Heritage blends with a girlfriend's box of wine

By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher

Some might disagree, but as for this woman on my mind I say her status as an old girlfriend prior to her status as a married person gives her the right to charm my socks off whenever she gets the urge.

And I'm easy.

She showed up when I was working on the barn, and instead of running her off I bought a cardboard box of wine and stored it for her on a wine shelf I nailed in a pine cabinet. She found us two plastic wine glasses at one of the dollar stores. Next thing you know, there we'd sit in the hallway of the barn, sipping wine, listening to NPR's evening jazz show, sometimes way into the night.

My daddy, the late Levin (Levy) Herman Old, painted that cabinet white, glass and all, and kept his farm records in it. I spent hours cleaning the glass and stripping it down to wood.

I named the barn the Big Hut Evans Wildlife Management and Rural Heritage Center. It's one of those old barns with the corn cribs down one side, stalls down the other. Once upon a time after a working day, Big Hut's mules or horses stood in those stalls and ate corn all night. In the morning, they were brought out in the hallway between the cribs and the stalls and hitched to whatever they needed to pull, a planter, a plow, a wagon or such.

March two years ago, when the grass around it was green, I went up there to burn the barn, which was slowly giving way to gravity and decay. Big Hut had been dead for years, but before I set the fire I kicked around in the rot.

There's an old slave cemetery about a 15-minute walk through the woods from the barn. Big Hut's mama's buried there. She wasn't a slave, but her mama and her daddy were.

Big Hut lived in a three room house on the farm where they'd lived. He drew water from a well on the back porch and he kept hogs and chickens. He and Roberta never had any children, but one day I sat on the porch with him and we counted 14 "grandchildren" who passed through his house on the farm, growing up where they learned how to butcher a hog. He salted hams on a table he built in one of the barn's old corn cribs and he hung them from the rafters.

Tractors had came along and sacked feed got cheap enough that Big Hut didn't need mules anymore, didn't need to stuff cribs with corn for the winter, so the function of the barn changed. The last plow horse to live in the barn was Daisy, a huge glass-eyed paint mare.

Besides grandchildren, named Evans, Finney and Rogers that I remember, Big Hut took in an old withered blind man named Drake. Mr. Drake lived with his sister until the day she died. They buried her over at the old cemetery and after the service, Big Hut said everybody just left, leaving Mr. Drake standing, blind, in the cemetery.

Think of that.

Big Hut took him home and for ten years or so that I can recall, late 60's and into the 70's, Mr. Drake - and everybody else - lived in the little three room house. When the weather was good, Mr. Drake sat with his cane on a bench on the porch, listening to children play.

Then he died. Daisy died too.

And a man named Charles died.

Charles Finney. He lived with Hut and Roberta, too. I have no idea how he was connected to Big Hut. Maybe he just needed a place to be. Charles was simple. He was gentle. He was strange. He roamed the farm at night. Some evenings he'd come down through the pasture and walk past my house, and he'd go over to the old cemetery. He liked to mow. He irritated Big Hut, going off mowing strips alongside the public oil top road that slices across the farm.

"Wastin' gas," Big Hut growled. "Wearin' out that mower."

One night at the old house, Charles sat bolt upright in bed. He stood suddenly and twisted, slipped down the wall and fell dead on the floor. He was in his 40's, and had lived there 20-odd years I could count.

That next morning I caught Big Hut in the barn, filling a well bucket with hen scratch. It was spring. He was crying and I didn't know what to say.

Big Hut had a knee so worn out his leg bent like a bow. On winter days he sat in a rocker by his wood burning stove, the leg of his overalls rolled up, rubbing WD 40 on his knee.

He told me WD 40 was great for rheumatism.

Besides when Charles died, I saw him cry one other time.

A man in Franklin County gave me five bois d'arc posts so big they squatted the rear end of a three quarter ton truck. It took three of us to pick up the one we set at the corner of Big Hut's yard. When we were tamping it in, he moved up and started tamping dirt with his cane, big old horse tears rolling down his cheek.

"Hut?" I said.

"I just can't do," he said, "not like I used to," and he jabbed at the earth with his cane.

He'd started walking on a cane a little at a time. One day early on in that we had some cattle penned. I'd turned my back to Big Hut when this clackity-clackity-clack! noise erupted, turning me to see him fighting an old cow. He fought like a pirate swordsman on a ship's deck. The old cow's head dipped and bobbed like a prize fighter, snorting and blowing, hooking at that cane wearing out her horns.

He turned her before I could stop laughing.

The day before he died they let me in ICU to see him. He couldn't talk. He was wild eyed, and a nurse came over and touched me and said, "Talk to him," so I did, and what shames me is I said what I said and left him. I learned from that.

After he died the old house burned. He was a tenant, and he never owned much in the world besides a few hogs, an old pickup, horses and mules, a few cows, traces and plows, and I thought about that years later, the day I went up to burn his barn. He'd been gone by then for years and whatever of value might have been in the barn was long since gone.

Kids had nailed an old bicycle rim basketball goal to the barn.

As much fun as a good fire is, and the barn was gonna be a cracker jack of a blaze, I put aside my diesel can, raked with a toe in the dirt and found what turned out to be the tip of an old wagon tongue. There was a stall door where somebody -- Big Hut, I figured -- wrote "Daisy" across the slats, letters colored in with pencil.

I got a big tractor jack and lifted a sagging corner of the barn high in the air. I got some come alongs and drove stakes, hooked up and was as surprised at how easily I could pull walls this way and that.

One day my son and his sidekick came up to help. They turned into an archeological team, sifting through the years of powder-dry dung, saving every old thing they found.

Turns out, it was the last mortal year for my dad to hold title to the place and he didn't seem interested in the barn until former NFL great Zeke Zwernemann and his trusty cooking sidekick Craig Rutledge showed up, at which point it became a worthy facility with Zeke and Craig eyeballing it as a combination domino hall and hunting lodge, though hunting is often secondary to cooking for them. Zeke and Craig are the heart of the Z-Bros BBQ team, the first to volunteer to cook for whatever charity needs a benefit. They're good guys.

Zeke and my dad negotiated away a Sunday afternoon and Levy Herman Old cut his last deal for the farm as master of the family estate. In exchange for development of a permanent base of operations with full hunting and farm-pond fishing privileges, the Z-Bros BBQ team agreed to contribute materials for restoration of The Lodge, as we first called it.

Remember building tree houses? It turned into that, and more. I saved every board, pulled all the nails, cut off the rot.

The cotton depression of the 1920's sent my grandfather into town - he built a big brown stone brick house on Third Street, one door down from the Methodist Church. He went on the road as a salesman a few years and my grandmother opened a hat store that turned into a ladies shop that lasted two generations. In the big barn I had a couple of huge sliding glass doors that once opened into my dad's mall entrance in his store downtown. I used them to make big picture windows. Zeke turned me loose to wreck out his old hunting camp, where I scored plywood flooring and treated 2 x 6's. He tore down a redwood fence that turned into more siding. When I started work on a kitchen, Craig introduced the concept of an ironing board as a serving buffet - the barn got not one, but two ironing board buffets.

In August the Methodists bought my granddaddy's old brown stone brick house and tore it down. I went over and loaded brick I used to make a little porch leading to the steps going into the newly- floored hallway of the barn.

I floored it with pine 1 x 8's from a one-time stall I named "The White Room."

Maybe in the 60's the master of the family estate declared that part of Big Hut's barn to be his office. Big Hut moved his stuff, the room was floored, the old glass front pine cabinet went up and everything was painted white.

The floorboards I pulled up came from Cy Roach's mill south of Mt. Pleasant. Take a piece of sandpaper and you could just about wipe that white paint off like dust.

Turns out, the barn was full of Big Hut's things -- broken saws, braces and bits, iron tools and lots of old iron rings and bolts -- even scraps of leather and iron shoe trees, things he used when he was cobbling.

The dusty old door in the rafters I ignored so many months turned out to be the door into the kitchen of the house where I grew up. Somebody kicked it in, shattering the area around the dead bolt. The house where the door hung was built in the 1890's and when I started sanding the door I found every color my mom ever painted her kitchen - that was pink in the 1960's. I varnished over the old paint, made it stand out, made a semi-clever wooden latch with boards used as splints to repair the shattered part. Big Big Hut made door latches like that. I used bed rails from his old green Chevy pickup to make a door pull.

New shelves were made from old wood, some stained, some just varnished, depending on what kind of cans of stuff I found that wasn't dried up. Evolving decor employed a shattered ceramic swan. I remember it being in the hat shop in town, and this is where it wound up when it broke. I glued together enough pieces to make it sit upright.

The book inventory grew and included a dead aunt's copy of The Modern Short Story, copyright 1939, edited by some lady at Columbia University. While she recognized Faulkner and Hemingway's bold new approaches to the short story, she certainly didn't believe them to be the only innovative new writers of the era. Some of her former students, it turns out, were every bit as innovative as the literary stars of the era. Her book was used as a literature text at North Texas.

Zeke brought a game table his bride ordered out of the house. We put it by a big window, then hung a broken mirror from a bedroom suit on the wall opposite the window, angling it to reflect light back across the table.

After dark, the same idea works with a lantern.

About an hour before sundown on a hundred-degree Sunday afternoon in September I stood with a fireman, watching as other firemen spewed what remained of the water from their pump truck on the embers of Big Hut's barn. I'd just finished a staircase going up into a little loft area I'd floored. I was proud of the way I used an old pickup camper window to let in light up there. Or a breeze.

There were seven different materials in the wall with the camper part, including a sliding glass door turned into a picture window, original 1 x 12 heart pine, salvage from a redwood fence, sheet iron from the original roof, and a decorative pattern created with alternating areas of corn-crib slats and grooved and tongued flooring Zeke salvaged.

The fireman and I were discussing possible sources of ignition. There was no wiring, though I had a great idea for that -- wire in a DC lighting system, hang a couple of leads through an exterior wall, pull your pickup up to the building, pop the hood and hook the leads on the battery.

I told the fireman that inside the barn, besides a half box of fine wine, there was gasoline, roofing tar, paint, varnish, camp-stove fuel, kerosene, cooking oil - all kinds of stuff.

Thinking aloud, I mentioned that just the day before I'd been working on an old rocker rescued from Ray McKelvy's burn pile, rubbing it down with -

"You weren't using linseed oil, were you?" my fireman asked before I said the word.

"Yea," I said slowly, a bit slack jawed.

"Soft cotton cloth?"

"Old T shirt."

"What did you do with the rag?"

"Why I saved it - pitched it up on a serving buffet ironing board, by the portable jam box radio," (a $10 second-hand store retail value.)

"That's it," he said. "Closed up, a hot day like this - that stuff's almost supernatural when it comes to spontaneous combustion."

Live and learn.

Mike Schutt, a wise man, heard about the fire and expressed his condolences.

"Rejoice in all things," I said, trying to sound at least philosophical, if not spiritual. (We were in the church foyer.) I said there were a couple of good things - I'd just taken my portable generator into the shop in town and not a week before I'd pulled the old school bus I got my wife for our anniversary away from the building to make room to work on that seven-material wall.

"So I got to keep that stuff," I said.

Such things, suggested Brother Mike, may be classified as Class B Praises.

I like that.

Besides me, my girlfriend was the only person to see the new staircase. She gushed about the landing I'd made and I showed her how I'd finally figured out a use for the old wagon tongue - "it's the banister," I said. Sometimes, when barn carpentry befuddled me, I'd stop to think and fill time rasping out rot and sanding the tongue out of Big Hut's old wagon.

My wife might have asked why I didn't find a real banister, or make one.

My girlfriend gushed at how clever I was.

I beamed. "Would you like more wine?"

"Sure, and why don't you light a lantern - turn the wick down low."

Big Hut and I were named for the same man. Levin Hudson Old. He died in 1943. While Big Hut was alive, on the farm I was "Little Hut."

I've still got to get up there and clean up since the fire. I'm ready to see what's left of the archeological record.

I've got to get my girlfriend to help me pull the old bus down by the pool below the house. I'm gonna fix it up and keep it stocked with a box of fine wine, build us a porch.

I wonder if Big Hut knows that even though he's gone, his barn was the setting where I looked again at my bride and found the old girlfriend in there.

If he does, then he understands why I was smiling, watching all that work go up in smoke, drifting to the heavens.