BUTCH'S GREAT ADVENTURE P A R T IV
1955 and into 1956: Bellevue; we rented a large old house on ten acres, a mile east of downtown. Bellevue was a very small town then. No building over four stories. Today it is full of Microsoft-type offices, and skyscrapers, bigger and busier than most medium sized larger cities. It has its own skyline, visible for miles as one travels north along Lake Washington up highway 405.
Mother worked while we lived there, she was a waitres sat the Village Inn, a big restaurant downtown. What a treat it was when Art took we three kids there, and we could get a discount on our hamburgers. The house had a full basement, and it used to flood easily. I guess it did not have an adequate, or extant sump-pump. One sad memory of that place was connected to younger brother Buddy. He was probably pre-school, or kindergarden then. A couple of stray cats had come to stay with us, and we kept them.[ In those adolescent years, we had dozens of dogs and cats in all of the many rentals that we lived in; always strays, usually bone thin and sickly. Most of them died of distemperor other animal diseases, got run over by cars, got stolen, or just ran off.]
One of the stray cats had kittens. When the kittens were still very young, one day they all disappeared. We looked around for them. Mother discovered that somehow, and for some reason, Bud had gotten a hold of them, put them in little bags and boxes, and he had drown all of them. Clystie, Mom, and I had a kitten funeral, out there on the edge of the adjacent pasture. Art didn't care one way or the other. He tended not be sentimental about pets. He was a real hard ass at times. I wondered, years later, what little Buddy was trying to tell us with that act of cruelty; what kind of attention did he crave or need?
It was at that house that I experienced my"musician" period. I might have been in the fourth grade. Pop had always played the violin; the fiddle. I decided that since Pop and I shared so much intellectually and emotionally, that hell, I too could probably learn the play the fiddle. Pop was, of course, a fabulous artist. Turned out that I, too, had some talent as a sketch artist, so I would sketch, draw, and was planning on learning to paint with oils. Pop had never taken real lessons, with the fiddle or with his painting, and he made it seem so easy; just natural raw talent that was the Carpenter legacy.[Pop told many stories of playing the fiddle at barn dances, and at Grange Halls, community dances, where he could earn a few bucks. He really could saw that fiddle, and stomp his foot. I guess Mom-Mom (Emma Look) and some of her older sisters would go to these barn dances. Pop must have seemed like quite a dashing fellow, up there playing the fiddle. He had a fast horse, and he could draw cartoon caricatures of all his friends too].
My folks rented a violin for me, and everything started off fine. During the first few lessons, I was first chair; top of my class. I held it perfectly, and I looked good holding it. Then came the moment that we had to run the bow over the strings; what a godawful noise that was; like someone was wringing a cat's tail, or slaughtering hogs. The racket I made was so arduous, so terrible, that itwould run people out of the house. Art's loud complaining did not do much for my confidence. After two weeks I gave it up.
Music, like math, was never easy for me to comprehend, and relate to. I loved to listen to it, but I accepted the fact; perhaps too quickly and completely, that I would never master a musical instrument.
Our neighbor there, on the north side of us, had a vast long section of chicken houses. He raised chickens commercially; kind of a noisy place to live adjacent to; those long white stinky noisy buildings. At some point a stray dog came into our life, a large black mutt, long-haired and tall-legged. He took to me right away, loveable and playful. How could he be a stray, I used to wonder? I called him Midnight. We romped in the fields, and walked in the woods together; a boy and his dog; fine moments of doggy kisses and retrieving of sticks. But one black morning, the nieghbor came over and fetched Art.
Midnight had broken into one of the hen houses the night before, and he had gone on a killing frenzy, slaughtering over a 100 chickens. When Art returned, he declared that the neighbor would not call the cops as long as we agreed to destroy the dog.
" Kill my dog?" I asked.
" Yes, Butch, it is time for you to grow up a little bit."
So we put the dog on a short leash, and Art picked up his deer hunting rifle, and a shovel. We walked silently together up through a large pasture to the south of us. It sloped high up above the house. Mother, Clys, and little Bud watched from a window as we halted a couple of hundred yards from the house. We staked out the dog, and it watched us with loving eyes as Art and I dug a doggie grave.
Then Art instructed me to get into the hole, and call the dog in. Midnight jumped eagerly in to join me, licking my face, and wondering what kind of game this was going to be; wagging his thick tail and whining happily.
" Now, step back, and slowly get out of the hole,"Art said.
Art shot the dog in the head, and then once more for good measure. The dog had only yelped once, in shock.The report of the large bore rifle pounded down off that hill like lethal thunder, cracking way off into the distance; twice. Taking turns, we shoveled dirt onto Midnight, burying my pet, and then tamped the dirt flat when we finished. As we walked down together, back to the house, Art put an arm around my shoulder. Perhaps he felt bad. It was hard to tell.
I was holding back scalding tears, and he said nothing. He probably felt that he had administered an important lesson in life. For a time, I hated him, and I just couldn't believe how unfair life could be.
In the back, and to the east of the house, there were a couple of work sheds, and the former owner, or possibly the landlord, had been a rock hound. There were thousands of rocks in piles on benches, on tables, in buckets, and completely filling a fifty gallon barrel. We kids were suppossed to keep out of them...right! Many of the rocks were split and polished moss agates, and lots of other brilliant colored rocks of various sizes. It was fun to sit out there and stare at the moss agates, seeing how the inner moss seemed to suggest familiar images; animals and such, kind of a rudimentary Rorsharch test.
1956: Art moved us to Kent, out near Panther Lake on the east side of East Hill, on a five acre plot. We rented a shack, basically. It was built up on stilts it seemed like, with a partial basement never being finished, and all the pipes were exposed to the weather. During the winter, we had to wrap, and rewrap those pipes, and sometimes heat them up to get the ice out of them. There was a large outhouse, a two holer, out by some other buildings; one being the woodshed.
We had power outages regularly. During one of the blackouts, Art was firing up a Coleman lantern, and some of the kerosene must have been drippy, because the lamp, and his whole arm became a ball of flame. Mother, quite quickly grabbed a kitchen towel and extinguished the flames on his bare arm. She put ice packs on the burns. Then she peeled several large potatoes, and she wrapped the raw potatoe peelings al lover the burns on his arm. It removed the pain immediately, and seemed to do the trick. He never was scarred up from the injury.
Out at the woodshed, it was my chore to chop the firewood and kindling. One day I was daydreaming and chopping at the same time. I had tried to steady a piece of wood with one of my feet. I swung the long heavy double-bladed axe, missed the wood, and drove it deep into my foot. My shoe filled up with blood. I don't remember if that precepitated a doctor's visit, or how long it took to heal up.
Mother was unhappy about the outhouse. It stood over a hundred yards from the house; that way the smell was easier to deal with. But it turned out to be a long walk to that outhouse in the dark, carrying a flashlight, in your underwear, in the snow.
Pop cameto the rescue. A new, or used, white porcelon toilet appeared one day on the back porch. Art quickly put up some cheesy plywood walls for a modicum of privacy. It became Pop's job to dig a great wide hole for the future cesspool, and several adjacent drainage ditches. He worked for weeks with a pick and a shovel and a steel wrecking bar. He told those stories again about doing this sort of work for a living during theGreat Depression. The project was finally completed. I doubt that Pop was properly thanked. We used the toilet for a few months before we moved again.
Glenn Buttkus
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