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Jack and Tildy"Godamighty!" biscuits were invented by my Great Aunt Tildy in 1902. The predominant ingredient was cockleburs which, with the exception of rattlesnakes, was the Freeman's most abundant crop. My Great Uncle Jack had named them with his first bite. When Aunt Tildy admonished him for his blasphemy, Uncle Jack quoted Revelations 1:8: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending."
"To put that another way," Uncle Jack continued, "These biscuits are Godamighty stickery going in, and they will, undoubtedly, be Godamighty stickery going out. Just read your Bible, woman!"
Uncle Jack spoke just strongly enough to maintain his position as head of the household, but just mildly enough to acknowledge that he was not yet completely out of the doghouse because of the haystack episode and especially because of the baseball game.
Tall, lean and sun-ripened, Uncle Jack sported a heavy, drooping mustache which would have bowed the neck of a lesser man, and always wore tall, earth-ripened boots. He embraced the Kansas state motto, Ad Astra Per Aspera, (To the Stars Through Difficulties) and, if he found more Aspera in life than Astra, he accepted that with good humor as a fact of life.
Aunt Tildy looked like a wren that had been too long on a skinny-worm diet. She was a bony bundle of peppery love. Her patience with my Great Uncle Jack might have given her a good shot at sainthood, but Aunt Tildy did not have much patience with saints. "Saints think they are just a little bit better than the rest of us," she often said. And you better not ever bring up the subject of angels dancing on the heads of pins around Aunt Tildy! "Them angels ought to have had a few goats to care for to take their minds off such foolishness," she would tell you.
Their ranch lay south, in that rough border area of Comanche County, Kansas. It abutted the Oklahoma Territory, cheek-to-cheek and jowl-to-jowl. Or, as Uncle Jack would have corrected, "If it abutted, then say what you mean! It was not cheek-to-cheek, nor was it jowl-to-jowl. It was pure and simply butt-to-butt."
Uncle Jack claimed they were "clear out where the hoot owls were forced by loneliness to make goo-goo eyes at the chickens." But I did not observe that behavior for myself, and I did not include it later in my master's thesis.
Uncle Jack also declared that his ranch was the sacred and hereditary home of the little massasauga rattlesnake. He said they came there to be born, and they came back to die. I had no reason to doubt it, except it seemed to me that most of them never bothered to leave.
With him, as with many of his neighbors, it was just common sense to place the outhouse on the Oklahoma side of the state border. Not an inch of Oklahoma belonged to Great Uncle Jack, but without a hint of a grin, he called it "squatters rights." Uncle Jack maintained that God created Oklahoma for the sanitary requirements of the Great State of Kansas.
Now, as Uncle Jack told it, life in those days was mostly pretty hard. "Sometimes it was so hot and dry that almost nothing grew. Praying for rain was about all the excitement we had. Well, one June I stomped eighteen rattlesnakes to death, but the joy of that soon palled. In July I tied the tails of two cats together and suspended them 'in the interim' as one might say, over the clothesline and enjoyed that spectacle until Tildy came out with a pair of scissors and performed an act of benevolence which left one cat with mostly two tails and one cat with mostly no tail. Then she proceeded to lecture me about the evils of being cruel to God's creatures! Judas Priest!"
Uncle Jack rocked in his old chair and mused and pondered. He scratched himself deeply, satisfyingly, and disgustingly. Aunt Tildy's neck bone popped from habit as she averted her eyes.
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