Tommy Thomson's Cabin
Copyright Joanne Harris 2006
Most of the events described here happened around 1937-38, somewhere in there.
I’ve thinking about when we moved to the cabin and when Mother worked on it. The trees burning. There was quite a bit of burning done around the cabin, snags and downed logs, things like that. We couldn’t have been living there at the time.
Once Mother, Daddy, Fritz and I, maybe Audrey, but I don’t remember who else, were working on the cabin. They had been burning and there were places where stumps had been burned out. You know how you can walk on ashes and make patterns in them? I walked into an ash pile where a stump had been and my foot sank into this pile of embers and ashes. I was wearing high top tennis shoes without shoe laces and my foot came up full of coals. Fortunately I was very near the creek. I shrieked and made a mighty leap into the creek. Even so, I had blisters all around my ankle and the upper part of my foot.
We had brought with us a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a roll of toilet paper that day. Mother smeared my burns with peanut butter and wrapped the foot with toilet paper. There were scars on my foot for a few years. It was not a life-threatening accident and my foot still functioned. The main problem with it was pain.
We must have been staying at Tommy Thomson’s cabin while we were working on ours. Tommy had a cabin over near Frank and Jenny King’s. We stayed there off and on for almost a year. At this stage, I remember this thing and that, but not in order, and now everybody’s dead except my sister Andrea and me. My brother, whom I used to refer to when I wanted to know what was going on, is gone, so I have to rely on my memory and the pictures we have of that era.
We had a few adventures at Tommy’s cabin. That’s where we met Louie Parenti, or “Louie the Indian.” My mother said he was a French-Canadian Indian. But we just called him Louie the Indian. There was no racism in that. He was just one of the mountaineers.
Louie lived straight up the mountain above Tommy’s cabin, about a mile with his pack of wild dogs. In fact, our German Shepherd dog that we had for several years, Mamie, was one of Louie’s pups. So we saw him from time to time.
Once Louie killed a mountain lion. He heard his pack of pups barking, and he went down to see what was what. The pups had treed a lion. The lion was sitting in the tree deciding which pup he was going to eat first, but Louie shot the lion and killed him.
We ate part of that lion. When you live in the mountains and shoot your own food, you don’t always get a deer with a rack of antlers. The trusty hunter doesn’t always come in with a month’s food over his shoulders. You get what you get.
We had a couple of goats when we lived there. Mother had them for milk for us kids, and I can see my uncle, my mother’s brother Norwin Austin, trying to catch them to milk them. In my mind’s eye I see him running and whirling a lasso over his head.
Mother said that if anybody left the door open the goats would run in and jump on the bed and piss. Once she was sitting outside reading a book when somebody drove up. She put the book down and went over to the car and when she turned around, the goat was eating the book. These goats were a lot of fun and a lot of mess. Audrey had to milk them. If I was five, she was eleven. She had to do quite a few things like that.
Once Audrey, Fritz, Beverly and I had been told to “clean up our area,” whatever that area was. Somebody had thrown sweepings into the stove that included a 30.30 cartridge. We were all standing around the stove when the cartridge exploded. It was a tin stove, not cast iron. Little pieces of shrapnel flew and mother got some in her leg. The stove lid flew into the air and lit on my sister’s head. It was exciting. I was the youngest one. I don’t remember if my cousin, Dana Austin, was there, but he would have been just my age.
More about life at Tommy's cabin next week.
