My Brother's Birthday

 

Donald Lee King - HS Freshman, gymnast, athlete, musician, nice guy.

October 23rd would have been my brother, Donny's 65th Birthday. He's been gone 49 years - close to half a century and I still think about things I want to talk to him about. I still remember him as the kid in the picture. We fought a lot - down on the ground wrestling matches; up into our teens. Then one day we realized that it was too dangerous to fight anymore because we were both strong enough to damage one another. So we quit.

 

We practically lived in the brittle old oak trees around our house on 4th Street, swinging from limb to limb in the treetops like a pair of apes. We'd set up army men on the ground and then climb to the top of this one oak that had a great crotch up there you could sit in. It provided a stable platform for our bombing raids. With our paper route money we bought these small metal toy bombs that you would load a Greenie Stickum Cap into and then drop from a height. They would pop loudly when they hit the ground among the toy soldiers. Once you'd exhausted your bomb load, you'd climb down and reset the soldiers, reload your bombs and then it was back up the tree again.

There were two Chinaberry trees in our yard. One by the house allowed us to climb up a limb and drop down on the roof at the back of the house. From there we would parachute behind German lines. Our "parachutes" consisted of one of Mom's old bedsheets. We'd tie two corners to the belt loops on the back of our pants and hold the other two corners over our heads, take a flying leap and plummet off the roof into a soft patch of thick grass that grew where the septic line ran out of the kitchen. It was sometimes squishy, especially if we'd been catching up on the dishes. Soft as the ground might be, that old house had a pretty high roof for an 80 plus year old one story house. My hips and knees are paying me back now for all of those parachute drops. Turns out, even if you only weigh 90 pounds sopping wet, hitting the ground from that height is going to be hard on your joints, even with the paltry slowdown provided by your bedsheet parachute. It also turns out there's a reason the Army used other than bedsheet materials to make parachutes.

The other Chinaberry tree was in back along the edge of the property.  The limbs of Chinaberry trees are not very big, but they are flexible and tough enough to support a pair of would-be chimpanzees as we sung from limb to limb. The back Chinaberry had limbs spaced so that you could start on a limb at the back of the tree and swing on a series of 4 flexible limbs and end up around by the front of the tree. Donny and I were very good at swinging limb to limb with our arms. We were the envy of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, some of our friends were not as "gymnastic" as my brother and I. A friend of Donny's, Edward Black, wanted to try it. I wasn't in the yard when he tried it, so I'm fuzzy on details. Mom heard someone screaming out back and ran to the scene. There she found Edward hanging by one leg from a lower limb, head down, his hands almost touching the ground. His leg was broken and if I remember right, Donny was trying to hold him up (or else he was hiding because he knew he was in trouble). You see, Edward had decided to try to swing from limb to limb like Donny did, but he was afraid he would fall, so as a safety measure, he decided to tie a rope to his leg to catch him if he fell. And Donny let him. Well the rope worked as advertised and snapped him up short before he did a header into the dirt. Edward hobbled around for weeks in a leg cast that summer.

Then there was the barrel incident! My step-dad had brought home an empty 55 gallon barrel which had once contained varnish from Brandom's Kitchen Cabinets. It had a lid with an intact locking ring. So! Donny and I took turns locking each other in the barrel and rolling the barrel down the little hill in our backyard. My sister, Debbie, begged us to let her take a turn. Finally, against our better judgment, we gave her her wish. She crawled in the barrel, we put the lid on it, locked it down and gave it a shove. As the barrel rolled off down the hill, there began such a wailing and screaming from within the barrel. "Let me out!  Stop it!" Trouble was the barrel was already halfway down the hill and gaining speed. 

Donny and I caught up with the barrel as it reached the bottom of the hill. From within the barrel there issued forth such shrieks and curses and threats that as Donny reached for the locking handle, gave us both pause. He stopped and looked up at me. 

"Should I open it or should we give her a second to calm down?" he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "She sounds pretty mad."

"She's going to go straight to Mama and tell on us!"

"What's she going to tell?"

"I don't know but if we don't let her out the barrel's gonna explode!"

"Okay, stand back," I said grabbing the release handle.  My sister busted out of that barrel rather the way a wet hen would fly up in the face of whoever was holding the bucket with which it had been doused!  I never heard the end of it. Somehow Donny missed receiving the blame for the whole affair and he was the one that was most reluctant to open the barrel! My sister told the story of her abusive older brother who forcibly shoved her into a barrel, locked it shut, and pushed it off a cliff. She told that story from one end of the state of Texas to the other. I finally resorted to telling my side of the story to her friends (all of whom knew my sister's penchant for artistic storytelling). When I took up my own defense, she finally slowed down telling everybody how mean I was and confined the relating of that tale to people I was unlikely to ever meet.

Our house was almost as old as the town of Keene where we grew up. In the winter when the wind blew the linoleum floors would breathe up and down and sigh softly in the night. It was a bit creepy I can tell you. But we had a pretty good time of it. My brother and I roamed the local woods and creeks. Donny was more ambitious than me. He went along with friends who soaped the college fountain, climbed things they weren't supposed to climb and generally got into mischief. I was more the shy nerdy type, but still we had some adventures.

The last time I talked to him was the night before his death. We stayed up late Christmas Night talking about Christmases to come and how we would celebrate it with our families. He said he would make his kids wait till morning to open their presents. He was an old softy and I'm pretty sure he'd have given in and like me, let them open one on Christmas Eve. He told me he was going to get his grades up again and stay out of trouble. He wanted to go back to Chisholm Trail Academy again where his Adventist friends were. He'd gone back to public high school after his grades fell at CTA. He told me he wanted to get back to church again too. He used to play saxophone trios for church with his friend David and Mr. Schramm the band director. He missed it.

 

Donny got up and left before I woke up the next morning. He was headed for his friend's house to hang with his motorcycle enthusiast friends. That afternoon a couple of friends pulled up to the house and took my sister and me to the place Donny had gone. I walked into the back room and found him lying dead on his back on the bed, a bloody hole in his chest from a shotgun at close range. The cops didn't bother to warn us and no one told us he was dead. A friend playing a joke with a shotgun that wasn't supposed to be loaded had pulled the trigger at close range. My mom was already there. I can't imagine what she was going through. I went through 3 very dark days. I spent much of them aimlessly wandering the woods where Donny and I had roamed since we were small.

The guy who killed him later told me it was the worst day of his life. I rather believe that. He'd killed a friend doing something careless and stupid. The police wanted to rain down the wrath of the law on the boys, but my family believed the boys that were there and didn't want to compound one tragedy with another.

Still, hardly a day goes by I do not miss him. Jesus cannot come soon enough. I have two brothers and a son I need to spend some time with.

© 2021 by Tom King

The Importance of Touching the Past

 

As all good Texans do I made a pilgrimage to the Alamo. I touched the bullet scarred walls. I walked the ground. Part of the old fort was across the street and stretched across a substantial area of downtown San Antonio. As a younger man I took my boys to San Jacinto, arguably one of the key battle grounds of the 19th century and walked the fields where the outnumbered Texans in their rage and fury thundered down on the surprised Mexican Army and destroyed it. I marveled at the courage it must have taken to cross that field knowing the army across the way was twice your army's size. And while they made that charge the immortal "Yellow Rose of Texas," a mulatto slave girl distracted Santa Anna and earned herself the title place in the battle hymn of Texas.

Then there was the Battleship Texas, a veteran of WWI and WWII, bombarding the landing grounds from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It's still maintained as a sacred site to Texans. I roamed the decks upper and lower as a kid (I was there twice). I walked the battlefields at Vicksburg, Valley Forge and the dog run cabin of Cynthia Ann Parker who was abducted by Comanches and became the mother of the War Chief Quanah Parker.

And every time I visit an historic place like that, I have to touch something that was there. In Washington DC, I did a rubbing of the name of a neighbor kid I knew that died in Vietnam and had his name inscribed there. And there was there in DC at the Museum of Natural History the very skeleton of a T-Rex that I had seen so many times in the books on dinosaurs that I poured over when I was 6 and had just learned to say paleontologist correctly and thought I wanted to be one.

When I see a generation coming up that has no reverence for the past it makes me sad. For those who forget the past, who have no respect for the lessons learned by our ancestors, are doomed to make far worse mistakes in the future.

Thank God not all young people have forgot. Some have learned. Their parents taught them and like my wife and I did we hauled our kids every Saturday afternoon to every museum, state park, stopped for every historical marker and landmark whether historical or natural within 150 miles of our home. We taught those kids to wonder. To experience that sense of touching the past, of reverence for the lives that made our freedom and prosperity possible.

God will not allow those kind of people to be lost in the quagmire created by the totalitarian rulers who want to erase everything worthwhile, everything heroic, every trace of goodness we've learned through hard endeavor.Those people seek a corruptible crown and by God we who each day continue to learn from the past - we shall oppose them!

© 2021 by Tom King