Beech Tree News Network

An hour into sun up and a month into summer, it was uphill all the way – the rest of the way; granddad Locke had barely broken a sweat.  He wasn’t even breathing hard.  Me? I was “ridin’ drag”, breathing hard and sweating, struggling with the lighter assembly of a house jack, the stand.  Granddad carried the head.  We had come about two miles, mostly on level ground. 
    We had stopped for a breather.  In the woods now, the shade helped.  “We’ll either pull ‘er this time son, on while pull’er two”, Granddad said.  He had borrowed the house jack from a neighbor.  The object of the whole effort was a rubber-insulated copper cable, enclosed in a three-inch steel pipe sticking up out of the ground about a foot or so. It went down into an abandoned underground coal mine works.  A mine official had told Granddad he could have it if he could get it out.  This wasn’t our first attempt.  We had tried to pull it with an IT-bar cut from a good- sized sapling.  No go.  The cable would only stretch.  “I’d guess that copper will bring a right smart of money”, Granddad allowed.  My ten-year-old-mind was already cogitating on how I’d spend my share of the loot.
My friend, Harold Cornelius had a little sorrel horse I wanted.  He was asking fifty dollars for it and a McClellan army saddle.  This was first on my list.  We finally got to the site. We wound the cable around the jack-head and kept jacking and propping the base up higher and higher with rocks.  Again, all it would do was stretch; it simply would not give up my dreams of that little sorrel horse began to fade.  “Pshaw”  , Granddad said, as we started back home wagging our equipment, “that thing must be really buried down these good.  I’ll need to study on it some, but we’ll finally unsnag ‘er.” We never did.  Granddad got a lot.  He became bed fast.  The last time I saw him my wife and family were visiting from out of state.  We went to see him; as we were leaving to go home, he propped himself up and said, “Boy, one day we’ll back over there; this time we’ll pull that cable.
 As far as I know the cable is still there after some seventy odd years.  I finally did own a horse; it’s the one I bought for my daughter when she was twelve.  That gave me as much pleasure as the one I missed owning- the one with the army saddle. Granddad died in his sleep not long after seeing him for the last time; he never gave up his plan for us to go back and give that cable another try.  Precious memories, how they linger…
                    Kindest regards…