Okay, I admit it, I’m a story topper. I know, I know, I know. No one likes a story topper. But I can’t help myself, storytelling is in my blood. I’m not trying to one up anyone, I just love telling stories. Sometimes, when the dialog really gets rolling, I find myself moving closer and closer to the edge of my seat, like a cliff diver waiting for the right opportunity to take the plunge.
I come by it honest. My family tree is filled with storytellers, on both sides. Take for example my grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Glover. Now he was a master storyteller. Dennis and I would sit at his feet for countless hours listening to captivating tales about his life. Grandad Ben, born on leap day in 1908, grew up in the wild and rugged Boston mountains of Northwest Arkansas and his stories were so vivid and realistic they sucked us right in, just like Jumanji.
Grandad had truly seen it all and we loved to hear about it. He was born into a world without electricity and indoor plumbing where wagons and trains were the common mode of transportation. He first learned to drive with a team of four draft horses pulling heavy loads across rough terrain, while he was still a boy. He harvested timber by hand with a double-headed axe and drove thousands of railroad spikes with a huge 20-lb sledgehammer. We saw him forge and shape steel with his own hands from red hot iron fired in his own kiln in his homemade blacksmith shop. Shoot, he even smoked hand-rolled cigarettes made from homegrown tobacco in those days.
Life was hard for him growing up poverty-stricken in rural Arkansas, and it wasn’t much better as an adult after moving to Picher during the boom town era. But he never complained about it, not even once. It made him the man he was. In fact, I don’t think he even considered himself poor. His family always had everything thing they truly needed. And, if they couldn’t farm it, raise it, trap it, hunt it, make it or fix it, then they didn’t need it.
Grandad’s big hairy arms were strong like the steel he forged and cut like chiseled stone. They were formed from decades of hard, physical labor. He could swing an axe like no man I’ve ever seen, before or since, and he could split timber easier than a hot knife goes through butter. He honed those axe heads himself, by hand, with pride and a peddle-pumped grinding wheel. Finishing them off with a well-worn, crescent-shaped whetstone. The razor-sharp, mirrored edges glistened in the sunlight like a prism as he raised the axe from the ground and fully extended his arms behind him. Then, like a catapulting guillotine, the axe split the air like a flash of lightning and landed with a thundering boom that shook the ground under our feet. It was a sight to behold, but he paid it no mind.
I have no doubt that he could have crushed diamonds with those hands and stopped bullets with those arms. It was fascinating and humbling to see him work, but he thought nothing of it. It was his life; the only one he knew. Yes indeed, Ben Glover was a man’s man, in every way.
When he stopped to rest, which wasn’t often, he would tell us stories, and my brother and I would sit there captivated by them. Leaving school after the eighth grade, his vocabulary was sometimes too limited to convey the meaning he desired. So, in those instances, he would add the most fantastic sound effects that you could imagine. I’m telling you they would have made George Lucas jealous. And, if I close my eyes and put on my listening ears, I can still hear that famous bobcat squall right now; in crystal-clear, high-fidelity, stereophonic sound. It was so realistic it sent shivers down our spine every time he did it. What a sight it must have been for him to see; two scrappy young boys perched on one of his fallen logs with our chin in our hands and our elbows affixed to our knees, looking up at him with full-moon eyes and canyon-sized open mouths.
I remember hearing a real bobcat squall once while we were visiting Uncle John’s cabin just outside of Mountainburg, AR, where our Grandad was raised. The isolated old house, about halfway up the hill at the end of a long and muddy road, was surrounded by thick woods. Dennis and I were outside playing, and he had done something to annoy me, again, so I was chasing him around the house. Then I heard something that stopped me dead in my tracks and turned my blood cold. Our grandad was inside, but that squall wasn’t!
Instantly, I knew it was all true. The story of Grandad’s bobcat encounter rushed through my mind like a Netflix movie streamed at 10x. I glanced over at Dennis, who was frozen in mid-stride like Hans Solo in carbonite, and his ashen face said it all. We bolted for the door without saying a word and for the first time in my life I think I actually beat Dennis to the door!
Try as I might to emulate it, and I have repeatedly, my squall will never be as good as Grandad’s was, nor will my stories be as grand. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of storytelling and there will never be anyone else like him. I only hope, that in some small way, the stories you read here will prolong his legacy and preserve his craft, for posterity.
Oh, how I wish he had written down those stories for us, even if it had been scribbled out with his flat carpenter’s pencil, in jagged penmanship and broken English, on the back of a ten-penny nail sack. We would have stored them in Fort Knox to safeguard them, if we had too. But sadly, that never happened before the beast came and robbed us of this priceless treasure. He was the first to succumb to it, or at least that’s what we thought.