My Guest Author today is my lovely aunt as she shares her passion
of family and keeps their memories alive.
I never knew my brother, Jack. He was born nearly 20 years before me and he died when he was only 14 but he lived a life that affected many.
Mama and Daddy were married on the 4th of November 1916. It was a mild fall day, gathering up for a full-fledged winter in the Melville country. They were married at my Uncle Ed’s. There is a little piece of Mother’s wedding dress in a treasure box. It was white wool with blue flowers.
I have to make up details to suit myself, but they had a nice lunch there and then loaded a few donations and gifts in Granny’s wagon. They would ride their horses along with the Uncles and Granny up country towards the Sweet Grass Canyon, some eight miles into the mountains. Granny Brannin and the bachelor uncles lived there on homesteads they had acquired. There often were a few who also went along just because they enjoyed the company, but in that group was Ernest Parker who was a partner with my Daddy in the sawmill business. They had bought the sawmill from Uncle Ed and were ready to get into business. No need to figure Mother in as camp cook as she had learned horse wrangling but not the skill of cooking, however Ernest had been on his own since he was 12 so he would instruct the feisty little gal.
The logging camp was set up a couple of miles beyond the Brannin homeplace, a rustic cabin, bunkhouse, and the sawmill on the side hill. There are still the remnants of the cabin, a rotted out log or two or at least I claim there is. As they settled in, so did winter and in March baby Jack decided to be born right there and then. Ernest was enlisted to get on his long-legged horse and plow through the drifts to get Granny, but in the meantime, my Daddy, Bud Ward was stoking the stove, sweating and boiling water for whatever reason and Mother and God were delivering her firstborn baby boy. Tiny little guy, he fit in a shoe box and when he wasn’t in my Mother’s arms he was near the warming oven of the stove.
An old Chinese proverb says that a child much loved has many names, or maybe one of my uncles said that. John Carrington Ward, carried the full array of English names that represented my Daddy’s family he had left at 16 years earlier to explore Canada and USA. But he was called Jack, Dyke, Montgomery Ward, Wardie or Baby Jack, doted on by his family and extended family.
By the time they could plow their way out of the Crazy Mountains in June, the Doctor pronounced him a genuine baby boy and by the time he was one year old, he weighed 12 pounds and could run without ducking under the table. I can see my Mama packing him on her hip down to see Granny or snagging him off a stump to ride with her on Spider. She always loved dolls and now she had her very own.
That next years were the years of WWI and Daddy, an enthusiastic American, gathered Ernest and my Uncle Barney and Uncle Sid and enlisted, going to France as an engineer in the sawmill division and Mother took little Jack to live with Granny. Many times, the little man got in trouble for something his Uncles taught him, but he was well loved and learned confidence, a little mosquito, a favored companion to everyone.
No sooner was the war over, and the men returned when they fought another war. Fire raged along the side of the canyon, an insult to their home, but God turned the beast back on itself and life went on. I see pictures of Jack squatted down playing around under the feet of a horse, riding on a pet bear or a pig, playing in mud puddles though Mother kept him a safe distance from the sawmill. I know he perched on Daddy’s knee and rode “a cock horse to Bamberry Cross to see a fine lady upon a white horse.” And he trusted Ernest’s growly instructions.
Even tiny boys grow up and though Mother, an avid reader had only managed, off and on, six years of school, Daddy was a strong supporter of education; so little Jack was left with the Evangelical Preachers family to stay in Big Timber, at least three hours away, to go to school. (I don’t know how my Mother could let him go.)
Being a fearless gregarious fellow, he enjoyed the fellowship and company, I don’t know about the academics. Because I lived the same way to go to school, I know it would be a long time before Mother and Daddy would get to Big Timber to see their school kids and in Jack’s case a much longer time; so what is a guy to do, but pack up and head for the hills. It was forty miles to the sawmill, twenty miles to Melville and twenty miles on from there. Jack caught a ride with the mailman to a few miles beyond Melville, now Perry Anderson’s. (Now how do you suppose this little kid talked the mail man into that?) He would hoof it over the hills home from there. Remember he is little in stature and few in years.
During the night, the Uncles saw a campfire up on the hill by the Lone Pine and figured it was a hunter but the next morning little Jack showed up at the ranch. That is a long and lonely trip, but that little boy could.
He went back to school and participated heartily, at one time taking a very hard blow to his head as he had put a bucket on his head and another boy hit the bucket with a bat. Whether this was the start of the tumor or not, who knows, but Ernest noticed Jack losing his balance and they took him to the Doctor to find out he had a tumor on his brain. Mother would take him to Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and they would use radiation. Ernest generously used his Spanish American War retirement to finance these treatments. Gradually Jack was confined to home and by now he had sisters, Ellen and Barbara and brother Buck.
Men regularly came to the sawmill to buy lumber and they almost became family as they were invited to eat and stay over, and they quickly took to the spunky boy. One man, a bit infamous, made a special trip to see Jack and left in tears at the sight of the crippled in body but not spirit, lad. Mother would massage the cramps out of his limbs. He would talk about his confidence in heaven and wrote out his will, leaving his cow and watch etc. to his brother and sisters and one day God relieved the little boy who could, and a community of admirers wept.
Mary Jane Andrews 9/2019
