CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD – YOUTH 3
and Baptist had camp meetings there but it was a long way around by road to get there, and I never attended, although we could see the lights and hear the Hallelujahs as they shouted at nights in the late summer. Indians must have stood on this bluff and shot arrows at the game in our meadow years before, for we found many arrowheads there.
As the oldest grandchild I went each summer after the age of ten to help my grandmother in her garden. Her especial pride was ground cherries; a kind of a husk tomato growing on a small bush. These fell off, a few each day, and were taken into a spare bedroom and spread out to dry. Each relative prized the quart of preserves which he was sure to get for Christmas from my grandmother. Here was a huge house of twenty rooms, a red Astrikan apple tree, a spring that never went dry or froze up, out of which water swelled sparkling and cold for the milk and butter in the milk house and for the watering trough for the horses.
As I grew older I cultivated corn the length of a mile-long hillside field, behind Dexter, the old white horse. I shoved back hay in the sheep barn mid wasps and sweat. My uncle Louis would always say, "It'll hold another load." I rode horses bareback after the cows to the lower farm in the evening. At daylight I walked the mile to the night pasture and warmed my bare feet where the cows had been lying. It seems impossible that a boy could have eaten a dozen or more buckwheat cakes for breakfast—but those were the days!
"Go to sister Randolph's; she's a good woman," was the direction given for miles around to tramps who asked for food. The stories which these "ambassadors" brought of the outside world and the kindness which my grandmother had towards everyone seem to me, now that I think of it, as the first appearance of that "Celestial Bulldozer" which has prepared the way for my unorthodox life. Perhaps I had a good start in being named for my grandmother's favorite brother, Ammon Ashford. (Ammon rhymes with Mammon.) He was the only rebel in the family. He did not belong to church but when he died he left me his Bible with the Sermon on the Mount underlined heavily. He had been a 49-er in California; a sheriff in Missouri who was shot in the leg by Jesse James. He was the local blacksmith when I knew him.
In the summer I met my family Wednesday nights at the local Baptist church, which was only a quarter of a mile from my grandmothers; also on Sundays. I sat through long Baptist theological sermons. Finally, at the age of 12, after cringing at the terrible threats of damnation from the pulpit during a six weeks' revival meeting at our church, I was baptized in the creek and gazed upon by a curious crowd—the only sucker caught in the theological net. This was in the swimming hole which I knew but the preacher did not, so he stumbled on a rock and nearly choked me. During the winter and several summers I did all of the janitor work of the church: filling the huge hanging oil lamps and cleaning the chimneys, carrying coal and emptying ashes from the big round stoves—but then I got to ring the bell and that was something. I did this free of charge and gave $15 a year to the church which was much more in proportion than rich farmers gave. I felt that I should be a missionary.
My father was one of those fine looking, dark Irishmen who made friends in this Republican community so that in time he was elected township clerk,
