A Story About Family: Everett and the Bird

This week's Long & Short Reviews question asks for a story about each reviewer's family or friends.

A story my blog buddy always wanted to post here, but never got quite right, was the story of my grandfather, Mother's father. Like many boys in his generation he was given some other man's first and last names as first and middle names, and called by his middle name. He was William Everett whatever-their-family-name-was, called Everett, or sometimes "Everdy." 

Children that age learned to do farm chores early, and by 1900 little Everett, probably still in grade four at school when one was open, was riding some sort of primitive cultivating machine through a field on his father's farm, chopping up weeds that had sprouted in the field last fall. 

As he approached the corner of a field, he saw some sort of little brown bird hiding in a thicker than usual clump of weeds. He shouted and waved his hat, but the bird didn't fly away. Everett always called it a sparrow. It had a nest on the ground and didn't want to abandon its nest. 

Everett stopped the machine, left it idling, jumped down and scared the bird off its nest, which he moved out of harm's way. Then he went back, started the machine moving from the ground, and jumped up toward the seat. As the wheels began to roll, a sharp cultivating blade on the machine sliced through Everett's ankle joint. His foot was hanging by the tendon. His leg was bleeding badly. Everett turned off the machine and shouted for help. 

His father was not far off. Though not a very kind father--next summer he would take Everett into town and set him out on a day labor site, with orders to find a place where he could work for room and board--he pressed the foot and ankle together and tied a tourniquet around the leg. 

Everett's mother took Everett into town in the wagon. There was exactly one doctor in the town. He looked at the foot and said, "I'll have to amputate it."

"No," said Everett's mother. "God left it in one piece for a reason. Sew it back on."

"The foot will only rot and fall off, and cost you more money," the doctor said. "Some infection has probably already got into the wound. There is a high probability that the boy may die." 

Everett said nothing. He had learned not to speak to adults until he was asked a question.

But his mother looked at his face and said to the doctor, "You sew, and I'll pray." 

"If you are determined to waste your money..." The doctor started sewing. Everett bit his lips and tried to be brave as a soldier, which he now realized he would never actually be. The doctor took care to put the foot on right, just in case the mother's prayers were answered.

Everett was carried home with his foot wrapped up and propped higher than his head. He had to miss several days' work. He spent the time studying. At that age he was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, and wanted to be a lawyer. 

A few weeks later, the doctor looked at the ankle and shook his head. "It's a miracle. There is no natural explanation why that ankle should have been able to heal, but it is healing. Make sure he wears good strong boots, and he can go back to work."

Back to work Everett went and, though his ankle was always stiff and sore, he could feel exercise pumping the blood through his ankle and helping it heal, so far as it could.

He always wore boots, one smaller than the other, and he always walked with a limp. He was a little boy, for his age, and grew up to be a short, thin man. He was strong and tough in spite of being small. He worked hard for his living, first on a farm, then out west as a cowboy. He went to school when he could, studied at home in between school terms, passed the bar exam, and was offered a job as a lawyer.

Looking at the first case he was given, he said, "But this man's guilty."

"Of course he is. New fellows always get the guilty ones."

"But I can't defend him when I know he's guilty."

"Oh well, no doubt he'll go to prison. Your job is to find extenuating circumstances and get his sentence reduced. That's all that can be expected--"

"I don't want his sentence reduced. Keeping the likes of him locked up is what the law is for." 

"Well, you are green! You'll soon learn what it is to be a lawyer."

"Maybe I don't want to be one," said Everett, and limped back in the direction of a place where he had worked before. "If I'll always be a cowboy, there are worse things." 

He was not always a cowboy.

His specialty was training horses. He earned extra money "bronco busting" in rodeos, but in those days teaching a system of cue signals, first to horses and then to those who rode and drove them, was a serious job. Everett earned enough money training horses to make a down payment on a farm. The rodeo had some events where girls competed, too, at show riding and marksmanship. Everett married the best female sharpshooter in that year's rodeo, and, some forty or fifty years later, they became my grandparents. By that time they had decided they were too old to farm, moved into town, and started managing a boardinghouse near the university.

Did they live happily ever after? Meh. Everett's wife developed diabetes. In those days, in most places people who had diabetes died in a few years, but doctors were just starting to offer insulin treatments that kept them going for a few more years. Everett's wife was an Irish-American celiac, a hardy breed, and lived for another forty years after having been mistakenly pronounced dead; but she never really recovered her health, or looks, or figure. She and her siblings inherited some land in Colorado that wasn't good for much else, so they sold the mineral rights; having heard that Everett's wife had died, her brothers and sisters divided the acreage among themselves so that all the oil wells were on their portions. They were oil millionnaires. Everett's wife always worked, and they always needed the money. After age seventy Everett became hypertensive and prone to bursts of bad temper

Still, all their lives, he and his family always lived reasonably well. They never got into debt. They lived through the plague years of the early twentieth century without any serious illness--except the diabetes. In two ways Everett and his wife were well ahead of their time: they had only two children, and both of them lived beyond age seventy. Everett lived to see two of a total of four grandchildren. Some people would say his was a long and enviable life.