Spencer Heath Archive

Item 615.

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath while reading aloud poems of Sam Walter Foss

September 10, 1955

 

 

 

Did I ever tell you how I gave a hot-seat to my Uncle Will? Well, my mother’s brother, Uncle Will, William Newton Payne, was quite a gay blade on the countryside. He had a bald head but a nice blond mustache and he had a very ingratiating way about him and always wore his clothes rather neatly, so that the girls were more or less fluttery about him. He took advantage of this and had himself a nice buggy, what we called a “pole” buggy. It had a long tongue and he drove two horses to his buggy. The gals liked to ride in that buggy and go a-tearin’ down the road, the horses stepping high. My Uncle Will was, as I say, a character.

So when my mother was going away for a day, she got her brother to come and keep the post office for her. Or rather she got Katy Tobberschmidt, a blond German girl, a nice strawberry blond girl, blooming, to come and keep the post office for her. And in the middle of the day her brother, who had been to town, Uncle Will, came back, came in and found Katy in the back room alone, sitting by the table and crocheting some nice little fancy lace in such a manner that it looked as though it might be sewed onto some garment or on the edge of something somewhere.

Well, I anticipated my Uncle coming in that afternoon. So before he arrived, I placed one of the plain dining room chairs up opposite, close to where Katy Tobberschmidt was, a chair that had had cane in the bottom at one time but the cane had torn out and it had been replaced by plywood with a nice star pattern of holes all through it, an extra-large hole in the middle. So I got myself a little piece of wood, through the end of which I had placed a long needle, with the eye close to the wood, at right angles. I balanced the other end of that wood over the upper rung of the chair, and a little bit projecting to the rear was a string tied to it, so when you pulled the string downward, and underneath the rung below, it would cause the other end of the stick to flop up. (Laughing) I had this all set, thinking Uncle Will would almost certainly come and sit in close to Katy to help her with the crocheting, and I ran the string of it across the floor. I used Barber’s black button thread. You could hardly break it; it would cut your hand. I ran it across the floor of the back room and out the window.

So when I saw Uncle Will drive up and put the horses away, I went in and tested the thing and found everything was working just right. Then I went outside and stooped down below the window. Uncle Will came in, full of gusto.

“Hello, Katy, how are you today? Mighty glad to see you. What a pretty girl you are, anyhow! What’s that you’re makin’ there? Oh, that’s some pretty lace. Where do you use it? Where do you put it? Do you put it on somewhere?”

 

I was peepin’ up over the sill and watching what was going on. And so he sat down, drew the chair up closer to where Katy was and began to take an interest in the lace that she was crocheting, in the various possible ways in which the lace might be sewed.

So at what seemed to be just the right moment, I gave the string a good hard pull. Up went the needle through the middle of the chair.  It must have had something to do with his nervous system [laughing], because he suddenly went up as though he’d had a torpedo explode underneath him. [laughing] Looking around in bewilderment and so on, he saw me grinning, my mouth as wide as my face, outside the window. He made a dive for the door and I made a dive for the fence. I went over the fence into the road, across the road and over another fence, into a clover field. The clover was pretty near waist high for me, over knee-high for him, but somehow or other I made better time in that clover field than he did.

So after he had chased me about half way across the field, he stopped, stood up, took a breath, and commenced to laugh. Then he said, “Come on, you show me how you made that damned thing work!” I knew then, by the time he had laughed as he did and got interested in the engineering of it, that I could go back and safely demonstrate it to him, which I did [laughing].

[MacCallum: “Quite a story. He makes me think a little of Uncle Irvan, the way he came in and said, ‘That’s a nice piece of lace you’ve got there—where’s it go?'”]

Yeah [laughing]. Yeah, he was a great fella for that. He didn’t marry till he was middle life. He left a crop of kids, cousins of mine, all of whom were much younger than I, because he was my mother’s younger brother, youngest of her three brothers, and he married late; so his children were like another generation below mine.

I had the curious experience, years afterwards, of having him in a Model “T” automobile, scared stiff. Almost everybody was afraid of his fractious horses when he drove them hitched to his buggy. Some people didn’t like to ride with him, afraid to ride with him. His horses had a habit of standing up on their hind legs doing tricks, and so on, which he didn’t discourage altogether. When I got him in the Model “T” and tried to drive him through the streets of Georgetown, west of Washington, he almost trembled in the seat. He prayed and prayed for me to go slow, be careful, stop, stop, stop, he was so afraid.

You take a man out of his own proper age and time of the world and put him into another era, and he who was most fitted to his former condition now becomes very much of a misfit, and such was Uncle Will in his last years.