Memoir: Chapter 13: Uncle Reed too unstable to live in our world anymore

Uncle Reed started having a pretty bad time around the time Darrow got killed falling off the School House ledge. He had just gotten home from the mental hospital and as we were driving through town one day, the whole family having just come from Salt Gulch, Reed ran down the road, yelling at us to stop. We pulled along side of him by the school house. He practically screamed at us, “One of the Moosman twins has fallen off School House ledge!”

Daddy and Mother tried to calm Reed down until finally were able to find out that the twin who fell was Darrow. I didn't know him very well even though he was in my room at school, but he was two grades ahead of me which would have made him around 9 years old. The other boys said they all climbed up on the ledge after Sunday school to roll rocks off and Darrow got too close to the edge and started slipping.  He grabbed hold of a little tree, but it broke, and to their horror, he  slipped and slid over the edge of a long drop.

His older brother Dee ran down to try to find him and sent Darwin, the other twin, for help. But he was dead when Dee got to him, his blood spattering the pale sand rock ledge in big spots. Darrow was such a daredevil, the other boys always said, taking chances rolling rocks off the ledges.

We school children marched into his house the day of his funeral and saw Darrow in his casket, his mother sitting beside him. She was another everyone was worried might go mad over his death, as she had been a patient at the state mental, too. She just cried quietly beside the coffin, her hand over her eyes, and looked the picture of a sorrowing mother.

Then Lola Joe, Uncle Reed and Aunt Thirza's fourth daughter just sixteen months old, developed pneumonia. Aunt Thirza came through Salt Gulch and picked up her brother Morias to go with her to take the little girl to the doctor. My cousins always said their mother stopped on Hell's Back Bone bridge and it was then that she discovered Lola Joe was no longer breathing.

Aunt Thirza decided that it was no use expecting Reed to help make cheese, as he just would not finish any work task he was persuaded to start, so they decided to move from the school factory house into her old family home where her brother Merlin, a bachelor, still lived. He and Reed were the best of friends and she had talked to Merlin who said he would help her take care of Reed so he would not have to go back to the state hospital. Marion, my six year old cousin, said that her mother had been having her watch him when she had to do something. Uncle Reed had such a hard time sleeping at night he kept her awake and she was not getting her rest.

The family was relieved when they stopped trying to make cheese and moved as Merlin was a gentle man and they thought he would be a big help in looking after Reed. I am sure Grandma King was exhausted trying to help watch him, too. He liked to come down to the ranch house and move around in the trees preaching to the spirits.

Now comes a time when I had to wonder why some things happen on earth like they do. I even had to wonder why God would let such a thing happen, but I guess God had nothing to do with it.  It was just men drinking.  The next thing that befell Uncle Reed bad enough to send a normal person mad was this. Reed and Merlin went to Richfield through Escalante, so the upper road out of Boulder through Wayne Country must have been closed They stopped in Marysvale canyon on the way and got out of the car. They were standing beside the road. Mother was sure they had bought a bottle and were drinking, so they probably had to relieve themselves.  As they were standing by the road, a car came speeding around the bend. The driver must have been drinking, too, because he swerved the car and hit Merlin, tearing off his leg! The driver did not even stop but dragged part of his leg down the road as he sped away. Uncle Reed was left to try to comfort his dying brother-in-law and best friend. He was waiting by his body when somebody finally stopped to help.
When I heard this story I thought to myself, 'Uncle Reed is never going to get better now. A man with such a fragile mind can only take so much.'  He'd had more than his share of sorrow and pain with his beloved brother and best friend Max got killed when he was bucked off a horse in a rodeo a few years previous. Now his best friend and brother-in-law had been killed in about as horrifying a way as possible. 

Well, the very last time, practically, I ever saw Uncle Reed, we had come down the lane to Grandma's house, and Mother and Dad were down to the corrals talking to the men working there. Marion, Max, and Carol, Reed's daughter with the bad heart defect, were with us. We children got out of the car and ran up to the old ranch house to play. Margie and I had LaRae with us who was only three. She naturally wanted to play, too. 
 Nobody was living in the ranch house that winter. Grandma had gone to her home in Escalante and insisted Grandpa go with her. When we got close to the house I could hear Reed in there shouting as he often did when he was preaching a sermon to the spirits.

My cursed curiosity compelled me to open the door to try to hear more clearly what he was saying. I started moving inside, the other kids following me. It was only then that I noticed a pig carcass laying on the kitchen cutting table. A long sharp butcher knife was laying beside it. The hired men were still in the process of cutting up the meat.

I looked up and saw Reed coming fast out of the living room, rushing toward us. He looked furious maybe because we were interfering with his concentration. As though I was living in a slow motion nightmare, I watched him stop by the table and pick up the long sharp butcher knife. He turned and came toward us, shouting and waving the knife.

I figured he was the angriest at me because I was more a stranger to him and was the biggest child there, so should have known better than to try to eavesdrop on his sermons to the spirits.  I started running to get help as fast as I could. As I ran I prayed I would not hear a scream if he caught one of the children behind me with the butcher knife in his hand slashing at them.

I have never ran faster in my life, straight to Mother and Dad, stammering out what was happening with Uncle Reed. After they checked to see if all the children were safe, unbelievably they just turned away and started talking about something else. They did not bother even to go talk to Reed. I was deflated. I just did not think they understood how frightening Reed had been grabbing up a sharp butcher knife to chase us with.

If he had just hollered at us, told us to get out, we would have run away, but would not have thought anything of it. It was the fact that he picked up the butcher knife that scared me half out of my wits.

I thought well, I guess the grown-ups think since he didn't kill one of us so everything is okay.

I was all wrong about what the adults were thinking--

A week later the Sheriff and two other officers came to pick up Uncle Reed to take him to the State Hospital. Mother and Dad met them a little ways from where Uncle Reed was living with Aunt Thirza, still in the cheese factory house, so I was there. But I didn't know until I saw the Sheriff what they were even going to do.  Mother and Dad had not told me. 
I saw Reed start to cry as soon as he saw the officers. I will never forget him sobbing, “I will be good, I will be good. Please don't take me away.” They just told him to get ready, so he picked up his daughter Marion, calling her “Punkin” and kissed her good-bye.

Oh, I was so sad, so terribly sad, because basically Reed never came home again. I just did not know if the punishment fit the crime or if Reed was really too sick to handle the gift of freedom any more--- I thought about it for years. 

Uncle Reed became a legend in his own time in spite of his violence.  People remembered his witty sayings.  They remembered his love for his little daughters.  He had fought for his life through two terrible childhood illnesses, pneumonia and spinal meningitis.  Everybody tried to keep him from drinking.  They did not always succeed. When I was incarcerated in a mental ward years later, I thought now I am in Uncle Reed country.  

Memoir: Chapter 13: Traveling the new upper road over Hell's Backbone to Escalante where we went to school 2 months

The highlight of my second grade year was a two month visit to the second grade class in Escalante. Mother told Daddy that never again would she stay all winter in Salt Gulch, so after the new year she must have gathered up her brood of four and went to Escalante to stay to Grandma King's house. I don't know if Grandma King was there or not, but Daddy was allowed to visit occasionally. Grandpa Wilson might have rustled up a job teaching high school in Escalante, and I know they lived in the King house one winter in Escalante so we may have lived with them. LaRae would have been walking all over since she was two years old.  I seem to remember her getting a lot of attention with her big eyes and thick hair.  I was seven so Ann would have been born that December in Salt Gulch before Mother took us to live in Escalante.  

We regularly traveled to Escalante on what was called the upper road over Hell's Backbone. Crossing Hell's Backbone bridge was always the worst of the trip for me. I would always ask to walk across the bridge rather than be driven in a car, but was never allowed to indulge my cowardly fears. I just did not trust that bridge! Down in Sand Creek you could look up and see this bridge way up in the air spanning two deep canyons on either side. It just looked very dangerous. When anyone talked about going to the Grand Canyon I always said I did not want to go as I thought I had seen enough deep canyons in my life, I didn't need to see any more.  

I guess I had heard too many stories about how the Escalante cat skinner, “Sixty McInelly” had crossed a dangerous temporary bridge made of planks with his 'cat' to connect the road over two deep canyons. He did not even tell his pregnant wife what he was going to do for fear she would go into labor out of fright. Everybody clapped when Sixty rolled up on the other side without plunging with his heavy cat to the bottom of the gorge. 

The CCC boys had been contracted to build the road so the mail could be brought to Boulder by truck instead of mules. After all, it was 1938. The CCC boys built a lot of roads so why not this one?

Now these same CCC boys were building a road over what they called the lower road into Boulder which was nothing more than a rough wagon trail over sand rock and deep sand. I always asked to be allowed to walk up Thompson's Turnover but was hardly ever allowed to do that either. So Margie and I would lay down in the back of the car and pray while Daddy would sometimes have to make three runs on that hill before he made it to the top in his gutless car. I prayed we would not be like Thompson and turn over into the canyon. There was always a deep canyon to fall into on those old roads.

It did take Daddy a long time to go over the old or the upper road to Escalante to buy a drink. The new faster lower road would probably cause him to become a worse drunk.

I think Mother was half way trying to leave him when she went as far away from him as Escalante to spend a couple of months. I loved my teacher there who taught the second grade.  Her name was Mrs. Helen Schow and she was young and enthusiastic like Golda Petersen had been. Margie got an older teacher named Mrs. Lee in the first grade but she knew her business.

Margie and I made friends with two sisters in Escalante who were the same age as we were named Jean and Joan. I envied them so because their mother combed their hair into ringlets every single day, and she dressed them in the latest fashion. Mother made our dresses but she always hemmed them too long on the grounds that we would grow out of them. They would be in tatters by the second year, but in the meantime we would have to go around in new dresses below the knees like two little old ladies. 

 I think Mother was suspicious of little girls dressed in short dresses with long hair. She never got used to how long straight hair looked since she and her sister had curly hair. Every picture she took of us when our hair was long, we had hairdos that made us look like we were forty years old. Mother's idea of a decent hairdo was not chic. I did not get to wear my long blond hair hanging down my back until I left home.

Well, we had to go home to the ranch some time, so finally Daddy talked Mother into moving back to Salt Gulch just as the spring work was starting. I knew my work load would start up again, too, as now there were two little kids under three to watch when Mother gardened and bottled. But a wonderful thing happened. Bill decided not to work for Daddy anymore so I told Daddy when haying time came I would drive the team hooked to the hay wagon and stomp the hay all day, too.

All I can say is that it was a good thing I waited until I was nearly eight to start doing a man's job. I would be exhausted by the time I stomped hay all day. But I loved driving swaybacked old Pet and her mate. She was the best old dear. She never acted up at all. I told Daddy she was the most patient hardworking old work mare I could imagine. I could hardly wait for Pat, her son, to get old enough to break to the harness.He surely would not be like old Fred, the King's prize work horse in Boulder, who would surely have run away with me, being such a young inexperienced driver. 

But by the time Daddy broke Pat, Old Pet was gone, and the work horse age was coming to an end in that country! Mother eventually tried to persuade everyone to buy Case tractors after she became the dealer. 
There was still some more upset to come due to the violence of men, but I don't have the strength to write about that today. I will end this chapter with my salute to good old Pet and all the workhorses who worked for mankind for centuries. I could just cry when I think of their faithful service. I think that was also the year that I was looking everywhere for stories about horses. We did still ride the cow ponies and always would on the rough cattle trails. 

Daddy told me when I was a year or two older he would take me to punch cows in Sand Creek where his winter cattle range was in Salt Gulch. I could hardly wait. Riding horses provided me with the purest joy in life I was ever to know in childhood.

Memoir: Chapter 12: A baby angel is sent to our family

I started to read adult fare in the second grade. I just did not think I could wait any longer to find out if there was anything in books that might explain to me what had happened to my father to cause him to behave so differently from how fathers and married men were supposed to act according to my once innocent conception of them. 
Golda Petersen, my first grade teacher, further spurred me on by having a story writing contest for the first four grades she taught in the little room. I did not trust her enough to write about real events as they were transpiring tin my life then,  so I just made up an out and out fairy story. I thought all the fairy stories had already been written long ago so mine would not be acceptable, but to my surprise Miss Petersen awarded me first prize. I don't know but what my winning while being the youngest child in school caused some of the older students to think I was the teacher's pet, but it promptly convinced me I should become a writer.

In the second grade my new teacher, Mrs. Hansen, was quite annoyed when I suggested I might be allowed to go into the big room to look for more interesting books to read. She said I certainly could not, so I started looking around the house to see if I could not tackle some quite simple reading material that my mother and dad were reading on a regular basis. Mother subscribed to as many magazines as she thought my dad would pay for, and I soon located a story in the Saturday Evening post I thought I might be able to get through about two characters named Babe and Little Joe. 

 I had no trouble at all reading the first story, so after that I just read anything Mother and Dad read. I soon did not even read Babe and Little Joe with a lot of interest since little Babe was just too sweet and innocent to even be believable. Nothing ever happened to her that remotely resembled what went on in my life.

I can't tell you what a huge disappointment Zane Grey as a western novel writer was to me. I borrowed every Zane Grey novel I could, hoping each might be better. Mother refused to buy Zane Grey because she and Daddy thought western novels were beneath their intelligence. Hmm, I could see why they did not relate. Nobody in those novels acted remotely like them. Mothers did not spank their kids for nothing, and Dads did not get drunk and still ride their horses very well out in the bad lands with the apt name of "Down Below". 

I do not know where Zane Grey got his information about the wild west, but about all he got right I thought were his descriptions of the canyons and mesas. And good descriptive writing did not satisfy me. I needed novels with more harsh reality in them than Zane Grey seemed capable of grasping.

I was doomed to be disappointed quite often in novels about the west over the next few years, which was why I determined I would grow up and write about the real wild west. I decided I wouldn't care if my stories disgusted the religious and horrified the old, I would tell nothing but the truth. All these pretty stories were nothing but lies and cover-up and did not help at all in sorting out my experiences in life which had taken such a hard turn to the dark side.  

I did not get to read a whole lot in Salt Gulch I had to work so hard, and neither did Mother. But she was my best source of reading material for years. She would do anything to come by a book to read. 
For a while we took Grit Magazine and I used to look forward every week to reading the serial. I even read Grandma King's relief society magazine stories and I had to be desperate to read those, the little boys and girls in that magazine were so sheltered, I could not believe they were real either. Who were these authors kidding? I wondered if Grandma had thought she could pattern her own boys' lives after theirs. If so it was a false hope. 

Now her second the youngest son had caused my mother to get pregnant again with her fourth child that she no more wanted than an elephant to raise along with her other three who were already about three too many with all she had to put up with.
That was about when Daddy started us to saving his dogey calves and every other critter on that place that lost its mother, as if we already didn't have enough chores to do. He would even bring us baby rabbits he found in the fields after he mowed the hay.  They would just die upsetting us and him, making us feel like failures as substitute mothers  You cannot save wild baby rabbits! 
We didn't even have time to go to church most of the time even though Mother loved to go she said to get away from all the work expected of her a few hours. I suspected that is why all the ladies in town were such faithful church goers. That was how they took the day off without feeling guilty! I thought they were still gluttons for punishment to listen to all that dull preaching on the only day they had an excuse to relax. 
Daddy would be home nursing a hangover from his Saturday night party. The only time he went to church was to bless one of his kids if he even managed to do that. Mother had gotten angry with him each time he had failed to be present when one of his children was blessed.  She was keeping count. In her eyes this was a major crime and surely meant he would burn in hell's fires.  As a matter of fact, I did not see how he could ever escape hell's fires even if we were able to persuade him to stay alive long enough for us children to be able to survive his passing. Mother's temper was simply too bad for her to be able to raise us.  The possibility of either one of them left alone to raise us was just not acceptable.     

Mother had decided to have her fourth child in Salt Gulch. She had persuaded or maybe even demanded Grandpa and Grandpa Wilson come over there and deliver it. Imagine! Her own Dad! She said she and Daddy just could not afford for her to go to Richfield to have a baby in a hospital. Grandpa did not want to do it, but he had to or his headstrong daughter might have tried to have it by herself and he could not let that happen! You never knew what reckless thing my strong willed mother might do to get her way. He probably knew he could not get out of it.

Well, Grandma and Grandpa had the worst time getting that fourth kid born. Grandma described over and over in years to come how Grandpa tried to coax that kid out for hours, maybe days until Grandma herself finally went in and laid down on the bed with a heart attack.

Grandpa had to persuade shy Baby Ann to come out and face a hard world with the help of fat Ellen Thompson, a mid wife's helper he told my dad to bring to Mother's bedside in a dire emergency. Mother said he had to pull the baby out with some nasty forceps that caused him to have to reshape her head entirely once she was born.  But Mother always exaggerated. I didn't quite believe every detail of her terrible stories.  Life for her seemed to have become one long horror filled nightmare. But we were probably lucky Ann was't brain damaged.  Or maybe she was but we just didn't know it! 
She turned out to be the first redhead born in our family. That was always her claim to fame. That and having been born in a real log cabin just like Abraham Lincoln who was a saint, too.
Grandpa was so mad over the very real scare he got trying to save Mother and her baby, he told Mother right then and there he would never deliver one of her babies again, and she just better not ask him to! 
Ellen Thompson stayed two weeks. I remember her doing a lot of work Margie and I might have had to do. She was so heavy she could hardly walk so I was surprised she was willing to relieve us child laborers. She probably did not know she could get a lot of work out of children, which a woman who believes in corporal punishment can more easily do. Mother believed in working her children so she could be free to pursue more interesting tasks.  By our age, we did whatever we could to please her, knowing a whole lot worse could happen if we didn't!
Mother was so long getting back on her feet, I got a little bit scared she still might be dying. But she said she was having her first good rest since LaRae was born even if she had to nearly die to be allowed to stay in bed a few days.  

After about three days Mother caught sight of Margie and me and made us come to her bed while she took a pair of scissors and whacked our hair off clear above our ears. And then she told us we had to go to church. I was mortified over her savage hair cut that amounted to cruelty to helpless animals but I was happy to report to our Sunday school class we had a little red headed sister.
You have never seen such a glorious head of strawberry blond hair as that child developed. It grew in looking exactly like a halo. To add to her heavenly appearance, she had one of the sweetest dispositions a child could ever have. I doubt  she even cried. 

Her hair was such an indescribable incandescent strawberry blond it made people stop in their tracks and stare. I am telling you it was a good thing her hair calmed down when she got older as that is all anybody talked about when they saw her.  Her hair, hair, hair. 

Even after her hair went a little darker, although still gloriously wavy, visiting relatives from afar would want to see the child with the halo of strawberry gold hair. I could see from the sensation Ann's hair caused, why people would come from far and wide to see the little Lord Jesus. They could probably see holiness in his eyes. Ann was a real little baby angel with the hair to match and has remained so to this very day.

I am sure the Lord saw that if ever a family needed an angel in their midst it was this one. And sent Ann.  

Memoir: Chapter eleven: A school girl who instantly hated Dick, Jane, and Spot

The fall after I turned six I went to school for the first time riding the bus to Boulder with the Salt Gulch kids who lived there year around which included Frank and Barbara Coleman and Marilyn and Mack, step children of Morias Hall. Morias had married their mother Marie and brought her to Boulder. She was now pregnant with their second child. 
I had been studying how people lived who did not tolerate alcoholism in their home. Barbara's father, Parley, did not own a ranch as large as my father's Salt Gulch ranch, nor were the water rights as good, but I thought he and his wife Esther lived a more sensible life with their eleven children than my mother and dad did with only three children. Parley did not drink and neither did his boys. 

As far as I could see Barbara's parents never quarreled at all and seemed content with simple entertainments they came up with to keep their children occupied. The kids played all kinds of games and Barbara and Gay were delightful teachers. They  showed Margie and me how much fun we could have playing steal the house in their pasture, and making squaberry beer, and fashioning hollyhock dolls. Sometimes their older sister Leah, who had worked for us at the cheese factory house, would play with us which was even more fun.I always liked it when older kids took an interest in us younger ones. 

Although Barbara and Gay had no horses to ride--their father and older brothers had to use them for farming--they possessed a great deal of nerve. Barbara would even handle snakes when she found them which always caused me to run home. I had developed a phobia about snakes. I had nightmares about them. 
Barbara had also been taken to all the notable places to hike to by her older brothers and sisters. The general history of Salt Gulch the family knew well from living there a long time. She said she would guide me on hikes so I could see all the sights there were to see in Salt Gulch. She even volunteered to take me on hikes in Boulder, once I was old enough. But her family was very proud of the rugged Salt Gulch terrain which they seemed to think was quite as spectacular as the Boulder side. I could hardly wait for summer to come so I could go to legendary places in that country led by an expert like Barbara. She did not know what my father's home town of Escalante was all about but she sure knew the country.

Marilyn, a couple of years older, was very beautiful but did not like Salt Gulch at all. She had been sad about leaving the big city. I felt sorry for her because she had never wanted to be a pioneer girl as I had. I always figured if I could not cross the plains in a covered wagon pulled by oxen, I could still live a primitive pioneer's life on a ranch my grandfather had homesteaded.  

When I got to school I found out there was another girl, Elaine, in the first grade who was from a large family, too. Elaine and Barbara were distantly related. I soon surmised her father was not an alcoholic either, so their home was bound to be more peaceful than ours. I thought Elaine was as beautiful as Marilyn, with her elegant long nose and big almond shaped dark eyes. 

LaRell was the only boy in our class. I felt very sorry for him because his dad had died of a heart ailment a year or so before leaving his mother on a little sandy ranch with eight children to raise and hardly any water rights. They missed their gentle lovable father very badly because they were now dreadfully poor with none of the boys big enough to go to work except Hayward.

But my greatest joy that year was to be my teacher, Golda Petersen, who had been persuaded to teach in Boulder that year but said she was going to leave the following year to go to Wayne Country to marry her fiance, Hans Jackson, another teacher. Golda was red headed and very kind. She made a special point to tell me that she had three younger sisters she dearly loved, who were all red headed! I thought my sisters had beautiful hair, too, but it was not red even though I was very proud to have a red headed Grandmother King. 
 

In the first grade, I regret to say that I did not like Dick and Jane and Spot at all. I can't tell you how those first grade primers aggravated me. Mother was confused and could not figure out why I so passionately hated Dick, Jane, and Spot. I thought it was too risky to tell her that no children were as simple minded and ignorant about life as Dick and Jane. I just could not wait to get to more interesting books to read. As far as I could see all the primers, even for the grades above me, had the same excruciatingly boring stories in them. 

I could not wait to get to the novels Mother loved to read to my Dad's disgust that might enlighten me about the problems that bedeviled my life.

Given my penchant for analyzing problems I had already concluded that Grandma King with her love of socializing in church had inadvertently done a bad thing moving to Escalante every winter so her children could attend better schools. I doubted if the boys had gotten any better education than the children were getting in the two room school house in Boulder the parents had insisted on building. Why hadn't Grandma and Grandpa King decided to send their kids to the Boulder school, such as it was, allowing husband, wife, and kids to stay together the year around? 
Perhaps it had been the custom back then for some of the women to move to a bigger town in the winter, but I thought it had been a terrible mistake because on her own Grandma was not able to control those wild boys of hers! They needed Grandpa King's stronger hand at all times, even if he applied the bull whip when extremely exasperated. In fact, they got so out of control during the winter, that was probably why he was driven to the bullwhip to try to straighten them out come summer.

I could see from what my cousin Ray had learned in Escalante that he revealed to me on rare visits how my dad and his brothers must have acted at his age. They had undoubtedly tampered with alcohol and tobacco, and since they did not have a ranch in Escalante, were far too idle in town during the winter months when they should have been kept so busy with chores they would not have had time to get into mischief.

Living in town might have seemed more entertaining to Grandma and Aunt Hazel who were saintly women and loved a big town relief society, but why hadn't they seen that town was no good for their boys who tampered with alcohol every one of them even while children!

In fact, since Grandpa King had not married until he was thirty I could not help but wonder if he had fallen into the same temptations as my dad might have done during his teen and bachelor years, which might have caused him to prefer that Grandma live in town while he stayed on the ranch with the hired men! 

Oh, the things I thought about after I was molested that were not to be found in the Dick and Jane and Spot first grade primers! But I thought studying these heavy problems was crucial to my survival, because even though I was now able to keep that molester at bay, every single weekend, my father, who I thought of as two men, came home to disturb the peace of our home with his drunken antics. 

By this point in her marriage, my mother seemed to go slightly insane every time she saw her husband drunk. She would immediately start calling him names and she would fight with him sometimes all night long! She just could not be calm when she saw that he had altered his total personality in a state of drunkenness she could not and would not tolerate without a violent protest. She would always say she had not been raised that way.  Her dad and brothers kept the Mormon Word of Wisdom.  And never drank.  

Therefore Grandma and Grandpa Wilson did not understand alcoholics nor it seemed did Grandma and Grandpa King, since Grandpa was not alcoholic even though his four sons were and some of his grandsons! Some of Grandpa's hired men even got drunk regularly on their days off.

In school, I realized that I was the poor little daughter of a bad town drunk right away from some of the names the school boys would call me at recess, like “Two-fingered Joe!” Hurt, I did not see why they would call me by my father's drunk name, but some of the boys seemed proud they knew what he was called by his drinking buddies. These were the wild boys in school who had older brothers and uncles in their families who partied and drank.
Some of them aspired to grow up and drink too as well as ride horses and punch cattle. Some even stole their mothers' vanilla which they called 'black alky' and got drunk when they were mere children.  

There was a lot to learn at recess, too, that was not contained in those little books about Dick and Jane and Spot. How long was I going to have to wait until I could read novels? I surmised that I was never going to find any real information in children's books. 

Fairy stories like Hansel and Gretel were about all I related to, where the poor parents had no money to feed their children and took them out in the forest for the wolves to eat, but guess what, Hansel dropped little rocks and the kids found their way home to be tolerated I supposed by the parents for a while longer until their money ran out again. 

I thought Hansel and Gretel were frightfully forgiving. I doubted if I would have been that anxious to get back to those parents. Those kids tried so hard to find their way back home so they could be treated the same way all over again! Except maybe the rest of the world was even colder when you thought about what the old witch did to Hansel, fattening him up just like you would a pig or a chicken to kill and eat. 
No, Hansel and Gretel did not seem to belong to the same world as Dick, Jane, and Spot. I was surprised we were even allowed to read such a tragic story about brutal parents that just seemed to be the norm.

Memoir: Chapter 10: The year of the big flood down the Boulder Creek

The spring of 1936 was the year of the big thaw after a winter of heavier snow in Boulder than anybody had seen in a long time. Men working on the Spectacle Lake reservoir on top of the mountain were forced to stop before they could complete the dam as they had expected to do if it had been a normal year. Nor had the spillway been built. The spring of 1937 followed another snowy winter and there were rumors the reservoir was leaking which nobody took too seriously. 

After the snow finally started melting on top of the mountain an excited caller on our telephone told us that the unfinished dam had broken! A huge flood was on its way down the Boulder creek. It would be roaring down the west fork of the Boulder to where the east fork and the west fork joined, so frantic calls were going out to everybody who had ranches along the Boulder creek. Mother and Dad were very concerned because the King ranch bordered the Boulder creek, but the old ranch house had been built on the hill for the very purpose of not being on the creek bottom where floods in the days before most of the water had been diverted by a pipeline and dams were much bigger.

We had been used to seeing the bridges swept away from time to time. In fact the main highway bridge into Boulder had just been rebuilt and because it had been designed by engineers to last, it was claimed with great satisfaction that no flood would take out this bridge.  

The cheese factory house had been built on the creek bottom toward the east, so Mother and Dad jumped in the car with Margie, baby LaRae, and me to rush off to checkout the flood. When we got to Boulder the flood had not arrived yet. The river bottom was so quiet and peaceful we all had trouble believing a flood was really on the way. My Uncle Crae came from the Boulder side meeting up with several other young men and they walked up the creek aways.  

Suddenly Mother looked up and saw the flood coming in the distance and started screaming at Crae and the others to get out of the creek bed fast! They looked up and saw what they said was a giant wall of water bearing down on them and were soon running east as fast as their legs could carry them.

I looked and looked and could finally see it. It looked like a huge writhing dragon gobbling up the trees and rolling big boulders with a roar like I had never heard before or since. We raced back up the hill west toward Salt Gulch. 

The flood roared by us throwing the new bridge up in the air like it was made out of matchsticks. We ran further back up the hill for fear the brown muddy dragon might devour us. Margie was so frightened she jumped up and down and screamed to the top of her lungs. Mother, of course, was ready to slap her out of her hysterics until Daddy stopped her.

I could not believe how the creek bottom looked after the flood had gone roaring by. It was almost completely denuded of all the beautiful trees that had been growing there for years. Big boulders that had never been there before were evidence of the power of the flood waters that had deposited them. The creek bed looked very ugly to me now when I thought of how many hours we had played in the water when it was low, catching tadpoles, covered overhead by a canopy of green we had taken for granted. I felt like crying.

But the adults were all saying well at least nobody has been killed even if it might take another fifty to a hundred years for it look like it did before. 

 The towns people were still determined to build the Spectacle Lake reservoir so pretty soon men went to work to build the dam back to preserve precious water that was flowing down the creek going to waste when it could be stored and used to save somebody's crops when there was a drought.  

The creek bottom came back enough by the time Crae was called on his mission two years later, that he baptized me in a pond that had been dammed for the purpose of swimming. I can remember some green that had revived and a tree or two that had not been uprooted entirely. But nobody was ever going to forget the biggest flood that had ever come down the Boulder creek in anybody's memory, thanks to the town which had more or less caused it by not quite finishing the reservoir before Mother Nature went on a rampage and dumped record snow falls on top of the mountain.

You can never predict Mother Nature. I had been terrorized many times already by flash floods. Sometimes we would have to wait a day before we could cross the Escalante river half way between Escalante and Boulder when it flooded. The bridge in Calf Creek which flowed down a canyon into the Escalante had been washed out many times by flash floods. The natives all knew a rainstorm in canyon country where the water had no place to go would cause a flood, but still the saddest stories I ever heard were about impatient people who tried to beat a flood and  brought eternal sorrow on their families when somebody didn't make it out of the roiling waters.

Canyon country and floods went together, and after the Boulder Creek flood I was especially worried my dad would be one of the impetuous fathers who could not wait to cross an uprising and drowned his whole family in a flood in his eagerness to get to town to buy a bottle.

Memoir: Chapter 9: Bill, the hired man, grabs me and makes me go down into the corn with him!

I had not been paying the slightest bit of attention to Bill. I had been interacting with hired men since I was born. My Grandpa King was known for giving wandering transients a job, a bed, and some good food to eat, so there was always someone I did not know working for him. He seemed to like to talk to men from the outside world as did my dad who had partied up and down the state with a lot of men.

I was sure that whatever went on in the old falling down cabin where Bill lived having sex, if that is what they did, was only a small part of it. Bill was apparently quite entertaining for my dad to pursue a relationship with him when he was sober, but then he had interacted with his own father's hired men all his life, too, so his dad was the one who had undoubtedly given him a taste for enjoying the world through the eyes of wanderers.

I did not even realize Daddy had gone somewhere when Bill unexpectedly accosted me out by the corrals where I roamed freely. Margie was given to allergic attacks out around the hay so she wasn't with me. The family had found out she had quite a severe allergy to hay that was probably going to limit her work activities in the out of doors.  The Salt Gulch ranch was a lot more of a hay producing one than Grandpa's Boulder ranch. Alfalfa did not grow nearly as well in the sandy soil, so Grandpa only raised wild timothy in Boulder. Mother was already going to help Daddy improve his alfalfa acreage by planting more seed and buying good fertilizer.

Anyway Bill suddenly grabbed me by the hand out by the corrals and said, “Do you want to go tend the water with me?” I had never had a hired man ask me to go tend the water, and I was thinking about whether I should agree to go when he started dragging me down around the hill. This forcefulness I definitely did not like and I began to get alarmed. I was even more uneasy when he headed toward the corn with my hand grasped firmly in his. He thrust me down on the ground where the corn hid me.  Then he set down beside me. 

 To my shock he pulled up my dress and I felt his hand slip down inside my underpants. He quickly found my two small mounds and began to caress them. I had been taught very well by hot tempered adults not to say anything when they were doing something to me I thought was very wrong. For a child to argue and resist determined adultgs only seemed to make them more determined. I am talking mostly about my mother here who went crazy if her child objected to her disciplining. She always thought she was being sassed, which was a terrible crime in her eyes. I made myself wait a few minutes before I started to wiggle, saying, “I have to go! My mother is going to be looking for me!”

That thought seemed to make Bill nervous enough that he reluctantly let me up, and I hurried back toward the house. I was feeling almost crippled by what had just transpired. I could not even run very well. I went into the house I think still in profound shock trying to decide what I could do.

My first thought was of Daddy's altercation with the cattle rustler, his former best friend. I decided immediately that if Daddy found out about him molesting me, Bill was as good as dead. I was sure he would not wait for the law to take care of him. 
The law played a very small part in our lives being so far away, in the country seat or somewhere. We had no law officers in Boulder. Besides that, Daddy might think it would be best to take Bill out before he landed in jail. Bill was very nervy and might do a lot of reckless talking when he should keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him.  

 
I just could not make up my mind that what he had done was bad enough to deserve the death sentence, so I didn't do anything for several days. Bill must have interpreted my lack of action as willingness, because he grabbed me again a few days later. This time he went on a little longer with his business in my underpants before I could persuade him I needed to go now, my mother would be missing me. 

Quite a few days went by after the second encounter, and I still could not decide whether Bill should be executed. I thought my mind was going to crack with the strain. So Bill naturally took advantage of me being in such a quandary and grabbed me again! 

As I was sitting down in the corn which by now had grown another few inches so it quite adequately covered us both from view,  I tried to think of the reasons Bill would take such a terrible chance grabbing his employer's little daughter, just barely turned six a couple of days before, for his sexual purposes. I recalled some information I had just heard about Bill.

Mother said that Bill was extremely angry at Daddy because Daddy would not take him to party with him on the weekends. “He hired him to do the chores,” said Mother, “because I told him I would not do them anymore when he was gone. Bill is crazy if he thinks Clyde is going to take an ugly old thing like him to Escalante to party!”

She was almost implying Daddy could find younger and handsomer men to enjoy his company. I was sure she did not know what she was saying, but I began to suspect that after all the attention Daddy had paid him during the winter rage and jealousy over Daddy's weekend partying still going on without him had caused Bill to go crazy and go after me in revenge. He was in such a state that imagining how much pain Daddy would feel if he knew what he was doing to his little daughter gave him more satisfaction than any possible worry about what Daddy might do to him as a result of his crimes.

Well, he could be killed, that is what could happen to him!  I knew now beyond a shadow of a doubt I had to do something before Bill did something even worse. He was actually causing me to have sexual sensations this third time around which I did not know a child as young as I was could have, as stimulated by the fingers of a grown man.

This was finally horrifying enough to help me to remember the danger he posed to me while he was still working for Daddy. In this emergency situation, I came up with a plan. 

I started staying very close to my mother. I kept Margie with me so he would not have the chance grab her. If I went outside I never went further than ten feet from the kitchen door where I would be able to see my mother working.

My constant vigilance was the only thing that paid off. Bill never got the chance to grab me again. As Daddy's interest in him appeared to have waned, he took to killing rattlesnakes about the fields as a hobby. Pretty soon he bragged he had enough to circle his hat. I never thought of a rattlesnake again but what I connected it to Bill, the most poisonous human being I ever ran into or would ever encounter again in my lifetime. 

When I started school that September and I had to ride the bus, I was very worried that Bill might try to way lay me when I got off the bus over the hill from the ranch, so I insisted that Mother and Dad be there to pick me up. When they did not show up I got very angry at them. I would dart along behind the trees, making my way over the hill and down into the ranch as though pursued by a demon. I let them think I was afraid of coyotes but my urgent commands caused them to show up almost every day.

I did not worry about Bill grabbing Margie because once I was gone I figured she would not go out around the corrals for fear of having a hay fever attack. She would stay in the house helping Mother with baby LaRae. I may have even warned her not to go far from the house, I don't remember.

I said nothing to anyone about what Bill had done to me. He worked for Daddy about a year longer and then by mutual consent they terminated their working relationship as well as their socializing one. I was playing once, however, on top of the hill in the middle of the ranch a year later when I was still six, and I looked down and saw Bill and Daddy together shoveling or doing something in the field next to the corn. 
 I glanced back and they had disappeared! I figured Bill had taken Daddy into the corn just like he took me which was tall enough to cover them. Daddy had followed along like an obedient kid.

I had a sudden vision in my mind of Daddy when he was not a lot older than I was following hired men like Bill into the corn or wherever they wanted to take him. Daddy being a boy could not have escaped a hired man hungry for sex as easily as I had, even. I recalled one who worked for the Kings for years who had never been able to find a woman to have anything to do with him. It could have been somebody like him who taught my dad the ways of men with boys. His dad would have made him work in the fields no matter what kind of poisonous men might mess with him there.

About ten minutes later I turned my attention back to the corn field and Daddy and Bill had reappeared and were innocently going on with their shoveling. So that is how Daddy does it, I thought, when he is on his own ranch.  He goes into the tall corn. Daddy seemed to be a very sexually active man at that age, because it would not be long until Mother was pregnant again!

I told Daddy I was sorry I did not think I was old enough to drive Old Pet and her teammate hooked to the hay wagon. I didn't tell him I did not want to work with Bill. I just said I would wait until I was a little older to drive the team, thank you. Daddy did not object. I was a girl after all, and there was plenty for me to do in the house with Mother who seemed a lot safer to me than a rattlesnake like Bill.

Memoir: Chapter 8: How Daddy became two fingered Joe and I find out the good die young

I was concerned when Daddy started to work so hard on the Salt Gulch ranch now that it was going to be his, that his right hand would give him trouble. Daddy only had two fingers on that hand, his thumb and fore finger. The other three had been chopped off in a wreck that he caused.

I don't remember the actual wreck, but I heard about it many times. During the cheese factory days Daddy was going to Salt Lake now and then to take the cheese, and get freight in the truck. My aunt Vesta decided to come and visit her sister and Mom and Dad and asked Daddy if she could hitch a ride with him. 
Oh poor Aunt Vesta! If she had only known more about alcoholics she would not have risked her life or her sanity on a trip clear from Salt Lake to Boulder with Daddy! In those days the trip was much longer than it is now because the road around the east end was so slow, narrow, and twisting, and very slick if there had been a storm on it.
They were driving down the road when Daddy became quite tired or drunk is more like it.  Some versions have a young hitchhiker he had picked up riding with them who disappeared after the wreck, but Daddy decided to trust Aunt Vesta to drive his truck rather than the young stranger. He asked her to take a turn at the wheel for a while as he was probably about to pass out.  She protested saying she had never driven a truck before, but Daddy's drunken behavior was making her so nervous she agreed to change places with him.  She soon got the hang of driving a truck and approached a car going so slowly that she decided to pass it.  
As she was just passing the other car Daddy raised up and saw that she was on the wrong side of the road, so he grabbed the wheel and turned it so sharply, the truck tipped over.  His window was partially down and when he grabbed it to brace himself three of his fingers on his right hand were chopped off when the truck hit the ground.  
Daddy did not even seem aware of how serious the injury was, but he was soon taken off to the hospital to have the dangling fingers cut entirely off and the wound sewed up.  Aunt Vesta was severely bruised all over, but none of her bones were broken.   

Daddy had the nerve to be quite mad at Aunt Vesta because he lost his fingers. This made Mother so angry she tried to beat him up. I am sure Aunt Vesta vowed never to ride anywhere again with my dad, but it was a little too late to prevent the damage done to both her and Daddy.

Daddy was worried he would not be able to do farm work, but he was soon managing everything well enough. His drinking buddies all started calling him “Two -fingered Joe.” That nickname would stick to him for the duration of his years of heavy drinking.
What I didn't like was that I was even destined to be called “Two-fingered Joe” by the mean school boys. 
Little children would ask him what happened to his fingers. My Uncle Vance's little girl was one of them. My mean dad told her that the birds had picked off his fingers, and when she got home she started screaming and crying when some birds swooped down in the yard. She explained she was afraid they might pick off her fingers and that is how they found out what my dad told her, so none of Mother's people were too happy with my dad for years.

What I loved the most about all Mother's brothers was that none of them drank. Her brothers were all good looking guys who loved to dance and party just like Mother did, but they could all get together and joke and laugh without drinking a drop of alcohol! Mother said her brother Guy had once tampered with alcohol but her dad would always go to all the dances, too, usually to play an instrument in the band, and when he saw any of his boys going outside to drink he took them right home.

I know Grandma King could never get Grandpa King out to socialize with the Mormons to a dance. I wonder if it would have made a difference if Grandpa King had acted like Grandpa Wilson did when his sons acted up. Mother and Aunt Vesta were always the life of the party they were such good dancers, but like most Mormon girls they did not even like liquor.

My Uncle Crae came down to visit his Mom and Dad and he came over to the Salt Gulch ranch and worked with Daddy for a while. There was even talk that he might go in with Daddy on the ranch after his mission. 
Grandma and Grandpa Wilson no more than got one son off a mission until they sent another. Guy and his girlfriend had gotten married in high school because there was a baby, my cousin Claudia, on the way, so he and little Uncle Bill were the only ones of Mother's five younger brothers who did not go on a Mormon mission. Crae was glad to go on his mission, which shows how different Mother's brothers were from Daddy and his brothers. 
He even met his wife on his mission.  She was a rare Mormon girl who was so devout she was determined to serve a mission to spread the gospel.  Crae married her before he went into the service. She revealed to the family she was pregnant when he became a crew member of a B29, flying bombing missions over Japan.
  

Uncle Reed was the only King son who ever went on a mission even though he broke the rules someway and got sent home early. Some Mormon ways stuck, but some of the things he observed people doing caused Reed to imagine a whole bunch of religious people were hypocrites. When he could not take any more deaths, he would say the religious people poisoned these people. I think what he meant was that religion could poison the minds of the people, but his logic was not too clear, so his message whatever it was was pretty much lost on people.

I paid very close attention to Reed however, because I thought he was kind of an oracle. I paid a lot less attention to my Wilson uncles who went on missions, even though you could not get my Uncle Crae angry. He was like my Grandma Wilson. He was not going to quarrel, and he never did that I know of. 

Mother did not take after her mother and brother Crae, but her dad, so she was a fright when it came to getting mad just like he was, but she loved her brothers. She could never be mean to any of them, at least when she was an adult. I would like to bet she gave them enough smacks when they were young they learned to respect her temper just like they did their dad's.

I could not count on any of them cussing her for whipping her kids, but she did not whip us when they were around. 
I did not know that Crae was the Wilson family angel and would not be with us long. He was my only relative on both sides of the family who would die in the war and there were a lot of King cousins who ended up in the service before they were through as well as three of Mother's brothers. Crae never saw his little girl, Trudy, born after his plane was reported missing coming home from a bombing mission.
 It was said of Crae when he was reported missing that he did not have anything left to do to be a real good guy. Margie and I enjoyed having him in Salt Gulch a couple of months before I turned six. He was a good influence on our dad, and we hated to see him go on his mission and right after it to war.

Thanks to him I did not refuse to be baptized. Because he was coming to baptize me before he left on his mission, I swallowed my doubts. When he dipped me in a Boulder creek pond and prayed, I actually felt a connection to God Almighty. That is how powerful my Uncle Crae was.