Don Brander and Maxine Learn, longtime neighbors in the small town of Proctor, were talking on the phone with one another one warm day in August.
The conversation got around to a long-ago neighbor and his family. Don was remembering the chimney fire that burned their little farm house down to the ground. He recalled how neighbors from all around came to their aid, trying to save as much as they could for the family with three small children. Don was telling Maxine how he remembers carrying their still-burning wood stove out of their 2-story home with his bare hands. He remembers looking back and seeing Hazel, the young feisty redheaded mother, pregnant with her fourth, trying to save a mattress by pushing it out a second story window. The stairs were smoking, her husband was gone and she was trying to save what little she could: pictures, keepsakes. But most would soon be gone.
"What a fire that was!" Don was remembering.
That was yesterday. Today, 55 years after that fire, two of the three surviving children, drove into the same community in rural Montana.
Terry Newell and I, Lynda Newell Backman, first pulled up to the little church where we had attended as children. Peeking in the windows, camera shutters clicking, Terry and I were trying to capture some memory of when we sat in those same pews.
Surprisingly, not much had changed. Although, the ceiling to floor oil painting our father, Jack, had painted for the little congregation was gone. It was a painting of Jesus, with arms extended in welcome and bigger than life behind the pulpit. That was a disappointment.
After taking a couple final pictures together on the front steps, I peeked around the back, there was a small fenced graveyard and, yep, there it stood, the outhouse. It was, in fact, this outhouse that especially amused my oldest brother Tracy on a return visit a few years ago... as he called it, "the 2-holer." That may not seem too strange, but there was no partition in those 2-holers and from what Terry says, they weren't that uncommon, but he says he doesn't remember more than one person using a 2-holer at the same time. Well, except for the time my mother was caught in there with a bear. But that's another story for another time.
With more to see, we started to walk away. Terry, with his wife Beverly at his side, getting in his truck they had driven up from Texas. Myself, with my husband Don Backman in our car we drove up from our home in Olympia WA. As I opened the car door to leave, I glanced over to the house next door.
What would it hurt just to ask if the people who lived there knew anything of the history of the church next door. While I was taking pictures through the old wavy glass of the church windows, I had been incredulous to find pages of very old Sunday School attendance records sitting within sight. I could actually that there were some of my best friends' names on it! Maybe I could get a closer look. I walked over to the house next door, up the steps and knocked on the old worn carved oak door. A very elderly sweet-faced gentleman appeared. He was the retired former pastor, Jim Dickinson, and although he had moved into the community the same year Terry had graduated from Polson High and left to join the Navy, Jim said he knew of the Newell name.
He was delighted to open the church for us. We all followed him back over next door, him talking all the way about what he could remember of the past. As he unlocked the door he started apologizing profusely for the dust and mess.
“No need to apologize!” I said. Little did he know the pleasure he was providing by unlocking not only the door, but many memories inside here for us.
I felt part of myself still tucked away
here somewhere and in the dell nearby
where lay the ruins of my childhood home. A feeling foreign to me this
connection for as a child growing up Ihad attended 12 schools in 9 years.
Connection wasn't a feeling I experienced. Memories were deep, emotions strong. I was surprised how strong. The old sepia picture on the wall of Jesus as a boy teach in the temple, the old organ -exciting in their familiarity.
I walked over to the desk by the window that held the rolled up & yellowed Sunday school attendance sheets. I read Susan and Sandy Helper’s names. I see their faces clearly.
Other names - our babysitter, Marvel and chubby, fuzzy haired Virginia. The Masterson kids! All 10 of them.
The Masterson family took us in after our home burned down. That made thirteen kids all together. I remembered the big table where we all sat during breakfast. Pancakes. A big tin bucket of peanut butter, another container of honey. I still love peanut butter on my pancakes. For lunch it was often just a glass of torn pieces of white bread, sprinkled with sugar and milk poured on top. I remembering really liking it then. Uck! Really? Hunger and not knowing better, I suppose.
And what a happy person I remember Verna Masterson being. I would soon find a picture of her husband, Lee, on the wall of the nearby school house – as a young man. I never pictured him as young! Verna was brown-faced and solidily slender, always cheerful. And there they were, her children’s names written in neat cursive pencil….Gale, Donnie, Clark, Dale, Elery, Carol, Doris…… It all came rushing back. Memories of bottle feeding an orphaned fawn - the feel of it sucking the bottle right out of my small hand. Bathing the younger children in a large tub sitting atop two old wood chairs facing each other. That was Carol and my job, young as we were ourselves…using the same water for each youngster in turn.Other memories came, rounding up their milk cow with the older boys, licking the saltlick (all having own spot of course – didn’t want to share germs with each other – no thoughts that we were sharing with the cattle or what other animal!), watching for rattlers in the grass and in the rock piles, listening to Lee sing along wi
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Verna
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Jim Dickinson excused himself a minute, as he phoned someone. When he returned, he told us he had just called a neighbor Maxine who had the key to the old school house.
Maxine had told him, ‘Curious, I was just talking to Don yesterday and he had mentioned that fire of ’57.’
Jim said this as if he wasn’t talking about us…or maybe he thought the memory was a painful one. He was full of information for us, helpfully trying to remember where that painting might have gone. He had set up a time for us to meet Maxine at our old schoolhouse. After visiting and taking more pictures, we thanked Jim profusely and he wished us good day.
Proctor School: 2 rooms, elementary on one side, high school on the other.
The drive to the school was a short one. It could almost be seen from where we were at the church. As we pulled into the gravel drive, we were met by Maxine. She was ready with the key to let us in. The school from the outside looked very much the same as when we attended. The bell still in it's place. The wall's peeling white paint and, yes, the outhouse right across the gravel drive. The smell of dust and old wood again met us as we entered. Wonderfully, only a few things had been update. Yes, there was a flushing toilet. Two large rooms, the high school side was still the same except for one updated green chalkboard.
Terry and I found two old class pictures on the wall. One familiar, one we had never seen before. I am not sure if Terry noticed it, but whoever typed the names under the picture (updated in a new frame) listed Terry as a Masterson. There were so many of them! And we were living with them at the time.
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Terry is here taking a snap of the photo; his reflection captured up against his own reflection as a child. I'm in the lower left sitting near his feet. |
Although we were in different grades, the pictures included all the students from 1-8, all 20 of them. Strangely missing were any pictures of our brother Tracy. Tracy was the family member who kept us all up-to-date on one another as adults; always calling, checking in and the one and only member of the four siblings who kept in touch with relatives in Montana. My heart ached a little that Trac' was not here. He would have loved being here with the both of us. Being the oldest, he remembered the most and had many more stories to tell. But we lost Tracy to cancer a few years ago.
From there it was a 2 mile drive to what used to be our property. We knew it very well since we had walked it 5 days a week for years. I reminded Terry how he had fallen asleep in a large snow drift alongside the road on one of those walks home –on a bitterly cold winter afternoon. And how mom was so mad at Tracy and I when we arrived home without him – leaving him alone in the snow asleep! I can still hear her yelling at us!
We pulled up to the barbed wire gate with the same familiar latch: a simple loop over top and bottom of the post. My husband lifted it open and let us step through. Terry soon disappeared into the tall grass. On a hunt for the familiar.
Terry standing where the house would have been.
And we did find some remnants here and there. It was strange that there was even anything left after such a long time. We found the chimney liner thrown aside behind what used to be the house. The culprit. A chimney fire had taken the house.
Terry recognized the pie cherry tree, picked some and handed them to us.
The cherry tree, so many years later, feeding us again!
Next we found the foundation where Dad had started to build a home for us but never finished. All I know is, our neighbors, the Powells, bought the destroyed homesite and it’s 80 acres back then and now it sat, so many years later, the area around the house and barn just exactly as it had been. The back 40 had been harvested recently as big discs of hay sat atop the hill.
While we were walking the property we noticed a man repairing a barbed wire fence on the other side of the gravel road. We crossed to talk. It was Ernie Learn. Still living on the same land he on which he was born. His wife, Maxine, had called him to say we were in town. He talked with us as he worked, he said a herd of elk had torn down the fence again. He was a very stoic man, not very expressive. Once he warmed a little to us, he told us the story of how our mother saved the hand of his small cousin when he had almost cut through his entire hand with a chain saw. He remembered how mom, not knowing how to drive a stick shift, drove him all the way to the hospital in Kalispell 35 miles away...in first gear. The doctors saved the hand.
"To this day," Ernie said, "he can grip good; all except his little finger curling up tight."
Just his taking the time to tell us that added information spoke to how important it is, especially in these parts where men have to work very hard on their land, to have a grip.
I think to have the guts, strength, loyalty and all the rest it takes (I can’t imagine and will never know) to work this hard for this long to maintain a home here. To make a go of it. I admire these Proctor people!
He said goodbye just as nonchantly as he said hello. As if we'd always been here and we'd be back tomorrow. So matter of factly. Is that the Montana way? I don't know. I've been away way too long to know.
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| A shot of the three of us at the ranch |
© Lynda Newell Backman
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