2010 Wyoming Writers Contest Winner - FICTION FOR CHILDREN

Tin Man

by Rex C. Myers

          “Tin Man is the craziest of all us crazy souls homesteading in Dakota,” Mother laughed, looking up from biscuits neatly nested in the campfire Dutch oven.  He lived way up Whitetail River.  But gossip dribbled down with summer’s trickle of muddy water.  “Bachelor farmer,” Mother also called him; a man who put down stakes without wife or family.        

I met Tin Man at a cabin raising, late June.  Best part of summer.  A family gathered logs, and then set a date.  Scattered homesteaders came together sure as ants at a sugar cube.  Women cooked; men gee-hawed logs and sod.  Perfect age, being ten:  old enough to help men; or carry cooking water; or play with new friends.

 “Richard Williams,” the tall man said when I brought around the water bucket.  “Thanks, young man.”  He drank two dippers, straight away.

“You’re Tin Man,” I said.

He laughed.  Others, too.  Father stepped forward.  “That’s not polite, James.”

“I don’t mind.”  Tin Man waved an arm as if brushing aside a grasshopper.  He looked at me kinda hard.  “You know how I got that name?”

“Because you have tin cans on your house.”  Men and older boys stopped working to enjoy conversation. 

“That’s right.  And why do I do that?”

Wind rustled grass in the silence.  Everyone said he was crazy.

 “I don’t know.  Mr. Williams,” I added his name, ‘cause being polite can smooth edges off awkwardness.

“Folks say I do it ‘cause I’m crazy.”  He grinned, eyes circling the audience.  Little wrinkles at the edges fanned up to reflect his smile.  “I know what they say.  But you come see me.”  He turned to Father.  “Send him next time you have cans.”  His invitation drifted out across prairie twisting around in dust devils.  His hand rested on my shoulder, heavy as a ten pound flour sack.  “I’ll show you how crazy I am.  And thanks for the water.”  He picked up his adze and bent back into cabin raising.  

So few trees in Dakota.  Not like Ohio.  “Scarce as silver dollars,” to Father’s thinking.  Cottonwood, mostly, bunched like wind-blown leaves caught in coulee-creased flat prairie.  Whitetail River clipped the northwest corner of Father’s quarter section -- our one hundred sixty acre future, to be mostly wheat, some corn and Mother’s garden.  A necklace of homesteads strung along water and trees like square beads.

 Father and my older brother, Paul, collected river bottom logs for a cabin.  We all camped alongside our wagon on what Father called a “bench.”  Six of us:  me, Father and Paul; Mother, Emily and Rachel.  Paul’s older, like I said.  Turned fifteen on our trip out.  I’m next; Emily’s eight and Rachel’s but five.

When Father figured we had enough logs for cabin raising – “A week from next Saturday” -- I finally got a chance to see Tin Man’s place.  Paul took one horse, Becky, and rode south along Whitetail to let folks know.  I got Ginger to ride north.  Mother also gave me a bag of tin cans.  Most from tomatoes, but some peaches, two oysters, and the rest canned milk.  I’d washed each one, careful not to bend them and “Make things difficult for that crazy Tin Man.”

          Tin Man built his cabin of sawed boards he got at Grier’s lumber yard.  Grier was our nearest town.  I hadn’t been there, yet, but that’s where the railroad came.  Father would take his grain in fall, and, if the price was good, get us new clothes, or candy, or, well, Christmas presents.  Emily, Rachel and I already started our dreams about Christmas.  I had, anyway.

          “Look who’s rode this far on his own.” I handed Tin Man the can bag before I got down.  “You thank your Mother for me, young man.”  He disappeared inside.  I climbed off Ginger and studied his cabin.  Tin Man re-emerged.  “You figure it out?”

          “Yes, sir.”  And I had.  Tin Man took cans, flattened them and made shingles.  Overlapped up the side of his cabin, row after row.

          “Tin snips.”  He held up what looked like big scissors.  “Cut out ends and flatten ‘em.  Works good as shingles; not that you can buy shingles in this treeless country.”

          “They’re rusted.”

          “Yup.   Them old ones.  But new ones shine like silver.  Back here,” he led me around to the west side.  “Back here I’ll put ones your Mother sent.  That’ll just about finish it.”  We studied a remaining rectangle of bare wood, four feet square.  “You remember to tell her ‘thank you,’ like I said.”

          I promised, again.

          His cabin, the back part, did shine.  I saw it that afternoon returning from my Paul Revere ride telling people about our cabin raising.  Right in the middle of rusty feather shingles, he’d nailed up Mother’s new cans.  They caught sun, bright as mirrors.

          “Didn’t I tell you?” Tin Man crowed.  “Silver feathers on my big prairie chicken.”  I decided he wasn’t crazy, just making do without trees. 

          Our cabin got raised and turned out first rate with two glass windows Mother brought from Ohio in the wagon – each had nine little clear panes in rows of three.  Three times three is nine.  I memorized multiplication tables up to twelve times twelve, which equals 144 and that’s also called a gross. 

          And we got the garden harvested and put up in jars, pickled in crocks, or packed in the root cellar before mid-September frost brought a glittering end to summer.  I figured we were pretty well set for winter, ‘til Grier Grain didn’t pay as much for wheat as Father hoped.  “Caught between railroads and grain elevator corporations,” he explained.  Next year he planned for forty acres, though.  “We’ll see if that doesn’t bring a little better return.”

Father’s last wagon of wheat had room for us all to visit Grier.  Wow.  I watched a steam engine move box cars so men could shovel them full of wheat.  I might be an engineer, some day.  Or a store keeper.  Thomas Grier ran the biggest one I’d ever seen with things you didn’t even know you needed ‘til you saw them:  a Barlow pocket knife, fishing poles, a single shot rifle, and so much more. 

“We should all dream,” Father said.  He took us out for supper at the hotel. Paid fifteen cents a piece for victuals, with pie and coffee.  “Treat your mother for all her hard work.”  Apple pie – a delicious wedge of lightly browned crust woven over apple slices, tinged with cinnamon and sugar.  Riding back in the dark, still tasting memory of pie, curled into blankets with my sleeping sisters, it first hit me.  We didn’t buy anything for Christmas.  What’s more, I felt pretty sure we wouldn’t be going back to Grier.

          Worry starts out, sometimes, no bigger than an apple seed.  But whether you tend to it or not, the thing takes root and grows faster than a tumble weed.  Hard as a coil of twisted barbed wire, its roots hang on like they had a fist full of your thinking and won’t budge.  Well, that’s how my Christmas worry grew.  A reappearing weed in my garden of holiday hope.  Bigger and uglier each time.

          Rachel could ask about Christmas.  When you’re five-going-on-six you can do that, even in October.  Young children are supposed to be excited.  I suppose even Emily could do it at eight.  At ten, I felt pretty sure asking about Christmas didn’t fit with a “young man’s” proper behavior.  So I didn’t.  But I thought about it.  Like I said, no sooner had my mind taken to remembering last Christmas in Ohio, or anticipating this year’s in Dakota, then bang!  That worry weed popped up.

          Not that I had much money to buy Christmas presents even if Father took us back to Grier.  I’d saved money in a baking powder can.  A shiny dime Uncle Bill gave me for good luck before we left Ohio.  It had Miss Liberty sitting in her chair like a Queen

Tin Man

Victoria.  Uncle Bill showed me wheat, corn, maple and oak on the back side.  No maples or oaks in Dakota, but we sure grew wheat and corn.  I had the nickel Mrs. Poindexter, our Ohio neighbor, gave me for getting her cat out of the tree.  Big “5” on one side.  Then four pennies, each with their Indian chief.  We hadn’t seen any Indians yet, although Father said there were lots of them around.  He called them Sioux.  Nineteen cents wouldn’t buy much Christmas. 

Worry about presents disappeared pretty quickly, however, once I decided I could make them.  With my pocket knife.  Mother wanted our cabin to “look like a home,” so I’d give her a promise, a premium like you won at the fair, for sun flowers carved in the cabin door.  Rachel’s and Emily’s presents came to me just as fast.  Rachel wanted a kitty and Emily, a dog.  I mean they wanted real ones, of course, but also toy ones for their dolls.  I could do those, pretty easy.  I’d whittled a cow and buffalo already, so figured cats and dogs looked about the same, only smaller.  And Paul gave me an idea for his present himself:  fishing.  Whitetail didn’t have fish, but not far west was Clear Lake.  Paul thought he’d fish there next spring.  I made bobbers.  Perfectly round out of cottonwood.  I untwisted old barbed wire making loops to stick in each bobber.  Paul could tie his line to the loop and it would work just grand.

For Father present, I had the hardest time.  But midway into November, he and I worked with the little barrel we used for Mother’s water.  Put in the kitchen, and kept full, we wouldn’t have to haul water every day and particularly when things froze over, like they did more and more in November.  Any how, he had trouble getting the bung back into the barrel.  “I sure miss my mallet.” We’d lost it somewhere on the trip:  “Probably floating down the Mississippi.”

That did it.  I set to work on a mallet; a good one with a dried willow handle.  Thick willows are perfect handle size.  And cottonwood, of course, for the mallet part itself.  Like I said, Christmas presents didn’t worry me much after I figured them out.  Others also started behaving secretively, like me sneaking outside to whittle. Mother and Emily sewing stuff, I could use a new shirt, and Rachel cutting paper pieces, probably making a picture. What Paul and Father were doing, I couldn’t even guess.  I didn’t peek, though.  That wasn’t fair.  Or asking for hints, either. 

But the weed that kept getting larger and larger as I worried about Christmas was a tree.  I’d been pretty far north up Whitetail, and Paul down south past where the railroad trestle crossed the river.  I asked him about it.  We’d been to Grier and back.  I even tried to remember from our trip west.  Same conclusion:  no pine trees. 

          Not that my worry needed any water, but Father and Mother as much as admitted we wouldn’t have a tree.

          “I miss pines and cedars once the leaves are gone,” Mother said.

          “Not a one to be seen or had,” Father agreed.

          That “or had” part I jumped on like chickens when you scatter feed.  Father tried to get a Christmas tree, I felt sure.  None of the homesteaders would have one.  Not along Whitetail, anyway. 

          Snows came, and cold.  We discovered holes in our cabin chinks we didn’t know we had until wind blew through them.  Father daubed in mud.  Mother didn’t like it

Tin Man

much, but we also hung deer hides on the north wall.  She talked about wall paper or using newspapers if we had newspapers.  For now, hides helped stop the wind. 

First week of December, Father and Paul announced a trip to Clear Lake “to check on wood supplies.”  I made myself pretty obnoxious until they agreed to let me go along.  I figured Father meant to scout out a Christmas tree, and I wanted to be part of the expedition.

Clear Lake is beautiful.  Even froze over.  Paul reaffirmed his plans to fish there come spring, so I felt good about his bobbers.  But Clear Lake had neither pines nor cedars.  Father even tried “a different way home.”   Those coulees held only bare branched cottonwoods, and brush.  Nothing suitable for a good Christmas tree.

More snows came and cold got even colder the week before Christmas.  We didn’t go out much except to feed horses.  And we still had a few chickens.  We ate most of them, plus coyotes got a few.  Mother hoped to have “one rooster and a few hens” for spring eggs.  Chickens didn’t seem happy.

Wind.  Father said all the flat prairie gave wind a “good run” at us.  It sure blew.  Dusty grit on everything in summer and fall.  Now snow.  Wind could take sparse snow flakes, gather them behind the cabin or near a bunch of bushes, and stack them into impressive drifts.  Bare ground here; drifts knee deep right near by.  Mom said it “howled.”  You could hear it some times like worried ghosts or spirits moaning around cabin corners.  I thought it roared like wintry dragons with deep voices – hrummmmm, hrummmmm.  Under my quilts at night I’d listen and imagine dragons out on the prairie.  Big, fearsome, flying in the wind, melting away bare patches with a blast of fiery breath. 

All of us hunkered in the cabin, more like chickens than dragons.  From time to time, we’d secret ourselves in corners working on presents; all of us too aware that this Christmas we wouldn’t have a tree to put them under.  Mother was sad as us kids.  On the 20^th, she dug out her six ornaments and we hung them on the south wall with space cleared beneath for presents.

Then near sundown on December 23rd, a Tuesday -- my turn to set table for supper -- we heard it.  Faint at first, sound tumbled in the wind like weeds or snow.  Nothing to keep us from work.  Then again.  We all stopped to catch it, but gone.  Once more.  You’d swear the jingle of sleigh bells sifted through chinks and around deer hides on little wisps of wind that tickled the lantern candle flame. 

“You hear that?”

“Sleigh bells.”

“Santa!”  Rachel believed.

“It’s too early.”  Emily wanted to believe but understood calendars.

“Sure enough, though,” Father reaffirmed.  “Sleigh bells.”  The jangle got closer.

“Hello the cabin.”  It sounded like Santa.  “Hello the cabin.  Anybody waiting for Christmas?”

That did it.  Emily and Rachel beat Father to the door, but he made them wait until we had coats on.  Mother handed him the lantern.  Father opened the door.  Dark.  But tinkling sleigh bells swept in on snow-peppered gusts of wind.

“There’s the Patterson family.”  I knew that voice.  “Can’t stay long, but brought you all a present.”  Father held up the lantern.  It sure looked like Santa’s sleigh, a dark silhouette in blowing snow.  Instead of eight reindeer, however, two mules stomped impatiently against the cold, ringing sleigh bells hanging from their harnesses.  . 

“Dick?”  Father’s voice cut into darkness beyond lantern glow.

“Tin Man, it is.  With a Christmas tree.”  He jumped down, went around back of his sleigh and produced the most wonderful pine I’d ever seen.  Tall as himself, frosted with snow.  He thumped it on the ground, turning it for us to admire.  Perfect.

“Richard Williams,” Mother chided.  “You are crazy.  Get inside and warm up.”

Tin Man brought the tree into our cabin.  Yes, sir.  The most beautiful one ever.

“Can’t stay long.”  He closed the door and handed it to Father.  “Got trees for all the homesteaders, but only half of ‘em delivered.”

Father just stood there, like the cat had hold of his tongue. 

“Little Missouri.  West of here some miles.  Lots of pines and all us out on the prairie needing ‘em.  Figured it was the least I could do.”

“You sit down Mr. Williams and warm yourself,” Mother insisted.

“Not ‘til I parcel out these trees.”  He looked at us kids.  “What’s Christmas without a tree, I say.  Don’t you think I should deliver trees to other boys and girls?”

We nodded, dumbstruck as Father.

Tin Man turned to leave; opened the door just slightly, then twisted himself back into the room.  “Oh, yes.  James.  Got something for you.”  I stepped forward.  “Thanks for bringing them cans.  I’ll give you one back.”  He dug around in his heavy wool coat producing a silvery tin star. “For the top of your tree.”

I took it, cold in my hand, but glowing with warmth that made this the best Christmas ever.  Tin Man closed the door into the snowy darkness, and sleigh bells jingled off across our treeless prairie.