Summer of my Indiscretion

In early May of 1949, school ended for the summer break. I was relieved to be finished with Miss Nicholson’s sixth grade class. She was a no-nonsense teacher, and she wasn’t the sort of person who bonded with any of her students. I felt like I’d learned a lot, but it hadn’t been an especially pleasant year. Some teachers know how to make learning fun, or at least less painful. My dad liked her as she joked around with him while buying her groceries, but that hadn’t made things any easier for me. I felt like she probably regretted becoming a teacher. Our paths would cross again years later, after I was in college and she’d retired. Then I would see a different side of her, and realize she wasn’t as awful as I’d thought back then. We seem to judge people from our own perspective.

That summer when I was eleven, my plan had been to spend my time losing myself in all the books which I hoped to read. I knew Mom would have some outdoor work she would insist that I help with, but she usually didn’t demand a lot of my time. A few days into the break, something happened to change the direction in which I expected things to go.

There was an old house further up the dirt road past our neighbor Joe Seay’s house, which appeared to be getting new renters. When Mom and I drove by on our way home from town, I saw a girl, who appeared to be near my age, and a younger boy moving items from the back of an old pickup.

I didn’t give it much thought, since I wasn’t particularly looking for a new friend. Joe Seay, on the other hand, enjoyed talking to everyone, and the new neighbors didn’t escape his notice. This house was along his walking route into town, and he stopped by to welcome the new neighbors with an offering from his garden. The couple were in their fifties, but the girl was my age and asked about other young people around. He told her about me. Little did I know this summer would turn a relatively respectable person into a guilty felon, or at least an accessory in crime.

A couple of days later, the girl and the younger brother, whom I’d seen when passing the house, showed up at our door and asked for me. Glenda was different from anyone I’d ever met. My first impression of her was of an extreme extrovert. She seemed lively, and fun-loving and full of mischief.  She informed me her family had moved from Smith County, a couple of counties south of Newton. She and Tommy were the last two children in a family of thirteen kids. The rest of her siblings were grown. When school started in August, she would be in seventh grade, like me.

The county she came from had the reputation of being the home to a family that feuded like the ‘Hatfields and McCoys’ of West Virginia and Kentucky. These feuds involved wild west style murders and gun battles among the Sullivan family in an area known as Sullivan’s Hollow. Glenda proudly proclaimed that her mother was a Sullivan, and most of her family were members of this notorious clan. The original Tom Sullivan who established Sullivan’s Hollow was father to twenty-two children, eleven from each of his two wives, to whom he was married at the same time. One of the women was an Indian of the Choctaw tribe he met in Mississippi after moving from South Carolina.

The grandson of the original founder, and Glenda’s uncle, was known as ‘Wild Bill’ Sullivan, and he was said to have killed 50 men. A couple of escapades she mentioned involved catching the sheriff, securing his head between two rails and leaving him in the woods to starve. Another involved harnessing a salesman to a plow and forcing him to plow a field. Wild Bill started a war in a church yard after Sunday services that ended in a number of deaths. The episode that finally got him prison time involved killing his own brother.

I was fascinated with her stories, and the three of us became friends quickly. Mom was pleased to know I had someone my age in the area. She was glad to see us doing physical activities like fishing in the pond, and playing games that had us chasing each other and turning hand springs, flips and riding bikes. Glenda tolerated Tommy, her younger brother by three years, although he was sometimes the butt of our jokes. We tricked him into touching our electric fence and getting a mild jolt, among other things.

All too soon, Glenda became bored with our usual activities and decided we should pay our neighbors, Joe Seay and wife, Virgie, a visit. The original idea was to see what we could find in his apple orchard. I knew Joe would be delighted to share his apples, so I didn’t anticipate a problem. Unfortunately, when we arrived at his shack, neither he nor Virgie, who out-weighed him by about 400 pounds, were home. Glenda’s next thought was to see what mischief we could create. Tommy immediately picked up a dead frog and chunks of dirt which he tossed into the well. Then, he got busy writing curse words with a stone on the grassless yard. Glenda overturned some flowerpots on the porch and then looked around for what she might do next.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go inside and see what we can do.”

This was out of my comfort zone. The door wasn’t locked and not wanting to be called a chicken, I followed her inside. The tiny shack only had two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. The unpainted walls contained huge framed portraits of men and women, who looked to be from the 1800s. Joe’s father had lived in the area and had likely come from a well-known family. I assumed the pictures passed to Joe at his death. Joe’s father, John, once owned the land my grandpa and Dad now owned.

Glenda was busy trashing the house by throwing quilts around and hiding kitchen pots and pans. “Do something,” she ordered. “Don’t make me do this stuff all by myself.”

“Okay,” I said. “Look, I hid the clock,” I dropped the clock inside a dresser drawer. “Come on. Let’s get out of here, before we get in trouble.”

“I’m through. Me and Tommy’s got to go home. You worry too much. Nobody’s going to know it was us. Anyway, so what? What’s he going to do about it? He’s a weird old man, with a really strange wife.”

Glenda and Tommy left to walk home, and I crept back in the other direction toward my house, hating myself for getting talked into something I knew was wrong. I buried myself in a book and tried to put the whole incident behind me.

I was reminded of the words, “Be sure your sins will find you out.” two days later, when my mother confronted me by asking if I been in Joe Seay’s house. At that point, I became even more of a sinner by pretending I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Joe said he and Virgie were working in the field and they saw you and Glenda and Tommy going into his house. He went to their parents and told them you all had trashed his house. Glenda claimed it was you and Tommy and Tommy claimed it was you and Glenda. Are you going to stand there and tell me you weren’t even there when he claims he saw you?”

“Well, maybe he saw me on the road with them. I walked as far as to the front of his house, but then I turned around. I don’t know what they did after I left.”

I’m sure Mom knew I was lying, but she didn’t push it. Maybe she didn’t want to know the truth, or maybe she didn’t want to hear me make up more lies. We never discussed it again. The only other thing she said was, “I don’t want to see those kids over here again. Christine wants you to go stay with her next week. You can help her and Harry with their dairy.”

I always enjoyed time spent with Aunt Chris and Uncle Harry, and I was more than happy to get away. It was a long time before I felt good about myself again. I didn’t confess my misdeeds to anyone but God, and dared to hope He’d forgive me.  

Glenda’s parents had grounded her and Tommy, so I didn’t see her again until school started, and then we never talked about it. Both of us avoided each other, and moved in different circles. The family only rented the house for one year, and I assume they returned to Sullivan’s Hollow where the rest of the clan still lived. The last thing I remember about Glenda was her shocking our class by giving our teacher a bottle of snuff for Christmas.