The Wild West, A Few Ashes Left
	Texas. This is a story about the Wild West, wild land, and wild cowboys. My Grandmother Ash used to sit on the couch in the living room of our house on Ellicott Street in Tampa. We would all be gathered around as she told stories about when she was a little girl and where she grew up. They lived in a little farm house in the screamingTexas wilderness. The closest population was a small, barely heard of town miles away from everywhere called Barksdale. My grandmother, back then, was a young girl named Inez Mandainey Chapman. The story that made an indelible impression on me as a small boy went like this: One evening after supper her family was sitting around the farm house doing whatever families did back then. This was in 1866. She said, "The quietness of the night was broken by the periodic howl of a coyote. Then a night hawk." Her parents looked at each other. Inez knew that something didn't seem right. Her father and older brother took their rifles down from the wall and blew out the lanterns. They quietly slipped out onto the front porch. An arrow hit the front of the house and stuck. Then another. "Everything seemed to be taking place at the front of the house." she said. "I knew we were being attacked by Indians." And in telling her old Texas stories, my grandmother prefaced almost everything with "wild". While her father and brother were fighting at the front of the house, her mother gathered her up and quickly slipped out the back door. I say, "her mother" rather than "my great grandmother" because that leaves the impression that she was an old lady, when she was in fact about thirty. Her mother took off her white apron so it wouldn't show in the night and threw it on the kitchen floor. They ran, crouched close to the ground, to an area being cleared near the house. At the edge of the clearing there was a big pile of sticks and brush. She said, "My mother pushed me way up under the pile of brush and said 'Don't make a sound.' Then she crawled under there and covered my body with hers. We were so quiet we were hardly breathing. All of a sudden there was a loud burst of barking right outside the brush pile. I knew it was an Indian who had found us, but it wasn't. It was a dog that belonged to the Indians. My mother instantly grabbed the dog around the neck and started choking it. She choked it until it was dead. Then she pulled the lifeless dog up under the brush pile with us." After the shooting was over and her father and brother were calling for them, the story, I guess, was over. I couldn't remember because my mind was was so preoccupied with How could they hurt that dog?! How could they do that?! And then I had to go to bed and I couldn't sleep. That story was one of the few things I remember about Grandmother Ash. But everything I do remember about her was always interesting. I used to hear my family say that after they all moved to Florida, everybody lived together in one house during the depression. I wasn't born yet. They said that Grandmother Ash felt she was always right about everything. If, on a rare occasion, someone was able to prove her wrong about something, she would always say, "Well, it may be that way here, but it's not that way in Texas." Almost a hundred years later, my brother, Tommy, and I still say that same thing to each other, in order to crawfish out of a situation, when one of us is proved wrong by the other one. And we've never been to Texas. Lash Out Loud