CHAPTER 20
It is hard to distinguish time during the swamp years. The days remained so consistently the same. There are several events I remember with great clarity, but not precisely when they happened or in what order. I can separate some by season, but not to a month or day.
We came in the beginning of 1948 and by Spring I was exploring further from the house. I had free reign to wander. The only restrictions were to stay away from Rt. 30 (the Lincoln Highway) and not to go over the crest of the hill behind us. I understood the first admonition well enough. I knew a truck or car could squash me just like the dog I had seen. I didn’t understand the second to not crest the hill behind us, but I was to hear the warning more than once over the months. Eventually I would discover why.
For the time being I was content to play my Bring ‘em Back Alive fantasies closer to the house. The swamp was only several yards from our front door and in the spring it blossomed with life. Redwing Blackbirds sailed into the reeds and cat o’nine tails of the marsh. They came in the mornings to breakfast on the water skimmers and mosquitoes. It singled the wetland was again swarming with awakening life.
I would amble along the shoreline with a butterfly net and Mason jar. I was stalking the ferocious tadpole. These baby frogs were massive, dark in color and shaped like sperm (I knew nothing about sperm at that age.). They wiggled about in schools just below the water surface. I snatched up a bunch in my jar and toted it to my room. I wanted to watch these creatures turn into frogs, but when mom saw my captives she made me turn them loose. It was cruel, she said. “They’ll just a die in that jar.” So I returned them to their home and family.
I caught a snake down by the water one day. It was three feet long
and probably a Garter Snake. They were fairly common in our part of the world. It wasn’t poisonous. I doubt there were any poisonous snakes in our swamp, which was a good thing the way I pursued such things with my bare hands. I ran toward the house calling for mom excited by my catch. She came out the front door and saw what I carried, knowing I had every intension of taking it to my room as a pet.
“You put that down right now,” she yelled. “Don’t you be bringing that snake in this house. Let it go.”
Mom didn’t like snakes. She didn’t have the phobia toward them my grandmother had and she wasn’t going for a hatchet, but she still didn’t want that snake near her. She went back inside and I stood staring at the porch with indecision. I hated to lose my prize, but I dropped it. It wriggled up the yard and under the front stoop. I didn’t tell mom where the snake went. I didn’t think she’d be happy it was close to the house.
Things were a little different when I explored the cow pasture across our lane. Sometimes there were cattle in the field, but most of the time there wasn’t. I would walk across the pasture when there wasn’t following this narrow stream that ran through it. The stream twisted about, sometimes doubling back on itself. It had high banks and a rapid current. It also had its own wildlife, but I never tried to scoop it up in a Mason jar.
The water was full of Crayfish as we called them. It some parts of the country they are known as Crawfish or Crawdads. I didn’t like the look of them. They reminded me of big bugs. They had these claws and I was afraid of being pinched. I left them alone.
Some people eat these ugly creatures. My wife order some in a bar once, but she couldn’t figure out how you get their meat and the plat did not come with instruction. Personally, I wouldn’t touch those things with a ten-foot fork.
There was watercress aplenty on the banks of this stream. I had
heard of watercress sandwiches, Lord knows where. I plucked a few handfuls, took it home and plopped it between two slices of bread. A couple of bites were enough; I never had another watercress sandwich in my life.
The marsh disappeared into woods to the southeast end of the property. I went into this woods a few times. Skunk cabbage covered the ground, which I was sure you didn’t put in sandwiches. I never went too deep into the trees for fear of getting lost. There was enough to interest me in the other fields about our home.
There was behind our house another home. It looked better than our place. It was all stone with no scaffolding. It never had people living in it though, except one summer a family came up the lane one day and stayed in that house for a month or so. I never spoke to them. At summer’s end they went away and I never saw them again.
I stayed away from that house.
One day upon arriving home from school I found our doors locked. We used the back door as our main entrance and seldom locked it. I walked to the front and found that door also locked. It was winter at the time and knee-shaking, teeth rattling cold. I rapped on the door, but nothing. The house looked empty. I panicked. I found a large rock out in back and used it to smash out a cellar window, crawled through the frame and went up the steps to the first floor. My mom came down from upstairs as I entered. She was now the one in a panic. She had fallen asleep and not heard me come home.
I wasn’t punished for breaking the window. My mom was relieved I hadn’t cut myself to ribbons on the broken glass and I guess my dad admired my act as some how manly.
There was a long slopping hill behind the house and garden. Corn covered its surface. In the early autumn trucks rumbled up our drive. One pulled an odd contraption with a long shute rising above one side with pointy funnel shaped tubes to the front. The ghost farmer had come to harvest his crop; I mean I had never see these guys before or when they planted the crop. It hd just sort of magically grown.
I stood by the back of the yard watching in fastenation and one of the men asked if I would like to ride in the truck with him. Sure, I would. I clambered up into the high cab and off we went. I discovered what the odd looking contraption did. It plucked the ears off the stalks. The pointy funnels pressed down the cornstalks and stripped off the cobs. The snipped off ears were somehow propelled up that long tube where they flew out of an opening into the bin of the truck I rode in. They spewed out fast and furious and occasionally an errant ear or more would sail through the open side windows of the cab and I would have to duck. The driver laughed at this. It was great.
The farm hands came that one fall for harvest and I never saw them again either, just like those summer visitors to that other house.
It snowed a good bit one of our winters there. That hill was great for sledding as long as I kept to the wagon path running along side the fencerow. If I moved too far into the field I would catch the sled runners on the broken stalks. I pulled my sled up the track by an old clothesline tied to the front. At the top I would sit on the sled and push with my hands to start. I never lay down facing forward to sled. I don’t know if I didn’t know how or was afraid.
As I trudged up the hill I saw something dark in the field. It was a bright morning. I assumed it was a shadow, but then it moved and I saw a second object, then a third. There were some kind of animals running out of the cornfield into the fencerow. I was a little nervous, but I continued on and didn’t see anything anymore that day.
At supper I told mother I saw groundhogs up on the hill.
She was a little dubious about this. I’m not sure she believed I saw anything. I made up so many stories she thought this was probably my imagination. She told me there were groundhogs in our woods, but they would be hibernating this time of year.
“On Feb’uary second, if’n the ground hog don’t see his shadow, it means an early spring. If’n he sees his shadow, he’ll get a scared an’ jump back into his burrow an’ we’ll git six more weeks of winter.”
“Really?”
“That’s what folk say. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you oughta look fer a ground hog to see what he does.”
“There ground dogs ‘round here?”
“It’s hog, honey, ground hog. Sure, they’re around here. I’ve seen ‘em up the hill sittin’ back on their hunches. They like to make homes in fencerows.”
Jenny dropped her fork and trotted to the kitchen door, pressing her nose against the glass panel to stare at the hill.
Helen put her hand against her mouth and said nothing of what popped into her brain too late. There were ground hogs, but they would be hibernating deep in their lairs this time of year.
Excerpt from “Ground Dog Day”
Barnes & Noble Read Aloud
February 2003
Wilmington, DE
Ann Murphy, Editor
Copyright 2003 by Larry E. Meredith
The next day I saw the spots again. This time I ran up the wagon track to get closer, my sled bouncing behind. The objects took off and ran into the fencerow as before and I followed. The animals were nowhere in sight, but the ground was crisscrossed by tiny paw prints. There was an old fallen log in the center of the fencerow with a hole in the ground at the near end. The prints converged at the hole. It must be the groundhogs’ burrow, I decided.
As I stood there something moved in the brush nearby. Suddenly a puppy scurried from the brush and skittered down the hole. Another followed it. I got down on hands and knees and tried to see down the hole, but it was too dark. I picked up a stick and stuck it in, wiggling it about.
By now I was lying on the ground. I heard a low growl behind me. Rolling over I saw a large Collie up on a small rise of dirt. It was bearing its teeth and the fur stood up on its back. I didn’t even think. I jumped to my feet and ran. I grabbed my sled and belly flopped upon it, riding it down the hill into the yard. It was my first face forward
sled ride. I rolled off the sled and ran up the back steps screaming for my mother. There was no sign that the dog had chased me.
My mother calmed me down and heard out my story. This time she didn’t question my truth. She called the Chester County SPCA and reported the incidence. An hour or so later a van came slowly up our driveway and mom went outside to meet it. She talked to two men and came back into the house. The men had some kind of pole and a cage, which they carried with them up the hill. They were up there for a time. When they came down they had the Collie, the mother dog, in the cage. After sliding this into the van they drove off.
“What about the puppies,” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I’m sure they’ll come back for them,” she said, but the men never came back. She called the SPCA again. The men couldn’t get the puppies because they were down a groundhog hole she was told.
“Couldn’t?” she muttered, “Wouldn’t is more like.”
Mother kept cans of dog food in one of the kitchen cabinets for feeding Peppy. I led my mom up the wagon track to where I found the log. She dumped some of the dog food at the edge of the hole.
Helen called the shelter in the county seat. The men didn’t come to their place until the next day. They parked the pound truck at the edge of the wagon trail and walked up the hill carrying a net and a cage. They were up in the trees for an hour, but when they came down they had the mother dog in the cage. They didn’t stop at the house to say anything. They put the dog in the back of the truck, stowed their gear and drove off.
“What about the puppies?”
Helen patted Jenny’s head. “Oh, I’m sure they’ll be back to git the pups.”
But the men didn’t come back that day. When they didn’t come back the next, Helen called the pound.
They weren’t coming back. The only way to get the pups was to dig them out of the old ground hog burrow. Couldn’t they do that? No, they wouldn’t do that.
“But without the mother, the pups’ll starve,” Helen told them.
“We’re sorry,” they said.
There were some cans of dog food left in the cupboard after Nellie died. Helen planned to throw the cans away, but always forgot. She got them now. For the next few days, Jenny made the climb up the hill and spooned the food down the hole to the pups. Sometimes she saw
them, but even when she did they quickly ran down the tunnel. She did rescue Thomas’s horn and returned it. He made no comment about the scratches or the small dent on the bottom just front of the valves. As long as his father never noticed, it would be their secret.
Excerpt from “Ground Dog Day”
Barnes & Noble Read Aloud
February 2003
Wilmington, DE
Ann Murphy, Editor
Copyright 2003 by Larry E. Meredith
We did this for a couple of days. My dad came home for the
weekend and mom told him about the puppies. He got a pick and a shovel and carried them up the hill. Dad dug the pups out of that burrow and brought them all down the hill in an old picnic basket. My dad found a home for each of the pups with his truck driver buddies. The runt of the litter was the only one left and dad said I could keep him. He was the smallest of the group, but I named him Topper.
Topper was the nicest dog. He was also very handsome. He grew to look like a German Shepherd, which must have been the father, but with the sleeker more elongated muzzle of a Collie. Now I had two recruits for my explorations, Peppy and Topper.
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