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Jack Hardesty: When Red Ryder Got Took Prisoner

He was the most solid man I ever knew. With a stout Irish core, he stood six-foot-three and weighed about two-hundred pounds, with hands like anvils. My grandfather's appearance was one-hundred-eighty degrees opposite from the frail man depicted in Grant Wood's American Gothic. In that portrait, the farmer stands with his pitchfork at attention alongside an expressionless woman - two icons of farm life. They are classic surrogates for many of the people who tirelessly toiled the soils of this country. My grandfather would have been a more virile model; sans coat and with a knotted handkerchief circling his wide brow. The contrast was as different as the message was similar: The rewards of farm life are meager if measured by wealth, but rich if a gauge of spirit.
      My father flew off again to India and Burma, and I got shuffled up to Arkansas for the school year while my brother stayed behind. Was there a plan to share a little of the two of us with everyone in the family so no one had to endure a fatal dose?
      Jack Hardesty was my grandfather on my mother's side. My grandmother Zella committed suicide in 1918. No one in the family would talk about the suicide until my mother dragged it out of her uncle. She told him she had to know, before she had children of her own. "Was she in bad health and with a disease my children may inherit? Was it mental?"
      This is the story. When Grandpa Jack and Zella lived in Oklahoma, Zella had been up in Enid with another man. Grandpa saw her himself, so it wasn't hearsay, and she didn't come home until the next day. Grandpa told her she had to leave and go home to her mother, and she could not take the two children with her. In those days, the scarlet letter "A" was worse than the most horrid of other sins. So that night she drank rat poison and threw the empty bottle out into the living room where Grandpa and his brother were sitting. They rushed to her, but she did not live ten minutes. She was only twenty-one.
      They told the children Zella had just "gone away" and stuck with the story until my mother demanded to know the truth.
      Grandpa was born in 1885, a Kentuckian, of staunch Church of England lineage. When they migrated to Kentucky from Maryland, some of the family married Catholics and were converted, and the lineage was broken. My Grandfather, though, became a Presbyterian. He didn't attend church when I knew him, but he read every night from a Bible so worn from use that its separated pages looked like a scattered deck of cards.
      He came from the hilly part of Kentucky near Brandenburg, among what are known as 'The Knolls' - where the Ohio River is a dominant part of history and daily conversation. The Ohio is nine-hundred and eighty-one miles long, and flows at three miles an hour, except around Louisville, where it drops twenty-three feet in two miles. Grandpa liked to talk about how one January in 1946, eleven barges loaded with four-hundred and six hard-to-get automobiles were ice bound in the middle of the river. The spectacle caused citizens to line the banks for miles.
      Grandpa Jack came from a farm family, as so many did, raising tobacco, oats, wheat and corn. He talked about how people stole their watermelons so often they had to plant them in the middle of the cornfield to hide them. Farm life was tough, and he had chores to do that lasted from daylight until lantern light and beyond.
      When he got a little older, young Jack saw a Wild-West show and the lure of the pioneer life made him decide to go to Oklahoma. He went to work for a company making oil rig equipment. Then for a while he did streetcar work in Tulsa. Grandpa didn't like their system. It was ill planned and was not managed like he remembered on his trips on the Louisville streetcars. Returning to his first love the oil business, he moved from one company to another, and eventually locked arms with Continental Supply Company. There in Tulsa he met and married his second wife Stell.
      Sometime after World War II, Jack began to dream about leaving the oil supply business and returning to farm life. He and Stell did just that, landing near Alex, Arkansas on a piece of ground staring right at Magazine Mountain, crown jewel of the Ozarks. He toiled his land for the next twenty years, churning the barren soil into productive vineyards and peach orchards.
      My first look at the farm came when the vines and trees were mature and bearing. I could not appreciate what Grandpa went through to get it that way. That is, except for the awe I held when I saw a rock fence two feet wide, three feet high, and a quarter-mile long. The fence had been tilled up a rock at a time from his fields.
      I walked to school in Alex, the coal town about two miles Southeast of the farm. The road was firm sand, weather-safe, and always beckoned me to seek its horizon. I remember how Grandpa told me about his walking twice that distance to school in Brandenburg, with a "ciphering-tablet" and a two-gallon syrup bucket with one biscuit in it for lunch. As most "when I was your age" stories go, it was always rougher "back then". I already have plans to tell my grandchildren about how I had to endure an old Cushman motor scooter, and later, a used '57 Chevy. As things seem to be headed, it will all seem like real hardship and pain compared to my grandchildren's helicopter rides to their private island.
      I asked him why he wouldn't just put the biscuit in his pocket or in a handkerchief rather than carry a mostly empty bucket. He said: "Well boy, I had to fill it up with blackberries on the way home or get no supper."
      I met a kid named Carl Oberman from the first house just to the West. We were in the same grade and walked the road together to Alex. The Obermans were nice people, but also a little weird … based on one impression: They kept a black and white throw rug just inside their front door. It was the tanned fur of their dead dog Muffy. When I went in Carl's house, I stretched out my legs about a yard apart so I wouldn't have to step on it. Somehow the pelt of a pet seems kind of holy.
      Carl owned a Daisy BB gun, something I longed for every time he let me shoot it. On weekends we lined cans up on the rock fence and shot at them for hours. When I got home I recited my love for Carl's gun over and over again to what I thought were deaf ears. But lo, Grandpa got me a Daisy for Christmas - the best surprise I ever had. Granny Stell told me way back at Thanksgiving they had no money, and Santa could only bring fruit and nuts in a stocking that year. Meanwhile, the gun was secretly on layaway at the Western Auto store in Ozark.
      I was thrilled, and didn't even open my other two presents until after I went out on the front porch and shot it. It was blue steel, with a brown wooden stock that had a Red Ryder figure carved in it. There was a genuine rawhide thong looped through the saddle ring. It was the deluxe model, a notch above Carl's. His had a vinyl thong.
      I got good at hitting every target I shot at. Grandpa's rules were simple: Never shoot at any animal except a snake, or aim at people even if unloaded. Never shoot toward the house. The rules left me plenty of legitimate targets and a host of inanimate casualties-to-be.
      I think Carl got jealous, because after I got my Red Ryder, he came down a lot less. I didn't seek him out. I stayed busy plinking down my inventory of a thousand BB's that Grandpa also gave me for Christmas. I tested its range by cradling my gun on top of grandpa's sawhorse and shooting at the tin roof of the barn. I learned elevation by backing farther and farther away, until it was hard to even hear the delayed "thenk" of the BB hitting the roof. It was sometimes difficult at long range to tell a "thenk" from a "think." A "think" is a spontaneous sound caused when warming sunlight expands a tin roof.
      Winter passed and spring began to push itself out of the dirt to salute a new season. By then I was halfway through the box of BB's. I exhausted every test of marksmanship and invented every game of chance and mastered them all.
      Then one dark day I crossed the Jack Hardesty Line.
      The jonquils, tulips, and wild garlic stalks were emerging, and their partners the robins seemed to come from nowhere to trumpet them to life. They were as fat as squirrels and I saw one land quietly on the clothesline post between the house and barn. Before I even knew what happened - it wasn't planned - the bird lay with feet curled up on the newly greening grass.
      Grandpa's breathing was the first thing I heard after my own heartbeat. I turned around and he was there, out of thin air. He took the Red Ryder from my hand, and pointed it like an extension of his burly arm right at the robin. "What's this laying here?" he asked.
      Ashamed, I swallowed the huge lump behind my tongue and almost whispered out the name "Robin".
      "Follow me." We walked straight over to the corral pen. With an effortless heave, the Daisy cartwheeled up on to the barn roof, where it bounced just once and settled. "There it'll stay," was the sentence pronounced.
      It stayed.
      Spring turned to summer after the rains. Sunrises and sunsets tumbled on and school let out. Once a week or so I stood on the tractor seat and looked up over the edge of the roof. It was still there, its blue steel rusted brown, and its brown stock bleached a pallor gray from the sun. A row of leaves nestled along its length like a shroud.
      I was too young and hadn't yet earned the privilege of a dissenting opinion. Also, it was not popular culture then to debate whether or not the punishment fitted the crime. It was a time of simple black and white. I violated one of Grandpa's three rules of shooting. No trial, just sentencing.
      I somehow survived without the Daisy Red Ryder and I never whimpered and I never pleaded. Grandpa made me conduct a sorrowful funeral for the bird behind the smokehouse. I mourned the robin and visited its grave often. A Popsicle-stick cross marked the spot, and my remaining BB's were its blanket of flowers.
      I got past the sadness and my focus shifted back to Carl Oberman. I wanted to get back in good with him - he was still armed.    

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