Chapter 11: Visitation

The Franklins were just finishing supper several days later, when there was a knocking on the front door. Very rarely did they have visitors.

In the yard was a crude cart meant to be drawn by a beast. Mule or ox. In the traces instead, were two dusty sweat streaked young men, bent over at the waist, supporting their exhausted panting bodies by locked elbows, arms rigid to their hands, propped on their bent knees. An old man with a wispy gray beard and gray hair tufts escaping from under a frayed straw hat, was standing at and about to knock on the door again.

“Good Evening.” he said, and indicated the group of people behind him with a slow sweep of his extended arm.

“I am Brother Robert, an itinerant preacher and servant of God. My family and I plead distress, and hope your hearts will be generous with us. We desperately need water and any food you can spare us. As you can see, we are in extremity.”

Three hungry dirty ragged children ages from about seven to maybe twelve, huddled in one group. An exhausted middle aged woman carrying a toddler of a year to eighteen months old, stood apart with a fourteen or fifteen age girl. Riding in the cart, propped up by many large knotted bundles was a very elderly woman, probably the clans grandmother.

Tom, Alice, and Doc appeared behind Morgan. Tom introduced himself and the family. He pointed to a large oak tree in a green pasture, between the house and the road, fifty yards distant.

“Rest yourselves in the shade there. You can camp there tonight. We will organize ourselves to attend your wants. Food and water. If waiting is too much strain, a garden hose is just there. You can quench thirsts and wash yourselves under the hose.” Tom was pointing at a spigot and hose coiled near the barn.

“Thank you kind people.” The old man turned and was leading his family towards the tree, but the young men had recovered enough to sprint for the hose, and the children weren’t far behind them.

Doc went to the smithy, collected and brought back a five gallon work thermos to the garden hose. Pulling off the cap, she asked the young men to fill the thermos whenever the hose wasn’t serving as a drinking fountain. She retrieved from her emergency supplies, a package of electrolyte crystals. Mixed with water, it made a version of Gatorade. Doc dumped it into the water in the big thermos. Morgan was selecting plastic glasses from the cupboard over the sink. Alice gave him a cardboard carton containing a dozen used but clean pint ball jars. “These will serve as drinking glasses.” Morgan loaded them in the bed of the Dodge. Doc set the five gallon thermos and a pail of plain water in the truck.

“Okay Morgan. Drive it down to those folks please.” Morgan was pleased to.

Alice was scrambling three dozen eggs in a huge paella pan sitting over four hot gas burners on the range top. Tom was making peanut butter half sandwiches on home baked bread, as quickly as he could spread and fold.

Doc drove off on her bike and soon herded from the fields, a young steer, back to the barn. Expertly she slaughtered, skinned, and dressed the steer. Rather than the normal butchering sequence of cuts, she began slicing off thin strips, like thick bacon until she had dozens. She wrapped them in butcher paper. She selected from the smithy, some thin gauge scrap re-bar rods to use as skewers. Doc rode down to the oak tree on her bike, balancing the twenty pounds of meat and steel skewers across the handle bars.

“There is a wood pile by the barn. If the young men will help Morgan load some in the pickup, you can get a cook fire going, and sear these stake steaks in no time.” She demonstrated how to accordion layer and pierce weave the strips of beef onto the rod points. “Then you toast them in the fire just like a wienie roast. I need to get back to butchering so the rest of the meat isn’t ruined and lost.” They all thanked her.

Soon Morgan and the young men returned with half a load of fire wood and a half bushel of potatoes from the root cellar. “To bake in the ashes.” Morgan suggested. Alice arrived with the scrambled eggs in the paella pan, and Tom with a sack of peanut butter sandwiches and a fist full of spoons and forks.

The patriarch, because he acted and appeared to be one, lifted his arms toward heaven and called down God’s blessing upon the food. The starving family gathered around the paella pan and ate scrambled eggs from it as a communal dish. The children all ate some scrambled eggs but soon gravitated to the peanut butter. The young men were devouring raw beef, not patient enough to flame broil on skewers, or wait for the fire to burn down to coals. The thermos drink was very popular, and the level was receding fast. The water disappearing also.

Alice was pleased their guests were religious. Tom was less than impressed. “Sounded more like he was ordering God’s blessing than asking!” Tom carped.

The road was about fifty yards off, and so was the house in the other direction. Doc suggested the roadside ditch was a convenient ready made latrine for the men, and sufficiently distant from their camp to provide visual privacy. The women were invited to walk up to the house if they chose. Or cross the road. The ditch on the opposite side, was even farther from the camp and afforded more privacy. Alice dug out from among century old stored items in the attic, an antique thunder-mug for the infirm grandmother to use.

Before the sun went down, the entire cart family was sprawled on their backs sound asleep. The soporific result of over-full bellies. The Franklins welcomed retiring earlier than usual, but a few hours later, after they attended the cleaning up. It had been a long eventful day for everyone.

A few hours before sunup, there was a mighty pounding on the door and screams, yelling, and loud angry voices outside. The Franklins were rudely awakened from pleasant slumbers and ran in their night clothes to the door to investigate the bedlam of insanity on their porch.