The Harrises

In late afternoon, I drove across town to Los Betos, a Mexican restaurant Alix had recommended after doing her usual online research. I bought too much food and took it back to the house and ate till I couldn’t eat anymore: a bean burrito, a California burrito, and three rolled tacos with guacamole and cheese. Actually, I didn’t eat it all, not in one sitting; but there were no leftovers by bedtime.

Grandpa was sleeping in the chair by the window when I arrived after dinner. I sat down beside him and watched a movie on the tv, Woman in Hiding (1949). The sound was off but the captions were scrolling at the bottom of the screen. Ida Lupino, who also directed the film, was trying to escape from a murderous husband; Howard Duffy thwarted but later abetted her efforts, and they fell in love Hollywood fast.  The two of them were either chewing gum or smoking in most scenes, sometimes both. Grandpa woke up and after a time said, “Back then, everyone smoked.”

I asked if he had smoked. “Oh, yes, till we moved to California, when I was thirty-five…. Off and on after that.” He had started smoking when he was ten. “One time I was out there at the Harrises, out on the farm, and I was smoking in the living room and Aunt Lu got mad, but I said, it’s only corn silk—I’d dry it out and smoke it—but that didn’t matter to her.”

When he mentioned the Harrises his demeanor changed noticeably; he became more animated, alert. And he talked for the next two hours, with fewer pauses and more command than any time in the last weeks.

The Harrises were his mother’s family, and for most of the first forty years of the twentieth century they lived on a farm in Leo Valley, near the town of Spalding in Nebraska’s Sandhills. His mother’s three siblings, Uncle Walt, Uncle Charlie, and Aunt Lu—none of whom ever married—lived on the farm with their mother, a small Irish woman who wore a white cap over her hair day and night. “I was an important person out there,” Grandpa said. He was their oldest grandchild, and the day school ended for the year Uncle Charlie would come to town and get him. “He said I was their hired man,” Grandpa said, smiling, giving a short laugh…. “So many things happened to me out there.”

They put him to work doing many of the same tasks as the men, driving a team, cultivating corn and wheat and barley, taking care of the white-faced cattle, later in the season carting threshed wheat to the storage sheds…. “Course, not all the teams matched,” and as the kid Grandpa wouldn’t get the best team. “They’d put my pony and a mule together, and that mule was lame; it’d got its leg caught in a fence once and never did heal right…. The pony would be pulling along too fast, the mule too slow…. So once, we came to edge of a field, to where the fence was, the grass all grown up, and I cut myself a piece of cottonwood sapling. Once we got going again I poked old Mike [the mule] in the rear, and he kicked right back, kicked me in the hand….” He held up his hands, to show how he was holding the reins. “I couldn’t believe it, it was so fast.” He laughed, and shook his head, to indicate how fortunate had been to dodge injury.

But Mike the mule’s orneriness could be more serious. Grandpa told about how one time he kicked Uncle Charlie in the head; there was a lot of blood. “And the worst was that the pigs—this was out by the barn—the pigs just got in there and were eating up all that blood out of the mud. Terrible.” Uncle Charlie had to be taken to the hospital in Grand island. “Part of his cheek never came back. But he was lucky, that kind of kick could kill a person. He had a scar from his ear to his mouth, and he carried it with him the rest of his life.”

Later the Harrises sold out and moved to Idaho, following Grandpa and his family. “Charlie, he had a place there at the college, in Caldwell…. He was a general…what do you call it?...seeing that everything’s cleaned up?” I suggested “maintenance man,” and Grandpa agreed. “He was like you, if he ever wanted to go somewhere, he just walked. Say across town, to this café where he liked to have his dinner, three miles, every night. He never did learn to drive a car…. He was sort of like that rabbit and turtle story, and he was the turtle….” Grandpa paused, snorted in happy prelude to another detail, then said, “You know he never wore anything but overhauls. You’d never see him in anything else. He had a new-like pair, not roughed up, that he saved for Sundays.”

Uncle Walt took up farming again when they first reached Idaho, on thirty acres outside New Plymouth. “But he didn’t stick with it. He went to work out at Simplot’s,” an ag company, big in potatoes, and probably still Idaho’s largest corporation.

Aunt Lu bought a house across the alley from her sister, Liz, Grandpa’s mother, “over behind the Baptist church.” She did various sorts of work. “She took people in for dinners and stuff…. They always did some kind of job that kept ‘em going.”

After a short pause, Grandpa shifted back to Nebraska…. “Mom was always taking me and Chuck [his younger brother] out to visit family, not just the Harrises but the Sullivans and the Higgins…. Grandma Higgins, she was a nice woman but you wouldn’t have known it…. She didn’t think much of young kids, at least in the house…. Chuck and I was over there this one time, I was about six, and we was jumping about and making noise or something, and she got mad…. There was this long dining table…. For, I don’t know, maybe ten people…. And she started chasing the two of us around that table, around and around, and after about four times we was ahead and we seen our chance and we cut across the living room, and out the door and down into the yard. Safe.”

Grandma Higgins, in her youth

The yard made him think of one of the Higgins boys, Lloyd Higgins. “He was older than me, and this one time we was out by the corral and he said, ‘I want you to see this, you probably haven’t seen this before.’ He was smoking a cigarette, and he took it and put it in his horse’s mouth and then that horse smoked it…. But I didn’t much like Lloyd for this one thing he’d do: I’d be walking along, and he’d get behind me and reach around and pinch me here on the neck, hard”—he indicated a spot near the front, beside his adam’s apple. “That made me so cotton-pickin’ mad…but he kept doing it.”

When he was in his late twenties, on the spur of the moment, Grandpa accompanied some of the Sullivans, who had also moved to Idaho, on a visit back to Nebraska. “That was during Lent, when we got back there,” he said. “And you’re not supposed to drink or anything. But those Sullivans were for going down to the bar, and I went too, and we broke loose of those rules.” That would’ve been in 1947 or 1948, and he’s never been back again, though Nebraska is the location for most of the stories he tells. I said, half-jokingly, half-serious, that if he would get a plane ticket to Omaha some time, I’d pick him up and we’d drive to Spalding and Greeley and have a look around. He smiled, but said, “Oh well, all those people are gone now.”

Soon he launched into other anecdotes, about a night in jail in Grand Island when he was eleven, about his father’s trucking business and the time his father rolled his truck when it was loaded with furniture….Stories I’ve heard many times. I finally stopped him, at dark, long after I’d planned to leave, and said, tell me more tomorrow, and then I biked back to the house and ate the rest of the burritos, sitting in Grandpa’s recliner and watching tv though nothing good was on.