There were no school buses in those days. All the children lived within walking distance of school, and walked back and forth from home to school every day. The distance might be a mile or more for some children, so the teacher had to take that into consideration when storms were approaching. The storms that came up in early or mid-afternoon would sometimes turn into all-night rains, or at least rain that lasted beyond the regular time for school to be over. The parents and the teacher didn't want students walking home in the storm, so the teacher had to judge whether or not to dismiss school early to allow each child time to reach home safe and dry.
One midafternoon, a particularly bad-looking cloud loomed up without much warning. The teacher looked out the window and decided that, unless they all wanted to be stuck at school until after dark, she should let the students go home immediately.
“Boys and girls,” she said, “I want you to listen to me carefully. A very bad cloud is moving this way. I believe you can get home before this storm hits, but you must hurry as fast as you can. Get your things now and run. Don't stop to play. Hurry!”
The students grabbed their books and lunch buckets (yes, buckets, because most students carried their food to school in little buckets that originally contained syrup), rushed out the door, and scattered in all directions. The teacher picked up her purse and some papers to grade that night and headed home herself, leaving the schoolhouse door unlocked as she always did.
One little boy had just reached the dirt road that led through the fields to his house when he realized he had left his arithmetic book at school. He had been having trouble with fractions, and his father had insisted that he bring the book home every night so they could study together. He didn't want his father to be angry, so he stopped and thought about what to do.
He looked at the darkening sky, but the main cloud still seemed to be in the distance. He knew the teacher always left the door unlocked for students who arrived early in the morning, so he decided he would go back. He hurried back to school, ran inside, snatched up the book, closed the door behind him, and dashed off for home as fast as he could.
Unfortunately, the little fellow misjudged the storm's speed. By now the storm had reached the boy, and the wind was whipping the limbs of the trees up and down furiously. He felt the cloud open up and saw a wall of rain heading right toward him. He clutched his book and wondered how he could keep it dry in the downpour. Just then he passed a hollow tree standing by the side of the road. The rain had reached him now, so he squeezed himself and his book into the huge hollow trunk.
The boy had been warned about trees like this. They were called widow makers because they often blew down in storms and killed the men who took shelter in them, leaving their wives widows. He did not heed the warning that day. He only thought of shelter from the storm, and that tree offered the only shelter available. The situation quickly turned tragic. A blast of wind uprooted the tree, crushing the little boy beneath the trunk as it fell.
The unbearable pain he was feeling brought darkness, so the boy wasn't aware that the storm soon stopped and that his father and his neighbors were looking for him. He lived long enough for them to find him and for him to tell them why he had gone back to school. He never knew that his arithmetic book had somehow remained dry and undamaged.
School was dismissed for the boy's funeral. When classes resumed, the teacher and the students missed the boy very much. They thought of him every day when they looked at his empty desk. The days came and went.
Then one day another storm headed for the school. The teacher was trying to decide if she should let the children leave when a student gasped, “Look!”
Everybody looked to where the boy was pointing. There stood the ghost of the little boy with his book under his arm, pointing toward the door.
The teacher took that as a sign that the storm was going to be bad and that they should all hurry home. She told the students to go. Remembering the fate of their former schoolmate, they wasted no time getting home. It turned out to be one of the worst storms of the year, but they felt that the ghost boy had saved them.
Until the school burned down mysteriously in a storm a year later, the ghost boy became a dependable weather forecaster. He didn't come in ordinary rain, but he always appeared if a storm was going to be dangerous.
Turkey Drive
Stories about cattle drives are common in the history of our country, but stories of turkey drives are rare. We were lucky to hear the personal stories of our grandfathers, Louis Franklin Simpson and James Milton Rooks, who participated in some of the drives.
Milton said that the turkeys sometimes had their own ideas about where they wanted to go. The men would take the family dog along to help control the turkeys, but it wasn't much help. The gobblers would spread their tails and fluff up their feathers to look bigger, and the dog would be intimidated and just stand and bark.