Part 10: Mohlenburg

            Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.  Mark Twain     

                Samuel Lee Noble was born smack in the middle of the Western Kentucky coalfields in a grimy coal town on the first anniversary of the D-Day Normandy invasion, and left the hospital for the family’s asbestos-shingled camp-shack they called home a few days later.  Like all the other kids in the camp who attended the one-room schoolhouse for grades one through twelve, he didn’t know he was poor necessarily, but was aware that Mohlenburg’s “city shitters” were considered rich folk – some even owned cars. 

His family’s first car was a used 1951 Studebaker Champion, flathead six-cylinder, which his father purchased the year Sam graduated from high school in 1963 and he learned to drive on.  He remembered the year well because that was the year JFK was murdered on television. 

It had a clutch (with headlight high-beam button just beneath), three forward gears, and one reverse gear with a stick shift on the column and was mint green, and riding with Ma and Pa for the first time was the proudest day of his life – the automobile’s modern design made it look like a rocket ship!  Young Sammy even helped his father install brand new Fingerhut clear plastic seat covers for an added touch of hillbilly elegance. 

The car worked really fine until Mr. Noble the elder had one too many jars of moonshine and while backing out of a circus parking lot one rainy night, drove the family transportation into a ditch.  Sam was an only child so there was just the three of them, taking in the bright lights of the carnival before going to the circus.  To help pull the car out of the ditch, one of the carny folks harnessed up an elephant to pull it out, but the animal slipped in the mud and flopped on top of the hood, not hurting itself but taking the life of the innocent Studebaker.

Sam had a huge family tree on his father’s side – he was one of eleven surviving brothers and sisters who had grown up in a tiny three-bedroom clapboard house down on rural route one, farther out still then the coal camp, situated on a red dirt road whose two-acre yard was strewn with old refrigerators, junked cars, and odds and ends of rusted out coal mining equipment, including an Atlas trolley, a timber setter, and a blower fan used underground.

Sam had heard that his grandmother had given birth to another four babies who had died from childhood illnesses or malnutrition during the Great Depression, but nobody liked to talk about those rough times much.  Sam’s father was constantly ill as a child, once contracting rickets from poor nutrition that bowed his legs permanently, yet like his healthier brothers, they had all gone off to war to fight in Europe or in the Pacific when patriotic duty called during World War II. 

Obsolete railroad tracks passed by out back behind the Noble family homestead, and beyond the outhouse, past a holler, and at the top of a small rise there still sat an idled, junked-out and ancient Vulcan steam-locomotive, looking like the carcass of some steel dinosaur.  The scrapped hulks were Sam and his cousins’ childhood toys and were reminders of an era when coal was king in Western Kentucky, starting way back in 1879 when mechanical stokers and coke ovens were first introduced and annual production hit a million tons. 

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The Nobles were a long line of coal miners, originally hailing from the black hills of Southern Wales when at the end of the eighteenth-century, the first namesake of the clan set foot on a New York pier.   There were Nobles strewn out from eastern Pennsylvania, to Kentucky, to Appalachia, to Southern Illinois, and even out west as far as Montana and they had black dust in their veins when they were born; they worked in surface mining jobs (dragline, auger, contour) or deep mining (drift, slope, shaft), it made no difference.

There was lots of labor unrest in Appalachia and Western Pennsylvania during the early part of the twentieth-century, where workers were getting tired of upper-class hoarding of wealth and nowhere was more unstable for a possible outbreak of labor violence against owners than in the Pennsylvania coalfields – both the bituminous and anthracite regions, where Eastern European immigrants worked in subterranean dungeons like dogs.  Men and boys labored in choking black dust below ground. 

And they and their families lived on the surface in black-dust polluted air day after day, earning just over a dollar for every ton of coal they dug out the ground.  If lucky, working families made $600 a year, but after paying back the coal company compulsory deductions for rent, fuel, medical bills, education for kids, food sold at inflated prices by company stores, and of course taxes, they got to keep about a third of what they made. 

They aged faster and died younger than any other industrial worker in the country before or since.  Male children began working at eight or nine years of age, picking splinters of slate out of the coal breakers until their little hands were scarred so badly they stayed that way for life.  Grown men fared even worse, working the black rock ten hours a day, six days a week, all year long. 

There was coal dust in the bread they ate and the milk they drank, they breathed it and coughed it until the Black Lung killed them.  When men were not yet sixty, the Lung had eaten so much of their internal flesh that to eke out a living they had to return once again to the breakers and work side by side with their grandchildren until the illness killed them.

It was in the spring of 1902 when Theodore Roosevelt had just become President that 175,000 Slavic anthracite miners in Pennsylvania quit work to go on strike until and unless management granted a minimum ten-percent increase in wages; immediately joining them were another 25,000 bituminous miners striking in sympathy and all miners said they would stay out until fall if necessary to get a fair increase in pay. 

The shutdown of coal mines forced another 50,000 coal-road workers to be laid off because of both strikes, so now a quarter-million men were not working and, including extended families, over a million people were going hungry.

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A crisis of huge proportion was building since coal was the main energy source of the day, needed by railroads and industry to keep the economic wheels turning in America.  But mine operators and absentee “baron” landlords back east refused to negotiate with mining camp scum, refusing outright any increases in wages whatsoever, despite the fact that the U.S. economy was booming - driven by the coal the poor black-faced miners dug from the earth. 

At first Roosevelt had refused to intervene, but after violence erupted he had no choice but to mediate between owners and labor after a few months into the strike; representing labor was the president of the United Mine Workers Union, thirty-two-year-old John Mitchell. 

The east coast financiers, who through mutual ownership of mines and railroads that hauled the coal, operated the greatest industrial monopoly in U.S. history appointed as their spokesman the tough-as-nails George Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad.  Even after the mine workers convinced their remaining brethren in the pump rooms and firehouses to go out on strike as well, Baer said they could stay out “six months or six years and cripple industry” for all he cared, but mine operators and owners would never capitulate to demands by lowly miners. 

Five months after it started, the national coal strike still had not been resolved and the nation’s Commander-in-Chief lay recovering from an operation on his leg to remove a tumor; the wound had infected causing serious concern amongst White House medical staff.  Still, President Theodore Roosevelt accompanied negotiations from afar and when a month later there was still no settlement, he appointed an independent commission who eventually found in favor of the striking miners and got the owners to increase salaries by the ten-percent labor originally asked for.

There was never any problem finding coal mining work in Western Kentucky, the only problems were associated with working conditions and pay.  By the First World War, annual production had risen to 20 million tons, during the Great Depression it passed 40 million, by the next world war it went past 80 million, during the Middle East oil crisis of 1973 it hit a 100 million, and finally reached 200 million tons.  Things were pretty bad down in the mines during the Depression until a son of Welsh immigrants showed up to stick it to the man, the still-greedy mine owners. 

John Llewellyn Lewis began working in the mines as a teenager in Iowa and moved with his family looking for work to Illinois at the turn of the twentieth-century.  And like many a young man, he joined the United Mine Workers of America that had been around since 1890.  John L. was forty years old when he became the union’s president in 1920, a position he held for the next forty years. 

He was a despot and lifelong Republican, yet supported FDR’s New Deal so he could bring into his union thousands of new members during the Depression – Lewis later broke with President Roosevelt when he would not support Lewis’ efforts to organize a strike against General Motors in 1937.

Say what you wanted about him, to mine owners he was feared and loathed, but when he spoke, they listened because “Big John” L. Lewis would shut them down in a heartbeat.  The unwashed masses loved him. 

His greatest legacy was the creation of the UMWA Welfare and Retirement fund to take care of miners too old to work or disabled from Black Lung i.e. pneumoconiosis from inhalation of coal dust, without cure or treatment, ultimately causing death when the lungs ceased to function properly, so it was a slow and painful suffocation.  Still, working in a coal mine was dangerous – the most dangerous job in America. 

All of Sam’s relatives had been injured at one time or another on the job; it was impossible to avoid injuries – explosions and cave-ins were the worst but you also had more common injuries resulting from equipment, bad air, the Lung, falls, loose rocks, cuts, poison gas, and on and on.  Sam was hurt twice by falling debris during the three months he worked in Old Ben Number Two coal mine after high school and before joining the army. 

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His cousin, Bobby Lee, had been killed just a few months before when he was crushed by a shuttle car so Sam was scared shitless to begin with.  Mines were scary places, real hell on Earth – you descended by crude elevator more than a mile straight down into a hole of pitch blackness and when you arrived, dimly lit caverns offered air foul to breath, stinking, hot, and humid. 

Time seemed to stand still until your shift finally ended and you arrived back at the surface craving a breath full of cool fresh air.  Sam couldn’t fathom men doing this kind of work for ten or twenty or thirty years, provided they lived that long, until they eventually retired.  As it was, life expectancy after retirement was just a few years anyway. 

Barefoot summers, when Sam and his energetic cousins weren’t playing at the grandparent’s homestead, they rode their rusty bicycles down dusty trails, through town, and around the camp, past the coal tipples and up the hill to Enoch's general store.  That the bicycles were old and dilapidated didn’t matter in the least because you could always soup them up with a playing card clothes-pinned to the spokes. 

Dirty and sweaty they leaped up the stairs to the front porch, and barged into the store.  They flew in past the screen door perpetually askew, kept closed by a length of spring wire, and let it slap shut behind them with the clap of a firecracker!  They handed the goofy clerk two bits for a sodie and a Moon Pie before leaving and letting the door slap shut again. 

The art of ice-cold sodie selection was a function of what was available inside the big metal ice-filled cooler out on the front porch – and there were essentially four primo belly washers in greatest demand; ranked in order of least to most preferred they were a Royal Crown Cola, a Dr. Pepper, a Bubble-Up, or the tastiest of them all, the very rare and mystical Grape Nehi which was so delicious that once you tipped the bottle into your mouth on a hot day, you were compelled to drain it completely and then your eyes would water from the fizzle. 

Sam never forgot that store, with the little vacuum-tube radio blaring out songs by the likes of Faron Young, Patsy Cline, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams; and then there was the store’s special scent.

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He could still imagine in his mind, and occasionally conjure up a fleeting whiff of the place in his brain, when he was some place and smelled something similar that brought back the boyhood memory.  It was that unique smell produced by a mixture of lye soap, turpentine, kerosene, Ovaltine, detergents, old milk, boxes of cereal, Eskimo Pies, and Wonder Bread; Hostess Twinkies, Snoballs, and Cupcakes; busted bottles and remnants of foodstuffs commingling in the cracks of the dirty wood-slat floor; licorice sticks, baseball cards, and Bazooka Joe on the counter; and slimy mildew on the walls. 

The store had everything but fruits and vegetables; those were purchased from an old black man everybody called Raggedy Rufus who announced his arrival up the camp’s one-street thoroughfare every day promptly at noon shouting, “Watermelon, cantaloupe, tomatoes, peeeeeaches….” in his deep baritone, singsong voice.

Sam liked to go off on his own too, and ride his bike deep into the woods along the many trails and find a big tree to climb.  When he got to the top, he would look around at his vast domain and feel like he was king of the world.  Relishing the moment, sometimes he felt compelled to sing with fervor his favorite boyhood refrain: Have you ever been fishing on a hot summer day, sitting on a log and the log gave away, with your hands in your pockets and your pockets in your pants, watching all the fish do the hootchie kootchie dance…  

And if feeling rather brash, he may have even crooned another of his favorite verses: Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I’m going to eat some worms.  Big fat slimy ones, itsy bitsy teenie ones, oh how they wiggle and they squirm…

But he always made sure he was home in time for supper so he could watch the Howdy Doody Show and eat a TV dinner on a tray in front of the television set.  The Nobles had an old black and white Emerson and at other times Sam would lie down on the linoleum floor with his head propped up by elbows and hands and watch the freaky looking puppet, his best friend Buffalo Bob, and wish he was one of the kids in the Peanut Gallery. 

It was Chief Thunderthud who originated the world-famous cry, “Kowa-bonga!”  He’d also love to watch the commercials and see what latest weapons were available from Mattel – it was an era when kids played Cowboy and Indians and Mattel made authentic-looking guns for kids, like the legendary Colt Fanner Fifty cap pistol. 

To get a bigger bang for the buck, the kids would take an entire roll of caps, they sold them at the general store, made with real gunpowder, and slam down on it with a ball-peen hammer or flat rock to get a really big explosion.  But you had to be careful using a hammer because the recoil from the force of the explosion may cause you to crack yourself right between the eyes.  Either that or scrape a cap with the thumb to set off the tiny charge and get a decent blood blister in trade. 

On Saturday mornings and weekday evenings, you had your pick of Westerns to watch on TV: Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers & Dale Evans, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Johnny Yuma, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Bronco Lane, The Rifleman, The Bounty Hunter, Branded, The Lawman, Wyatt Earp, Death Valley Days, Gabby Hayes, Buffalo Bill, Jr., and the list went on and on.  But no matter what, kids never missed the Walt Disney Show on Sunday night because that’s when you saw the next episode of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, and if you were lucky enough, you could wear your coonskin cap while watching it along with PF Flyers on your feet. 

Maverick, though, played by actor James Garner in a TV show of the same name, he was one cool dude – a professional gambler/gunslinger/lady’s man – who always kept a few bucks pinned to the inside of his coat just in case he lost everything gambling or got mugged.  Sam learned the lesson and always kept a few bucks put away, tucked away some place safe – that was his rainy-day “Maverick” money.

Sundays were also for Sunday school, reflection, and prayer of course, after a bi-weekly bath in the big zinc tub on the back porch and dressed up in the spiffiest duds; at school they’d sing: Jesus died for all the children, all the children of the world; red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight; Jesus died for all the children of the world.  You sinned on Saturday and asked for forgiveness on Sunday.  The bible-thumping Nobles were holy-roller evangelists and their pastor used to give soul-saving tips like, "You have a power in yew greater than all the powers that come against yew!"

Then after the big extended-family lunch, the kids would go back to killing each other with make-believe bullets: Jesus loves me!  This I know, for the Bible tells me so.  Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong.  Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.

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One of the high points of Sam’s childhood had been when he and his cousins “accidentally” shot and killed the neighbor’s cat with a pump-action .177-caliber pellet rifle and went way out in the woods to bury it.  While digging the feline’s grave, they hit what they thought was a large black rock with the shovel but as it turned out, the stone was an ancient Indian club head of some sort, very smooth and obviously man-made, with grooves running down the middle of either side where it had been fastened to a wooden handle.  The kids used the black stone for a show-and-tell presentation at school, claiming it came from the Ice Age, but the teacher never gave it back afterwards so Sam never did find out how old it was or its historical significance. 

Still, it had generated a curiosity in archaeology that Sam still had to this day.  The schoolmarm, Miss Bobette, did give him something in return, however; it was a book written by F. Van Wyck Mason about the American Revolution entitled Eagle in the Sky, and it made the young Sammy Lee feel the tingling sensation of patriotism for the first time, and sparked his lifelong passion for reading. 

Miss Bobette was still teaching at the camp school when Sam became a high school senior, and he busted with pride when his teacher appointed him writer/editor of the two-page school newsletter, Bobette’s Gazette.  Sam’s very first article was about the Indian tribes of Western Kentucky.  He had loved writing as a boy and hoped some day to write a novel. 

As he grew older Sam put aside boyish things.  He learned to fish, hunt, and throw knives and axes from his father and uncles, and earned the reputation as a crack shot with a .22-caliber rifle.  This led to jokes about his mother’s Indian blood – she was an eighth Cherokee – and how her son had inherited from her side of the family his love of the outdoors, hunting prowess, and fishing ability.  Other than that, Sam remembered very little from his mother’s side of the family. 

He did recall when he was very young he met his maternal grandfather who looked almost oriental, who told him he came from a long line of tribal shamans going back many generations, and he met his great-uncle too, Chelan Cloud, a very tall, dark, and proud man.

He did remember, however, and not too fondly that his mother was not treated all-that well by his father’s side of the family and as an adult, years later he realized he had witnessed something called discrimination. 

Sam’s mother told him to seek his own life’s path and ignore his narrow-minded relatives who said he should stay in Mohlenburg and work in the coal mines.  They told Sam, “Don’t get above your raisin’.” She gave him a pearl of wisdom that he never forgot, “The future ain’t been writ yet so anythin’ can happen!”

The first Saturday in May belonged to the “Run for the Roses” up in Louisville, a time-honored tradition signaling summer was near, and the family all gathered around the TV to sing along with My Old Kentucky Home and choke up a little because of the sentimental words: Weep no more, my lady.  Oh weep no more today.  We will sing one more song for my old Kentucky home, for my old Kentucky home far away.  Wasn’t it funny how an old song could always take you back in time and how the tune could conjure up almost-forgotten memories?

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Summertime meant picnics and family get-togethers at the old house on the rural route – thankfully all the rusted-out old junk had finally been carted off – where card tables were set up under the giant elm tree for pinochle, a game of washers was set up (a poor man’s horseshoes), and the two big picnic tables were put end-to-end for the dining feast: gallons of ice tea and chilled buttermilk; mounds of mashed potatoes made with whipping cream and butter; fried chicken; thick pan gravy made from flour mixed with chicken drippings; sweet corn on the cob dripping with butter; green beans with ham hocks swimming in butter; buttered homemade biscuits; and peach cobbler with ice cream and ice-cold watermelon for desert.  Out back a ridge runner would drop off mason-jar moonshine for the men folk on occasion.

Whatever shortcomings there were in victuals during the Great Depression, Sam’s aunts and uncles sure made up for lost ground in later years, yet despite the rich, fatty foods they consumed by the truckload, they lived well into their obese seventies.

            Maybe it weren’t exactly high tea, but then again the Nobles and just plain country folks like them weren’t fancy European blue bloods living in castles – no dukes or duchesses, no counts or countesses, no princes, princesses, kings, nor queens nor royalty of any kind. 

But they didn’t need to put on airs because they had Nashburg’s country royalty and its sacred tabernacle, the Ryman Auditorium, in fact, it used to be called the Union Gospel Tabernacle, that broadcast songs on WSM Radio every Saturday night from the Grand Ole Opry.

All the stars traveled to this Mecca of country music in Nashville and sang there until it closed in 1974; legends like Mother Maybelle Carter, Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Minnie Pearl, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Loretta Lynn, Vassar Clements, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Brenda Lee, Tammy Wynette, Red Foley, and Lefty Frizzell to name but a few. 

And if they hadn’t made it big enough back then to get on the Opry, you could catch the up-and-coming young outlaws down on Lower Broadway or up in Printer’s Alley, in places like Tootsie’s Orchard Lounge – the likes of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson.

The most memorable of family get-togethers happened not long before Sam was due to ship out to Fort Knox, located about a hundred miles northeast of Mohlenburg, where he was due to be inducted into the U.S. Army then get put on a Greyhound Bus with other recruits for the long ride to Fort Lewis, Washington for basic training.  Bored by the goings-on and usual inane redneck conversation, Sam decided to rummage around in the partially flooded basement of the grandparents old clapboard house to see if any of the junk stored there was interesting. 

The dingy place had the usual aged, faded black and white photographs of long dead ancestors, cobwebs, old crates filled with discarded odds and ends of clothing and frayed papers, busted up furniture, and banged up pots and pans; but a very small object caught his eye.  It was an empty wooden container, a little hinged box with the word “Elgin” stenciled in black letters, and it had once held a pocket watch.  It looked very old but the felt liner with the indentation once filled by the watch was still in place, barely, so separated easily enough from the box when Sam tugged it a bit.

That’s when the idea occurred to him to have a little fun with the bunch out in the front yard, you know, shake things up a bit.  He tore off a small piece of paper from one sticking out of a crate, and began drawing a crude map of the homestead’s back yard, starting out by the outhouse, which was still in perfectly good operating condition. 

There even hung from a piece of twine a JC Penny catalog.  Upstairs in the kitchen drawer he found a ballpoint pen and number two pencil, but he decided on the latter writing instrument, not knowing if the ballpoint pen marks would pass scrutiny, or test the legitimacy of an “ancient” map he was about to create.

The map he fashioned showed a dotted line twisting and turning around the yard, looping and passing where the Elm tree now stood, all the way to the far side of the property where Sam scribbled a large “X” and printed underneath it “$GOLD$.” 

Then he rubbed the paper on the dusty window sill over the kitchen sink a few times, front and back, to give it that authentic soiled look; popped it in the toaster very briefly to impart a yellow-parchment effect; and finally crumpled it up and opened it a few times to add another decade or two of aging. 

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The forgery was now perfect, so it was time for the hoax to proceed to the next phase, which meant placing the “treasure map” back inside the small wooden box and folded just right so it fit underneath the felt insert.  As the noise outside on the lawn was reaching a boring crescendo of fun and mirth, Sam decided to go out and add some real excitement to the festive occasion. 

A transistor radio was blaring and the men folk were listening to a Paducah radio station broadcasting a St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cub baseball game; both teams were perennial archenemies but in this neck of the woods, Cardinals were king. 

Nonchalantly walking to the middle of the yard flanked by relatives on all sides, Sam sat down on a folding chair and began noisily fiddling with the box, examining it very closely, very seriously.  Like moths drawn to a flame, the aunts and uncles took the bait.

“Hey Sammy Lee, watcha got there little buddy?” queried the ever scheming and conniving Uncle Jeff, husband of my father’s sister, Aunt Violet.  Us cousins loved him though; when we were little kids he’d entertain us of an evening catching big, fat, juicy water bugs and squish them between his thumb and forefinger causing us to giggle madly in mischievous revulsion.

“Howdy Uncle Jeff.  I’m not quite sure what this is.  I was just rummaging around the basement and found this here little box.  Looks like it used to hold maybe an old watch,” Sam replied innocently enough.

“Pass that thing over here for a second, boy.  Violet’s granddaddy used to own a pocket watch, used to keep it hanging out the front of his bid overalls hooked to a Freemason watch fob.  Liked to let folks think he was a Mason and his favorite saying was, ‘Don’t let them goddamn city shitters kick you down.’  Hells bells, the old fart only had three damn teeth in his whole head.  Couldn’t read or write neither, and didn’t have a pot to piss in or window to throw it out of, so the poor bastard didn’t fool anybody about really being a Mason!” 

And with that Jeff slapped his knee and guffawed with laughter, but he doodled with the box some more, and Sam thought, “Come on Uncle Jeff, lift the liner and take out the map.”

          “Yes!” Sam said to himself clinching his fists in muted glee as Jeff found the paper and began unfolding it.

“What you got there, Uncle Jeff?” Sam queried utterly dumbfounded, and a little more loudly than really necessary, “Looks like some kind of map.”  With that, a dozen heads whipped around to see what was going on – the Uncles Arthur, Paul, Lindbergh, Jim, and Harold; the Aunts Violet, Pearl, Maxine, Louise, and Ruby; Sam’s parents; a myriad of assorted cousins; and all looking very serious except Sam’s mother – she knew his scam was on right away and grinned slyly.

“Land sakes alive, looks like some kind of treasure map!” Ruby exclaimed, pointing to the word "Gold" and the dollar signs.  This led to general chaos with everyone talking at the same time.  “Everybody knew old granddaddy Noble had money stashed some place, hell, for years he told people how he rode with Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War killing Yankees, and was with ‘Wild Bill’ when he got his self shot and killed back in 1865, not that far from this here very spot. 

I’ll bet this is some of that dang blasted long lost Confederate gold everybody ‘round these parts used to talk about, yeehaw!”  And with the Civil War historian Uncle Harold’s seal of approval, there were accompanying Rebel yells and yelps galore and things really started getting out of control. 

Harold was my favorite uncle.  He’d worked the coal mines nearly thirty years and was as healthy as a horse.  He carried in the glove compartment of his Ford pickup truck a pint of Wild Turkey bourbon whisky and a 9-mm German Luger he took off some Kraut during the Second World War and peppered his conversation with good ol’ boy expressions like: “colder’n a well digger’s ass in Montana;” “hotter’n two dollar pistol;” “tighter than a buffalo’s ass in fly season,” and describing a drenching Baptist-style downpour would say, “she’s coming down harder than a cow pissin’ on a flat rock!”

The next thing Sam knew, everyone started running for shovels and Uncle Arthur said he was going after his loader backhoe to dig up every inch of this yard.  Trying now to get the genie back into the bottle, Sam shouted to everyone that it was a joke, he yelled out he had forged the map and there wasn’t any treasure, “no gold, no gold!” he yelled. 

The gold-fevered crowd refused to believe it was a hoax, didn’t want to hear the truth; the scam had been too good, too damn perfect.  So when it finally sank in it was a big joke, slowly they turned, step-by-step, inch-by-inch, and glared at Sam while moving forward en masse in his direction, livid for being made fools of. 

To this day, he thought he saw a knotted rope flung over the Elm tree’s biggest branch but quickly realized it was only his imagination.  But for the next minutes, hours, and days, he had to endure mob anger from his own kin, the worst kind of anger there is, and was glad when he finally shipped out to find safety in the bosom of the U.S. Army.  The episode went down in family folklore history as the Great Noble Gold Rush of ’63 and over time, everyone was able to laugh and joke about the whole thing.

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)