Ozark Justice

By Dwight Milgrim

The year is 1938, and it’s a beautiful Indian summer day in the Ozark Mountains. Yarnell Cates, his wife Thelma, and his father are returning home with a wagonload of stove wood when they discover the sheriff’s car in their front yard. Sheriff J. D. Hawkins is there to arrest Yarnell on trumped-up charges concocted by the prosecuting attorney and his brother, the circuit judge. The charge is part of an ongoing feud between their families and the Cates.

In a twist of fate, Yarnell is forced to kill the sheriff in self-defense. This act incites the prosecuting attorney to form a posse with orders to burn down the Cates’ home, slaughter their livestock, and shoot Yarnell on sight. A bounty of five hundred dollars is placed on Yarnell’s head, later increased to fifteen hundred dollars, driving Yarnell and Thelma to seek refuge in a cave in the mountains. Throughout the winter, they endure harsh conditions while evading the men of Sycamore County in a desperate bid for survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798886936667

Dwight Milgrim

Kenneth Dwight Milgrim was raised on a farm in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. His family was not unlike the Cates family in this story. They raised cattle and hogs and planted a big garden every spring. They always kept a milk cow and butchered a beef and a couple of hogs each fall. They cooked on a wood cook stove, pumped water from a hand dug well, and did most of their farming with a team of horses. Dwight based the dialog in this story on the way his family and neighbors talked as he was growing up in the 1950s. He is an amateur musician who has written several songs and poems, some of which are included here.

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About the Author

Kenneth Dwight Milgrim was raised on a farm in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. His family was not unlike the Cates family in this story. They raised cattle and hogs and planted a big garden every spring. They always kept a milk cow and butchered a beef and a couple of hogs each fall.

They cooked on a wood cook stove, pumped water from a hand dug well, and did most of their farming with a team of horses. Dwight based the dialog in this story on the way his family and neighbors talked as he was growing up in the 1950s. He is an amateur musician who has written several songs and poems, some of which are included here.

Dedication

If you ever ate a c-ration while sitting on your steel pot under triple canopy jungle, then this book is respectfully dedicated to you, my brother.

Welcome home!

Copyright Information ©

Dwight Milgrim 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Milgrim, Dwight

Ozark Justice

ISBN 9781638290414 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638292722 (Hardback)

ISBN 9798886936667 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023921912

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Acknowledgment

Many thanks to my son, Jonathan Milgrim, for his help in getting this

book published.

Chapter 1

The last thing I wanted to do on that pretty fall day back in 1938 was kill the high sheriff of Sycamore County, Arkansas. No, that’s not right. That would have been number two on the list. The very last thing I wanted to do was let J. D. Hawkins kill me, which he came mighty close to doing.

I guess you could say it all started the night before. We had a full moon that night. What they call the harvest moon, I believe. Or maybe it was the hunter’s moon, I don’t know.

Whichever one comes in the first week of November. I know it was so bright outside that you could have drawn a bead on a deer or gathered corn, either one.

I had stepped out in the back yard for a minute before I went to bed, and I’d no more than stepped down off the back porch when a screech owl started hollering his fool head off from that old hollow white oak tree there behind the barn. He was so loud that I thought for a minute there that he was inside the barn.

Now, I’ve always liked to listen to the night sounds. Like the whippoorwills in the spring time, the geese flying by overhead in the fall, or the hoot owls talking back and forth to each other any time of the year. I guess my favorite night sound is an old bullfrog bellowing down at the pond or over at the river. I’d rather listen to one anytime than eat frog legs.

I even like to hear a freight train way off yonder in the distance. Sometimes you can hear one blow its whistle for the Miller crossing if it’s a still night. It’s a good sound, but it can be a mighty lonesome one, too. Just depends on what kind of mood you’re in, I guess.

Having said all that, though, I’ll have to admit I wasn’t too keen on hearing that screech owl. A lot of the old folks will tell you that hearing a screech owl holler up close like he’s talking right to you means you’ve got bad luck dogging your trail.

I’ve never taken much stock in a lot of those old tales. I’ve been hearing screech owls all my life, but then, I’ve had my share of bad luck too, so who knows?

Those same old folks will also tell you if you hear a dog howl at midnight it means someone you know is going to die inside of three days. That thought had no more than crossed my mind when some old hound about two hollows over came out with the most mournful, long-drawn-out howl you ever heard.

The Jenkins boys’ dogs set in to barking over on the next ridge, and here came Walter out from under the back porch, aiming to put in his two cents worth, but I put a stop to that right quick. One thing I don’t aim to put up with is a dog sitting out in the yard all night long, barking just because he can hear some other dog off in the distance.

The first dog howled again. I looked down and my shadow from the moon was pointing right at the North Star, so I knew what time it was. Like I say, I don’t take a lot of stock in those old tales, though I did stand there a minute and try to think of who in the community might be fixing to die. The only one I could come up with, off hand, was Aunt Beulah Perkins, who was about ninety years old. Aunt Beulah had been in the old folks’ home down in Cartersville for about a year, so I don’t know whether or not you could count her.

Outside of Aunt Beulah, I couldn’t come up with anybody that was apt to die in the next three days, but I didn’t come riding in here on no load of turnips, as they say, and I knew it was mighty easy for a man to die when no one had any idea he was fixing to. Those were rough times in our part of the Ozarks back then, and I’d known more than one man who’d died when dying was the last thing he expected to do. Pa could name you a lot more than I could, if you could get him to talk about it.

I zipped up and went on inside and snuggled up against Thelma, and never gave another thought to owls a-screeching or dogs a-howling.

I should have gone to bed earlier, for Ma rousted us out well before good daylight. She already had breakfast on the stove, just about ready to eat.

We got a bad spell of weather a-comin’, she said as we sat down at the eating table, and that little jag of wood we’ve got ain’t gonna last long if it turns off cold for a spell. I’m thinkin’ y’all might oughtta go cut us another load this mornin’, while I get the washin’ started.

Now, Pa wasn’t the kind of man to take orders from a woman, but when Ma saw something that needed doing, and ran it by him in sort of a polite way, he was usually agreeable about doing it, especially when he could see it was something that needed to be done. Sometimes, though, she would blindside him, get him to talking, throw in a word here and there, and the next thing you knew Pa would be working on whatever it was Ma wanted done, and be thinking all along it was his idea to do it. I’d caught her doing it more than once, and I planned to keep my guard up so Thelma wouldn’t start pulling that stuff on me.

Ma was sorting out the dirty clothes, so Thelma went out to do the milking while I pumped the wash kettle and the rinse tub full of water. Pa went out to catch up the team. By the time I finished, he had old Dot and Bess harnessed up and was leading them out to the wagon. Thelma was straining the milk on the back porch.

When Walter saw Pa hitching the team to the wagon, he realized we were going somewhere and got all excited about it. He started barking and jumping up at the horses, but they didn’t pay him no mind, and he finally gave up and trotted out of the yard and stopped and waited to see which way we were going to go.

I loaded up the tools and we were ready to leave. Ma came out of the house with us some dinner in a cardboard box. Don’t let Walter get into this, she said. I ain’t got no lard bucket to put it in. She told Thelma she’d be more help to us loading wood than she would be helping her wash, so to go along with us if she wanted to. Thelma was agreeable, so she climbed up in the wagon box and sat with her feet hanging off the back end. Me and Pa had the seat, and as we jangled out of the yard Ma was building the fire under the wash kettle.

It was kind of a warm morning for the first week in November, but then we’d had a mild fall so far. Only one heavy frost and a couple of light ones. As we climbed the hill there in front of the house, we could see the sun peeking through the trees on the next ridge over. The sky was just full of geese on their way south. One bunch would no more than get out of sight ’til you’d hear another flock coming. It was shaping up to be a nice fall day, what with the leaves being so full of color and all. Pa noticed it, too. Ain’t this a pretty day? he said as we topped out on the hill. A day like this is worth a hundred dollars, it is.

Get up there, Bess! he hollered, giving her a slap with the checkline. Quit lollygaggin’ along. You’re makin’ old Dot do all the work, you are.

It’s a nice day, I admitted, but I believe I’d take the money.

That’s because you ain’t lived long enough to be sixty-two years old, he replied. A day like this is one of the few good things in life that a poor man can enjoy that don’t cost him nothin’. You’re too young to be properly thankful for the good things in life, you are. He patted me on the knee.

Oh, I appreciate the good things, I said. I just wish they weren’t so few and far between.

I know times are hard right now, and have been for quite a spell, they have, he said, but listen to me, Son. Things could be a whole lot worse, and they could get that way mighty quick. That’s all I got to say on the matter, it is.

It was, too. We drove along in silence for a good ways. That was a strange speech, coming from Pa. He hardly ever talked about things like that. It made me wonder if he’d heard that screech owl himself. By the end of the day, I didn’t wonder about it anymore. I was pretty well sure of it, but by that time it was too late to ask him.

Pa knew where there was a big red oak that had been killed by lightning back in the spring. It’ll make a right smart of wood, it will, he said. Probably about two good loads, but don’t tell your ma we cut a lightnin’-struck tree. You know how she is about that.

I knew. Ma believed it was bad luck to burn a lightning-struck tree for firewood. That was another one of those old tales that a lot of people believed were true. Actually, it wasn’t bad luck—what it was, was dangerous. If the lightning had hit it hard enough to bust up the trunk, you would get it sawed about halfway through and all of a sudden, the tree would be falling and the trunk would split up fifteen or twenty feet and about half of it would fly up in the air, and you had better be out of the way when it did!

Walter was running around out in front of us, and when we pulled up and stopped a good piece from the tree, he started barking treed. We climbed down to see what he had. He was barking up a medium sized hickory that had such bright yellow leaves that it almost hurt your eyes to look at it. Pa and I stood still while Thelma walked around to the other side. Sure enough, here came a fat fox squirrel edging around the trunk about half way up.

Look at that, said Pa. There’s meat for supper, and we didn’t have sense enough to bring the .22.

One squirrel wouldn’t go very far with four people, I said.

Look up in the very top, said Thelma. "There’s another one the same size as that one.

Two big fox squirrels like that, with a skillet of gravy, would be a mighty good start on supper.

Thelma was right. They would have made some good eating, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it, so we went on back to look at the dead red oak. Thelma pointed over toward the wagon. Look, she said, there goes a terrapin crawlin’ east. You know what they say. That means it will rain inside of three days. She looked over and caught me grinning at her. Hey, don’t laugh, she said. That goes right along with what Miz Cates said at breakfast this mornin’, now don’t it?

I guess it does, I admitted. It turned out that Ma and the terrapin were right.

It didn’t look like the tree was splintered up any, so we decided to go ahead and cut it. It may be a booger to get down on the ground, said Pa. We’ve got to make it fall right between those two trees there, or it will hang up on us, it will.

I wasn’t worried. Pa was the best hand I knew of to make a tree fall right where he wanted it to. He looked it over from about five different angles and held the doubled-bitted ax up like a plumb bob a couple of times, and then we took the two-man crosscut saw and cut about six or seven inches into the trunk in the exact spot Pa judged to be right. Then he took the ax and notched the wood out above the cut we’d made.

He said it looked right to him, it did, so we took the saw and started in on the other side of the tree. One thing you could say about Pa—he kept his tools sharp, especially the ax and the saw. We had that crosscut fairly singing a tune, and in no time at all we heard the tree start cracking and popping and saw the saw cut getting wider and wider, so we took off running back away from it. It came crashing down in just the right spot with leaves and little dead limbs falling all around. One stick flew back and didn’t miss Walter by more than two feet. He took off running and never stopped ’til he was underneath the wagon.

Thelma got a big laugh out of that. Where was you goin’, Walter? she hollered at him. You can come out now. It’s safe. Walter stayed where he was. Pa started trimming the smaller limbs off with the ax, so Thelma took the other end of the crosscut and we started sawing blocks off the main trunk. After he got the smaller limbs chopped up into stove wood, Pa took the saw over from Thelma and she drove the team and wagon up and started loading the wood he had chopped. When we judged we had enough blocks sawed off to make a load, we stopped sawing and started splitting them up small enough so they would fit in the stove. Pa was splitting the smooth ones with the ax while I worked on the knotty ones with the sledgehammer and wedge. Thelma was loading the sticks just about as fast as we could bust them off.

We had all worked up a pretty good sweat, and the wagon was about three fourths loaded, when Pa took off his hat and glanced up at the sun. It’s prit near dinner time, he said. Close enough, anyway. Let’s eat.

I stood us up some blocks to set on and Thelma opened up the cardboard box and passed around the food. Ma had sure put us up a fine dinner—all we could eat. She put in some boiled eggs and the biscuits left over from breakfast, along with some deer steak and fried potatoes from supper. There were some fried raisin pies that Thelma had made the day before, and a jug of sweet milk that she and I passed back and forth. Ma had put a quart mason jar of buttermilk in for Pa.

All of that sure made for some mighty fine eating. What we didn’t know was that it would be the last good meal any of us would get for a good long while. I