Tessie
Tessie owned our land long before we bought it. She had lived in her yellowish farmhouse across the creek and a little ways downstream, for her entire eighty six years, the last fifty alone. All her brothers and sisters were gone, having left as soon as they could. Tessie was the youngest of eleven and they were all dead now.
She had never married because her father had run off the only man who had ever proposed to her. She and her beau were supposed to elope and her father found out about their plans before they had a chance. to slip away. He never even let her know about all the letters that he burnt without opening.
Tessie’s mother had died birthing her and she was never forgiven for it. Her father had decided to keep her home to tend to him, cooking and cleaning. He had always worn a long red beard and every time she came over to visit she would start with,
“Your man should cut off that beard. I don’t like a man with a beard. Can’t trust ‘em. Makes ‘em look mean.”
Tessie was under five tall, a little stooped with age, and had the
longest white hair. It had never been cut and she kept it up in a twisted bun at the nape of her neck with a lot of hair pins. and a head scarf.
She wore men’s long sleeved plaid shirts, buttoned all the way up, and baggy work pants, no matter what the weather was. In winter, more like October till May, she added long johns underneath. She also wore brogans, leather lace up work boots, and carried a cane made of a young tree wounded from a twining honeysuckle vine in its youth. There were dates and initials carved into it denoting various events in her later life.
Every first of the month she walked the six miles of gravel road into town to collect her Social Security check, buy what she couldn’t grow herself, and have lunch with people she knew in the old folks home. We always offered her a ride, but she preferred to walk in as long as she was able. She would have a poke in each hand on the way back though and was sometimes willing to accept a lift.
Across the Crick
A single-log footbridge spanned the creek, from Tessie’s mailbox on the road, and joined a narrow foot path through the grass, over to the house and barn. The log had been adzed flat on the top side and a wider board had been added and screwed down at some point. A thin hand railing made of a rusty steel well pipe ran along the downstream side, for balance if you slipped. Two log steps brought you down to ground level and the path up to the house, which sat about a hundred feet back , up on the second flood bank.
The creek flooded regularly but the water had never gotten into the two story wooden house. Water would surround the corrugated metal shack at the oil well, which sat right in the low bend of the crick, and sometimes, in the worst floods, water got right up to the barn door.
There was a crick crossing near the oil well you could drive a truck through, but it wasn’t hardly ever used, and had almost disappeared. Tessie had never driven a car so she didn’t need to get a car across, and the oil men didn’t need to unless there was major work to be done at the well.
Tessie carried everything she needed across the little footbridge in her two grocery pokes. The mail carrier brought her the local newspaper every week and she would be waiting for him when he arrived. She didn’t get visitors and her only relatives lived way down near Weston and never came around.
Wisdom Passed Down
The first week we moved into our little cement, milking parlor shack, Tessie came by to visit. She wouldn’t come inside but we shared a cup of coffee outside sitting on a couple of logs. The other neighbors had warned us off from her, but she was friendly, and gave us advice about gardening and stories about various flood events over the years. She wanted to make sure we knew to respect the creek and the power it had.
Living in a bottom you do have to make peace with your creek if you don’t want to lose all the work you put into it. She showed us where the different flood banks were and how often we could expect the water to rise to each one, and the creek proved her right, over and over again. So we were careful not to build the goat barn, the chicken house, or the outhouse where the water would reach and we put the garden where it would dry out quickest in the spring. The bottom land had a lot of red clay and once it got wet it took awhile to dry out. We parked the tractor, the VW bug, and the stockpiled sawmill lumber well back from the low spots. Tessie came by about once a week and I always looked forward to her visits.
One August day she came by when the sweet corn was just coming in. She didn’t have any ready yet so I was picking her a few ears to take home. She said,
“Well, you’d better have your shotgun ready tonight. Those coons ‘ll be out here eating your corn. It’s a full moon. They know when it’s ripe and I always sit out in the garden with my gun or I wouldn’t get any corn at all.”
Sure enough, the coons got in the garden that night, but we heard them and went out and scared them off. We didn’t want to shoot them. We were vegetarians and not into killing anything. They got a few ears but we managed to beat them to most of it. We picked, husked and scraped the kernels off the cobs, packed it into pint canning jars, and had enough sweet corn for the winter. Barney and Daniel, our donkey and pony, ate the husks and the chickens pecked the cobs clean.
Tessie came back the next week and told us she had shot three raccoons in one night. She hung their bodies on stakes in her garden to deter their friends. The neighbor’s kids had told us she wielded a mean shotgun and would shoot at them if they ventured over there. They had no business being over there so I didn’t see a problem. She was a good shot and was obviously just scaring them away.
As time went by, Tessie told us more stories about her life. She invited us over once to see where the Magic Lilies come up. She showed us a section of mown grass. She had just mowed using one of those hand pushed reel mowers.
“See that spot along there? In the grass? Tomorrow there will be magic flowers pop up. Come by and see.”
So the next day we walked over, and sure enough, there was a whole line of big pink lilies on stalks about a foot and a half tall that had not been there yesterday. We had never seen them before and were amazed that she knew exactly when they would arrive.
“Well, I have been keeping watch on them for a lot of years now. Do you want some to take home and plant?”
Well, yes, we did. So she said she would give us some cut ones now for the table and bring us by a few bulbs after they had gone dormant again in the fall. I planted them alongside our outhouse to pretty it up some, along with the cowslips and Forget-me-nots and Tiger Lilies she gave me later. I have managed to plant bits of these at every house I have lived in over the years and still have some today, forty years later. I love having plants with a history and stories behind them. Seeing them come up each year brings back memories of people and places and times the same way photographs do.
Tessie always planted Irish Cobbler potatoes, from sets she had saved the year before. She didn’t go for the new fangled ones they sold in the feed store. She showed us how to cut them in pieces for planting, when to hoe them up, how to dig under them with our fingers to get the new potatoes, and how to cure the full grown ones for storing in the winter. We didn’t have a root cellar like she did though, so we had to pile ours up in hay mounds covered with dirt to keep them from freezing in the winter. We got that idea from the Mother Earth News and it worked fine.
She saved seed from all her peas, beans, squash and onions too. One year she gave me some Multiplier Onion sets. They were cool. They grew little miniature sets at the top of the stalks and you would save them and plant them to grow more plants for the onion at the bottom. They were a purple colored set on a green stalk and looked pretty in the garden. I have run out of those onions and would like to get some more one day.
The Farmhouse and the Well
Tessie’s house was very old, built by her father in the 1870’s I think. It was built of sawmill lumber using Yankee Framing, which means there are no studs in the walls. The inch plus thick boards are laid upright on the inside and then the siding is nailed to the outside in the horizontal direction. All the windows and doors are framed with inch boards too. There is no space for insulation. They used wallpaper to thwart the drafts coming in the cracks.
The floor joists under the house sat on rocks and were made of logs that were flattened on the top side with an adze, but still had their bark on the rounded sides. The back of the house faced into the hill and was L shaped with a porch the whole way. The well where Tessie got all her water was about fifteen feet from the porch with a stone path leading to it. There was a roof over the well and a pitcher pump had been added, but the well itself was open, and you could shine a light down to see the water. The hole was hand dug and about 30 feet deep, about three feet wide, and lined with bricks. Tessie hauled all her water from the well to the kitchen using two blue speckled enameled buckets at a time. She always boiled the water before she drank it.
Tessie had been trying to get somebody to clean her well out for awhile because it had not been scrubbed down in quite a few years. She was unable to pay much and couldn’t find anyone to do the work. It didn’t help that all the neighbors thought she was a crabby old witch. We finally caved in and offered to do it for her. This was a going to be a big job requiring an electric water pump, which we had to borrow, garden hoses, a ladder to go down the well on, buckets of bleach water and scrub brushes. First, we shined a light down the well to inspect the situation. We squinted into the hole.
“Oh, my God! There is something floating in the water. I think it’s Mr. Grey!”
Our cat had gone missing and there had been no sign of her for a month. Her name was Mr. Grey. Tessie hurried out back of the nearby shed and puked-over and over. She had been drinking water with a dead cat floating in it for a month! Good thing she boiled the water, but still, really gross.
We lowered a bucket down the well and scooped the decomposing, smelly, soggy remains of our cat into it and buried her up in the woods. Then we stuck the hose way down in the water and started pumping the well out, which took all night with the pump running. In the morning we lowered the ladder into the hole, took up our buckets and scrub brushes and stepped down in. There was still water coming in at the bottom so we started down low and worked our way up, takings turns.
It was creepy down there in the dark and cold. Eck would scrub awhile, then come up for air and light and I’d go down. It took us a few hours but we got it cleaned up, then ran the pump some more to rinse the sides, pumped it all back out, and let it start refilling. It took a few days to come back up to its normal level.
The next thing to do was to build a cover so nothing else would be able to fall in. It was kind of ironic that it was our cat that had fallen in. We felt bad for Tessie unknowingly drinking the bad water, responsible for the cat, and so relieved Tessie didn’t have any lasting effects from it. We built a frame to fit the top and stapled hardware cloth to it. While we were at it we built a wooden bucket rest under the pitcher pump to make filling the buckets a little easier.
In Tessie’s kitchen there was the most beautiful cast iron gas cook stove I have ever seen. I seriously coveted that stove. It had shiny nickel plaiting on the handles and trim, a warming shelf, and stood on stout, curved legs. I asked her how she kept it so black and shiny and she told me,
“You’ve got to rub tallow into it one’zt every week. Can’t be any salt in it and it’s got to be beef tallow, can’t be pork. Can’t use butter or it will smoke. I get some ground beef from the Overfields down the road and cook it up for supper and save the fat offen it, get the oven going on a slow cook and rub it in everywhere, ‘cept where it’s nickel. Use toothpowder on that to get it shiny clean. “
She had replaced her old natural gas refrigerator with an electric one some years back and no longer used her old gas lights, having found the electric ones to be cleaner and brighter. We didn’t have electric in our shack and had to put our gas refrigerator outside under the eaves because of the fumes it put off, so I got that. Our lighting was from kerosene lamps because it was hard to find working gas fixtures anymore. Tessie wouldn’t part with hers though.
We all had free gas piped in to our houses from all the oil and gas wells, which saved on electric bills, if you had one. It was OK until it froze off in the winter from all the drip gas accumulated in the lines. Then you needed a backup heat source like wood. There should have been a calcium dryer installed at the well heads but that would have cost a lot of money that nobody had. We didn’t even have a pressure regulator on our line.
In Tessie’s parlor room there was a pump organ and an old wind up Victorola record player. Sometimes when I visited we would play a record and it sounded pretty good. The organ needed some work on the leaky bellows to work right, and she said she wasn’t very good at playing it anymore, so I didn’t get to hear that. It was a beautiful piece of furniture though, dark oak wood with mirrored lamp shelves, inlaid mother of pearl decorations and scrollwork.
There was a store bought oriental type rug on the floor, where all the other rooms had floral patterned linoleum rugs tacked down. All the floors squeaked in places but she kept them scrubbed and polished with beeswax. The windows had pull down plastic lace shades and she kept the rooms dark, pretty much only using the kitchen and one bedroom upstairs.
Her bed frame was strung with rope and had to be tightened every once and awhile due to humidity stretching the ropes. I helped her with that a couple of times. She had an old horsehair mattress and on top of that a feather bed tick, then the sheets, then another lighter feather tick for a blanket. You could barely see her down in there when she laid in bed.
Once she fell and broke her arm and was feeling poorly there for awhile and I would go over and make her some tea and brush her hair and put it back up in the bun for her. Her hair went all the way down past her waist and was snowy white.
In the parlor was an old photograph of Tessie in her twenties wearing a long white dress and standing with her two Jersey cows. She was beautiful. I asked her about it and she acted like it was somebody else in the picture, some other life.
“There used to be a man came by every Friday to pick up my butter, sour cream and buttermilk. We couldn’t keep it cold enough to sell much of the fresh milk. It was the only time in my life I ever earned any money, but I never did get to spend any of it. Father made me give it all to him. I didn’t mind really, I loved my cows, but it would have been nice to have some of it for myself.”
Family
When I asked her about her brothers and sisters she got kind of sad. She was always going on about Una and what a bright kid she was. I asked,
“Who was Una? What happened to her? Where was she now? “
“Oh, they took her away from here, down to Weston State Hospital. There wasn’t anything at all wrong with her, but nobody would listen to me. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t ever do anything bad. She wasn’t crazy. She was a sweet, bright baby girl. The problem was, her mama was my sister and her papa was my brother, and nobody but me wanted her around. When father found out the truth about who her Daddy was, he called in the authorities and they decided she needed to be taken away, for her own good. The morning after they took her away, I found my brother hanging dead from that apple tree, right next the garden. My sister ran off right after and I never saw her again.
Father wouldn’t talk about it and forbid me to ask. One of my cousins came by a few years later, though, and told me they had let Una out, to live with a couple who couldn’t have kids of their own, and she was doing fine. She didn’t know what ever happened to my sister. She was way older than me and she is sure to be dead by now.”
Critters and Haystacks
So that is where I came by the name of our first sheep, Una. She was a sweet little lamb we brought home from Mountain (used to be called Mole Hill) in the VW bug. She fit on my lap and enjoyed the ride. Later, when we got the milk goats she would jump up on the milking stand to be milked too. She had the softest udder. Her first lamb we called Newton, since we had him neutered, and the second we called Nebo. But that was later.
Tessie used to tell us about all the floods there had been over the years on our creek. They were all named for the year in which they occurred. Flood of 36, flood of 50, etc. The one in 1950 was the worst and it floated her haystacks out of her bottom , way down the road to the Overfield’s farm and left them sitting there, high and dry. Nothing wrong with them at all,Tessie said,
“I knew how to build a proper haystack is why. I built them up from the base by winding the layers of long hay around the center pole, slowly walking around and around as I went, tamping down each layer. By the time it was at the top of the pole it was 12 feet high and densely packed. I never lost any to mold or rot. When that flood came up they floated pretty as you please, just like a boat, and they landed the same way.
Overfield’s tried to claim them for their own but I held my ground and I went down there with the mule I used to have and hauled them on home. Had to get the boys up the road to help me rig up a sled to pull them onto to, but we got every one of them stacks. I needed that hay for the Jersey’s and the mule and I wasn’t about to let them steal all that work away from me. They called the sheriff, saying I was trespassing but he made them cooperate. What’s right is right. They lost a bunch of their hay too is why they were being mean about it. Well, they just had to go get their own hay back. I doubt theirs was nowhere as good as mine though. I can show you how to make a good stack of your own hay when you’re ready.”
So, when we got our own hay cut and raked she did show us and we managed to make a halfway decent job of it. I don’t think ours would have stayed intact floating down the creek, but it kept our critters fed that winter. We didn’t have a barn to keep hay in so this was a big help. We made our hay using a horse drawn mower and a ground driven, side delivery rake, both of which we pulled behind our tractor.
Then we drove over the windrows with a flat bed wagon and the hay loader, a contraption that looked like a manure spreader standing up on its hind legs. It raked the hay up onto a slanted bed with hooks and chains pulling it up and over the top and dropped it onto the wagon bed. My job was to stand on the bed and level the load out with a pitchfork as it landed. It worked pretty well except that it also picked up any snakes hanging out in the hay and dropped them on my head. Copperheads are not meant to fall from the sky onto your head. I learned to jump out of the way fast. That first year we killed sixteen copperheads in our hay bottom. It was the first thing we learned how to kill, usually with a hoe or an axe. Tessie told us,
“Whenever you get a copperhead, leave him dead where you kilt him, and come back at sunset. You’ll find the mate to it curled up beside him and you can get her too.”
She was right about that. Worked every time. We wouldn’t have killed them if they would have left us alone, but they were getting totally out of hand. Coming in the house. One morning, after a windy night, I went outside to check if the gas had blown out on the refrigerator. I had not even had any coffee yet. I stuck my face down low on the ground to see the burner up underneath there, and there was a copperhead staring right at me. That was unnerving. I went and got a bent coat hanger, dragged him out, and killed him. At sunset, sure enough, there was another one. Eck got that one. Didn’t seem to work the same way with black snakes though.
The blacksnakes were pretty darn abundant when we first moved in, too. They aren’t poisonous and I generally like snakes. They eat mice and don’t usually bother people much. However, the old pile of hay we slept in the first few nights we lived there was their home first. We pitched all the hay outside and made a giant compost pile so we could put our bed and stuff inside the shack. The black snakes did not appreciate us tossing their home outside and proceeded to harass us every chance they got. They swung from the rafters, striking at us. They slithered into tight places and scared us half to death.
Once, we opened the silverware drawer on the stove to get a spoon and found it filled with a six-footer. We kept throwing them outside, they‘d come right on back in. They were on our bookshelves and you’d reach for a book and grab a snake. One night they were under the bed, and we ended up sleeping out in the car. That was the final straw. That was when we decided it was them or us and we were going to each have to kill them.
I got the neighbor in to kill mine, because I thought he would be better at it. That was a bad decision. He started in chasing and swinging and getting the poor snake all riled up, blood was flying, blood got on the books. It smelled like a skunk from the snake fear. Eck killed the second one and he was much quicker about it. Better all the way around. Still we were vegetarians and did not enjoy the process at all.
The snakes got us back, by laying all their eggs in our new compost pile before we killed them. They started hatching a few weeks later and we had to kill the babies too. I tried feeding them to the chickens, since they were kind of like worms, but they would have nothing to do with them. We had to chop them up and it was really gross. Later that summer it was the copperheads. After that, the snake population was so decimated that it was quiet for a few years.
Crude Oil Painting
Tessie came by one day wanting help to paint her house. She had been doing all the lower half herself but was having trouble getting up and down the ladder. How can you say no to that? She was almost ninety years old and still painting her own house! So we went over and she showed us what she wanted.
First thing was a trip to town and the hardware store for more paint. Then we had to dip crude oil out of the tank by the oil well to thin it. That was different. That explained why her house was yellowish, instead of full blown yellow. I don’t know why they show crude as black on TV because it’s not that color here. It had a nice clear, golden color and mixed fine with the oil based paint. It seemed to do a good job.
I wonder about how flammable her house might be. Still, that house has stood there for over a hundred years so far and is not showing much sign of rot. The county road gets crude oil put down on it too. Keeps the dust down and makes the hard packed dirt and gravel seem almost paved.
The drip we collect from the low point on the gas lines, which happens to be us, is useful for starting brush piles . It even works for running tractors, if you don’t mind fiddling with the carburetor and shortening the lifespan of the motor. Drip gas tends to burn too hot and fast. You can tell when somebody is using it in their tractor just by the fast sound of it. You wouldn’t want to run a good tractor on it.
Going to Town
When Tessie hit 90 she finally started slowing down, and we made a habit of taking her to town on the first of the month. We’d go to the bank to cash her check, stop at Berdines Variety Store for new kerosene lamp globes and wicks, Stout Hardware for beeswax, window glass and tools, and the old wooden floored A and P grocery store for peanut butter and coffee and such. Then we’d stop for lunch at the senior center and she’d get to visit with people she used to know. It was an all day affair and fairly exhausting but I enjoyed it.
Let it All Go
That fall, we decided to head north to New Jersey for a couple of months, to make some quick money. We farmed our animals out to various people and took the dogs with us. It was hard being away. I kept having dreams about Tessie. She was crying and begging to be let go.
I got worried and we came back home only to find her missing from her house. It was all locked up and there was no sign of her. Nobody seemed to know where she was. Finally we found her in the hospital 45 miles away. It was a Catholic Hospital with nuns and everything. Tessie was not Catholic, she didn’t even go to church. I located her up on the third floor, in a room with tubes and machines all hooked up to her.
The nurse said she had been brought in by her cousins, after collapsing while they were visiting. Something was wrong about this. Where had these so called cousins come from? What were they up to? Then I remembered she had told me one of her quite removed cousins had been writing to her and trying to get her to give her antiques to him, the organ, the Victorola and such. She had written him back and said no.
Apparently he had shown up on her doorstep once or twice trying to convince her. He told the nurse he had found her, locked in her house, dying. She would not let him in, told him to leave her alone. She wanted to die in peace, at home, alone. Then he could have whatever he wanted. He broke the door down and carted her off to the hospital about two weeks before I got there. Right about the time I started to have my dreams.
I walked over to the bed and sat down, picking up her hand. The nurse said,
“She has been totally unresponsive. She can’t hear or speak, poor thing. It is a good thing her cousin found her and brought her to us.”
Looking around at all the tubes and machines I knew she did not want, I held her hand, smoothed her hair, and started talking to her.
“Tessie, it’s OK. You can let go. They can’t hold you here.”
She opened her eyes, tears streaming down her face.
“I am so sorry I was not there for you. I know you wanted to die at home, without all this. You can decide when to go. It’s up to you. Don’t let them make you go through this. Just let it go.”
I released her hand and went out into the nurse’s station and asked to speak with the charge nurse.
“Why are you keeping her alive like this? She wants to die. She is ready. You are prolonging her pain.”
The Nurse got really huffy and said,
“It is God’s will, not ours and not yours that counts. If HE wants her to die she will.”
“Not as long as you have all those tubes and machines breathing for her, feeding her. That makes it your will, the hospitals will, not any Gods” I argued.
I went back to the room and Tessie’s side.
“You have had a good life Tessie. If you want to go, you can. I will be here with you. I am not leaving. Try to relax and let it all go. Thank you for everything you have taught me. I will miss you but you can let it all go”
Tessie looked me in the eyes, took one last deep breath and was gone. The nurses did not get there in time to prevent her. I turned and walked out, down the long corridor, the stairways, outside into the fresh air. I got in the car and cried. At least she would suffer no more.
-Wendy lee, writing at edgewisewoods.com