

The Bible says we have guardian angels to look after us. When we were growing up, ours had to have been working overtime just to keep us alive. I broke my nose three times.

When I was small, my older brothers were up in the shed chamber with beams four or five feet apart.  They were jumping from one beam to another. One of them looked back to see me making a run for it.  He tried to grab me but missed and I landed, head first, on the woodpile below. It was a wonder I didn’t break my neck.

Why Should I Wander

Oh, my God, why should I wander
In the darkness of sin’s night?
When in Jesus Christ, the Saviour,
You have given me the light.
Wake my soul from sin’s black valley,
Let the light of God shine through,
Fill my heart to over-flowing
Till I walk in light with you.