The Entwining Circle

By William Wayne Dicksion

Hard times have hit Troy Dean Talbert’s family in Oklahoma. His father Tom has been losing his crop to drought. The bank forecloses on their farm, which forces Tom to move his family to California. However, an incident occurs that allows Troy to graduate from high school and not have to move west with the family. He hopes to marry his sweetheart but instead she marries someone else. He is devastated, joins England’s Royal Air Force, and becomes a hero in the war.

Troy is wounded badly, and he is ordered to recuperate on Lady Ashley Wakley’s castle. Here he finds love and prospers. But soon she finds other diversions and leaves him, which leaves Troy to doubt himself again. The doctor tells him that he should go to where the trouble started to find himself, he must go to where he lost it. So he goes back to Oklahoma . . . .

The Entwining Circle is about Troy who regains confidence and also helps his family who was caught in the cycle of events of drought, war, and greed. He then realizes that home is in England with Ashley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Wayne Dicksion
• Release date: May 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311559319

William Wayne Dicksion

William Wayne "Bill" Dicksion was born in Wewoka, Oklahoma, the descendant of pioneers of the early American West. He grew up steeped in the lore of their adventures. Writing is his way of sharing the stories he remembers and enjoyed. He has traveled extensively and is educated in science and literature. He and his wife live in Hawaii, where he does his writing.

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE CIRCLE BEGINS

Troy Dean Talbert

Early one morning in the summer of 1938, I looked out the window and saw my father Tom Talbert, an Oklahoma farmer, walking across his cotton field. I dashed out to join him. I knew that he was troubled; it hurts him to see his family go hungry. Dad's been selling most of our animals for our subsistence. I’ve heard Mom and Dad talk of having to leave the farm.

Molly, I heard him say to Mom, I’m going to try to talk to the banker again today, but I’m afraid it’s no use. We can’t go on living this way. I have failed as a farmer. I hope my father won’t think badly of me. He’s been dead for four years, but I feel that he knows.

Tom, I heard her reply, times are hard, and we’ve got to think of our future. I’m sure your father will understand. After all, times were hard for them too when they came here. They made it, but they had good soil and plenty of rain.

Hey, Dad, I said as I caught up to him and asked casually, Whatcha doing?

’Morning, son, I’m just trying to determine the value of the cotton. I need to know what it would be worth after it’s picked and bailed.

I watched him sift the dirt in his hands. In the last few years, the drought had been so bad that no matter what he did, he couldn’t harvest a crop. Time after time he planted his fields only to watch them dry up and blow away. He didn’t want to witness another dust storm like the one that devastated Oklahoma in 1935.

Dad gazed at the sun rising above the horizon. It silhouetted his eastern fence against a cloudless sky. The fence was half a mile away, yet it stood out stark and clear. He had lived thirty-six years on the Great Plains and had learned that a morning like this was a sign that it was going to be another dry day. He shook his head.

Well, son, you’d better get ready for school.

Okay, dad, I said and hurried to the house.

I’m Troy, his only son, and I’ll be eighteen when I graduate from high school this year. My sister Jolie is fifteen. We both enjoy attending the Idleburg High School and hate the thought of moving away.

Chapter 2

Molly, my mother, was a city girl, the daughter of merchants. Her parents were of English and Irish ancestry; they had come to Idleburg from Ohio and opened a general store. They were considered well-to-do by Oklahoma standards.

Mom and Dad met at the University of Oklahoma, where Dad was studying agriculture and Mom was getting her degree in education. They fell in love and got married right after graduating from college, spent their honeymoon at a local recreation area, and then returned to the farm where Dad had grown up.

Mom wasn’t sure she wanted to live on a farm, but she learned to love it. Farm life was hard, but it offered a freedom Mom had never experienced. It was a wonderful place to raise children. Jolie and I learned to work hard and to love nature; we saw the full cycle of life all around us all the time. Nobody had to tell us about the birds and the bees.

This year, the cotton yield was pretty good. Any other year, he would have been pleased, but cotton at today’s market value was worth only two cents per pound—it would cost more than that to pick it. If we’d had enough money, Dad could have held onto it for a while in case the price went up. Maybe it would, and maybe it wouldn’t; but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t get it picked, and he couldn’t leave it in the field to be picked later. He had farmed for three years now without making a profit.

We all worked right alongside him in the fields. I tried to keep up with Dad, and I was strong. I was tall—six feet two—and the hard work had given me broad shoulders. My dad used to tell me that, with my dark eyes and hair, I took after my grandfather Samuel.

My hands were getting as tough as Dad’s, but Jolie’s and Mom’s often bled. He tried to keep them out of the fields as much as possible. They were both willing workers, but it just didn’t seem right for them to be there when they had work of their own to do in the house.

It was especially hard to see Jolie doing such harsh work; my sister was just becoming a woman. She had reddish-blonde hair, green eyes, and a lightly freckled complexion not meant for work in the fields. She had been attracting a lot of attention from young men lately, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t let her date yet. They said that at fifteen, she was too young to handle the emotional problems of dating.

She would be an easy mark for some aggressive young man, Mom said.

Jolie didn’t agree, and she wasn’t interested in just any man; she had eyes only for Jimmie John Landen. She begged for mom’s permission to date Jimmie, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Mom knew that Jolie yearned for Jimmie, but she had other concerns to worry about. She had cried herself to sleep last night. Not about Jolie, but because she had nothing to fix for breakfast. We had nothing left to eat. Jolie’s problems had to be pushed to the back burner for now.

Chapter 3

Thomas Tom Dean Talbert

Tom had hoped to shoot a cottontail this morning, but all he’d bagged was a jackrabbit. Tough as leather, he thought, but Molly can make stew. At least the kids wouldn’t have to go to school hungry.

Tom couldn’t help thinking about how hard his mother and father had worked on the farm. They had started from nothing and made it into one of the best farms in the area, but years of drought and the Great Depression had made it impossible for him to keep it.

Samuel Thomas Talbert, Tom’s father, had made the run for land when the unassigned lands in Indian Territory were opened for homesteading on April 22, 1889. He had moved his family from the Cherokee nation in Tennessee in a covered wagon.

Each homestead was a half-mile square, 180 acres. It had been good farming country when the sod was first turned, but the wind and rain had eroded it down to clay with a thin coating of sandy loam. It was flat prairie land, with just enough topsoil left to produce wheat, oats, corn, or cotton.

Samuel Thomas Talbert was of Scottish descent; Adaline Donavan, Tom’s mother, was the daughter of an Irishman named Dean Donavan who had opened a trading post in the Cherokee Nation and married a Cherokee Indian girl. Maybe that’s where I get my coal black hair. Tom thought. It’s sure not where I got my blue eyes.

Tom gave up on further hunting and headed home with the jackrabbit. He would have to tell the family today, that the bank would foreclose on the mortgage, and he could see no way to save the farm. They’re going to be devastated.

When Tom had planted the fields, cotton was bringing sixteen cents per pound. He had planted a hundred acres, which should have produced fifty bales. A bale of cotton weighs five hundred pounds, so at sixteen cents per pound, the crop would be worth four thousand dollars. That thought had made him smile; it would be enough to pay off the mortgage and plant next year’s crop. However, he had had to sign a mortgage to get money to plant the crop. That’s the way farming is done in Oklahoma.

But the drought had lasted so long that he hadn’t gotten the crop he had hoped for. He couldn’t pay the mortgage. Instead, he’d had to get another loan. Men were not supposed to cry, and he was glad that there was no one around to see him. He had to pull himself together before he got to the house. He didn’t want to let his family know just how desperate their situation was. He stopped by what used to be the smokehouse to clean the rabbit and get it ready for Molly to cook.

When he walked into the kitchen, Molly was just starting to fix breakfast.

I tried to shoot a cottontail, but a jackrabbit was the best I could do, Tom said as he handed her the rabbit.

Thanks, Tom. Molly looked relieved that the jackrabbit was already cleaned and ready to be cooked. Things are getting pretty bad when we’re reduced to eating jackrabbit for breakfast, she mumbled.

Tom heard the mumble and replied, Yeah, but it’s better than nothing.

While Molly was cooking breakfast, Tom went into the washroom to wash his face and put on a clean shirt. After breakfast, he would go to Idleburg and talk to the banker, again. What he needed to do might be better described as begging, but he had to try to get Banker Pruit to extend his loan. He knew, though, that there was almost no chance—the bank had been taken over by a big banking firm from back East, and there was just no heart in them. They were not in business to make friends; they were in business to make money, and they were foreclosing on farms and businesses left and right.

Molly’s mother and father had closed their store last year and moved back to Ohio. Molly had cried when they left, but there was just no other way. The store was losing money, and they had to get out while they still had enough to open a business back in Ohio. Ohio was also experiencing a depression, of course, but at least they didn’t have a drought to go with it. The banks were writing off loans in the drought-stricken areas of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas by showing these loans as losses against their profits on their other businesses in other states. They were acquiring the land at taxpayers’ expense, disenfranchising whole sections of the country, and causing unbelievable hardships, but they didn’t give a damn. Their purpose was to make money, and they were making lots of it.

Tom went back into the kitchen to set the table while Molly cooked the rabbit.

Chapter 4

Breakfast is ready, Mom called out.

Jolie and I sat down, grateful for the hard bread and jackrabbit stew.

That’s the best jackrabbit stew I’ve ever eaten, Molly, Dad said, and we all laughed.

As we finished our breakfast, Dad announced that he had something to say.

We sat quietly while Dad told us what we had already suspected.

We have a crop of cotton in the field, but it won’t bring enough money to pay for picking it. We would lose money, but we have no money anyway. We can’t make the payment on the mortgage, and it’s overdue. The Idleburg Bank has refused to extend the loan. We have been ordered off the land. I’m going to the bank again today and try to get them to extend the loan, but I can see no way of saving the farm.

No one said anything; we just sat there staring at him. Dad looked as if he had a lump in his throat the size of a gourd and a knot in his chest that left him unable to say a word.

Finally, I broke the silence by asking, What are we going to do?

I don’t know, son, but I’m open to suggestions. I want all of us to think about it today, and we’ll discuss it tonight.

Chapter 5

The school bus was right on time. Jolie sat in the back with her friends, chatting about their class assignments. They were all very animated, excited about cheerleading at Saturday’s game.

I was on the team, and I couldn’t help thinking this might be the last game I’d be playing before we moved—moved to where? And to what? How would I tell Darleen that I’d be moving away? Her father, Wyler Walston, was also a farmer, but his land was river-bottom land, and they were one of the few families who had not had to mortgage their land. They would probably not have to move.

I’d known Darleen since we first started school, and we’d been a pair since the first time we met. I’d always assumed that she and I would get married after we graduated from high school. Her father, however,