Uncle Arthur and the Panther

Late in the afternoon on a cool September day in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, a Southern Pacific freight train slows down and stops in Marathon, Texas. One of the several hobos riding in an empty box car decides to get off and try to find something to eat. He has not eaten anything since yesterday when he got on the freight train in Yuma, Arizona. In an adjoining neighborhood to the railroad tracks, he goes to the backdoor of a house and knocks on the screen door. A Mexican woman comes to the door and seeing a hobo there, she latches the eye hook on the door. He takes his hat off and asked for “comida, por favor”. She nods and disappears. He waits. She returns, unlatches the screen door, and gives him a plate with scrambled eggs and a tortilla. While sitting on the backdoor wooden steps and eating the eggs, he hears the train whistle and can hear it chugging as it leaves. Stranded, he is now going to have to find a place to sleep tonight.

When I was about three or four years old which was during The Depression, our family lived on East Main Street in Uvalde, Texas. Every morning, it was my job to sit by the back screen door to warn my mother when a hobo was approaching. They always came to the back door, never the front door. I was fascinated by these strange smelly creatures standing there with their haunted eyes, hat in hand, quietly and politely asking my mother for something to eat. They were very different from our present day alcoholic and drug addicted aggressive panhandlers.  

She always gave them a couple of scrambled eggs and some toast. Through the back screen door, I have watched countless hobos sit on the back steps and eat those eggs on the plate balanced on their closed knees. They were always polite and so thankful to my mother.

The hobo that got off the train in Marathon was my Uncle Arthur. He told me this story the summer I stayed with him for several weeks on his farm west of Colorado City, Texas. At the time I stayed with him he was in his fifties and I was in my early teens. I can remember almost everything about that visit. Uncle Arthur was a small thin man. He walked with his left shoulder slightly forward, a spring in his step and his sweaty hat at an angle on his head. He had bright blue eyes and always had a slight grin on his face. Several of his teeth were missing. Recently, I did a Google search on my name on my computer, and his name, that is very similar to my name, came up on a genealogy web site. It said he was born in 1895 in Opelika, Alabama.

Late one night when returning home from the church revival, he told me that he had once done a great sin. During the Great Depression, he had a red-haired wife and three kids, two boys and a girl. He had lost his job. They had no money. He was extremely depressed and didn’t know what to do. So one morning, after a fight with his wife, he walked out the door, got on a freight train and never went back. He had abandoned his family in the time of their great need. They had never forgiven him. He was a hobo for several years riding the freight trains all over America. I don’t know how it came about that by the late 1940’s he lived by himself, in a rundown unpainted farm house, on a large cotton farm that he owned in West Texas. I could write a book about my experiences that I had on that summer visit to his farm, however this story is about his experiences one night near Marathon and his life-long fight with the demons in his soul. The scene in this painting of a cougar looking out over the Rio Grande River valley is only a few miles south of Marathon, Texas.

In Marathon after eating the eggs, it was getting dark and he started looking for a place to sleep that night. West of town, south of the railroad tracks, he could see an abandoned farm house on the other side of a field by some mesquite trees. He walked over to the old house. All the windows and doors had been removed. It was just a shell of a small four room house, but it would do, so he went in and in one of the back rooms he laid out his bedroll in the center of the room. Exhausted, he soon went to sleep.

Way late in the night, a noise outside of the house awakened him. He opened his eyes, the room was dark, but he could see the outline of the open window. While looking at the window, a large panther leaped through the window and landed on the wooden floor next to his bedroll. He immediately set up and he and the panther, almost nose to nose, stared at each other in the dark room. Suddenly, the panther let out a deep growl and hissed. Uncle Arthur was petrified with fear. The panther slowly backed away, growling.

Uncle Arthur got his pocket-knife out of his pants and opened it. The panther quit growling and started slowly circling him on his bedroll. As the panther would circle him, he would turn and face the panther on his knees. In the dark room, he couldn’t see the panther, but the panther could see him. He could just hear the panther as it walked and hear it breathing. When the panther would get too close, he would lash out with his pocket-knife, and the panther would growl and jump back. They did this terrifying dance for some time. It seemed like to Uncle Arthur that it would never end. He thought for sure that the panther would kill him and eat him right there on his bedroll. Then, after a while, the panther went to the window and silently leaped out. Uncle Arthur shaking with fear, threw up the eggs waited for the panther to return until sunrise.

During my visit that summer, Uncle Arthur paid me, and his youngest son that was my age and also there for a visit, and a tenant family consisting of a father, mother, a young girl and a boy that lived on the adjoining farm, five dollars a day each, sun-up to sun-down, to chop cotton (hoeing weeds) in his cotton fields. At night, after bathing in the horse trough, we would go to town to a revival at a little church. In his run-down unpainted farm house, on every wall was a framed certificate stating in beautiful calligraphy that he was the largest contributor to that little church, year after year. I now realize that he was trying to make retribution to his god for his great sin of abandoning his family. He would go on to own several large farms, become wealthy and gave more and more to that little church, but never quite enough for the salvation for his great sin that he so desperately needed.

The demons in his soul eventually won the battle and he had a tragic ending to his life. Perhaps, someday, I will write about that tragedy in another story, when I can keep the tears out of my eyes.