More Regarding Uncle Claude Argata
Enkey
(May 22, 1902 — September 27, 1981)
by
Wally Lee Parker
(all rights to this material reserved by
the Enkey-Parker Family History Newsletter)
———
Reprint from the Enkey-Parker
Family History Newsletter
July/August, 2000 A.D.
———
… a letter from Alzada Burch …
On May 9th, 2000, I
received this letter from Alzada Burch, daughter of
Claude and Olive Enkey.
Dear Wally
I am sending you a few
memories. Please excuse the ‘messy’
pages. I am pretty sure that if I wait
to recopy them I may never get them sent.
Hope we’re not too late to be of help.
Your Cousin,
Alzada Enkey-Burch
P.S.: I started to
type this, but I’m just too slow. I have
arthritis in my hands, so you will have to make do with my scratchy notes. Okay?
One
of the items sent by Alzada was the formula for the poultice mentioned by Jack
Willis in his memories of his Grandfather, Claude Enkey, published in the
May/June newsletter. Jack didn’t know
the exact formula, or how his granddad came to start using it. So Alzada explains ...
Dad’s remedy for snake bite was
equal parts of coal oil, turpentine, salt, and gunpowder. He learned this recipe when my brother Lon — the
oldest of us kids — got spider bit.
Lon, and my sister Opal were down at a neighbor’s house (the Steels)
when Lon started feeling bad and getting stiff.
They figured he had been bitten on his neck, at the base of his
skull. The two kids decided to walk
home. Lon just kept getting sicker, so
Dad decided he’d better take him to the doctor in Tahlequah.
At the farm gate they met an old man
passing by on the road. Dad told him
what was going on and the old man said, “You can take him to the doctor if you
want, but I can cure him.”
At the house, the old man mixed a
paste of the above ingredients and spread them on torn strips of a white sheet
to make a poultice for Lon’s neck. Opal
remembers changing the bandage, and recalls that it was green with the stuff
that had been drawn out of the bite. Not
long after and Lon was up playing.
Alzada
also added this story about Claude Enkey’s impressive physical strength.
Earl Enkey’s daughter, Janice, tells
of the time she watched my dad loading a truck.
He would carry a 100 pound sack of feed under each arm, one over each
shoulder, and another one clinched by his teeth — all
at the same time. He was quite the show
off that way.
And
this recollection of stories told by Mabel Alice Enkey-Martin, Alzada’s aunt,
and Lillie Ada Enkey-Parker’s sister, about Alzada’s grandparents, David Enkey
and Pearl Lee-Enkey.
Aunt Mabel said her father, David
Enkey, hand built a china cabinet for Pearl’s dishes. Pearl was so proud of it. One day Aunt Mabel ran into it, knocking it
over, breaking Grandmas dishes. When
David came in he told Pearl, “Don’t worry.
We’ll get you some more dishes.”
Early on the family lived on a
cotton farm. They’d have pickers come in
at harvest time. David would haul the
cotton to town by wagon. The family was
doing quite well for a while, but it gradually became too dangerous. The workers were thieving so bad David began
fearing for the family safety.
On one occasion, when David was
gone, a man trying to get in the house broke out a window. Pearl sent one of the kids out the back way
to get Claude, the oldest boy, who was working in the fields. Claude ran to the house, got his gun, and
hollered out to the intruder that he had better go or Claude would kill
him. Everyone knew that Claude was a
crack shot, so the man ran away.
Whenever David would take produce to
town, everyone assumed he’d be returning with a lot of money. So three men laid in wait and jumped him on a
return trip. He broke free and
escaped. Once home he told Pearl they’d
better sell out and move before some of them got killed.
Selling out, the family traveled
around by covered wagon for two or three years.
During that time David did find one place he really wanted to buy. But an old Indian told them that it was
Indian land so he wouldn’t be able to build a house on it. Since David wanted a home for his family, he
let it be. He was so discouraged by
everything that the family kept traveling from one place to another till the
money ran out.
Opal,
Alzada’s sister, and the oldest of Claude and Olive Enkey’s children, has a
number of stories to tell. Alzada
repeats several of them.
Olive was a school teacher. One time, when Opal was just a baby, Claude
and Olive were traveling by wagon to see a school board member and took the
baby with them. The trip was taking
longer than expected. Opal got to
squirming and whining. They hadn’t
brought anything for the baby to eat.
Driving passed a house, they smelled
food. Claude said he was going to get
the baby something to eat. He knocked on
the door, asking the woman if she had something that he could feed his hungry
baby.
“Well mister, I only have some bacon
and cornbread.” She gave him some and he
gave it to the baby. Opal was as good as
gold the rest of the way home.
After she was grown and married,
Opal asked mother, “When did we live in a white, two-story house?” Opal described the farm Claude and Olive
lived on from December of 1926 to December of 1927. Opal was born there on there that first
December.
Opal remembers sitting in a room
with a varnished door and a blue speckled doorknob —
sitting on a bedroom window seat used to store quilts. It was a second story window. From that window she could see her dad out in
the field plowing.
She recalled watercress growing by a
brook that trickled near the house, and her mother picking the watercress to
put on sandwiches.
Opal told our mom that she could
remember her and our dad looking at a brown house, and Opal was wishing she
could talk, so she could tell the folks that she didn’t want to move from the
pretty white house to the brown one.
Olive said, “Well I guess you
do. The white house was the Davis place,
and the people who owned it wanted to buy out the lease. We moved from there to a brown house.”
And a story about Claude’s
abilities with horses.
Aunt Mabel used to tell about a high
spirited horse her brother Claude had been given. He trained this horse so only he could ride
it. Then he’d bet people they’d get
bucked off if they tried to ride it.
Unknown to Claude, Aunt Mabel got to
going out to the barn, feeding and petting this horse, till she got to where
she could get up on him and sit.
One day Claude went with two other
men to build a fence on a neighboring farm.
He had told Mabel to bring him over some lunch around noon time. While working, my dad went to bragging about
his horse, how spirited it was, and how not a man in the world could ride it
‘cept him. About noon Aunt Mabel got to
thinking about toting Claude’s lunch on that long, hot, dusty walk to the
neighbor’s farm — and decided she’d ride her brother’s horse
instead. So she got on the horse and off
she went.
When
the men Claude was working with saw Mabel — maybe nine years old
at the time — ride up on the horse her brother had been bragging up as
un-rideable, they just started laughing.
Aunt Mabel said my father’s face turned bright red. And he was mad. He told her to get off that horse before it
killed her.
Then Claude turned to the men and
said, “I bet you guys five dollars you can’t ride it.”
Having seen his nine year old sister
ride up on the horse no man could ride — and not being too impressed
— one of the men took my dad up on the bet. He climbed up, and of a sudden come flying
back off. Grinning, and retrieving his
pride, Claude pocketed his five bucks.
In reference to Claude Enkey’s
unusual methods of hunting, Alzada said …
Aunt Mabel told me how Dad learned
to hunt like he did — reaching into hollowed out trees and
pulling out squirrels, then killing them with his teeth and such. That
was something Grandpa Lee, our mother’s father, had taught him.
And we all knew ‘bout hunting
coons. Our dad would hunt at night, with
his dogs and a carbide lamp strapped to his forehead. I remember the last time I went hunting with
him. I was about 9 or 10 years old and
Lon was four years younger than me.
I
knew it was a bad mistake when we drove up and parked by some thick timber,
then crawled through a barbed wire fence and out into the dark woods with
nothing but a lantern. We walked, and
walked, and walked. Every once in a bit
the dogs would start barking way up ahead and Dad would say, “There they
are! Sounds like they done treed
something!” He could tell by the way
they barked whether they had treed an animal or were just running. He could also identify each dog by its bark. Anyway, he’d hear them and away we’d go.
We
run till Lon couldn’t go any more — and my legs felt like they
were going to fall off. We decided being
alone in the dark wasn’t as bad as more running, so Dad told us to keep the
lantern, sit down by a big tree, and he would find us on the way back. We knew there was a graveyard pretty close to
where we was, so we sat down in the leaves and stared at the dark, wondering if
a ghost was about to grab us.
We swore that if we ever got home we
would never go hunting after dark again.
Dad finally came back — after what seemed like an
hour or two. I personally never went
coon hunting with him again. If I had to
be alone, I would take my chances at home.
Our father told about an animal
encounter when panthers roamed the woods near our Peggs, Oklahoma, home. Every year we picked huckleberries in those
woods. And there was a pasture in the
timber covered hills we had to bring our cows down from every night for
milking, and then herd back up into the hills.
You could hear the panthers scream out there in the woods —
sounded just like a woman screaming.
Dad said he rode his horse into
Spring Creek to let it get a drink.
Sitting there, he looked to the bank a few feet away and there was a
black panther, standing, staring. Dad’s
hair, all the way down the back of his neck, stood straight. Trying to think what to do, he reached into
his pocket, got a match, and struck it.
The panther bolted, running off into a field.
Entertainment
was something family and neighbors worked up for themselves.
In those days there was no
television of course, and only on occasion did we listen to a radio —
powered by the car battery. But when
people came to visit, and all gathered around the wood stove, my dad could
entertain them for hours just telling his stories.
He was a good dancer too. He’d square dance — and
would call at gatherings. But what I
remember best was what he called ‘stomp dancing’. Now days I guess it’s called ‘clogging’.
He also played the fiddle. And that brings up another story.
Me and Bill — Bill
being the fourth oldest child and six years older than me — had been
looking dad’s fiddle over, wondering if it was one of those expensive ones —
a Stradivarius. It had a name on it,
but, if my memory is correct, it said Stravinsky or some such.
Dad had just thrown one of his
famous Claude Enkey fits — after us for playing instead of
working. Bill got the idea of taking
away some of dad’s fun to get back at him.
He decided to tie some bailing wire to the fiddle, climb up in the
rafters of the house, and hang the fiddle from the two by fours.
I was afraid to climb into the attic
space. Too many of my nightmares come
down from the blackness up there. But Bill
came back grinning, “Dad won’t find it now.
If we can’t play, he can’t either.”
Then he made me promise I wouldn’t ever tell on him.
I never did tell on him either. But my conscious did bother me a lot over the
years.
A few years ago I reminded Bill
about this. At first he denied doing any
such thing. But I could see him wince
when the memory finally came back to him.
What made it worse, years ago Bill had bought this same place and it
later burned down. And he now realized
that as far as we know dad’s old fiddle was still hanging in the attic when the
place turned to ash.
My father did have a soft side. But years of hard times, futility, and
disappointment caused us to see a lot more of the tough when we were growing
up. That left its mark on all us
kids. And I’m thinking it made us
strong.
I think about the chores I was
expected to do at age six; milking cows, clearing the fields of rocks, cutting
sprouts, cutting and hauling in wood, cleaning the chicken house, gathering
eggs, stripping sorghum cane, fighting with yellow jackets when dropping the
sorghum sticks into the foaming molasses vats, picking huckleberries and
blackberries — then helping mom clean them under the arbor
with beautiful clusters of Wisteria hanging down while pumping water from the
well beside the house to wash the berries.
In 1947 — when I
was seven — we moved from the Peggs place.
We moved to ‘the prairie’ home to take care of our mother’s mother,
Grandma Freeman. It was like going to a
barren desert and I hated it. But life
goes on.
My chores seemed to shift some
there. I milked cows, churned cream,
stripped and cut cane to make sorghum molasses, carried pummies — the
cane stacks after the juice was squeezed out — away from the cane press,
chopped corn, planted the dreaded black eye peas — and gathered them in
the hot sun, and shelled them, and shelled them, and shelled them. It seemed like those dreaded peas lasted
forever, always there to spoil my fun.
But there was also some fun
times. Lying under a shade tree, birds singing,
a cool easy breeze cooling when we were supposed to be chopping the weeds out of
the corn. Or digging the sweet, dripping
hearts out of delicious watermelons before throwing the rest into the pig
troughs. And the smell of cornbread,
fried potatoes, corn on the cob, and maybe fried chicken or slab bacon for
lunch. How good it tasted after a hard
morning working in the fields — bailing hay, picking
cotton, or hoeing the garden.
I reminisce occasionally when I see
a piece of machinery — a plow, planter, cultivator, disk, hay
rake. I suppose I have used just about
every piece of farm machinery except the hay mowing machine. Dad was always afraid us younger children
would get our hands or feet cut off by that thing.
Life was hard in those days. But I wouldn't trade my experiences for all
the gadgets made today. It’s sorrowful,
the memories today’s children have lost not being able to grow up on a farm.
I
can’t thank Cousin Alzada Burch enough for this wonderful set of memories. Most of us could ‘wince’ a little in sympathy
with the story of the lost fiddle. And
most of us have our own stories of the pain we’ve caused our parents — pain that we dearly wish we could
take back.
…
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