A reflection of an incident at the Seabeck Conference Center, in the late 1970s

The Crow in the Cherry Tree

By R.J. Lane

Two boys looked up when they heard the bang.

They saw the crow fall through the branches of the cherry tree.  They knew it had been shot, as boys know those things, even though theirs were not hunting families.

The sound could have been that of a firecracker.  During the past weekend, the holiday had heard many exploded on the church-resort grounds, and in the forest trails that bordered them.  It had been expected there would be no killing.  But here was that loud sound, and there lay the crow. Its spread wings fluttered in the deep, wet grass.

The boys watched it die.  They looked at each other, and they looked around, toward the adults walking and talking lower down the hill.

The fluttering stopped.  The boys approached the crow.  One picked it up by its wings.  The crow’s head rolled crazily at the end of its long neck.  They boy slid a hand beneath the black, warm body.

The other boy touched its wings.  He touched the black bill.  He saw the drops of bright, crimson blood that sparkled upon it.

The boy pulled the beaks apart.  More blood lay on the bird’s tongue.  The boy closed the beaks.  The two companions stood together in the ankle-deep grass of the old orchard.  High in the century-old maples that lined the nearby road of the former farm, a crow began to call an alarm.

The boy holding the dead crow explored its breast with his fingers.  They found a wound, tiny and dark with clotting blood.

The other boy turned from it to face the crow in the tree.  He looked down the hill.  He began walking.  The boy with the dead crow ran to catch up.

A man sat in a wooden lounge chair in front of a huge building by the road. He watched the boys approach.  He looked at the crow.  One boy spoke to him. The man’s hand waved toward the building.  The boys turned and climbed its steps.

The building’s office was empty.  The boy with the bird waited outside its door. His companion walked through a dark hallway.  Voices echoed back to the boy with the bird.  The other boy returned with a large man in his wake.  The man looked at the crow.  He took the bird from the small hands that cradled it.  He held it by one foot.  The wings fell open. The head rolled.  Blood dropped from the beak to the man’s shoe.

Crows eat the fruit in the old farm’s orchards, the man told the boys.  The birds are shot and the bodies hung from the trees to warn away the other crows.  He turned and took the dead crow back up the dark hallway.

That evening, as they walked by the dining hall, the boys saw the corpse of the crow hanging from a limb of the cherry tree.  The crow in the maple was gone.

###

The Smith Kids, a Gang of Their Own

We had a family of Catholics down near Tennyson Road.  I can't remember all their names, or how many kids they had, but there were a lot. Old Man Smith was a bricklayer, tuck-pointing industrial chimneys.  He hurt his back in a fall from a scaffold, but by then the three oldest boys were home from the war, so the family was okay.

Our sandlot baseball diamond was across the street from their house.  It was at the edge of The Flats, which flooded every spring because the bedrock, only inches down, was too frozen to allow runoff from the snow-melt.  Mr. Smith liked to watch our games from an easy chair on the front porch, an elevated position because years before, they had had to raise the house on cinder blocks to escape the spring waters.  At any rate, he had a good seat.

After the games, we all went over to the porch for ice cream.  In a day when our family of six would split a brick of neopolitan, the older, working Smith boys would bring home sacks of the stuff.  Every kid got a half-brick, ruining supper appetites all over the neighborhood.

If I happened to be hanging out with Bernie, my age, at suppertime, Mr. Smith would tell the youngest, little Eugene, to "run up to Bobby's house and ask his mom if he can stay for supper." 

A generous family.  Our culture at home wasn't Catholic-friendly.  My England-born grandmother, living with us, always had an unkind word for the pope, Pius-the-something.  Not so many generations removed from King Henry and his troubles with Rome, I suspect. 

It wasn't until my dad was on his death-bed, in '92, that I learned that he'd been raised Catholic.  That may have been why his mother's name had been crossed out in the back pages of the family Bible, in Oxfordshire, for marrying a Catholic.  Heck, I told Dad, why didn't you tell me?  I'd have been Catholic.  It would have been a lot more satisfying than my having had to go to Sunday schools run by Mennonites or Pentacostles..

Last week I watched a Monty Python movie in which they lampoon the Catholic Church's birth-control stance.  A house is crammed with a least a score of small children as they sing the opening song, "Every Sperm Is Sacred."  A bit much, even for me.

Saving the World for Democracy, and Tailfins

   I hadn't meant to join the Air Force. Ralph Hafener had the job I wanted, operating a grinder lathe in the machine shop where we worked.  When he announced he was going to join the Air Force to avoid being drafted, if I would go with him, I figured it was an easy and somewhat honorable way to get him out of the way.  After all, I didn't have to actually sign up, did I?
  So we went together to the old Post Office Building in downtown Buffalo.  We stripped, we coughed, we dressed and took the aptitude tests.  I scored high;  Ralph, a technical high school graduate, scored low.  We'll take you, Lane, the sergeant said, but not your buddy.  Hey, sarge, both of us or nobody, I declared.  You win, the sergeant said.  Sign here, both of you.  It wasn't until we were driving home, bragging about our military coup, that I realized I wouldn't be running that grinder lathe after all.

A Lesson Learned

  I may have recalled that deception nearly four years later when I was about to be discharged from my contracted military service.  I was offered my choice of Air Force assignment if I would simply sign the re-enlistment papers.  It was suggested that there were bombers at MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida.  Then the colonel would sign my release from a job category rated critical to the mission of the Strategic Air Command--bombsight-navigation systems maintenance--and I would be free to apply for Information Services School on Staten Island.  But I had not worked in that specialty for three years, having wangled various assignments to fly an Underwood. You sign first, I said.  The colonel, wary, said, don't you trust me?  Sir, I don't trust the Air Force, I replied.  And that was that. 
  Two months later I was working for a civilian newspaper.  Too late I learned the gross pay of a rookie newsman was less than the take-home pay of a staff sergeant--and I had to pay for my own room and board, medical, dental, clothing and transportation. And beer at civilian prices.

still to come:

boot camp in february
i learn how the air force does things
dancing in the snow
pneumonia, and its rewards
ralph goes to the desert
with long hair, i get the armband
the D.I. goes on strike
taking turns in basic training
real military bivouc--but no on weekends
airmen don't get bullets
waiting for tech school
scaling the red rocks with bill green
cleaning gutters for ike
shoveling pre-dawn coal
grits?  what the hell are grits?
typing the bowling scores and washing buicks, for a second stripe
loyally working on real airplanes; god, i hate winter
frozen to my work
pre-flight drill, without a work order
the gunnery mechanic's tool box
sergeant george's typing test
ed musinski--photography afield, in ohio and heyford
jim brady and kid Ory.
Sniping mice on pizza nights
racism in art
courier on a new Schwinn
the tech reps
how the navy does it; the introduction of transistors
an artist's reward
sgt george goes fishing
sergeant lepinski and the adding machine
he gets a girlfriend, and a heart
the monthly reports--seven carbons, no strikeovers, no errors
captain morris and the command from on high
sgt george's solution
the captain's  reward:  no more mister nice guy
a brand new air force base, and a brand-new career, by the skin of my teeth
white birches outside my window
writing headlines, while listening to louie prima
the secretary of the air force wears polka-dot boxers
8th air force liked my fuel-tank photo
five miles of shoreline
the sentry dogs
burying cigarette butts
the duck blind and the generals
a lonesome clarinet
god loves Whips, and air force photographers
shipping home bricks, a bike and paving stones

The Flat Rock

You must understand, these farmers never had a chance.  With bedrock 18 inches down, or less, how much sustenance could the soil deliver into crops?  They gave it everything they had, but after The Crash, the county took the land for back taxes.  And it became a paradise for kids.

The tableland east and south of two Great Lakes--Erie and Ontario--was formed of bedrock limestone.   Winter frost that cracked the fragile rock as much as six feet down had each spring pushed limestone shards through the soft hard-pan to chip the plows and dull the harrows.  Farm families and hired hands followed horse-drawn sledges and piled them high with rocks.  They dragged these "stone-bolts" to the property lines, and off-loaded them to create stone fences that generations later still delineate the fields.

Beside the fences, where the horses made wheeling turns as they plowed their rows, scrub willow and chokecherry shrubs took hold, then grand white oaks that still stand sentinel beside the perpendicular rock lines.  Apple, pear, black cherry trees prospered there.

Terraces of limestone stepped down toward the lakes.  Some were marked by rough, gray walls higher than a boy could throw a stone.  Others were sharp outcrops only a few feet high, in a wavering line from hedgerow to hedgerow.  A few of these held openings that led to water-carved caverns, tantalizing mysteries known only to the woodchucks, rabbits, skunks and garter snakes that made them home.

A cavern we had heard was accessible through the basement of a house next door was said to hide runaway slaves in the Underground Railway.  In a lake in a cavern near Harris Hill, my brother's buddy Alvin Bates discovered a blind shrimp that was named for him.

Near the Flat Rock was a narrow opening that led down to a larger passage.  My brother Choddie and his chum Hans Nonne had explored it for some distance, until there was not enough light to continue.  Paul Smith, survivor of several merchant-ship sinkings on the Murmansk run, came home from World War Ii solemn and fearing children might be trapped in it,  filled in the cavern opening with rocks and sod. 

The glaciers that had scoured the limestone shelves during the last Ice Age had been supplanted by  lichens and grasses.  These encroached upon the exposed rock for some 10,000 years but still left bare scores of  table-sized plates of gray limestone.  Warmed by the summer's sunshine, these made perfect tableaus for childhood picnics.  The largest of these our family adopted as the Flat Rock.  When I revisited here in 1992, the lichens were beginning to cover our names and initials that we had carved in childhood.

The Flat Rock

The Flat Rock was at the high end of one of the gently sloping fields, offering views of rows of homes a half-mile to the east and west, and to Nonne's Woods to the south.  To the north, just beyond the shallow ridge where Paul Smith had filled in the cave entrance, lay another hedgerow of the towering oaks, buttressed by wild apple trees and scrub.  Beyond it was the largest of the farm fields in our neighborhood.  This had in post-war years been reclaimed by the plow, for golden, ripening wheat.  And beyond that lay the final limestone ridge and Sheridan Drive, an arterial that linked the rural communities that lay to the east beyond Transit Road to industrial Buffalo and the Niagara's Grand Island.

Just beyond Sheridan Drive but out of sight from the ridge top lay a small airport.  It's Piper Cub and Aeronca high-winged planes whispered overhead as they glided to a landing.  They inspired me in my early teen years to design an aluminum-framed, primary glider that I had hoped could be towed behind the Allen brothers' 1937 Packard for takeoffs.  It never got off the notebook papers on which I sketched my hopes.

The 1937 Packard Touring Sedan

The Allen boys lived next door to us, on Tennyson Terrace.  That Packard was Gene Allen's first car after the old Dodge in which he had driven his family east from Nevada to find work in Buffalo's World War II defense plants.  The Dodge had running boards, and a spare tire bolted on the back of the car.  It had an oval-shaped rear window that had no glass.  Rumbling east along the highway at maybe 50 miles an hour, Gene was surprised to glance in  his rear-view mirror and see in the back seat--no boys!  They were standing on the rear bumper, hanging onto that spare tire, waving at other motorists.

The Dodge was succeeded by  the Packard, which in the late1940s was followed by a Buick convertible.  The Packard had little trade-in value--cars that somehow had been kept running during the war were rapidly being turned in for the streamlined products roaring off Detroit's auto factory production lines.  Gene tossed its keys to the boys.

The brothers were too young for drivers' licenses, so they drove the heavy touring car in the hedge-rowed fields behind our houses.  Within days its almost treadless tires had carved a roadway in the dry, summer grass.   At first they were content to sedately motor parallel to the hedge rows.  Soon bored with this, they added side roads twisting between the choke-cherry and thorn-apple shrubs.  By the time they had invited me to take a turn at the wheel, one of these side trips included a jump over a limestone ridge behind my house.  At speed--the speedometer, actually, was broke, but we estimated in our zeal some 35 miles an hour--the heavy, black machine would have all four wheels off the dirt.  It would crash to earth, jarring our spines, and eventually breaking most of the spring suspension.   The original low-rider!

Before long, the brakes failed as well, a brass line undoubtedly ripped loose by one of the shrubs.  To stop the car, we filled a rusting, 55-gallon drum with rocks.  We would slam in the clutch, swiftly rock the long floor-shift pillar through the gears until we were almost stopped, and gently bump into the barrel.  This was a trick we learned from the Allens' neighbor on the other side, a trash collector named Norm Smith. 

Norm Smith, the First Recycler

Norm had begun collecting the community's trash soon after the war ended.  We set it out at the street in galvanized, ribbed cans.  At first Norm simply dumped it and burned it on his lot, or in the field behind it.  Soon he was hauling it away to someplace else, approved by the health authorities, on a contract for the township.  In those booming postwar years, Norm's business also boomed.  Soon he had a fleet of trucks doing pickup for him, but he never lost the common touch.  Norm kept his hand in on a few rural routes, taking as his helper another geezer.  You could set your clocks for 4 each afternoon, because that was when Norm would glide his old stake-bodied truck into the parking lot of a tavern up at Transit Road and Wehrle Drive.  It was no secret that the pair had been to other taverns during the day, by the way they slammed into the lot.  After complaints from the tavern keeper that the truck was knocking away his building, Norm lined the side of it with rock-filled barrels.  These were loud, but easier on the siding.

Even though Norm no longer burned the community's trash on his lot, he became what was probably the nation's first recycler.  Stack of old tires, mounds of scrap metal and a mountain of wooden pallets towered as high as the surrounding apple and cherry trees.






Still to come:

The Allen boys, Denny and Dave, were natural leaders in  the Tennyson Terrace community.  

The war of the huts.

2x4 steps to the platform in the oaks

Bernie Smith's amazing taking of the pheasant.

The woodchucks.

The tiny, incredibly sweet strawberries.

You can't outrun white-faced hornets.

Pushing Hans Nonne's jitney.

Looking for Happiness at the Yukon Roundtable

The last horse thief hanged inIn Billings swung from a limb of a cottonwood tree on the south side of the railroad tracks and the north side of Montana Avenue.  The cowhands who eventually cut him downb carried his flat-brimmed, embroidered sombrero and nickle-plated, roweled spurs to the Yukon Bar, where a bartender nailed them up on the wall. The hat and spurs were still up there in the 1950s when I  started boozing there, Looking for Happiness.

The Yukon Bar was typical of those old Montana saloons--5 yards wide and 30 yards long.  The bar itself began near the front door, on the left.  If it ever had a brass rail, it was replaced by a linoleumed step for the high-heeled boots of the patrons.  Nor was there a mirrored wall behind the bottles on the back bar.   I don't remember what was there--I never drank at the bar.  My place was at the Round Table, a wide, oak dining-room table at the farthest reach of the smoke-stained room.  There reigned the winoes, for the most part Indian women waiting for the next loose-changed chump to buy them another Mad Dog--Mogan David muscatel.  They always found a chair for Bobby Lane and his jingling pockets.

At the Round Table, my name always was Bobby Lane--never just Lane, as in the uptown bars, or Bob, as to my newsroom colleagues.  Later, I was honored with the Crow Indian moniker of Tow-Kanish-Eepay.  This, I was told solemnly, was the same title bestowed upon General George Armstrong Custer, which, according to Crow humor, he accepted with pride--until overhearing one of his scouts warning another, "Don't step in the Kanish-Eepay."

I was introduced to the Round Table by Ed Beck, a hulking mountain man born too late for his era.  Ed was partnered to Josephine Crow, of the Crow's Hardin reservation.  Josephine, no small person herself, was a nurse's aide at the Billings hospital.   Her husband, two teenage daughters and a son still lived on the reservation.   Her father was keeper of the tribe's buffalo herd, and her uncle keeper of the elk herd.  Ed was valued for his shooting skill and called upon to bring his .30-'06 rifle to the semi-annual slaughters.

In his earlier years, Ed has also been valued in some quarters for his willingness to smuggle beer onto the Crow Reservation, where it was forbidden to Indians by tribal and federal law.  Ed said he gave up the trade when his old Dodge was overtaken one night by two carloads of young Indian men bent on honoring their tribal code.  He said he lost his car and a trunk-load of beer but escaped by crawling through weeds in water-soaked ditches, until he was off the res and could hitch a ride back to Billings.




Other topics I'm about to include:

Taking old Joe out to freeze

The trapper's cabin

custer's gun

the school superintendent

Benny Auk

The artist--the electgrical plugs, and we reserve the right to serve refuse.
sheepherders

kenny the bartender

repainted in 1960

silver dollars

folsom point

once into the hospital, they never leave alive

doctor says they have no money, so he doesn't treat them.

sideslipped in his big van, nearly rolled it.

cowpoke, scarred knuckles.

kicked a guy over insulting a whore.

couger cosgrove

the archeologists and the mayor

my $3 hat.  indian bronc rider came back for it, i kept mouth shut. I left the hat hanging on a floor lamp when I tiptoed out the door after hearing her tell a friend on the phone, "It won't be a big wedding, I think.  Maybe only a few dozen people."  I miss the $3 hat.

the cheyenne woman and the bus.