"War and drink are two things man is never too poor to buy."
-William Faulkner

 

One evening I was sitting on the front patio watching the emerald sun set over the rooftop of my neighbor’s house, sipping at a gin and tonic.  The drink was in a whiskey glass I got from “hanging” Judge Parker’s courthouse museum in Ft. Smith, Arkansas.  Etched into the bottom of this glass is a noose with the words:

“To all present when you are about to drink a glass of whiskey look closely in the bottom and see if you cannot observe therein a hangman’s noose.  There is where I first saw the one which now breaks my neck.”

            -Boudinot Crumpton, June 30, 1891

This quote by the unlucky ruffian was recorded after he’d been captured robbing and pillaging over in the Indian Territory by U.S. Marshals working for Judge Parker.  Mr. Crumpton did indeed meet his maker on that sweltering Arkansas day in 1891 at the order of Judge Parker, the same Judge that Rooster Cogburn worked for as U.S. Marshall in True Grit, that wonderful novel by Charles Portis.    

"True Grit" by Charles Portis

Steve Earle’s “Tom Ames”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=793o8zRFVA8

As I was enjoying my drink on the patio, an elderly African American man named Clarence rolled to a slow stop in front of my house, as if he had no brake pressure in his rusty rattletrap 1960s Ford pick-up.  He got out of his truck and retrieved a large coffee can filled with eggs from his farm south of town.  I must say this is the third (and I hope final) can of eggs I’ve received from Clarence since giving him my old chainsaw last summer, as he was chopping down the neighbor’s tree with an axe.  But I don’t have the heart to tell him not to send anymore.  So instead I tell him my mother sends her thanks, even though by the time they make it to me they are spoiled and smeared with chicken poop. 

But that’s beside the point.  

So I took the rusty can of chicken poop eggs and offered Clarence a gin and tonic.  He politely refused, saying that he only drinks whiskey, and then only on Saturdays.  For some reason I asked about his family history and roots in this area.  He told me his great grandfather was a Choctaw slave who came to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears; and that he grew up in one of the tiny scattered all-black towns formed after the Civil War by the freed slaves (called “Freedmen”) of the southeastern Indian tribes.  Even though I’m sure Clarence has little formal education and has labored in poverty on a poor subsistence farm all his life, I could sense the deep wisdom in his eyes and from his swollen and scarred hands.    

I appreciated his honesty, so I told him the story of my great, great Grandfather Jasper . . .

Jasper was a Confederate cavalry scout for the notorious Texas General Ben McCulloch, whom fought at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri and at Pea Ridge in Arkansas where McCulloch was killed.  They were called scouts, or skirmishers, because their job was to ride ahead in small parties to scout the strength the approaching Union army by skirmishing with them.  It was often suicide for a soldier.    

Steve Earle’s song “Ben McCulloch”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKbErAqZ1l4

It was common for some southern slave-owners in Arkansas to either send their slaves in place of themselves to fight or bring them along to do the cooking and domestic chores.  The latter was the case for Jasper, and he brought along his slave named Hunter.  One day early in the war in southwestern Missouri, at a skirmish that would later be called the Battle of Dug Springs, Jasper and his team of Arkansas scouts were pinned down by Union artillery and a charging force of cavalry troops.

 

Battle of Dug Springs, Missouri

As a result their horses scattered, and Jasper and the other confederate scouts lay wounded or otherwise exhausted, awaiting their fate.  But just as a Union cavalry soldier was making his charge to finish them off, Hunter unsaddled him, in the process getting partially scalped by the soldier’s saber.  Somehow Hunter still managed to shoot the soldier.  He then found a horse, putting the wounded Jasper on.  He then climbed on and rode south to safety. 

Jasper ended up fighting in some of the key battles in Arkansas and at Vicksburg, Mississippi, somehow surviving the entirety of the War.  After he came home he married my great, great Grandmother Clementine, and their first son was named William, my great grandfather. 



Jasper and Clementine (Seated)
William (standing far left)

I told Clarence that it’s difficult to comprehend the irony in this story, of how a slave named Hunter saved the life of his master in the Civil War, and how I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for his courage.  Of course this makes me think about how little events and U-turns in life have a strange way of affecting our destinies and those of our descendants down through the ages.

I think the next time I see Clarence trimming my neighbor’s overgrown hedge with his rusty manual hedge clippers, I’m going to give him my electric trimmer.  Because I want him to bring another rusty coffee can filled with chicken poop eggs, as long they come with a story.