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A fathom is 1,8 metres (6 feet).
And Now You Do
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14:27, The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death.
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Thinking of the way it was in Kerens back in the 1950s, I always find it pleasant to remember how people always seemed so willing to help out their friends and neighbors. Folks just seemed to spring into action when they heard of a person who was having a hard time. As one example, people would always show up to bring food to the home of a person who had lost a relative. Few of us were very well off, but it seemed like just about everyone was more than willing to share what little they had.
Howell Redford was one of our neighbors. His farm was on the road to Oak Grove. If you go east from Kerens about a mile and a half, you take a left just beyond the second little bridge you come to. This is the bridge over Cow Creek, the same bridge my Dad once rammed into and totaled our brand new baby blue 1951 Ford—first new car we ever had, and Dad was just sick over it. Anyway, turn left off Highway 31, go past the two houses on the north side of the road where Matt Horn and Robert Horn used to live, turn the first corner and head north toward Oak Grove. Howell Redford’s old farm place is about a half mile past the turn and on the left or west side of the road. I am not quite sure if Mr. Redford actually owned the place, or whether he was renting it from someone, though I have always assumed that he owned it because he and his wife had lived there so long.
One time, maybe about the middle of June--or anyway it was a few weeks after school was out and I was doing summer farm work--I stopped off at Mr. Redford’s place for a drink of water.
Well, in those days if you wanted to stop by and see somebody you might just say you were stopping for a drink of water. Maybe it seemed a little too frivolous to say you were stopping just to say hello, just to visit. I always liked talking with Mr. Redford because he treated me like an adult, seemed to take me seriously, but I would never have said that I was stopping to visit with him.
I was driving our old green Oliver 60 tractor and pulling a big flatbed trailer, headed down to the Trinity River bottom to load the trailer up with fresh baled hay. I just pulled the tractor up beside Mr. Redford where he was sitting in a chair out beside the barn. His place did not look as clean as it usually did—grass around the house was unmowed, and his cotton fields looked like they could stand plowing, unusual for him.
In talking to him, I found out the reason why things looked a little out of kilter. Mr. Redford told me that he had some kind of tumor in his stomach, and it was just bothering him too much to get on and off the tractor, and actually riding on the tractor to plow just put him in too much pain. He was more or less waiting to see if his stomach would get better, and Dr. Sanders was suggesting that he have an operation. He told me that he had just about decided to check into P & S Hospital over at Corsicana and let Dr. Sanders whittle on him, but now he said his stomach hurt so much that he was not even sure he could drive a car that far, about 15 or 16 miles west to Corsicana on Highway 31. He knew, he told me, that if he had an operation he would have no money to pay Dr. Sanders, and he also knew that if he went through the operation there was no way he would get well soon enough to get back to the farm and finish the work to make the cotton crop.
I listened to all of this without saying much except that I was sorry he was not feeling well. I had my own idea about his illness, but nothing that I wanted to say out loud. I knew a little about cancer because my Grandma Vernon had died of colon cancer just a few years earlier. She was living at our house at the time of her death, so I had seen the progression of the disease, and knew about the pain and agony that went along with it. She was hurting so bad that she was screaming out loud for someone to help her, and all Dr. Sanders could do was give her a shot of morphine several times a day until the end.
About the time I was ready to leave, Dad pulled up in the blue 1953 Ford, and he wanted to know why I was stopped. He told me that it was high time to get on down to the bottom and get the trailer loaded up before it started raining, and when I told him that I was just stopping for a drink of water, he reminded me, quite logically, that I had just had water at the house, and that we had a cooler full of ice water down in the river bottom. Dad was a little like that. It did not work to give him some type of lame excuse for your behavior, because he turned on the light of logic and stayed at you until your excuse was totally destroyed! There was not a cloud in the sky, and we had not seen rain for over a month, so I rather doubted that rain was a major concern, though I certainly did not feel like bringing up this fact to Dad.
Dad talked to Mr. Redford and found out the situation. He came down to the river bottom and told me he was taking off the rest of the day to take Mr. Redford to the hospital. Dr. Sanders operated on him the next day, and said he thought he had got all of the tumor, best he could tell.
The point of this whole story is about how neighbors helped each other out. Dad and several other farmers brought their tractors over to the Redford place and plowed out his cotton crop.
Later on in September, after school was started up again, Dad took his cotton picking crew over to the Redford place and got the crop out, not too much, around ten or twelve bales, to the best of my recollection. I would go by the place in the afternoon after football practice and feed his cows and chickens and mow the yard up around the house.
A bunch of farmers and people in town got together and contributed some money, about a thousand dollars, for Mr. Redford. The problem was how to get it to him, because we all knew that if we just went out there and offered it to him he would turn it down. People in those days mostly had too much pride to willingly accept a handout. The solution was to get the Red Cross in Corsicana to take it out to him, which they agreed to do. However, they only gave him half of the money and kept the other half for overhead, but they wound up giving him all of it after a couple of the farmers went over to Corsicana and gave them holy hell about the situation.
That was Mr. Redford’s last cotton crop and last year on the farm. He bought or rented a little wood frame house in town, right on Highway 31, first house on the west corner when you turn off Highway 31 to go to the Coop Gin. I think he lived there for only about a year after the operation because apparently the tumor came back.
It always makes me feel good about Kerens when I remember how the farmers and people in town always seemed ready to pitch in to help folks when they run into problems. I like to think that a person who is sick or has other problems feels a lot better just knowing that there are people out there that care enough to help. Wouldn’t you?
Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net
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