People

Today on the People page we remember a man from my childhood.  His last name is not important but everyone called him Tern.

I knew Mr. Tern, as I called him, from 1949 through the decade of the 1950s.  He and his family lived a few houses down the gravel road from us, so it was a short walk for me. When I was old enough, it was okay for me to go down there as long as I reported to Mom that I was going to Mr. Tern’s.  I went there often after school and during the summer.  

I don’t remember how many children were in Tern’s family, I only remember him and two of his boys who were a few years older than me.  Between Mr. Tern and the boys they were pretty consistent in stirring up things that attracted my attention.  I was a curious kid by nature, and it was just so interesting down at their house as something always seemed to be happening.

The house was a white, clapboard sided, square, frame building, set up off the ground with limestone support piers at the corners and in between.  There were wood floor porches extending across the front and back of the house.  It was a three-room house with the main living space extending through the house so you could see through the doors from the front porch to the back yard.  The doors to the porches were ‘usually’ covered with full screens.  On one side of the living room was the Warm Morning stove, and the kitchen was an L-shape, open to the living room.

In the back yard there was a large, black, cast iron boiling pot, heated with wood, where they made their hot water, and for other uses like boiling coons and sometimes possums, and turtles.  They  kept a couple trot lines in the river that yielded a good turtle about once a week.  Beyond the boiling pot was a small vegetable garden, and further back was a small barn with two stalls. One stall was for the cow and the other for the horse with a small fenced area for the animals.

The side yard of the house was covered with various things:  two or three usable vehicles parked; one sitting up on blocks; a small, wooden boat, an outboard motor, rabbit hutches, cages for caught animals, and back toward the barn several pieces of horse-drawn farm equipment.    

My visits were usually noticed by the two coon hounds stretched out on the front porch, who would acknowledge me with slightly raised eyebrows; the two hounds under the porch were, most often, just too tired to move.  About three nights a week, Tern, the boys, and the hounds would spend several hours after dark chasing through neighboring woods on their regular coon-hunting trips. 

The signature feature of Tern was his ever-present pipe, hanging from the left corner of his mouth.  Whether or not it was smoking, it was always there.  He had several styles of pipes, some straight stem, some crooked, a couple were corn-cob pipes.  But whatever the style, it would be firmly clinched in the remaining teeth on that side of his mouth.  I never could understand how he could talk to me, yell at the boys, and the dogs, while holding that pipe so tightly in his teeth.

He smoked Prince Albert pipe tobacco that came in the thin, flat tin cans with the flip-top lid.  He also smoked Bull Durham tobacco that came in those small, white linen bags with the draw string at the top.  The living room of his house was forever littered with those empty Prince Albert cans and the Bull Durham bags.  I loved gathering up the cans and the bags.  He told me I could have them if I wanted, but Mom would never let me bring them home.  Today, those tins and linen bags are collectibles and you can buy them online. 

In the early ‘50s, Tern would hire himself out to plow gardens around our neighborhood.  This was before tractors had become widely used, and it was common to see plowing being done by horses.  Mom and Dad, and some of our neighbors, would hire him to plow their garden spots, getting them ready for Spring planting. 

Some of my earliest memories of Tern are his plowing episodes.  He always seemed to have a horse that was not really a ‘plow horse’, but Tern would make him one.  Tern would come up the alley from his barn to our garden spot behind our house, his horse harnessed up to pull the equipment sled with the plow, tiller, and drag harrow.  Right away you could tell the horse was not happy with the harness, or any of the other stuff, and especially not with Tern.  And Tern wasn’t happy with his horse. At this point, I will inject another feature of Tern – his language.  When he was around women and children he tried to control his use of curse words, but in other settings, not so much.

Watching Tern and his horse plow a small garden was an adventure.  Dad was never home when Tern was plowing our garden, so it was up to Mom to try to keep me away from the action.  One day, after he had plowed our garden with only minimal mayhem, he moved next door to plow.  A large mulberry tree at the edge of that garden proved to be a problem.  The horse had suffered all he could take that day, so he decided to wrap his trace lines, single-tree, reins, plow, and Tern around that mulberry tree.  Apparently, Tern forgot that every woman and child within a half-mile could hear him abusing that horse with language even a horse shouldn’t have to hear.  All the while, Tern’s pipe stayed firmly clinched between his teeth.  It took a while, but Tern and his horse finally got things straightened out and finished the garden project.

In my young life I had learned a few horse names, such as Morgan, palomino, paint, roan, buckskin.  But I had never heard the names Tern called his horse that day.  So I went in the house and asked Mom what a %&#-&$()#% &$#@ .?@$%&– #?%&$! horse was.  To say she was flustered would be an understatement.  She grabbed the nearest thing she could reach, a bar of Lifebuoy soap.  It’s really not that bad.

One year Tern had sold his horse and bought a Shetland pony.  I liked that little horse, but he was not very friendly.  I went down there one day to see him and found a sizable crowd gathered at the barn, standing around and looking down.  It was the Shetland pony lying stiffed-legged, dead on the ground.  Seems the pony found the dry feed barrel in the cow’s stall and ate until he foundered.  Tern said he never liked that pony anyway.

On one of my visits to their house one day, I noticed something looked different from the road.  It was the screen door hanging loose on one hinge, and the screen was torn into shreds  When I got in the house Tern had both of his arms in bandages.  Seems they had been coon hunting that night and killed a momma coon that had a young one.  Tern thought he would keep the baby coon and make it into a pet.  They had wrapped the unruly baby up in a jacket for the trip home.  When they got in the house, Tern was holding the jacket with the young coon inside. Despite a valiant effort to hold him, the youngster escaped the jacket, ripped up both of Terns arms, ran to the screen door to get out and proceeded to shred it like paper.  The coon got through the door and ran across the road toward the woods.  Tern said the dogs would probably tree it someday soon.

The episode which almost perfectly describes Tern and his boys happened one night while they were at the river running a trot line.  The boys told me the story.  Fishing had been slow, but they did hook a large, soft-shell turtle.  He would barely fit into the boil pot in the backyard.  These critters are usually pretty aggressive, especially when they’re trapped in a small boat.  So, that’s why they always carried their big Colt 45 revolver just for cases like this.  A single shot through that turtle, and he had been subdued.  Only trouble was, he was lying in the boat.  I looked into the boat and verified the half inch hole in the bottom.  With luck their little outboard motor got them to the bank of the White River before it sank.

The stories could go on, but I’ll close with this.  Sometime around 1960-61 Tern developed a cancer in his jaw which spread to the left side of his face.  It started where he carried his ever-present pipe in his teeth.  Within a few months his face was decimated with cancer.  He refused to see anyone, and he became confined to a bed in his home.  His good friends, my Mom and Dad, visited him a few times in his closing months to pray with him.  We do not know if he ever prayed the sinner’s prayer, or if he did and just wouldn’t talk about it.  That would be Tern’s way, but we can only hope.