VERNE AND GUSTY
By Jack Harrell
Understanding who we are is often a process of looking outside of ourselves, to our culture, family, friends, and the ancestors from whom we sprang. When I joined the Church in 1982, I was barely out of my teens, and so forward-looking that it took me years to begin to look back to the people I came from. My first step toward understanding my family history came in 1990, when I asked my mom to tell me about her parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Williams. I told her I wanted to learn about their work, their character, and the things common to them in the late 1920s and early 30s, when she was growing up on their farm two miles outside of Iola, Illinois. Mom sat down at the kitchen table in Parkersburg, Illinois, one morning and talked into a cassette recorder for an hour. Then she sent the tape to me in Utah, where I was attending BYU. That tape sparked an ongoing conversation between us, about the way my grandparents lived, the skills they had, and their personal characteristics—both good and bad—that made them who they were. Through the course of this conversation, I learned a lot about my grandparents, but I also learned to understand myself more fully as I grew to appreciate their world—a world of hard work and skill, wholesome food, good music, and life close to the land.
My grandfather, Verne Green Williams, was born in 1893, and married Augusta Tackett—whom he called “Gusty”—in 1914. Grandpa Williams farmed several crops, grew fruit trees, and raised livestock. Grandma had chickens and sold eggs. She sewed the children’s clothes and worked with my grandpa, cutting wood and harvesting crops. Out of necessity, Grandpa and Grandma worked together. His work in the field, and her work in the kitchen—cooking, preserving, and canning foods—were two necessary parts of one whole: providing for their family. When my mom was a young girl, in the late 1920s, Grandpa farmed with horses and mules. They went into town once or twice a month for things like needles, sugar, rope, peanut butter, mason jars, salt and spices, nails, kerosene for the lamps—all the things they couldn’t make themselves. They bartered corn and wheat for cornmeal and flour at the mill, but most of what they used was produced right there on the farm.
They butchered their own meat, but because Grandma didn’t like beef, they didn’t butcher any beef. Grandma loved pork instead. When it came time to butcher a hog, it was an all day job, involving Grandpa, Grandma, and all children, when they each got old enough to handle a knife, cutting and sorting the meat. Grandpa always waited until it was cold enough, in November or December, to do the butchering, so the meat wouldn’t spoil before they got it cured. He used his rifle to shoot the hog between the eyes, killing it instantly, so it would drop where it stood. A stout, 250-pound man, Grandpa could flip a hog on its back after shooting it, and then Grandma would hand him a razor-sharp butcher knife. Grandpa would cut the hog’s jugular, and the animal would bleed and kick out of reflex, which helped get the blood out. Sometimes a neighbor would help, and sometimes Grandma would help lift the hog into a slanted barrel of hot water set up near the pigpen. They would dip the hog in and out of the hot water to scald it so they could scrape the hair off. Grandpa would use a wire-stretcher, the kind he used to pull the fence wire tight, to pull the hog by its two hind legs until it hung from the limbs of the walnut tree near the house. He positioned a tub underneath the hog and gutted it. Grandpa was so good at shooting and cleaning a hog that other men asked him to come over when they were ready to butcher.
Grandpa quartered the hog and took most of the meat to the smokehouse to cure it, rubbing a mixture of salt and brown sugar into the meat every day for a week or two, until all the blood was gone and the meat was thoroughly cured. Grandma always cooked up the hog’s liver first thing, having it for supper that day, because that was Grandpa’s favorite. They ate the brains, the heart, and the sweetbreads—the pancreas. Working in the closed-in back porch so the dogs couldn’t get to things, Grandpa and the family trimmed the fat off the meat and the organs and Grandpa would put the fat in a big black kettle to boil it down and render it into lard, which Grandma used when she cooked. She also took the leftovers from rendering the lard, the “cracklings” it was called, and used it when she made soap. After Grandpa cured the meat in the smokehouse, he took an old sheet and wrapped up the meat tightly, using string or wire to keep it fixed. Grandma sewed the sheet so the meat was sealed completely, to keep flies from getting in and producing maggots.
Grandpa would grind some of the meat in a hand-crank sausage grinder they fastened to the end of a table on the porch. Putting the ground pork into a big tub and adding seasonings—salt, homegrown sage, and red, white and black pepper—he made sausage patties that Grandma would fry up on the stove. She’d get three or four skillets going at once, frying patty after patty all afternoon long. She put the cooked patties inside five-gallon stoneware crocks or quart jars, pouring the grease over them to seal them off from the outside air. These crocks and jars were put in the root cellar, where they’d stay good for a year or more. When the family wanted sausage for breakfast, Grandma went down to the root cellar with a spatula and pried some patties out of that hardened grease. Then she took them to the kitchen to heat them on the stove. The grease from the sausages was good for gravy, and she cooked eggs in it too.
Good pork meat was only one of the many things they produced on the farm. Grandpa Williams had forty acres of rich bottomland. He plowed straight rows and couldn’t stand a weed in his cornfield. In my mom’s words, “He stressed perfection all the time.” He grew potatoes and always kept the potato bins full. He kept a hundred pounds each of soup beans, black-eyed peas, and butter beans in gunnysacks in the back of the house. He had calves to sell when they needed money. He had hogs to sell and hogs to butcher. They had blackberries in the summertime and peaches and apples in the fall. Grandpa even kept beehives to provide honey. “Always plenty to eat,” Mom said. Grandpa liked to eat. He liked to have plenty. He didn’t like to do without.
Grandma canned all kinds of fruits and vegetables, cooking strawberries and blackberries and other fruits down into jelly on the wood-burning cook stove. There was always a kettle of something cooking on the stove, Mom said, something being canned or something being prepared for the next meal. Grandma made hominy out of the corn by soaking it in lye and wood ashes, and in the fall there was a pan of hominy and a pan of pumpkin cooking on the stove all the time, because Grandpa like fried pumpkin for breakfast, and the kids liked hominy. One of my mother’s fondest memories is coming home from school on a rainy fall day in late September and smelling the ketchup her mother had cooking on the stove.
They had Jersey cows, and they milked the cows and skimmed off the cream to sell. They drank the milk, calling it “blue john,” and when five gallons of cream was put aside, Grandpa took it to the train station and shipped it off to the Beatrice Dairy Company in Springfield, Illinois. Beatrice tested the level of butterfat in the cream and sent back a check. In the cold of winter, from January to March when there wasn’t much to do on the farm but take care of the animals, Grandpa and Grandma went out to cut wood. When my mother was too little to go to school—she was the youngest—they took her along in the wagon. Grandpa would trim a few branches off a dead tree and make a little fire to keep her warm, and Grandma would bring a sandwich or some peanuts to keep their little daughter busy while Grandpa and Grandma used a crosscut saw to cut down the trees. When the trees were cut into logs, Grandpa split the logs with an ax to make firewood for the fireplace and the cook stove.
One year, my mom recalls, Grandpa made a cistern to bring clean water into the house. The well water in the area was all hard water. Grandpa wanted soft water, because soap curdled in hard water and left soap flakes on the clothes. So he dug a hole, twelve feet deep and seven foot across, off the kitchen window. He hired some men to cement it up. He put rain gutters around the house to catch the water, and a downspout to drain it into the cistern. He made a brick chute that looked like a chimney and filled it with charcoal, coal, and gravel, to filter and purify the water. Then he put a hand pump in the kitchen to pump the water in from the cistern. They drank that water, cooked with it, and washed their clothes in it, too.
My mother was about seven years old when the Great Depression hit. I ask her once about the effects of the Depression on her family, and she answered, “We were poor, but everyone was poor.” Because their livelihood was more connected to the land than it was to the stock market, they had a little bit of everything even when the economy was bad. They had walnut and hickory trees, and in the fall they’d pick up the fallen nuts and put them in gunnysacks. Before his own crops were ready to harvest, Grandpa went north to shuck corn for extra money. Grandpa went to the fruit orchards in the area and picked up the drop apples and peaches—those that had fallen to the ground—for fifty cents a bushel.
When the chicken eggs hatched, Grandma would put all the little chicks in a box, and if the weather was cold, she’d bring them into the kitchen by the stove to keep them warm. Then it was “Cheep, cheep, cheep,” all night long, my mom said. When the chicks were a few days old, Grandma took them out to the brooder house, where the little chicks hovered around the kerosene brooder stove to stay warm. Sometimes the chicks pecked at each other, and if one was weaker, he’d get picked at all the more. Once a weak chick started to bleed, the others would peck at it until it was dead. Mom said she often thought this was just like people, with their tendency to pick at someone weaker until they pick that person to death.
Grandpa and Grandma’s life wasn’t all work, though. In the wintertime, or in the summer on a Saturday night, people had music parties. Grandpa was a left-handed fiddle player who didn’t restring his fiddle. He just reached across and played the strings backwards. Grandpa bought their musical instruments out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, the same place he bought shoes, tools, coats, and furniture. I still play a Sears and Roebuck guitar Grandpa bought for $18 for my mother in 1935. My daughter plays the violin Grandpa bought my mother back in those days too.
When it was time for a music party, people around Iola gathered at someone’s barn to play their fiddles and mandolins, guitars and banjos, harmonicas (which they called “French harps”), and sometimes someone would bring a big double bass. No one brought sheet music, because most of them couldn’t read it anyway. They played the songs everyone knew by heart, like “Devil’s Dream,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” and “Boil Them Cabbage Down.” People pulled taffy and made popcorn and candy. Some played and sang, some danced, some just enjoyed the music and visited with friends. Some would drink a little, and once in a while someone would get drunk and pick a fight.
Everyone in the Williams family loved music. Grandpa played fiddle and Grandma sang. When my mom and her sister Lottie Ellen were in their teens, after the family got a car, they started performing together at music contests, many of which were aired on local radio stations. Lottie played mandolin, my mother played fiddle, and they both sang. They often won cash prizes at these contests, which allowed them to pay Grandpa for gas to put in the 1930 Chevrolet. If they won first prize—two or three dollars—they split the money and had enough for gas and enough to buy a store-bought dress for fifty cents or a dollar. Once my mom bought a “circle skirt” made with fifty gores—fifty triangular panels—that was very much in style at the time. She could sit on the floor with that skirt on and those triangular panels would spread out on the floor and form a perfect circle around her.
My Grandpa was a skilled farmer who enjoyed music and could butcher his own hogs, but he wasn’t always easy to get along with. He didn’t have a lot of patience, not even with himself. As Mom says, he was “particular.” He was stingy with his money, but he wouldn’t buy junk. He wouldn’t own anything that was poorly made. He bought quality things and took care of them. When he and Grandma hung wallpaper in the house, the lines had to be straight up and down. Grandpa did most of the hanging himself because he wanted it done right. When they visited someone else’s house, he’d notice if their wallpaper was crooked, and later he would comment on it to the rest of the family. Sometimes on the way home he’d stop the wagon if he saw crooked rows of crops or weeds in the field. He’d say, “Now, Gusty, just look at those crooked rows!” Or, “Look at those weeds. I wouldn’t have weeds like that in any of my fields!” And he wouldn’t. His rows were straight. His fields were weed-less. He worked hard to keep them that way, and didn’t rest until things suited him.
He kept his tools sharp. Every tool in the barn was hung on the wall, clean and out of the weather. His wagons were kept in good condition—axle grease on the wagon hubs, for example—and he parked the wagon in the barn so the weather wouldn’t damage it. He wasn’t so good to the horses, though. Grandma would say the horses needed more than just corn and hay. She’d say, “Verne, you’ve got to give them horses some oats. They wear out if you don’t give them oats.” But oats were expensive, and Grandpa was stingy. He never gave the horses enough oats to suit Grandma.
Grandpa had a temper, and he was hard on the animals. Once Mom saw him get angry at a mule. He talked to the mules and horses as they worked, telling them to “gee and haw”—turn to the right or to the left—and he yelled at them if they trampled the crop. One day as he drove a team of mules to the end of a row, one of the mules stepped on a little corn stalk just a few inches high. Grandpa started shouting at the mule, hitting it on the neck and face, and finally, he bit the poor old mule on the face so hard it drew blood.
At other times he lost his temper with his family. Once, when Mom and the other kids were a little older, after they’d bought the 1930 Chevy, Grandpa got mad at Mom’s older brother, Bernard. On the way home from a dance in town on a Saturday night, Bernard had run the Chevy into a ditch, and Grandpa had to get the tractor to pull it out. When Grandpa got Bernard and the car back to the house, he took Bernard out to the barn and whipped him with the horse strap.
Mom also remembers a time when she was a little girl that Grandpa got mad at Grandma. She can’t remember what had gotten him angry, but Grandpa made Grandma sit on a stump behind the house all morning long while he sat on the back step with a shotgun across his lap. While Grandma sat on the stump, she tried to talk to him, but he only looked away. He never hit Grandma or raised his voice to her that my mom ever witnessed, but that particular day he was mad at her, and he was going to make sure she didn’t forget whatever it was that had displeased him.
As I listen to Mom’s stories about Verne Greene and Augusta Tackett Williams’ lives, I think it’s the mixture of their virtues and shortcomings that fascinate me the most. Seeing them at their best and their worst is what makes them real. I can understand them better because I know they were human. The past seventy years has brought so much change. Farming with mules, butchering hogs in the back yard, having music parties in the neighbor’s barn—that’s a world I’ll never know. But when I think of my grandfather’s straight rows of corn, I want to be the same kind of man, a man who takes pride in his work and does a good job. I don’t want to be the kind of man who horsewhips his son, but that story reminds me that each person on earth is an amazing mixture of divinity and flesh. Any person with faults is also a person with virtues, who should be judged accordingly.
Though our worlds are so different, I can’t help but feel an affinity toward Verne Greene Williams. I admire his skills, his knowledge, his experience. I can understand a man who wants his tools sharp. I can understand a man who loves music, good food, and quality work. Like my grandfather, and my mother who took after him, I love to have things orderly and clean. I love to see things tended to—to see things cleaned, painted, trimmed, mown, polished, pruned, straightened, tuned, decorated, sorted, cooked, and finished. In that sense, learning about my grandparents has helped me to understand myself. Like them, I want to be industrious. I want to be skillful. I want to live a good life and find some joy along the way.
I don’t love these stories about my grandparents because I want to butcher hogs. I love them because they teach me more than what my own narrow experience has given me. History, even a family’s history, can have the same effect on us that we experience when we look in a mirror. As we casually glance at our own face—a face we think we know so well—something unpleasant or unusual catches our attention. We stop. We look more closely, trying to understand ourselves. We strain to find something beautiful, something good, something that will allow us to walk away and feel better. If we look long enough, we might see beyond the eye’s pleasant sparkle or the skin’s ugly blemishes. If we look honestly enough, we might see through to the soul, that mixture of divinity and flesh so worthy of redemption.
By Jack Harrell
Understanding who we are is often a process of looking outside of ourselves, to our culture, family, friends, and the ancestors from whom we sprang. When I joined the Church in 1982, I was barely out of my teens, and so forward-looking that it took me years to begin to look back to the people I came from. My first step toward understanding my family history came in 1990, when I asked my mom to tell me about her parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Williams. I told her I wanted to learn about their work, their character, and the things common to them in the late 1920s and early 30s, when she was growing up on their farm two miles outside of Iola, Illinois. Mom sat down at the kitchen table in Parkersburg, Illinois, one morning and talked into a cassette recorder for an hour. Then she sent the tape to me in Utah, where I was attending BYU. That tape sparked an ongoing conversation between us, about the way my grandparents lived, the skills they had, and their personal characteristics—both good and bad—that made them who they were. Through the course of this conversation, I learned a lot about my grandparents, but I also learned to understand myself more fully as I grew to appreciate their world—a world of hard work and skill, wholesome food, good music, and life close to the land.
My grandfather, Verne Green Williams, was born in 1893, and married Augusta Tackett—whom he called “Gusty”—in 1914. Grandpa Williams farmed several crops, grew fruit trees, and raised livestock. Grandma had chickens and sold eggs. She sewed the children’s clothes and worked with my grandpa, cutting wood and harvesting crops. Out of necessity, Grandpa and Grandma worked together. His work in the field, and her work in the kitchen—cooking, preserving, and canning foods—were two necessary parts of one whole: providing for their family. When my mom was a young girl, in the late 1920s, Grandpa farmed with horses and mules. They went into town once or twice a month for things like needles, sugar, rope, peanut butter, mason jars, salt and spices, nails, kerosene for the lamps—all the things they couldn’t make themselves. They bartered corn and wheat for cornmeal and flour at the mill, but most of what they used was produced right there on the farm.
They butchered their own meat, but because Grandma didn’t like beef, they didn’t butcher any beef. Grandma loved pork instead. When it came time to butcher a hog, it was an all day job, involving Grandpa, Grandma, and all children, when they each got old enough to handle a knife, cutting and sorting the meat. Grandpa always waited until it was cold enough, in November or December, to do the butchering, so the meat wouldn’t spoil before they got it cured. He used his rifle to shoot the hog between the eyes, killing it instantly, so it would drop where it stood. A stout, 250-pound man, Grandpa could flip a hog on its back after shooting it, and then Grandma would hand him a razor-sharp butcher knife. Grandpa would cut the hog’s jugular, and the animal would bleed and kick out of reflex, which helped get the blood out. Sometimes a neighbor would help, and sometimes Grandma would help lift the hog into a slanted barrel of hot water set up near the pigpen. They would dip the hog in and out of the hot water to scald it so they could scrape the hair off. Grandpa would use a wire-stretcher, the kind he used to pull the fence wire tight, to pull the hog by its two hind legs until it hung from the limbs of the walnut tree near the house. He positioned a tub underneath the hog and gutted it. Grandpa was so good at shooting and cleaning a hog that other men asked him to come over when they were ready to butcher.
Grandpa quartered the hog and took most of the meat to the smokehouse to cure it, rubbing a mixture of salt and brown sugar into the meat every day for a week or two, until all the blood was gone and the meat was thoroughly cured. Grandma always cooked up the hog’s liver first thing, having it for supper that day, because that was Grandpa’s favorite. They ate the brains, the heart, and the sweetbreads—the pancreas. Working in the closed-in back porch so the dogs couldn’t get to things, Grandpa and the family trimmed the fat off the meat and the organs and Grandpa would put the fat in a big black kettle to boil it down and render it into lard, which Grandma used when she cooked. She also took the leftovers from rendering the lard, the “cracklings” it was called, and used it when she made soap. After Grandpa cured the meat in the smokehouse, he took an old sheet and wrapped up the meat tightly, using string or wire to keep it fixed. Grandma sewed the sheet so the meat was sealed completely, to keep flies from getting in and producing maggots.
Grandpa would grind some of the meat in a hand-crank sausage grinder they fastened to the end of a table on the porch. Putting the ground pork into a big tub and adding seasonings—salt, homegrown sage, and red, white and black pepper—he made sausage patties that Grandma would fry up on the stove. She’d get three or four skillets going at once, frying patty after patty all afternoon long. She put the cooked patties inside five-gallon stoneware crocks or quart jars, pouring the grease over them to seal them off from the outside air. These crocks and jars were put in the root cellar, where they’d stay good for a year or more. When the family wanted sausage for breakfast, Grandma went down to the root cellar with a spatula and pried some patties out of that hardened grease. Then she took them to the kitchen to heat them on the stove. The grease from the sausages was good for gravy, and she cooked eggs in it too.
Good pork meat was only one of the many things they produced on the farm. Grandpa Williams had forty acres of rich bottomland. He plowed straight rows and couldn’t stand a weed in his cornfield. In my mom’s words, “He stressed perfection all the time.” He grew potatoes and always kept the potato bins full. He kept a hundred pounds each of soup beans, black-eyed peas, and butter beans in gunnysacks in the back of the house. He had calves to sell when they needed money. He had hogs to sell and hogs to butcher. They had blackberries in the summertime and peaches and apples in the fall. Grandpa even kept beehives to provide honey. “Always plenty to eat,” Mom said. Grandpa liked to eat. He liked to have plenty. He didn’t like to do without.
Grandma canned all kinds of fruits and vegetables, cooking strawberries and blackberries and other fruits down into jelly on the wood-burning cook stove. There was always a kettle of something cooking on the stove, Mom said, something being canned or something being prepared for the next meal. Grandma made hominy out of the corn by soaking it in lye and wood ashes, and in the fall there was a pan of hominy and a pan of pumpkin cooking on the stove all the time, because Grandpa like fried pumpkin for breakfast, and the kids liked hominy. One of my mother’s fondest memories is coming home from school on a rainy fall day in late September and smelling the ketchup her mother had cooking on the stove.
They had Jersey cows, and they milked the cows and skimmed off the cream to sell. They drank the milk, calling it “blue john,” and when five gallons of cream was put aside, Grandpa took it to the train station and shipped it off to the Beatrice Dairy Company in Springfield, Illinois. Beatrice tested the level of butterfat in the cream and sent back a check. In the cold of winter, from January to March when there wasn’t much to do on the farm but take care of the animals, Grandpa and Grandma went out to cut wood. When my mother was too little to go to school—she was the youngest—they took her along in the wagon. Grandpa would trim a few branches off a dead tree and make a little fire to keep her warm, and Grandma would bring a sandwich or some peanuts to keep their little daughter busy while Grandpa and Grandma used a crosscut saw to cut down the trees. When the trees were cut into logs, Grandpa split the logs with an ax to make firewood for the fireplace and the cook stove.
One year, my mom recalls, Grandpa made a cistern to bring clean water into the house. The well water in the area was all hard water. Grandpa wanted soft water, because soap curdled in hard water and left soap flakes on the clothes. So he dug a hole, twelve feet deep and seven foot across, off the kitchen window. He hired some men to cement it up. He put rain gutters around the house to catch the water, and a downspout to drain it into the cistern. He made a brick chute that looked like a chimney and filled it with charcoal, coal, and gravel, to filter and purify the water. Then he put a hand pump in the kitchen to pump the water in from the cistern. They drank that water, cooked with it, and washed their clothes in it, too.
My mother was about seven years old when the Great Depression hit. I ask her once about the effects of the Depression on her family, and she answered, “We were poor, but everyone was poor.” Because their livelihood was more connected to the land than it was to the stock market, they had a little bit of everything even when the economy was bad. They had walnut and hickory trees, and in the fall they’d pick up the fallen nuts and put them in gunnysacks. Before his own crops were ready to harvest, Grandpa went north to shuck corn for extra money. Grandpa went to the fruit orchards in the area and picked up the drop apples and peaches—those that had fallen to the ground—for fifty cents a bushel.
When the chicken eggs hatched, Grandma would put all the little chicks in a box, and if the weather was cold, she’d bring them into the kitchen by the stove to keep them warm. Then it was “Cheep, cheep, cheep,” all night long, my mom said. When the chicks were a few days old, Grandma took them out to the brooder house, where the little chicks hovered around the kerosene brooder stove to stay warm. Sometimes the chicks pecked at each other, and if one was weaker, he’d get picked at all the more. Once a weak chick started to bleed, the others would peck at it until it was dead. Mom said she often thought this was just like people, with their tendency to pick at someone weaker until they pick that person to death.
Grandpa and Grandma’s life wasn’t all work, though. In the wintertime, or in the summer on a Saturday night, people had music parties. Grandpa was a left-handed fiddle player who didn’t restring his fiddle. He just reached across and played the strings backwards. Grandpa bought their musical instruments out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, the same place he bought shoes, tools, coats, and furniture. I still play a Sears and Roebuck guitar Grandpa bought for $18 for my mother in 1935. My daughter plays the violin Grandpa bought my mother back in those days too.
When it was time for a music party, people around Iola gathered at someone’s barn to play their fiddles and mandolins, guitars and banjos, harmonicas (which they called “French harps”), and sometimes someone would bring a big double bass. No one brought sheet music, because most of them couldn’t read it anyway. They played the songs everyone knew by heart, like “Devil’s Dream,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” and “Boil Them Cabbage Down.” People pulled taffy and made popcorn and candy. Some played and sang, some danced, some just enjoyed the music and visited with friends. Some would drink a little, and once in a while someone would get drunk and pick a fight.
Everyone in the Williams family loved music. Grandpa played fiddle and Grandma sang. When my mom and her sister Lottie Ellen were in their teens, after the family got a car, they started performing together at music contests, many of which were aired on local radio stations. Lottie played mandolin, my mother played fiddle, and they both sang. They often won cash prizes at these contests, which allowed them to pay Grandpa for gas to put in the 1930 Chevrolet. If they won first prize—two or three dollars—they split the money and had enough for gas and enough to buy a store-bought dress for fifty cents or a dollar. Once my mom bought a “circle skirt” made with fifty gores—fifty triangular panels—that was very much in style at the time. She could sit on the floor with that skirt on and those triangular panels would spread out on the floor and form a perfect circle around her.
My Grandpa was a skilled farmer who enjoyed music and could butcher his own hogs, but he wasn’t always easy to get along with. He didn’t have a lot of patience, not even with himself. As Mom says, he was “particular.” He was stingy with his money, but he wouldn’t buy junk. He wouldn’t own anything that was poorly made. He bought quality things and took care of them. When he and Grandma hung wallpaper in the house, the lines had to be straight up and down. Grandpa did most of the hanging himself because he wanted it done right. When they visited someone else’s house, he’d notice if their wallpaper was crooked, and later he would comment on it to the rest of the family. Sometimes on the way home he’d stop the wagon if he saw crooked rows of crops or weeds in the field. He’d say, “Now, Gusty, just look at those crooked rows!” Or, “Look at those weeds. I wouldn’t have weeds like that in any of my fields!” And he wouldn’t. His rows were straight. His fields were weed-less. He worked hard to keep them that way, and didn’t rest until things suited him.
He kept his tools sharp. Every tool in the barn was hung on the wall, clean and out of the weather. His wagons were kept in good condition—axle grease on the wagon hubs, for example—and he parked the wagon in the barn so the weather wouldn’t damage it. He wasn’t so good to the horses, though. Grandma would say the horses needed more than just corn and hay. She’d say, “Verne, you’ve got to give them horses some oats. They wear out if you don’t give them oats.” But oats were expensive, and Grandpa was stingy. He never gave the horses enough oats to suit Grandma.
Grandpa had a temper, and he was hard on the animals. Once Mom saw him get angry at a mule. He talked to the mules and horses as they worked, telling them to “gee and haw”—turn to the right or to the left—and he yelled at them if they trampled the crop. One day as he drove a team of mules to the end of a row, one of the mules stepped on a little corn stalk just a few inches high. Grandpa started shouting at the mule, hitting it on the neck and face, and finally, he bit the poor old mule on the face so hard it drew blood.
At other times he lost his temper with his family. Once, when Mom and the other kids were a little older, after they’d bought the 1930 Chevy, Grandpa got mad at Mom’s older brother, Bernard. On the way home from a dance in town on a Saturday night, Bernard had run the Chevy into a ditch, and Grandpa had to get the tractor to pull it out. When Grandpa got Bernard and the car back to the house, he took Bernard out to the barn and whipped him with the horse strap.
Mom also remembers a time when she was a little girl that Grandpa got mad at Grandma. She can’t remember what had gotten him angry, but Grandpa made Grandma sit on a stump behind the house all morning long while he sat on the back step with a shotgun across his lap. While Grandma sat on the stump, she tried to talk to him, but he only looked away. He never hit Grandma or raised his voice to her that my mom ever witnessed, but that particular day he was mad at her, and he was going to make sure she didn’t forget whatever it was that had displeased him.
As I listen to Mom’s stories about Verne Greene and Augusta Tackett Williams’ lives, I think it’s the mixture of their virtues and shortcomings that fascinate me the most. Seeing them at their best and their worst is what makes them real. I can understand them better because I know they were human. The past seventy years has brought so much change. Farming with mules, butchering hogs in the back yard, having music parties in the neighbor’s barn—that’s a world I’ll never know. But when I think of my grandfather’s straight rows of corn, I want to be the same kind of man, a man who takes pride in his work and does a good job. I don’t want to be the kind of man who horsewhips his son, but that story reminds me that each person on earth is an amazing mixture of divinity and flesh. Any person with faults is also a person with virtues, who should be judged accordingly.
Though our worlds are so different, I can’t help but feel an affinity toward Verne Greene Williams. I admire his skills, his knowledge, his experience. I can understand a man who wants his tools sharp. I can understand a man who loves music, good food, and quality work. Like my grandfather, and my mother who took after him, I love to have things orderly and clean. I love to see things tended to—to see things cleaned, painted, trimmed, mown, polished, pruned, straightened, tuned, decorated, sorted, cooked, and finished. In that sense, learning about my grandparents has helped me to understand myself. Like them, I want to be industrious. I want to be skillful. I want to live a good life and find some joy along the way.
I don’t love these stories about my grandparents because I want to butcher hogs. I love them because they teach me more than what my own narrow experience has given me. History, even a family’s history, can have the same effect on us that we experience when we look in a mirror. As we casually glance at our own face—a face we think we know so well—something unpleasant or unusual catches our attention. We stop. We look more closely, trying to understand ourselves. We strain to find something beautiful, something good, something that will allow us to walk away and feel better. If we look long enough, we might see beyond the eye’s pleasant sparkle or the skin’s ugly blemishes. If we look honestly enough, we might see through to the soul, that mixture of divinity and flesh so worthy of redemption.
