Tuples and Attributes

Two more episodes as related by my grandfather:

During the winter of 1891-92 a scourge of diphtheria came to our rural community. Most of the cases were light. My little brother, Willie, came down with it. Within four days he was dead. In a few days I came down with it. After three days the doctor said there was no hope for me and that I would soon be gone. Mother had watched my brother, Willie, die; so she got a long hat-pin, sterilized it in the fire, and dug at my throat by the hour, and kept it open so I could breathe. Finally the crusting in my throat began to subside, and I was out of danger. For about three months after I was able to be out of bed, I could not walk, because, as they said “It had settled in my legs”. I think, instead, it was because of the horrible medicine that the doctor had prescribed that my legs could not be used. To this day, I sometimes feel that same pain in my hip. Very few boys are indebted to their mother two times for their life.

During the winter of 1896, my grandmother Blue had had an accident. She had fallen through a board while riding in a hayrack, and fell through onto the hard road. Soon she was on her death bed, evidently from a kinked intestine. Mother was staying with her, caring for her, and on the day of my next accident, father had gone to town on business.

My elder brother, Irvin, had gone for the cows, to bring them home to be milked. When he got back, he said that one of the cows had a little calf and I would have to go help him bring them home. It was less than a mile from home. On the way I had picked up some ears of corn from the cornfield to entice the cow to follow along. I threw her an ear of corn but she did not seem to see it, so I stooped down to pick it up. The cow jumped at me and knocked me over on my back. She hooked me with her sharp horns. Her horns passed through my coat on one side of the row of buttons, and came out on the other side of the row of buttons. She threw me up on top of her head and ran bellering with me on top of her head to the top of the hill about 25 rods from her calf.

I fell off there on top of the hill and fell into a dead-furrow (the name for the place in a plowed field where the dirt has been thrown both ways and left a ditch). I straightened out in the dead-furrow and each time the cow tried to hook me, she would run her nose in the ground. After several attempts to hook me, and having stepped on my legs a couple of times, she left me and went back to her calf. I got up and was so scared that I, seemingly, could not make one leg move past the other. However, when I finally realized where I was, I had gotten clear to the valley, and my brother was trying hard to catch up with me from the creek bank where he had taken refuge.

First I noticed my cap was missing. (It was several days before I got courage to go look for it.) Then I noticed that my coat was torn nearly the full length of the front on each side of the buttons. I asked my brother if he thought mother would give me a licking for getting my coat torn. My coat was new, made from the back of an old coat father had worn out. How I wish that I had preserved that coat to this day. Mother had no more gray cloth like the coat, so she patched it by putting in pieces of strong cloth, brown on one side and red on the other.

Father later went after the cow and calf, and tied her in the barn, and cut off the ends of her horns. I can still feel the thrill of joy that we boys had in getting a long pole and jabbing the cow by the hour making her beller. I had no injuries except a bruised chest and some bruises on my legs. Needless to say, mother did not lick me.