CyberChildren


'Ollie Oxen Free' is what we yelled as children when we made it back to safety, usually our snake stump, without being captured while playing hide-n-go-seek. Our old snake stump is a traditional part of our farm in rural southeastern Oklahoma. Our farm has a small swampy lake on it full of fish, frogs and every venomous water snake you can think of including, the very deadly and very aggressive Water Moccasin.

Our snake stump is a dead and spooky looking tree stump hollowed out by age on water's edge of the lake providing an excellent home for Water Moccasins, one of the deadliest snakes around. We choose the stump for safety simply because it adds extra excitement; making it to safe does not mean you are. Around our parts, a venomous snake bite is considered fatal. By the time you make it to Doc Sheriden, some twenty or so slow mule miles away, you are dead. The nearest hospital is over a hundred miles farther over in Tulsa, much too far to reach by mule.

Walking down a cow path to our lake, all of us children carry head high sticks to whack at rattlesnakes often sunning themselves while waiting for unwary innocent bare feet to startle them into striking. Each bare step increases our excitement and fear in coming closer to the dark and dank snake stump where Grandma always reminds us not to go. She says a hundred year old cranky Mama Water Moccasin lives in there. We always become wide eyed when Granny tells us of children who vanish. It is known to all, the old Moccasin living in the snake stump feeds children to her babies.

"Doc" Sheriden, our local doctor, is treating me for Scarlet Fever one winter. Being a kind old gentleman full of local gossip and lore he tells me the story of how Mama Moccasin catches kids to help take my mind off painful injections he is giving me with a horse needle the size of a Santa Fe Railroad spike. I swear he is using a claw hammer to drive it into my tender little butt, an inch at a time.

"Okpulot Taha," he always calls me by my Choctaw name to show respect in my being honored by local Indians for becoming an orphan. They honor crazy people the same way, "..why that old mama snake is pert near the size of a Missouri mule's hind leg and its hide is tougher than dead catfish skin. Old Crazy Hawk over in Choctaw Town says he saw the snake once, right close he tells it. That Indian said it has fangs even bigger than sixteen penny nails. She kinda coils all up like a bedspring in that old stump and waits for kids. All of a sudden like, that snake flies out her stump through the air faster than greased lightning." I flinch and squeeze a few tear drops out of my eyes in pain with those words when he stabs a needle deep into my rear end. Looking back at my bare bottom I can see he is injecting what looks like a cupful of raw milk. "Then it coils up all around a hapless kid slowly tightening up, choking 'em. When that Snake from Hell," the word 'Hell' made me flinch even more. That was a word when spoken around adults would get ya hauled out by an ear to the wood shed for a damn good switching, "...got a good grip, she sinks her fangs right in the kid's neck and begins spitting poison right down his throat. Real quick like that kid falls to the ground just stupefied." I felt the cold chill of rubbing alcohol on the other cheek and grit my teeth. "Then she drags 'em by his head back in her stump and hangs 'em upside down by his toes. Her baby snakes crawl all over the kid bitin' and sucking blood for food. I reckon it takes 'bout a week for a kid to die like that. Right slow like."

Hanging by my toes or not, his second shot hurts like Hell and causes me to cry and holler like there is no tomorrow. Granny comes in having heard all my commotion. Doc Sheriden takes her aside, they quietly talk but I hear, "Mrs. Marrs, if you don't make that gall darned fool headed child stay inside out of the cold weather she is gonna die."

Farm life is not seasonal as many believe. Regardless of the season, hot or cold, every single day is filled with work. Spring is for turning the soil and planting your winter stores. Summer is for tending growing crops. Fall is for harvest. Winter is for tending stored crops and smoked meat. Farm animals don't stop eating nor stop having needs simply because it is winter. About the only difference on the farm in winter, is you wear your boots and if you are lucky, with socks. During ice storms of winter in southeastern Oklahoma, is when the most people take ill and die. I lost my mother to an exceptionally cold winter. We also lost a lot of valuable stores and animals that winter of nineteen-sixty-two. Bad times for all.

Death was and is very common on rural farms. We were lucky Doc Sheriden was a good man. He would take crops, eggs and milk for payment. Many worked his farm for him to return what he had done for them. Some of the local women, even some of the Squaws, would be his nurse for his helping deliver their children. Had he not worked for barter, I would not be alive to write this. You could say my grandparents bartered for my life.

That old snake stump is still there today. I suppose the Mama Snake still is as well. She serves well to explain why farm kids vanish all of a sudden. We all know the truth. We understand the real truth is the kid has died. Maybe from Scarlet Fever during winter or the Cholera just like my mom did a couple of years after I was born. Some lives couldn't be bartered. It could have been snake bite or trampling by mules. Whatever the reason, when a farm kid disappears it is that old Water Moccasin. We keep this secret just like the adults try to keep the painful truth from us kids.

Bean sucking was another favorite sport until one of us kids sucked one clean up his nose and had to be taken to Eagletown to see Doc Sheriden. Seeing him meant hitching up a mule to our wagon and plodding along for several hours' worth of twenty miles. Bean sucking? It is an art of putting a fresh picked bean up against a nostril and sucking in through your nose to hold it in place. Whomever kept it there the longest, won. My cousin Weldon won. The bean was up his nose for three days before it had swelled up so big, Grandma and Grandpa couldn't help noticing it. His butt was good and sore for three days after returning from town.

An absolute favorite after church on Sunday, is to sneak off away from the older people on our way back to the farmhouse, cut down our secret shortcut which has been a secret to generations, including our parents, and go over to Choctaw Town. I knew most of the Indians living there having been adopted by their tribe as a baby. Mostly, I was given a namesake and some personal items I treasure. It was their way of saying thank you to the Marrs family for always helping them when times were tough.

Choctaw Town, from an adult perspective, was a sad, tragic collection of shanty buildings housing Choctaw Indians, left in ruin by our benevolent Government and alcohol. There were quite a few traditional Indians living there who still maintained their old ways. They would have tribal councils, perform sacred rituals and even pow wow. However most were living a life of drunkenness having been displaced and downtrodden by the whites. They share a common fate with Cherokees just north of them. For the most part, all Indians have been honored only on paper. Our farm was in Choctaw County and just to the North, Cherokee County. Namesakes.

Through the eyes of a child, Choctaw Town is the most dangerous place on Earth. Even more dangerous than Mama Moccasin. We had all heard wild stories on radio programs about being scalped, staked out next to a fire ant hill and the kidnapping of children from a forest only to become Indian slaves. Serial radio shows were a Saturday regular for farmers, well, next in line to the Saturday night dance. We didn't have a television or even a phone then.

Luther is the clown and upstart of our bunch. After following our secret shortcut back home after church, God found us hiding behind trees close to Old Squaw Schilitubi's house. A few years back she had choked her husband to death with her bare hands. Farther back in time, it is rumored, while in her usual drunken state, she shot her husband's squaw lover with a shotgun. Those were things overlooked by our local sheriff. He was as kind and understanding as Doc Sheriden.

So Luther, showing off, creeps up behind a tree nearest to her house. He is looking at the rest of us, making faces and snickering. Unknown to him, the Old Squaw has come out of her house, she knows we are there. She walks right up to Luther's tree, grabs him by the neck with both of her hands, lifts him up off the ground, starts shaking him like a Blue Tick hound dog would shake a caught rabbit. She is screaming some kind of of Indian words during all this. It is clear she is not calling him a darling.

In bravery and family unity, the rest of us take off running like frightened does. A marathon runner couldn't have kept up with us. By the time we arrive back at our farm, Luther is already there sweating, pale as a ghost and looking all bug eyed like a bullfrog in heat. New local lore in the making.

There was a fire in the forest near Choctaw Town that day. One of my old ornery uncles told me Luther ran so fast he set the forest on fire. I believe it.

So what happens to us when we become older? Where does our childhood go? It is like our fires of youthful excitement and curiosity dwindle and die. How is it we grow out of it and often become stuffy and formal? Everyone tells me when I hit sixty, I will start my second childhood. No, I don't think so. I haven't finished with my first one yet. Chances are I never will.

"MOM! Stop it. Don't do that!" my daughter scolds me when she catches up with me at our car. We are grocery shopping. Coming out of the store, well, I guess a case of the 'can't help its' got me. There is a gentle downhill slope to the parking lot at Unluckys, our favorite grocery store. "My friends might see you do that," she adds breathlessly. Just outside the store door I decide to get our shopping cart going at a fast clip and jump on the back of it. It was really fun! I rode piggyback on that cart pert near all the way to our car. Kinda thrilling when you do some 360's on the way. Tracilynne didn't notice virtually every customer in the parking lot have dropped their jaws and are gawking at the sight of a woman acting childish. I love it. Next time I am going to yell, "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free Ol' Momma Snake Can't Catch Me!" and perhaps do a little Indian dance routine at the rear of our car.

Later in the day, we went clothes shopping. Hey! Young girls need real life experience in that! On our way into a mall, I talk her into a traditional Indian challenge. We have to make it to mall by walking only on curbs and planter boxes. You get the idea. How fun! Looking like a couple of drunks taking a sobriety test. Dodging bushes and cars, hopping across gaps and stepping up onto planters. She actually enjoyed that one. Who cares if her friends saw her acting silly?

Inside the mall her friends do count. Walking past a Where House store, a music shop, sounds of rock and roll somehow took total control of my simple mind. I didn't see God but I put on one of the best dance routines you could ever wanna see. Ginger Rogers would have kissed me silly. My daughter wanted to slap me silly. This was one of those times she elected to walk about thirty feet behind me, and not make eye contact. Boy I'm glad I didn't do my erotic dance routine with the pole in front of the shop.

Later, a peace offering is made in the form of ice cream at our favorite cellulite store. "Mom, why do you haveta do stuff like that?" she asks having just watched me play a quick game of hopscotch on my way back to our table with napkins. "Tracilynne, my dear little monster, I don't 'haveta' do stuff like that. I want to do them," crossing my eyes at her. "But mom..." knowing what is coming I choose to be assertive and cut her off mid-sentence. "Love, who would you rather have as a mom, Aunt Crabass or me?" Actually her name is Crabtree but the other name fits her personality better. "You Mom!" with a big uncertain smile. "Why Traci?" stimulating her overly intellectual mind. "Cuz you are fun Mom!" She starts slowly licking her ice cream while pondering her answer she gave to her own question. I pondered what my next act of silliness would be when we finally finished fattening our bottoms. I was kind of considering walking through the mall Frankenstein style, dragging a foot and all.

It is my childhood. It is my right to keep it, live it and enjoy it. The two of us, my daughter Tracilynne and me, are CyberChildren. We are of a high tech era. My young rural beginnings on a poor dirt farm in Oklahoma left me with knowledge, an awareness, technology pales in comparison to. That knowledge is life is meant to be lived without socially imposed constraints of "maturity." Tracilynne and myself choose not to become slaves to technology and 'adult behavior'. We do damn well as we please. It is our childhood. Someday I will play hide-n-go-seek with her near an old spooky tree stump. Afterwards, we will climb on top of it and talk of times past and lessons learned about life by a young Okie farm girl named, Okpulot Taha.