Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
On summer afternoons, Darrell and Larry and some of their cousins would have BB fights over by a part of the property they called shack town, between R.J. and Lexie’s house and the old cannery. This is where the hired help from out of town used to live during canning season. During the fifties, when Darrell was growing up, there were just four or five of the little tar-paper shacks still standing, but the kids saw them as their very own playground village.
Shack town and the defunct cannery were remnants of old Frank
Mease’s legacy. Frank was R.J.’s dad, and one of the real characters in Reeds Spring history. The son of a traveling preacher, Frank moved from Iowa to Reeds Spring in 1890, when the town was little more than a scratch and a hopeful squiggle on the rugged Ozarks landscape. He hurried through two wives before he was thirty, and then, in 1901, he married a local girl named Elizabeth Teeters and settled down to the business of raising children and canning tomatoes.
Before they were done, Frank and Lizzie had a total of seventeen children, twelve of whom survived into adulthood. R.J., born in 1922, was number fifteen. Their canning operation really took off after the railroad was put through Reeds Spring in 1905, and for a stretch in the second decade of the twentieth century they owned six canneries at once and employed hundreds of people during the busy season, some coming all the way down from Springfield and putting up at one of those little one- or two-room shacks for weeks at a time. Tomatoes were always their biggest product, but after a while they branched out into green beans, blackberries, and raspberries. Frank farmed some of the fruit and vegetables for the operation himself, as often as not working the fields wearing nothing but his boots. Anyone with nerve enough to ask why, he’d sit down and give a good talking to on the restorative powers of the sun.
No one could accuse Frank Mease of entrepreneurial complacency. In 1920 he built an eight-story oak tower at Reeds Spring Junction, installed a telescope on the roof, and rented out the floors beneath to tourists. A few years later, he purchased Old Spanish Cave just north of the junction, opened it to the public, and put up a hotel, gas station, and campground with rental cabins on the adjoining property. The cave wasn’t quite the commercial success he’d hoped for, but for decades afterward young Meases, including Darrell, found it an enchanting place to bring first dates. During the 1930s, finally, in an effort to beat back the effects of the Depression, Frank went into the beef-canning business and opened up his own slaughterhouse in a hollow half a mile outside of town.
The advancing years weren’t kind to Frank Mease’s various business
ventures. When he died in 1951, eleven years before his wife, most of what he’d started up had fallen into ruin. Through good times and bad, however, he held onto his spunk. Well into his late middle-age, he still got a kick out of putting an arm chair on the roof of a car and then climbing up on it and amusing folks by standing on his head for five or ten minutes at a time. By the time he hit his seventies, he’d given up on this stunt but was still raising eyebrows. Once, in Springfield, he was intercepted in the middle of an illegal U-turn by a cop who told him, “You can’t do that.” “If you’d get out of my way, I could,” Frank retorted.
Toward the end, Frank was forced to surrender his driver’s license, but he didn’t let this slow him down too much. He just had somebody else drive him to Springfield for fun and games once or twice a week. In his more domestic moments, he enjoyed entertaining relatives at the big white frame house he and Lizzie had built next to the main cannery early in their marriage. There was no shortage of relatives to entertain. Long before Frank’s old age, the rocky corridor stretching northwest for two miles from the edge of Reeds Spring to the junction of U.S. 160 and Route 248 had become known as Mease’s Hollow. There were so many Meases in the area, it was sometimes said, that you’d be hard-pressed throwing a cat out of a speeding car without hitting one.
It would be asking too much for anyone on Darrell’s mom’s side to be as colorful as Frank Mease. Ed Graves came pretty close though—on his good days Lexie’s dad could give old Frank a pretty good run for his money.
Ed and Clemmie Graves moved about in the Ozarks a fair bit after getting married, once bundling their young children and worldly belongings into an iron-wheeled covered wagon and journeying all the way from Mammoth to Rogersville. They settled down in the Reeds Spring area for good in 1918, where Ed made a living, among other things, running his own butchering and auctioning business. It was some of those other things that got people talking. During Prohibition, Ed had Clemmie sew half- and full-pint-sized pockets into the lining of his coat. He’d fill the pockets
with bottles of homebrew and go into town looking for customers. Finding them was never a problem; the only thing Ed could have used was a bigger coat.
Ed was a big man, at six five and 250 pounds almost as big as the stories people told about him. There was the story, for example, about how he shot a revenuer to death in Galena but got out of serving serious time because he was related to the trial judge. Or how he once turned such a large profit selling horses and furs that some of the county’s most prominent bootleggers wondered if maybe they’d gone into the wrong business. Ed was known, sometimes admiringly, as a scoundrel, a scalawag, and a womanizer. Never one for manual labor, he lived by his wits and his courage. He’d do almost anything to make an easy dollar, and the thing he did best was trading. In the Missouri Ozarks trading in goods was a well-entrenched practice; in Ed’s hands it was an art form. Nobody traded more creatively than Ed. He was the kind of guy, his friends liked to say, who could walk into a county fair with nothing more than a pocketknife and then go home hours later with a new wagon and a pair of mules. He’d just keep trading up, swapping one thing for something else more valuable, and on and on. People seemed to find his charm irresistible.
As for Clemmie, almost everyone in town agreed she was as nice and sweet a woman as you’d want to meet—maybe too nice and sweet, some said, for her own good. Staying married to Ed took a certain forbearance, but nobody could recall Clemmie complaining. If anything, she seemed to view the assignment as a special challenge. Clemmie’s great passion in life was religion, the Pentecostal faith to which she converted when she was twenty-eight, and in his declining years she finally succeeded in bringing Ed into the fold. Some folks thought big Ed was merely covering his bets; Clemmie didn’t much care what folks thought.
Lexie was the baby of the family, the youngest of Clemmie and Ed’s ten children. She was sixteen and still in high school when she married R.J., who was four years her senior. With Frank’s help, the couple built a new house on a ridge in Mease’s Hollow, a modest,
comfortable rambling house they figured would be ideal for raising children. R.J. took a job at the garment factory in town while Lexie finished school, and when Darrell was born in 1946, and then Larry a year and a half later, their life was starting to take on a nice shape. By 1958, when their daughter, Rita, was born, they had everything a young Ozarks couple could reasonably have asked for.
W
HEN DARRELL WAS
growing up, it was commonly observed that he took after his dad. Like R.J., he loved spending time in the brush, always itching for an opportunity to get back out again. He was a true Ozarks boy, a hillbilly in the best and most complimentary sense of the word. He knew the names of every plant and animal in the area, what you could eat and what you couldn’t, and how to hunt and fish and cook his own food beside a mountain stream. If need be, he could live in the brush for weeks at a time, months maybe, without asking for help.
Lexie knew this about Darrell, but she also knew something else. Lexie was a deeply religious woman, raised by her mom in the Pentecostal faith, where spiritual intuition counts for more than abstract dogma, and she thought she sensed certain things about Darrell that most people probably missed.
When Darrell was four years old, Lexie started taking him to the Reeds Spring Free Pentecostal Church. The church was housed in a former feed store just off the main street, right next to the garment factory where R.J. worked and almost directly across from the walled-in spring the town was named after. She took Darrell to services Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, and unlike a lot of boys his age he seemed really pleased with the idea of going.
Darrell enjoyed church. It was a whole different world—a rich and mysterious world that gripped his imagination every bit as much as the world of the backwoods. He loved the boisterous shouting and singing, the sweetly intoxicating poetry of tongues; he looked forward to the preaching, the Bible drills, and the revivals. He was born-again, or converted, at the age of ten, which was normal
procedure for Pentecostal children of that age in the Ozarks, but for Darrell there was nothing routine about the experience, nothing just-getting-it-done-with. He took his conversion with utmost seriousness, believing that somehow, at the inner core of his being, he’d been marked as one of God’s very own. He believed that he’d been profoundly changed—and Lexie believed it, too.
It wasn’t that his life changed much on the surface after he was born-again. He was far too young for drinking and carousing, and he’d never been heard to cuss, so it wasn’t as if he needed to do much about mending his ways. On the surface he remained pretty much the same kid as before, reading his Bible a bit more perhaps, but still hanging out in the woods, still cutting up with Larry. No, it was nothing major, nothing plainly visible, but a series of small things that convinced Lexie there was something special about Darrell.
There was the dream, for example. When Darrell was twelve, he came into the kitchen one morning while Lexie was preparing breakfast and told her about a dream he’d had the night before. In the dream, he and Larry and Garth were walking single-file along a precipitous path, with R.J. up ahead telling them to walk straight and take care not to fall over the edge. The boys tried to do as R.J. told them, but it was tough going. The bank along the narrow path was rocky and slippery, and they had trouble keeping their footing. Once or twice Darrell came close to slipping off, and down below, while struggling to regain his balance, he could see deep pits with grass in them and goats nonchalantly munching on the grass. Eventually the boys made it safely to the far end of the path.
Lexie took dreams seriously. She believed they were an important way the Holy Spirit communicated with Christians, and now, having listened to Darrell, she felt certain she knew the spiritual meaning of his dream. Before she could speak, however, Darrell said, “Mama, this is what it means,” and he proceeded to interpret the dream himself.
“The straight-and-narrow path we were walking along stands for the life Christians have to lead after they’re born again,” he said.
“The rough rocky bank stands for all that Satan will try and tempt the Christian with to pull him from the path.” He went on: “You know, in the Bible goats represent sinners and sheep represent born-again Christians. Well, these goats are in these pits of sin and they’re unconcerned about the condition of their souls—just feeding on what Satan has to offer.”
Hearing this, Lexie felt a surge of pride; no, it was something more than pride—she felt real spiritual excitement. Darrell, all of twelve, had understood the dream exactly as it had been revealed to her. Who knew what might be in store for her firstborn son?
There were other small things that caught Lexie’s notice. On autumn evenings Darrell and Larry and some of their cousins liked to have spear fights by shack town next to the old cannery. They’d yank up dried-out horseweeds, six or seven feet long, and hurl them at one another, trying to score direct hits. The weeds were tough and pointy and potentially dangerous, so the boys had drawn up their own convention of warfare: no hitting above the shoulders. One evening, when Darrell was thirteen, one of his cousins violated the convention and drilled him in the side of the head. Darrell fell to the ground in pain, and when he got back up he realized he could see nothing, nothing at all, out of his left eye. He walked home, dazed and scared, told his mom what had happened, then went straight up to his room and prayed for healing. Three hours later, the sight in his eye returned.
Darrell’s high-school years were about as steady as they come: he seemed to breeze right through. While some of his classmates were running into the usual kinds of teenage trouble—heartbreaks, hangovers, the usual teenage blues—Darrell mostly kept doing what he’d always been doing. He started dating a bit, but he wasn’t known as a fast mover. Holding hands and talking was the speed he usually felt most comfortable with. As for school, it was just another way of passing the time—nothing to get too worked up about. His grades were fine, almost always above average, and his teachers liked him well enough, but outside of class he very rarely cracked a book.
Watching her oldest boy go through high school, Lexie remained as proud as ever. She recognized the temptations teenagers faced, and she was pleased with the way Darrell kept up with his religion, long after many of the kids he’d grown up with had stopped giving it anything more than token attention. She watched him reading his Bible, not as often as when he was younger maybe, but still reading it, still staying firm, and she thought to herself, “I’ve always known it; God has a special ministry in store for that boy. Darrell might become a preacher.”
A
ND WHY NOT
a preacher? In the southwest Missouri Ozarks, becoming a preacher wasn’t a bad career option. Long before Darrell’s time, the region was known for its religious fervor and its rich mixture of home-brewed pieties. It was sometimes said, with only slight exaggeration, that every hollow had its own minister and just around the next breakneck bend of the county highway there’d always be yet another roadside tabernacle. If you were a young preacher just out of Bible school with a new message of sin and salvation, chances were you’d find an enthusiastic audience, providing you kept the message simple and biblical and free of anything too foreign-sounding—which usually meant anything too Catholic. Simple and biblical: this is how the Missouri hill folk preferred their religion. And entertaining—a little pizzazz couldn’t hurt. The best preachers were those who could fire their people up with threats of damnation and promises of salvation and then cool them down with some good country-cured humor.