Newton

He Said She Said #5

"C’mon Mark! don't be a frady cat",  "man we'll be in for it Jimmy if we get caught!".
"Don't worry about it, the store's closed"
Me my brother Mike and Cousin Jimmy started up the rickety stairway that was on the outside of the back of Riley's General Store. The same Jimmy I wrote about in   THE LAST CALL
A quick glance at the old general store in Newton Stewart, Indiana and you would swear you were looking at a Norman Rockwell painting, a real piece of Americana.
A weathered building with one gas pump out front, a liars bench on the front porch complete with a couple of old men sitting on the old bench whittling and shooting the bull.  On the left side of the building towards the woods was a lean too with a 55-gallon barrel of what may have been a mix of old oil and antifreeze toxic ooze that seemed to be leaking. I don't know that the hell was in it, Al Gore would have had a shit fit over it.
Inside the store was an old warped wooden floor a small post office in one corner and a coke cooler where you opened the lid and all these bottles of pop were sitting in very cold water.
But the place that held me and Mike and cousin Jimmy's fascination that day was what was in the upper floor of Riley's General Store.
There is a picture of the newer store as in the She Said blog, but I don't know of any of the old original store that exists.
There was an upside-down star at the very peak of the roof along with some other strange symbols.
We headed up the steps to the door, apparently Jimmy learned how to jimmy a door at an early age.
We walked in the room and just stood there eyes wide open and mouths agape. "Wow! Look at all the cool stuff on the walls!". Inside the upper room above the haggard old general store was a room that looked like King Arthur would hang out in. There was a long wooden table that looked like it belonged in a mansion. The walls were adorned with swords, shields and stuff I have never seen before. The floor was not some beat up old wooden boards like what was in the store below it. There was a lush red carpet on the floor.
We were all awestruck, but before we could investigate further, we heard a voice from below, it was Uncle Kenneth, "What are you boys doin up there? You better get outta there before I tell your daddies!" he yelled.  We skedaddled out of there as fast as we could.  I never got over the contrast of the Masonic lodge and the old store below.
The only thing I knew about Masons was they made damn good root beer.
My grandfather was the Grand Master or whatever you call it of this lodge and all my uncles were Mason's, my dad was never involved. I think my dad was the Grand Poobaa of the American Legion.
Going to Grandma and Grandpa Riley's house was like going back in time. The only drawback was staying all night there because if you had to go to the restroom, that meant a trip out to the backyard.
The walk from the store to the house was a good hike up a big steep hill. That hill was fun if you had a bike and the nerve to coast down the hill. Whizzing by the blacksmith shop (a real blacksmith shop) and a few seconds later you shoot by the store, now here's where it gets tricky. Past the store was a scary looking bridge over Patoka Creek. The bridge was an iron and wooden structure. When you rode your bike across it you had to be on your game. There were just two narrow sections of the roadbed of the bridge covered with wood so that a car could drive over it. On either side of the strips were steel girders and open spaces between them
if you missed the wood strips with your bike you were toast.
That big hill took its toll on many a kids in that area, who were mostly all my cousins. One day somebody got the great idea to ride a wagon down the hill, they loaded as many cousins as would fit. My aunt was there supervising the whole stunt and would not allow one of the smaller kids to get in, he was heartbroken. There was no room for me so I just stood by for the next turn.
Now a Radio Flyer is a fine piece of machinery, just grab the handle and you can haul a shitload of kids, dogs, whatever, but it is not a Ferrari. You CAN
 sit in it and steer with the handle flipped back, SLOWLY !  AND THERE IS NO BRAKING SYSTEM!
It was never designed to hall a bunch of goofball kids a hundred miles an hour down Mount Everest towards the bridge of death.
So off they went reaching Mach 2.3 in about 7 seconds, with no braking system, they hit the bottom of the hill and were at full speed.
What happened next would be scrutinized for several days, it looked to me like a case of over steering, then overcorrecting, then more overcorrecting, then......
Looked like classic pilot error to me.

 You see where this is going, with that last heroic effort to right his ship, he swung the wagon completely sideways  and the wagon rolled over, several times. Kids were flying everywhere, oh the humanity!  Then my aunt looked down at the too small of a kid to go on this death ride and said. " see I told you!"
The little tot looked down at the carnage horrified.
I don't know if my aunt was just a sadist or if she had a fresh life insurance policy on the kids she sent to certain doom. All I know was I wasn't heartbroken about missing the inaugural ride of death.
There were all kinds of ways to get hurt in this neck of the woods.  With No TV, DVD, Xboxes, or Internet, we had to find other ways to get our adrenalin rush.
I still have a long scar down my index finger from throwing a busted beer bottle back at the dump. I laid that finger open, but I knew I would get my ass beat if I sought medical attention so I just rapped it up in a dirty rag and stopped the blood loss. Gotta say, it healed up quite nicely.
Speaking of fingers, when my uncles were just kids, one of them chopped the others finger off with a hatchet. Some sort of hazing mishap I suppose. There were 14 or 15 siblings from grandma Riley's brood so it was just the law of averages that somebody was going to lose a finger or two.
There are many more tales of woe from that village, too many to cover here.
My favorite memories come from just hanging out in the store. There were way too many grandkids there to hope to get free stuff, but sometimes if you would sweep the floor or help with some other chore around there you could earn a Nehi Orange Crush or a Double Cola.
There was a map of a big lake pinned to the wall. Newton Stewart was just a tiny dot on the map surrounded by water. The map didn't reflect the current topography, this was something in the planning stages by the Army Corps of Engineers. This was when Patoka Creek would become Patoka Reservoir.
It was many years before this came to be. When it finally was time to knock thousands of acres of trees down (logging it was going to take to long) and raze thousands of old houses to the ground, some of them went willingly to the big town of French Lick where some of them would have indoor plumbing for the first time in there lives. But some of the old timers had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the only place they had ever called home.
Imminent domain has its place when used correctly, but it can be a cruel law.
Patoka Creek became Patoka Lake, it is the second largest reservoir in the state and serves as flood control as well as an  incredibly beautiful place to visit for camping and fishing in Southern Indiana.  

I have been back there a few times since the valley was flooded, most of Newton Stewart is underwater. The top of the big hill where my grandparent’s house was, still has some signs of where the rock foundation was. And if you stand at the top of the hill and look down you can kind of see the old road bed now covered in grass and the trees opening up to show the path where brave kids dared to ride bikes and wagons towards the scariest bridge in the world.
Progress sometimes requires us to part with something that means so much more to some than it does to others.
Patoka Lake is beautiful, but I do miss the old Newton Stewart, outhouses and all.
When I stood there looking at the old roadbed that used to take you past the blacksmith shop, past Riley's General Store with the Masonic Lodge above, to the Bridge Of Death, that now leads down to the 9000 acres of water, one last favorite memory came to mind.  

I remembered  looking at the wanted posters hanging by the post office section of the store.

 I just knew at any moment one of those criminals was going to walk through the door. I would keep constant vigil and do my best to serve justice. I don't know what a scrawny little kid could have done to put a dangerous criminal such as the likes of John Dillenger out of commission except maybe offer him a ride down the big hill in a little red wagon.

http://ihavearighttospeaktoo.blogspot.com/ Read the She said here.