Moose County Legends

Lilian Jackson Braun the road, and Hilda’s shack was on his property. She lived there rent-free, brought water in a pail from his hand pump, and helped herself to firewood from his woodpile in winter.

One night, right after Halloween, the Reverend Mr.

Wimsey from the church here was driving home from a prayer meeting at Squunk Corners. It was a cold night, and cars didn’t have heaters then. His Model T didn’t even have side curtains, so he was dressed warm. He was chugging along the country road, at probably twenty miles an hour, when he saw somebody in the darkness ahead, trudging down the middle of the dirt road and wearing a bathrobe and bedroom slippers. She was carrying hedge clippers.

Mr. Wimsey knew her well. She’d been a member of his flock until he suggested she quit bringing the clippers to services. Then she gave up going to church and was kind of hostile. Still, he couldn’t leave her out there to catch her death of cold. Nowadays you’d just call the sheriff, but there were no car radios then, and no cell phones. So he pulled up and asked where she was going.

“To see my friend,” she said in a gravelly voice.

“Would you like a ride, Hilda?”

She gave him a mean look and then said, “Seein’ as how it’s a cold night . . .” She climbed in the car and sat with the clippers on her lap and both hands on the handles.

Mr. Wimsey told Grandpa he gulped a couple of times and asked where her friend lived.

“Over yonder.” She pointed across a cornfield.

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Short & Tall Tales

“It’s late to go visiting,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather I should take you home?”

“I told you where I be wantin’ to go,” she shouted, as if he was deaf, and she gave the clippers a click-click.

“That’s all right, Hilda. Do you know how to get there?”

“It’s over yonder.” She pointed to the left.

At the next road he turned left and drove for about a mile without seeing anything like a house. He asked what the house looked like.

“I’ll know it when we get there!” Click-click.

“What road is it on? Do you know?”

“It don’t have a name.” Click-click.

“What’s the name of your friend?”

“None o’ yer business! Just take me there.”

She was shivering, and he stopped the car and started taking off his coat. “Let me put my coat around you, Hilda.”

“Don’t you get fresh with me!” she shouted, pushing him away and going click-click.

Mr. Wimsey kept on driving and thinking what to do.

He drove past a sheep pasture, a quarry, and dark farmhouses with barking dogs. The lights of Brrr glowed in the distance, but if he steered in that direction, she went into a snit and clicked the clippers angrily.

Finally he had an inspiration. “We’re running out of fuel!” he said in an anxious voice. “We’ll be stranded out here! We’ll freeze to death! I have to go into town to buy some gasoline!”

It was the first time in his life, he told Grandpa, that 쑽쑽쑽

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Lilian Jackson Braun he’d ever told a lie, and he prayed silently for forgiveness.

He also prayed the trick would work. Hilda didn’t object.

Luckily she was getting drowsy, probably in the first stages of hypothermia. Mr. Wimsey found a country store and went in to use their crank telephone.

In two minutes a sheriff deputy drove up on a motorcy-cle. “Mr. Wimsey! You old rascal!” he said to the preacher.

“We’ve been looking all over for the Clipper! Better talk fast, or I’ll have to arrest you for kidnapping!”

What happened, you see: Hilda’s dog had been howling for hours, and Grandpa called the sheriff.

Eventually Hilda was lodged in a foster home—for her own protection—and had to surrender her hedge clippers.

The whole town breathed a lot easier. I asked my grandfather why they put up with her eccentricities for so long.

He said, “Folks still had the pioneer philosophy: Shut up and make do!”

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5.

Milo the

Potato Farmer

As Thornton Haggis Heard the Tale

from His Grandfather

Thornton is a fifth-generation stonecutter witha degree in art history and a keen interest inMoose County’s past. Now retired, Thornspends countless hours at the Art Center as avolunteer.

—JMQ

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Milo Thackeray and my grandfather were good friends.

They played checkers and went hunting together—

varmints and deer. Hunting was not a sport in those days.

For many struggling families it was a way to put food on the table. Hard times had come to Moose County in the early twentieth century. Yet this had been the richest county in the state when natural resources were being exploited.