Coins of the Heartland

January 6, 2023

Coins of the Heartland

For more than 50 years, my mother’s youngest brother, James Knight, has been breeding and training horses on a farm about 175 miles north of here in Garden City, Missouri. In his early years, he often showed his magic on the old Benton County fairgrounds where our school now stands. My brother and I spent many childhood summers with our Uncle Jimmy, helping with chores as best we could, occasionally sleeping on beds of hay in fairground stables. He is a teacher at heart who patiently showed us how to drive tractors, mend fences, run trot lines, and steer clear of the bone-crushing hooves waiting for those who carelessly approach the back side of a horse.

My mother’s mother, Ruth Knight, was also a teacher. She started her career in a one-room schoolhouse about 130 miles north of here. I treasure the photo of my grandmother standing proudly beside her ten students, boys and girls of all ages. But for her bobbed hair and flapper dress, the photo could be a palimpsest of her Victorian era mother who raised eight children alone on their farm after her husband was killed by lightning. Ruth was just four when she found her father’s remains in the field where he had practiced his version of paternal love and restorative justice:

"If any of us children needed to be punished, he would take our hand, and together we would search for an appropriate 'switch.' Strange enough, none were ever found that were just right, so our punishment was the walk. He was just so kind."

Spare the rod, but not the walk. Ruth inherited her father’s kindness and often expressed it with home cooking for her grandchildren. My brother and I grew to love “Mur” over stacks of silver dollar pancakes smothered in maple syrup and melted butter before heading off to the stables for a day of dusty chores and farmyard adventures with Uncle Jimmy.

In the afternoons, after washing off the stables, we would play in the den while Mur prepared dinner. When we weren’t building forts with Lincoln Logs, I would wander into her room to pour over a collection of old coins stowed in her cedar hope chest. I stacked them high and studied them closely – Chieftains in feathery headdresses, Ladies of Liberty in Phrygian caps, and countless sheaves of wheat and herds of buffalo. At the end of a hot day, there is nothing like a pile of cool coins to stir a child’s heart with dreams of freedom and abundance. They told the story of America I trusted.

By the time dinner was on the table, my mother’s father had returned to the house and settled into his version of Archie Bunker’s chair. While Uncle Jimmy tended to the farm, E. Lyle Knight tended to his real estate business. Manual labor was no longer within reach. On Christmas Eve in 1968, when he was almost 60, he lost his writing hand to a tractor-powered corn picker. The machine would have run off with his arm – and probably his life – had he not cut himself free with a pocketknife he opened with his teeth. At one point during his self-amputation, the fly wheel of the picker hit him in the face and made him drop the knife. Somehow, he maintained consciousness, unlaced one of his boots with his only free hand, retrieved the knife with his toes, and finished the job – all the while ducking the harrowing haymakers of the fly wheel.

Once free of the machine, he tied a tourniquet around his wrist, drove the tractor back from the fields to an empty house, climbed into his truck, and raced to the county hospital some 20 miles away. The truck was still hitched to a full load of corn when he walked into the emergency room under the power of adrenaline. Before allowing the attending physician to triage the stump, he insisted that the hospital call the County Co-Op and tell them to come for the corn. Ruth and E. Lyle were products of the Great Depression and did not let anything go to waste.

Our grandfather had also been a teacher in his early years, and the dinner table was one of his favorite classrooms for character education. In the gentlest way, “Pobo” would remind us to pass whatever dish we had neglected to send his way before hungrily diving into the enjoyment of our own helpings. Sitting before an empty plate, he would look at me from the head of the table and ask, “How are those tomatoes, Hawkshaw? Fried chicken tasty? Corn buttered to your liking?” – rhetorical questions he softly repeated until I returned from the euphoria of Mur’s cooking and remembered my manners.

After dinner, we would gather around the television for homemade ice cream or some other sweetness from Mur’s pantry. On a few occasions, our grandfather rose stiffly from his easy chair to peer out the front door window at headlights moving slowly up the long gravel drive toward the house, a modest single-story that stood about a half mile off the county road. He would slip into the bedroom and quietly return with a handgun at his side, continuing to study the intentions of the driver while we waited in the den. I wondered if the car was coming to take Mur’s cedar chest. “Probably just lost or looking for gas,” he would say as the headlights finally reversed course and headed back into the night.

Baby corn on the cob in the spring was a special test for a growing boy with loose teeth, and Pobo was always happy to assist with free dental extractions. He kept a pair of pliers in the tool drawer by the dinner table. I would climb onto his lap, close my eyes, and trust him to do his handiwork. The metallic taste of the pliers was strangely comforting. He would have the wobbly tooth out its socket in a flash and pop it into a jar for safe keeping until bedtime. While I slept that night, the tooth fairy would take the ivory of my infancy and leave a numismatic portrait of George Washington on the bedside table. In the morning, Pobo would gently bite the quarter and assure me that it was the genuine article, another gesture from his Depression days when counterfeit currency filled the dust bowl.

Popo’s heart finally gave out in 1998 when he was 88, two years after surgery with a full rib spreader. The cardiologist advised octogenarians against such an invasive procedure, but E. Lyle refused to meet death without one more fight. The night after the surgery, when he regained consciousness and found himself in a hospital bed, he pulled out the tubes and got himself dressed. The night watch intercepted him in the hallway on his way out the door and needed restraining belts to hold him to his bed. My mother rushed to the hospital in an effort to soothe his soul. The ferocity in his eyes, she says, would have frightened Captain Ahab. At his funeral, I read Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night,” a tribute to the man who raged against the dying of the light.

Mur was sweetness and light, and we assumed she would live forever. She passed at 98, ten years after we said good night to E. Lyle. After we moved to Northwest Arkansas, Uncle Jimmy told me a story about Mur and one of her older sisters, Mary, that I had never heard. Mary’s first and only love was a cowboy named Otis. Tragically, he drowned in a flash flood while moving cattle across the Grand River not far from the Arkansas-Missouri border. Shortly before his death, Otis had given Mary a small container of Parisian bath powder, an engagement gift she mixed only with tears until she died many years later. When Mur later took this gift into safe keeping, she detected a faint rattle inside. Upon opening it, she discovered a five-dollar gold piece dated 1894, the year Otis and Mary were engaged. Otis had hidden it there for the wedding – a gift within a gift.

Maya Angelou, the Arkansan poet and novelist, reminds us that “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The Knight family made me feel safe. I believed in the watchful eye of Uncle Jimmy as I worked with him around the horses. I believed in the gentle hand and iron will of Pobo, waiting for me with his pliers or peering into the night with his handgun. I believed in the inexhaustible bounty of Mur’s silver dollar pancakes, and those coins in her hope chest were my articles of faith. As for Mary’s belated wedding gift, that now belongs to my wife Margaret, my closest companion on this journey back into the heartland.

 

Clayton K. Marsh
Founding Head of School