Heavens to Murgatroid

By Ronald Garver

It is not everyday that a book comes along that really conveys the humor, laughter, and misnomers rolled into a Moms neck. One such book is Ronald Garvers Heavens To Murgatroid, a funny read about a Mom bent on straightening out her misguided sons frame, and a Dad on a mission to eax the keeper of the hen house that will keep you in stitches the whole time.

After the moon slithered up in the east the neighborhood hid behind shuttered windows. A shadow swept across the Parker corn field, was it The Creature, where did it come fromwill they survive the night, or will they end up as casualties of Garversville?

Heavens to Murgatroid is a story with a lot of heart. The readers will love the Garver characters down to earth life styles, their everyday trials and rules of conduct. The author lived each episode, like waking up under his bed each day to new revelations. The book has an unique storyline and can hold a readers interest to the very end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 20, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462825165

Ronald Garver

Ronald Garver is an extraordinary man - an acute bad-ass, and has an odd affinity for kick-ass westerns. Comanche Indian Heritage stirs Garver’s blood ‘round. He resides in North Texas where John Wesley Hardin and John (Doc) Holiday lived. Writing for most of his life, numerous books, short stories, and editor of a local newspaper - A Gunslingers Affliction novel blossomed in the traditional dialog of the 1800’s... Garver’s unique voice depicts a different kind of Exceptional Western Thriller, sending y’all on a mind-trip of terrifying ancient relics, secrecy, and thrilling romance. Y’all will cry a little, yet feel at home on the range...

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Copyright © 2002 by Ronald Garver.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

ONUS-ONEIDA IROQUOIS

EPISODE 1

HEATHENS

EPISODE 2

LADY MORAINE, SIR CHICKEN

EPISODE 3

EGGS OVER

EPISODE 4

ESCAPE FROM MADISONBURG

EPISODE 5

THE BRIBE

EPISODE 6

FIELD OF DREAMS

EPISODE 7

LORD OF FLIES

EPISODE 8

BLOOD TO BLOOD

EPISODE 9

GENOCIDE

EPISODE 10

SISTER OF THE COOP

EPISODE 11

BEYOND YONDER

EPISODE 12

SPAWNING IT

EPISODE 13

IT’S ALIVE

EPISODE 14

A PEARL BEFORE SWINE

EPISODE 15

ELECTRIC NIGHTMARES

EPISODE 16

… FAMILY STRANGE

EPISODE 17

FRIENDLY FEAR

EPISODE 18

ONLY OF ALONE

EPISODE 19

SISTERS FROM PARKER ‘S HOLLER

EPISODE 20

LIFE IN THE OUTHOUSE

EPISODE 21

CHEAT, KIDS, and CLUMPS

EPISODE 22

CELEBRATION

EPISODE 23

TIME OUT

EPISODE 24

DUPED IN DAFFYSBURG

EPISODE 25

FISHING MELVIN

EPISODE 26

INVENTOR, TEACHER, POET

EPISODE 27

WAR SORES

EPISODE 28

OUR LITTLE HOUSE

EPISODE 29

CHALLENGES

EPISODE 30

DRACULA … WHO?

EPISODE 31

EPHEMERAL

Mom

In loving memory:

Beatrice (Bea) Gail Parker Garver;

and

all our family jesters … .

WANTED

THE GARVER’S

missing image file

For

Tomfoolery

Back Row: L to R, Sisters Donna Lynn, Dorothy

Arlene, Gladys Gail

Seated: Russell Lee, Ronald Glenn, Beatrice Gail

A special thanks to my sister:

Dorothy Arlene Garver McMahen

for her special knowledge in excess of all that is known.

and

Pat Elliott

for his patience and expertise in Photography and the

Graphic arts.

The smell of kerosene, burning burlap, urine, eviscerating chicken carcasses and decaying egg matter floating through that claustrophobic space under my bed its sharp scent burning in my nostrils … .

When I looked out into the grown-up world the howling wind flung it sharply at my tearful eyes, and my field of vision narrowed in close, went blurry and shapeless, opaque and void, and foreshortened my view of everything … .

ONUS-ONEIDA IROQUOIS

FOLKS HAVE ASKED me: How can you remember all those events when you were only 8 years old?

I tell them:

Well-when I provoked Mom … one evening she plopped into her bed and was surrounded by a white-sheeted-sea-of-dead insects … she’d shinny up on her high-horse and spawned knots on my head then hungered to cherry switch my behind and rankle hog innards over me. Or-when she’d wear Dad’s bedpan on her head and tried to pussyfoot past my rooster, through the grape vines to the hen-house … eventually my dad committed MURDER … my sisters poked pins in their dolls, resembling me. The Zombies and I were incited to festinate to Grandma’s house. Or-when my knock-kneed sister romanced the hog, learned piglatin, and intentionally tried to electrocute me-Mom stood me in our driveway covered in sashquash enemas and feathers with my stigmata hanging out—that drove our neighbors behind shuttered windows. Or—when I was duped and Draculized by my uncle, and nearly struck by lightning, and almost killed by Grandpa’s runaway wagon … I slept under my bed pusillanimously with the toadstools and my fox terrier … my inhibition threw down its gauntlet, it jolted my upper story KA-BAM! … imprinting these calamities permanently on my Einstein matter.

The year was 1941, in midsummer, it fell capriciously as the wind, with contortions of mind and egregious of spirit. The effrontery treatment of our sow, the fractious guile chasing my rooster to Hades and back will keep the reader in hysterics. Mom’s antics and our entire cast of comical characters will entertain and electrify everyone.

EPISODE 1

HEATHENS

WHERE IS THAT W heathen? Mom hollered down her spasms.

Shredding me over her pince-nez glasses as if I were guilty, they scrouged, detoxifying the effluvium violating her nose.

On the hood of Dad’s car. I yelled back, careful of my tone, not wanting to get hung by my tongue, I gulped the air on promise of supply, not to sass. I slid off our back yard swing, petted my fox terrier, and cultivated my idiotic grin.

That heathen would make a good hood ornament, Mom crowed. Twitching like a flounder, she staggered up the back porch steps, stumbled inside her kitchen, and KA-PLOPPED on a straight-back chair, she unfurled like an exhausted tapioca pudding.

Heathen! Heathen! Heathen! Mom lobbied her mantra.

I performed the cock-of-the-walk across our back yard, my rooster was strutting and clucking on Dad’s ‘41 Plymouth. I hopped up the squeaky steps and barged in the back door behind her and crawled up on my wobble-legged-warlock stool, tilted my little head down, my blond hair scattered over my green eyes filtering my peeping view of Mom’s—err—Dad’s high-water shoes. I drew a pucker-puss grimace on my best down-and-out-expression maker and folded my little arms around my kidneys and rocked back and forth trying to look as pitiful as all get-out. I slowly raised my head, and, with one eye stared at Mom’s battered condition.

But Mom, you stepped on his neck, I whined. He’s family, remember? I taught him to walk, I fed him by hand, I slept with him, I raised him from a cripple … .

I can’t stand much more of that heathen, Mom squawked. She tattered me over her tea cup twisting her behind for accent. You know Ronald, a steely edge creeping into her normally soft spoken voice, day by day he’s becoming a vicious heathen—we’ll have to buy eggs from Mrs. Moraine again.

But Mom … .

Hush now, don’t sass me. She closed her teary blinkers.

I spent several days and nights in midsummer in 1941 under my bed with my Fox Terrier where toadstools grew, not to mention being wet. If there was a moment in my life when the world turned frightening, my hidden nightmares began that day. I feel driven to account for this injustice more particularly since my pet rooster lost its head, and I lived, had things gone the other way there would be no one left to do the accounting.

We lived two miles north of Madisonburg Ohio on a mini-chicken farm, and I was 8 when I realized that most Mom’s bribe their son’s … her haphazard behavior commanded not culture ambitions but rather a prehistoric-mind warp, therefore it was easy for me to understand why blood grume, cuts and bruises covered her arms and gams and rotten eggs took refuge on her body like a toxic spill its shells crawled through her black hair like the snaky locks of Medusa and scattered about her bombosity with its ugliness.

Mom had to buy eggs from our neighbor, Mrs. Moraine during this crisis even though we had eleven layers in the hen house. Mom grew tired inside her bones, but, before laying a hemorrhoid or reaching critical mass, she phoned home from prayer meeting on a Wednesday evening and begged Dorothy to gather the eggs. Terrified, my sister climbed into the fourth dimension-SLAM!

Now my mom Beatrice was 37, and hanging on, she would say. Short as a mop handle, round as a barrel, and with her dark-wally eyes she could stare fleas off a dog, and with her stringlike mouth puckered around toothless gums her BLUBBA-BLUBBA lips could jump start a zombie’s heart. To make her face resonate, she would say: I now wear gold rimmed glasses. She always smelled of cinnamon, even when she wasn’t baking pumpkin pie, and was usually as perky as a rat in liverwurst, but not on that day.

With one arm and a left leg she raised her bombosity. Dad’s red-plaid shirt was ripped from neckline to hemline. She untied the shredded scarf from around her neck, picked up a towel that hung at the end of the kitchen counter where she wobbled by the sink like a traumatized warrior bravely wiping egg fetus off her face and out of her peepers, and dabbed at her bleeding wounds. She turned around and opened the drawer at the side of the sink and took out a bottle of Grandma’s iodine, a secret mixture of curealls, and smeared her cuts and scratches from collarbone to anklebone. It stung like hot peppers passing through raw hemorrhoids. She howled down her tears. Her squalid hair compelled to dare shampoo, and bore by weary dullness the tiresome color of mustard and crawled with slimy critters. The odor made my fox terrier want to bury her leg, but he peed on it instead-Mom thought it was raining outside. Her Einstein upper story wasn’t shouting Hallelujah!

She heated water for a bath. Mom wasn’t a debutante, not that she couldn’t have been one, but the neighborhood was missing that knight in shinning armor, she got Dad in his shinny jalopy instead. She blundered through the sheet hanging for a door into the washtub room, and shrieked: Heavens to murgatroid! My kids must be heathens—look at this place. Mom was forced to suffer a filthy wash tub, plus the toilet-pot reeked strong enough to overpower her perfumes in their delicate glass bottles atmosphering the environment and atrophying on a petrified shelfhanging beside the wash basin that was steaming the walls and was suspended in a wooden box. Dad dangled a mirror over the wash basin. Mom wiped away the dust and steam and took a gander at herself. EEEK, oh me, oh my, is that me, she moaned. No, it must be Mrs. Staa’p, what’s she doin’ here?

My sisters job was to keep the bathing-tub-room clean, but dragging hot water in, scrubbing, sopping up, became too much of a chore or they thought they had better things to do—they dreamed. Surrounding the wash tub was the sight of mildew, it encrusted the flower-papered walls, and enraged Mom. There wasn’t running water in the house, but Dad had managed to pipe a line in from the well to the kitchen connecting a hand pump. Mom thought she was a debutante with her little handpump proudly spitting water out its green canker, it was better than carrying water in from back of the house at twenty below zero which was usually my job, when I didn’t have a bad back.

Although Mom’s wounds were aplenty she managed to fling her barreled bombosity up from the wash tub while nearly getting tangled in the surrounding sheet that Dad hung from the ceiling. Its promise was zero water on the floor, but Dad’s master plan backfired, kids fouled the equation. Alfred Hitchcock would have been in Water Heaven making a movie, Psycho-Bubbling with Bea. Mom dried furiously, dropping the thick pink towel, sopping wet, on the warping parquet floor, it heaped beside a half dozen other soggy towels. She turbaned her hair. Dad’s masterpiece of parquet woodmenship was the beginning of our future full-featured bathroom.

DAD"S FLIVVER

missing image file

1922 Ford Touring Car

Girls, Mom wasn’t accustom to slobbering. Come here, and be quick about it. Mom blustered up in her pucker-puss mood.

My sisters heard Mom yelling in the bathing room. They slogged hangdog lip through the kitchen and stood at the entrance to our shoe-box-bathing room chewing their nails and rehearsing their act. Dorothy paused, shook off a shiver, slowly reached for the suicide handle. Drawing the sheet back they commenced their quiver-lip act. I slipped my head through the other side of the curtain, and stared at Mom standing there, with arms akimbo, steam curling up her robes’ behind and snagglesnaking around her torso. The moisture allowed several hairs to slip from beneath her turban and uncoil down her face making her look even more ferocious. She huffed a blow up her snout and her turban fell off… she stared hominy grits at us. My sisters stared at Mom’s appearance then the floor, they wanted to giggle. She forgot to remove the Band-Aids from her face, arms, and legs, and her hair was knotted it stood straight up and soap was dangling from her nose. She wasn’t hathor headed. Scared at what Mom might do my sisters covered their mouths, while at their canthus, tears doused their cheeks, they didn’t dare show emotion or forever covenant their brains.

Mom, they whined in unison. Oh Mom … !

I slapped my hand over my expression maker muffing my noisy smile. I backed out of there grabbing up my little fox slamming the back door KA-BAM trouncing through Mom’s rhubarb SWISH falling down KA-FLOP in front of the chickens out pouring the Saltin Sea like Caffe’ Freddo gushing from the Mojave.

Don’t say a word … not a word, Mom growled. You girls might think this wash room smells earthly, honest, even of natural body smells, but I’m here to inform you, I don’t. The idea—you girls think you were brought up in a barnyard. Well, we’ll see about that. You girls might have a habit of living completely in the moment and think you’re wasting precious time on stupid things like cleaning-all you have to do is look at the wet towels on the floor or the mildew on the walls or the smell from the pot to realize that filth is everywhere, it’s everywhere! You all are not above such petty concerns are you … ? Don’t say a word, it’s probably a lie, and you’ll get a cherry switch if it is. Now get those buckets. You’ll learn to scrub and clean around here if I have everything to do about it … now get busy.

But Mom, it’s not all our fault, Dorothy blatted.

Now don’t you sass me or you’ll fetch a cherry switch.

I lie upon the grass, my opalescent-tinted eyes flush with rhubarb sprouts. I laughed my wee heart up. My boyish features heaved a concave chest under my grassed stained undershirt which emphasized my small stature, my curly hair was always in my face like looking through a rake, my little hands dangled, my long fingers were connected to knobby knuckles, I could sock a feather farther than anyone. All this slumped on skinny legs that appeared lost in my trousers. I really looked pitifully puny. I looked up through my eyebrows at my rooster marking its territory on my back, my fox-terrier Tiny launched his bladder on the sow wandering around in Mom’s rhubarb. I tried desperately not to pee in the rhubarb, well-maybe not.

My rooster crowed, my dog barked, the sow didn’t say anything. Mom’s radio blared, where the innocent and cruel line up before the audience’s wrath, the dogs of love. The nectarous sounds would be pushing cries of passion into Mom’s noggin, and soothing her battle wounds. I must do a lie down, my tireds’ ah-hangin’ out, she groaned, and laid her head upon the satin couch pillow allowing the romantic epigrams to massage her wounded spirit like an invisible worm, the mad-blind muse of-Stella Dallas … .

Now, If you sass me….

missing image file

1941

Our Matriarch: Mom Bea; Beatrice Gail Parker Garver

…You’ll cut your own cherry switch

EPISODE 2

LADY MORAINE, SIR CHICKEN

THE WHOLE THING started in the spring of 1940, on May Moraine’s chicken farm. The neighbors didn’t like her. She was different, ghostly, and was always cloaked from head to toe in some strange looking garment. They thought she cackled, but no, it was only her battle cry with a cyclops or a troglodyte haunting in her chicken coop. She always said, what the neighbors don’t know … . The neighbors shunned her, they didn’t understand her abnormal bunny eyes.

She survived across the dirt road from us, called the 3-C Highway, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, six miles North of Wooster. She had a penchant for her chicken coop but the two-story structure was weathering from paintlessness. The inside smelled of sweet rot, dust and soured laying mash, moist and hanging in burlap sacks from the rafters above. Along each side of the twenty-foot