Stories of my Dad
I have been thinking a lot about my dad lately. I guess most people do at some point think about their parents’ from time to time, maybe one or the other. My mom died when I was young, 7 years old. I don’t really remember her very well, only some memories. My dad was around until I was in my 40’s, and that’s why I think about him more.
My dad lived life on his own terms, which I used to think this was an amazing thing, and as I got older, I realized that all people do that. The terms they live on and with are their own; I believe it is the same for everyone. My own son said something to me awhile back that reminded me of my dad. We were walking to the car to go someplace, and he stopped and looked at me, and said “dad, you walk around like you own the world”. Now what a thing for a son to say. He wasn’t telling me I was great or anything, he was just making an observation of his own. I thought about it, and that is how I saw my own dad as I was growing up. He always seemed to own the place he was standing at any given moment. Sometimes he was even bigger than life to me, even as when I was an adult and owning the world in my own right, he was always still a little bigger than life.
When I was in my forties I made a trip with my dad and step mom back to the old homestead in Kentucky; back up in the mountains of Southeastern Kentucky. At that time most of the people my dad knew when he was growing up were still alive, and some even still living in the same places. I feel fortunate to this day that I had the opportunity to go visit that place with my dad. In the little town of Caney Kentucky, the Morris family found a home back sometime around 1820. There is a Morris church, a Morris cemetery, and I am told one of my dad’s uncles own a local store; I was told another was the local sheriff who owned a still and made moonshine. You get the picture. Morris’s everywhere.
My great grandfather was a traveling preacher, one of those that had a circuit he followed every week or every month. My dad said that sometimes he walked, some time he rode a horse, or even a wagon someone would let him use. I ask my dad once (being young and stupid) how did he manage to always be in a town on Sunday. My dad gave me a look that I have never seen anyone else have, it said not exactly that are you stupid, but more are you serious and really need me to say it out loud to you, and also at the same time with a little sympathy that maybe he had not taught me all the things he should have. It was a very complex look, and then he explained that church happened on whatever day of the week his grandfather showed up. If it was Tuesday night, then church was held Tuesday night.
I tell the back ground of this because when my dad was 10 years old, his grandfather was ran over and killed by a passing train. I ask my dad how anyone could not notice a train coming. He explained, this time without the look, that his grandfather was in his late 70’s and couldn’t hear very well, and that he couldn’t see all that well either. It was late at night, and my great grandfather was walking home on the tracks because he know they ran right past his house, so that way he could make sure he found his way home in the storm. He was walking on the tracks, and the train engineer couldn’t see him either until it was too late. My grandfather was a big deal in that part of Kentucky and there is a monument on the spot where the train killed him. That was in 1928, and every year since then, a church service/reunion was held on the last Sunday in August in the Morris cemetery up on the hill to commemorate his death. That is what my dad wanted to go see when we visited, and as it turned out, it was for the last time. I think he wanted to go home one last time, and so we were there.
We arrived on Thursday night I think it was, and stayed with family. My older brother was there with two of his boys, and one of my younger brothers was there with his boys as well. We spent Friday and Saturday visiting family and friends of my dad. Every place we went, they gave my dad the most comfortable chair, or the best seat in the house, and meals were made to be sure he was taken care of. I had never seen people treat my dad like this. It was like some kind of royalty had come home. I asked my great aunt about it, and I swear she gave me close to the same look my dad gave me when I asked about my grandfather and the church services. Except hers definitely had the “you must be stupid” part to it. The only thing she didn’t say is well bless your heart, which in southern is polite for stupid. She looked at me and said, “You don’t know who your dad is, do you?” She said he cut a wide path in these parts, and no one has ever forgotten him. Then as if that had explained everything, she stopped talking.
Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting on the front porch of one of my dad’s childhood friends. You have to understand what this means. The house sat on a flat piece of land that went up hill in the back, and downhill in the front. The view was great sitting on the porch. The porch was the same length as the front of the house with a long bench against the wall. A couple of nice chairs sat closer to the door. My dad was in a nice chair, and I was on the bench with a few of his buddies from childhood. These are men who fought in World War II, both in Europe and in the Pacific. I tried mostly to listen, since these men had lived lives I only have seen in the movies. Since I was Curt’s boy, they wanted to know something about me. The conversation would go something like this. So, what do you do out in Utah. I would explain I wrote software for a living and worked with computers, talking in what is for me a normal pace. Then there would be silence, no one speaking. Each of the men leaned forward smoking. I would start to think I had said something wrong, when 5 minutes would go by with no one speaking, then one of them would say something like, “how is that working out for you?”, then silence. I wasn’t sure if I should say something or not. It was to say the least, an interesting conversation.
Curt is what they called my dad. Just to let you know a little about my dad, his real name at birth was given as Benny Curtis Morris, but he never liked the name Benny, so when he enlisted in the war, he just changed it. Told them his name was Curtis Benny Morris. It stayed that way the rest of his life. Simple thing to do back then I guess, and since no-one checked, and no one said no, it became his name.
We were sitting on the bench, and they started telling stories of their life in the war; how hard it was killing the solders on the other side, and how it took them all a long time to get over it and live life again as best they could. My dad couldn’t join in because he never left the U.S. I could tell it bothered my dad that his friends went off to the fighting war but he never did. They told him he was lucky, but I don’t think it helped my dad any. Then as is with most things when people get together, the story-telling turned to when they were all young and before the war. It was a time when they were just young men of the hills doing and living the life they wanted. They spoke of how my dad was a wild boy, had his first shotgun at 10, and carried it everywhere with him. They spoke of how he considered every place he went his home. They talked about when he was 10 or so, he was a restless spirit, so he started moving around and they would wake up and find him asleep on their front porch. They said he would stay a few days and hunt, then share what he killed and then he would be gone. In a few short years he had lost his mom and his grandfather and that he just felt the need and moved around. Since it was all family, it was always OK.
The story that stuck with me the most was when they were all 18-19 years old. They said my dad considered all of that part of Kentucky as his, and went and did as he please. I looked at my dad, and he was smiling at the memories. They went on about how there was maybe 5 or 6 of them out hunting one day, and they happened to be on the nation forest land. They said there wasn’t a whole lot of hunting going on, mostly shooting at anything that moved and missing, and just having fun and making noise. At one point a park ranger rode up and told them they couldn’t be hunting on federal land and that they had to “get”. Now the term “get” just means to get your ass someplace else, any place else as long as it is not here. The next thing they all said was they noticed my dad had that shotgun pointed at the ranger, so they all pointed their guns at the ranger too. They didn’t know why, but it seemed the thing to do since my dad was already pointing his gun at the ranger. As the story goes, my dad looked at the ranger and told him he had it all wrong. That this part of Kentucky belonged to him, and that he never wanted to see the ranger on his land again or he was going to shoot him. He went on and told the ranger he had about 1 minute to get up over the ridge and out of his site or he would shoot him off his horse. They were all laughing and enjoying the memory. They said they never did see that ranger again. My dad looked at me and said, don’t believe everything you hear. But he was laughing too. It’s one of my favorite memories of my dad. He and his lifelong buddies telling tall tales of when they walked the earth as masters of all they saw.
Sunday came and we headed to the cemetery for the reunion. There was a little over 30 or 40 people there, up on the hill under the big tree that stands at the top of the cemetery. My uncle Woordy gave a sermon and afterward everyone headed back down to the church for the lunch. My brothers and I stayed a little longer with my dad. We were walking around looking at the names and dates on the tombstones. I found the one for my dad’s grandfather and found a few more just strolling around. I stopped at one that looked different from the rest. Not bad, just different. I asked my dad about it, and he said it was different because there was no body in the grave. So I asked why, of course, I had to ask why. He said that it was supposed to be the wife of one of his relatives who had died, and the Morris’s buried here in the cemetery. He explained that her family didn’t care for the husband, so one night they dug her up and reburied her in their own family cemetery. I asked why our family left the headstone. He looked at me, and simple said, they might put her back some day. Which really meant he didn’t have a clue as to why the headstone was still there, but it was, so leave it alone.
We went back down the hill and there were over a 100 people all standing around and talking. We got in line with everyone else and filled our plates with food. I sat next to my dad and was amazed at all the people who came up to say hi and talk to him. More than one person said they had always heard about him and wanted to meet him and shake his hand. This went on most of the afternoon. My dad to my amazement knew who they all were. For me and my brothers they were all strangers. One young man, maybe 30, came up with his sons and introduced himself, my dad looked at him and said you are so and so’s boy. The man said he heard my dad would be at the reunion and so drove over from Ohio just so he could meet him and introduce his sons to my dad. This was a world of my dad’s life that I had no clue about. My aunt was right, I had no idea who my dad was to these people. I asked her if there were always this many people at the reunion, and she said no, that normally there was about a dozen. I asked her why there were so many here on this day, and she gave me that same look again and said, they are here because the word spread far and wide that your dad was coming this year. She said all these people are your dad’s family and that makes them your family. This time she came close to saying, “bless your heart”.
We left the next day, Monday, and my parents took me back to the airport for my flight back to Utah, and my brothers all went back to their homes in Georgia and Florida and my parents made the trip back to Texas. The trip changed how I saw my father, even sick as he was getting, he still seemed to own whatever land he was standing on. Whenever I visited my parents in Texas, I tried to always talk more to my dad. At that time he had the habit of getting to bed early, and then getting up about midnight for a cup of coffee. Whenever I heard him get up I would also get up and sit with him at the dinner table. I found out that if I asked him questions he was glad to talk, but you had to ask. I sometimes asked him about Kentucky, and sometimes I asked about his time in the war, but at other times we just ended up talking. I found out when he was young he made his living by being a gambler, and never had a real job for well over 10 years. Then he married my mom and got a real job, well, it wasn’t really that straight a line and there are stories in between those two events. Maybe those are stories for another time.
Sundance