The humble genius

Hearing a loud knock, Roy Austin, 21, opened the door of his line shack, surprised to have a visitor that far from town. Before he could make out his visitor’s face, he could smell whiskey, a smell that made his stomach churn.
“Hello, son.” His dad swayed from side-to-side. “Long time no see. Do you have any grub?”
Roy wanted to slam the door shut, but he didn’t. Instead, he opened it wider, so his dad could stumble in. “What are you doing all the way out here?” He reached out a hand to steady the older man.
“Lookin’ for my boy. Wanted to know if you was still among the livin’ after all these years. You have a nice set up here, son, not fancy, but nice, and them herd of pintos in the corral, now them’s pretty horses.”
Roy didn’t answer. He took some jerky out of his knapsack and handed it to his father. He’d planned to eat it for lunch the next day, but from the looks of him, his dad needed it more than he did. He rolled out a blanket in front of the stove, and after his father ate, the older man lay down and fell heavily to sleep.
He was still sleeping the next morning when Roy walked to work. When the young man returned that evening, his herd of pintos, his saddle horse, his food, and his clothes were gone. All his dad had left him was a saddle and rifle.
At least that’s what I imagine happened to my granddad on that fateful day, and the broad outline of the story is true if not the dialogue.
My dad’s dad, Roy Austin, was born on November 23, 1895 in Beggs, Okmulgee, Oklahoma where he’d grown up with an alcoholic father and a mother whom my dad and auntie always insisted was part Cherokee.
Granddad was the second youngest of the seven living children. His dad, George Austin, was a sharecropper and poorer than the red Oklahoma dirt he tried to farm.
Roy’s mom finally had enough and ran away with all of the children except Roy who was working in the fields with his dad, so when he was 13, Granddad made his own escape.
My cousin Gordon said he wanted to become a cowboy and found work with the local farmers and ranchers, building his own herd of horses by the time he was 21.
After Granddad discovered the theft, he threw the saddle over his shoulder, carried the rifle in the crook of his arm, and walked until he came to the Charles Ingram farm. Charles hired him to help with the roundup.
After the roundup, the Ingrams hosted a rodeo, a feast, and games where Granddad and a cute Ingram daughter, Mildred, teamed up in a taffy-pull.
After they won, Mildred, 15, stood on her tiptoes and kissed Granddad on the cheek. That was the beginning of their relationship. They married that same year, in 1916, but life didn’t get easier.
For a time, they lived near Wellston, Oklahoma, close to her folks, where they had their first baby, David. In 1918, Granddad moved to Oklahoma City to find a better paying job and lived in a rooming house until he could afford an apartment for his little family.
When Grandma didn’t hear from him for a long time, she and the baby caught a ride to Oklahoma City. Once there, she learned from his landlady that he’d contracted the dreaded 1918 Influenza, which eventually killed millions worldwide.
He’d just started working again, so at quitting time, she took David and went to meet him. As she was passing a couple of old men on the sidewalk, one of them stopped and said, “Mildred.” She hardly recognized her husband because he was “skin and bones.”
They hugged and cried, and it took her a long time to nurse him back to health.
After he recovered, he worked at various jobs: In an ice plant, picking cotton, and in a glass factory. They eventually added five more children to their family and moved to Kansas in 1924 where he worked as a hired hand.
My dad often talked about Granddad walking to and from work every week, sometimes a 50-mile round trip.
One evening on his way home, a ferocious Kansas blizzard swept over him, but he bent his head into the snow and kept stumbling forward because he wanted to make sure his family was safe.
He caught a cold which morphed into pneumonia, and, again, he was sick for a long time.
He finally found the perfect job, working for the Ottawa County Road Department. He could look at a potential bridge site and tell them how much it would cost, doing all the math in his head.
He could add up long columns of numbers in his head (as well as doing all the other operations) faster than anyone could do them on paper.
He worked for the county for 35 years, becoming foreman of the bridge crew after ten years, and then superintendent of the roads, often doing the work of an engineer even though he only had a third grade education.
Granddad looked exactly like the pencil drawing of him that my aunt recently gave me, a thin face, well-set ears, a left quirky eyebrow, lips parted in a slight smile, and eyes that looked through the shadows to the light.
As I examined the portrait, I asked myself, how did a boy who ran away from his alcoholic father at age 13 turn out to be such a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather?
I may never know, but I vividly remember him sitting by the propane stove with a worn Bible open on his lap.