Lad Moore is a former corporate vice-president who left the boardroom in 1998 and returned to his roots in “Deep East Texas”—the fountainhead for much of his writing. He retired to a small farm near mysterious Caddo Lake and the historic steamboat town of Jefferson. In the solitude of those surroundings, when not writing, he walks the piney trails among the muscadines—with his “ever-encouraging” Australian Shepherd, Quigley.
   Life experiences are splashed freely into his writings. His early years were like a pinball game, shuffling among caring family members between stints at military school. His parents divorced early, and his father was always away—following his dream, soldier of fortune style. There were years of rare adventure—life in strife-torn Indonesia, Burma, and a year on board a steamer-freighter sailing the world. In high school he joined a circus—only one event in a series of rites of passages that he reflects upon in his stories.
   He has written and published many of his works. A collection of stories, Odie Dodie, has been published by BeWrite Books. A second collection, Firefly Rides, is nearing completion.  A non-fiction work in progress, Offspring of the Tiger, will portray what he calls his ‘dizzy’ relationship with his father—one of the storied Hump Pilots of World War II.

The author is honored to have been published more than two hundred times—including in Carolina Country, Amarillo Bay, The Pittsburg Quarterly, The Paumanok Review, Eclectica, Manx, Danforth Review, Literary House, The Virginia Adversaria, Adirondack Review, and in AIM, America’s Intercultural Magazine. His four-story anthology, Natcherly Bad, was featured Creativity Magazine. 

His prize-winning story, “The Firmament of the Third Day,” was published in the Fiction Writers Association’s Best of Carve Magazine Anthology. “Burger Recollections,” a burger-shop memoir, has been featured in ABC’s of Food by Peach Blossom Press. In addition, Mr. Moore is a past winner of The Wordhammer Award and the Silver Quill. His short story “The Day Hunter” was nominated for a 2002 Fiction Award at The Texas Institute of Letters.

Enjoy some fresh "Butter Beans"—Lad's inspirational short stories in e/book download at http://www.shortstuffbooks.tripod.com 

Visit Lad's website at http://www.ladmoore.homestead.com/home.html 

Read Lad's blog: http://www.laddiemoore.blogspot.com/ (25/09/07)

Read an interview with Trouser Cloninger - one of the many stars featured in Odie Dodie

Vindicating the Kaiser by Lad Moore

At the neighborhood mission my grandparents founded, there was a rough old man in denim overalls who always got to the services early, but sat on the last pew and didn’t mix much with the others. Sonny Cox told me that the old man was mean. He said that people around town named him “Kaiser,” because that name had something to do with the enemy in the Great World War. In my world, Sonny had credibility because he was on the junior varsity basketball team and was already shaving his chin. Sonny also told me that the Kaiser was so mean they ran him out of the bowling alley because the old man “bowled overhand.” To rest his case, he said that Kaiser Bill ambushed dirt daubers with a 12-guage shotgun because they were “carrying off his soil.” I noticed that the Kaiser’s arms were covered with dark bristly hair and were about the size of footballs where they disappeared into chambray sleeves. Sonny warned me about those arms, and said I shouldn’t get too close. “That old man is as quick as a cobra and has a five-foot reach,” he said.
   From then on, I was fascinated by the mystique of it all. I remember raising my head like a periscope above the top of the pew and looking two rows back to study the Kaiser’s face. If my grandmother caught me staring, she pinched the back of my leg just below my knee. I would squint in pain, slump down like a feed sack, and twist back to face the front. Even so, I was able to steal some long looks, and I saw that his face was deeply pocked and leathery. Once, at an after-church dinner, I noticed that something wet and reddish-brown had pooled in one of those giant pockmarks. It looked like blood, and lent strong credence to some of Sonny’s warnings. I asked my grandmother about it, and she whispered that it was Red Ribbon Tobacco. From that day on, I connected Red Ribbon with blood and pockmarks, and stayed well clear of it.
   One morning before church started, I lingered to stare at Kaiser Bill through the parted burlap curtains that divided the Sunday school rooms. His eyes met mine, and he smiled ever so slightly and winked at me. It was clear that I had been discovered, and a sudden rush of fear made me quickly turn away. After services were over the unthinkable happened. He invited me out to his farm to ride his horse. As I looked into his face, I quivered with fright. But the lure of an afternoon on horseback and my grandmother’s nods of reassurance seemed to make it okay.
   We drove out to the farm in his faded flatbed truck. I don’t think I took my eyes off the floorboard except when I cut them slightly to the side to study his gnarled hand on the gearshift knob. It was the size of a baseball mitt, with wadded-up fingernails that resembled half-melted plastic spoons. My grandmother had taught me to respect the hands of toil. “Hard work is honorable,” she said, “God loves working men.” I was glad I studied his hands. My heart relaxed into a rhythm of relief—the same feeling one gets when a hound comes at him with curled lips, but then wags his tail.  
    Kaiser Bill’s farm on Five Notch Road looked weathered and tired. The barn had such a lean to it that at high noon there was still a wide shadow on one side. He had a long hen crib nailed to it, and it hung at a steep enough angle that eggs rolled forward and stopped at the lips of the boxes.
   “The barn ain’t plumb, but my eggs gather easy,” he said.
   The trepidation I felt about going to his farm was erased as soon as he lifted me up onto the back of his plow horse, “Gert.” I rode her bareback except for a feed sack blanket, and she had that good horse smell--like damp hay. I rode alongside Kaiser Bill as he repaired fences that day, re-stretching a section where a tree had fallen across it.
   “Dutch elm disease,” he explained, peeling back the powdery bark. “I wish it would infect the bull nettles instead, but I guess that won’t happen. It’s nature’s irony—like how Bermuda grass grows in my walk but not my yard.”
   That first visit to the farm was the beginning of a bond between a still-malleable boy, and a man not yet willing to concede to uselessness. Soon it seemed I was out at Kaiser’s farm more than I was home. I helped him with chores, fed the animals, and rode Gert to the end of Five Notch Road and back every Saturday.
In the evenings we sat together on the porch swing, celebrating the red-rouge Texas sky. We shared cookies and iced tea, and to this day I am still fascinated by his ability to safely partition the cookies from the Red Ribbon tobacco in his mouth. There was something confessional about those evenings on the porch, and I told him things about my life that only my pillow knew.
   My mother left me when I was six months old, and I felt forever stained by that fact. When kids asked me why I lived with my grandmother, I reached for the paint that would portray my mother at her best, but they were painfully shallow colors. I needed to salvage honor from disgrace, so I told my friends she was a Cherokee Indian. I told them that she had died from cholera, a disease once so rampant that most kids had seen it carved on at least one relative’s tombstone. I knew there was something very honorable about being Cherokee, and I was especially proud of having embellished my mother’s character.
   I didn’t have to lie so much about my dad, because his exploits were certifiable. His work in freelance aviation called him to strange places around the world, and my telegram collection included cables from Rangoon, Calcutta, Bombay, and Djakarta. His cable address, Tailwind, best summed it up. He was forever rushing away, and my memories of him are limited to the three short years we lived together. My favorite picture of my dad was the one in front of the Great Pyramids, wearing a fez and a crisp khaki uniform with an abundance of pockets on it. The photo captured a swirl of dust behind him, and I could almost hear the sound of the wind squeaking across the hot sand. I knew that the smile on his face was fleeting—not lasting beyond the click of the camera shutter. I knew that as soon as the photo was taken, his lips would return to their tight, pursed line. In all my memories of him, I never recall him genuinely laughing. He was a serious man, and his lifestyle was as hurried as his death, at age 41.
   It wouldn’t be fair to either man to say that Kaiser Bill became my father figure, but suddenly fate thrust the comparison upon me. I was spending the weekend with him, and we stayed up late Saturday night listening to my favorite radio serial, Gangbusters. I awoke the next morning to crowing roosters, but something was missing from daybreak’s usual sensory cues. Coffee. I didn’t smell coffee. I got out of the bed and skipped through the living room toward the kitchen. The venetian blinds were tilted, and the ribbons of sunlight on the floor had inspired my hopscotch gait. The coffeepot sat washed and empty, like we left it the night before. Suddenly I knew there was something very different about this day. I moved in quiet half steps down the hall to the bathroom, its door standing open. Kaiser Bill was on the commode, his pajama bottoms pulled down past his knees, with a Texas Monthly magazine resting on the elastic waste band like a little tray. He was leaning forward slightly--his hands clasped and folded across his knees. He didn’t seem to know I was there. Then I looked into his unblinking eyes. The kind blue pupils were gone, and there was only gray.
   Kaiser Bill’s funeral was the only one I ever attended besides my dad’s. There weren’t many people there, mostly strangers. Then I saw Sonny Cox sitting on a crowded sofa in the only room where smoking was allowed. I squared my shoulders and marched right up to him as he fumbled his cigarette trying to stand up. I wanted him to know right then and there that he was dead wrong about the dirt daubers, and that Kaiser Bill had never once been bowling.  

An Interview with Trouser Cloninger of Low Melody Farm
Interview by Lad Moore, Author of "Odie Dodie"

Lad: Good Morning. First tell me the origin of your unusual name.
TC: You mean Trouser? Well, when I was a little tweet, we was cockeyed poor. I slept in one leg of a pair of my Daddy’s overalls-you know, like a sleeping bag. Mama called me the Trouser Boy. Reckon now that’s my name.

Lad: Tell me what you remember most about Low Melody Farm and your childhood.
TC: Daddy believed that a kid oughta have chores, like a list of regular things to do. You couldn’t play or fiddle around until that list got checked off. And you couldn’t cheat-Daddy had a copy of the list in his bib all times.
TC sighs. But mostly it was a good childhood. Full of adventures. I pretty much played by myself. Didn’t like the little Neds-the Townies I mean. I rather play sticks than townie games.

Lad: Sticks? What is that?
TC: Sticks is when you cut a small pole about a yard high. And you find other poles in the woods and they smack each other. The pole that breaks loses. But if you be careful, like pick a persimmon pole, you can whup every other stick.

Lad: Okay, Now about that story you told in the book ‘Odie Dodie’. What do you think the tale about Ferro and the fishes is really all about? Is there a moral or lesson to that story you wanted readers to learn---a special message?
TC: In my head I followed some kind of direction that I wasn’t in control of. It was a dream, but not really a dream. Because I rode that tractor down to Caddo Creek just like the story says. I didn’t make that up.

Lad: But in the tale you tell of sleeping by the Iron Ore Pond and waking up after what was a long rest, reciting the tale of the fishes.
TC: But in that dream it actually happened. I came swooning out of my body. My body was at Iron Ore Pond, and my figment was on the 8-N Tractor, like I said. I was with Ferro and the Fishes on their ride to Progunder.
If you read the story again, you will recognize that it is the Good Book tale of Exodus. The fishes are freed and they follow their new leader. But they forsake him later, and they all die.

Lad: Is that the fate of mankind today?
TC: I look around and I see the merriment and the frolic, and the forgettin’ of the rules. I think that is what happens when things get too good and nobody has a chores list. Also, you surprisingly can learn that the leader is just plain wrong. Yep, leaders sometimes hear the wrong drummer, but there ain’t no one there that can tell them anything, because, well, they are the Deciders.

Lad: But in the end, the faithful fishes all die. Is that what all of us can expect?
TC: 'Spose so. The big Ten-Star General Julius Caesar was the best leader of all the big wars of the Roman World. But even he learned there was a fiddler to be paid.

Lad: And what was that?
TC: There was a simple but trusted scribe that whispered in his ear the warning, that ’All Glory is Fleeting.’ Then look what happened to Rome.

Lad: We could all learn from that. But to sum up, what is the best lesson we can learn from the fate of the fishes at Progunder?
TC: That singing man Bob Dylan had it right. Do you know what he said?

Lad: Not actually.
TC: He wrote these words once: He said, ‘Don’t follow leaders. Watch your parking meters.’
So I trustes, I mostly obeys, and I serves my chores list. But I keep one eye squinted in case the Deciders is wrong.