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| Herbert c. 1944 |
When I was a kid I thought everyone had a grandpa like mine that told stories. I didn’t realize at the time what a gift I’d been given. These are a few stories that my grandpa, Herbert, told me, as I remember them.
He had good stories about his years as a hired hand or working in the field. Once when working on a threshing crew (and having a little coffee), he somehow, on the sly, put baby mice in the coffee of one of his co-threshers. The hapless guy didn’t see the mice in his coffee until he got to the bottom of the cup, and then promptly went behind the granary and horked up his lunch. It never occurred to me to ask Herbert why he had baby mice in the first place.
I heard about his strong friend Rudolph who, on a dare during a card party, carried five 100 pound bags of flour up to the second story of the house. Rudolph had two hundred pound bags balanced on each shoulder, a one hundred pound bag under each arm, and held last one hundred pound bag in his teeth. My grandpa never mentioned it, but I’m sure there was some alcohol involved.
Or one Sunday, when Herbert was a hired-hand at Rudolph’s ---- and a minister and his family from Minneapolis were at Rudolph’s for Sunday dinner --- and the bull got out while grace was being recited.
Well….then there was the one about the man with the monkey tail, who only showed it to people when he’d had too much to drink.
Herbert’s best stories usually involved the natural world, and some freakish, shocking event in it.
One of his most exciting stories, especially when I was very young, was the one about his sister, Pearl, who was a telephone operator in White Rock. If it looked like a stormy night was approaching Herbert (who was probably pre-teen) would walk to White Rock and stay with Pearl so she wouldn’t be alone during the storm. If lightening hit any of the phone lines during the storm, lightening and fire would shoot from the phone switchboard in White Rock and flip on all the switches. Pearl would take a rolled up newspaper and flip the hot switches off.
And there was the story of Schubert. Schubert was leading a bull by a chain in the barnyard, and lightening hit Schubert, the bull or the chain. They both died on the spot.
I heard a lot about the hot summer of 1936. One morning when Herbert was working for Gertie and Sig, his sister and brother-in-law, he woke up to Gertie yelling at him from downstairs to get up because a big storm was brewing. Before he got out of bed he realized the blankets on the bed were floating up and down, raising and lowering on the bed. A tornado hovering over the house (that eventually touched down in Wisconsin) was his explanation for that phenomenon.
Snakes and other creatures played a big role in his stories. I believed in hoop-snakes for years. There was also the story about Cousin Ferdie’s account of a snake that was so huge, that it’s slithering made the oats in the field swish back and forth. And then there’s the story about the man who awoke to a feeling of movement and churning in his stomach, after taking a nap outside on the grass. This was very disturbing. But his good friend said, “I have an idea. Lie back down and put a bowl of milk by your mouth.” So the man did just that. In a short time a snake, that smelled the milk, emerged from the man’s mouth. The snake had entered the man’s mouth as he slept with his mouth open. And the milk worked well to lure the snake out because snakes like milk. And, oh, yes – snakes will steal milk from cow’s utters while they are grazing in the pasture.
It never questioned any of these stories or “facts” when I was a little girl. I heard them so many times; I knew they all had to be true.
But my all-time favorite Herbert Story is the one about the boy and the new boots.
A young boy got a new pair of boots, or at least they were new for the young boy. Not long after, the boy got mysteriously sick. Even as he got more and more ill, he wanted to keep wearing his new boots because he was so proud of them. Well, the boy eventually died. After he died his boots were removed and a red mark was noticed on his leg. Nothing was thought of the mark, it was probably just where his new boots had rubbed his leg. After the death of the young boy, his younger brother was given the boots to wear. In a short time this boy also got sick. And he also had a red mark on his leg, in the same spot. The parents decided that they needed to inspect the boots. Well, lo and behold, they found a rattlesnake’s fang lodged inside the boot! The poison from the fang had rubbed into the legs of the boys, killing one brother and making the other one ill. The younger brother lived only because they found the rattlesnake’s fang just in the nick of time.
I won’t say that I’ve been affected by all of my grandpa’s stories, but to this day I’m very leery of lightening, and I never put on my shoes before checking them first.
