My father was born in nineteen twenty five to a family of ten children.
He was in the middle of the stairstep ages, seven boys and three girls.
It was the time of the Great Depression, and the movie Grapes of
Wrath could have been his story put to film. His father was a hard
and defeated man who was taken to drink, leaving his family for weeks at
a time alone. And the older of the seven brothers were tasked with hunting
and fishing to feed the family, and my grandmother would take in sewing jobs
and any odd job to buy basic food needs. The family did okay after
my grandfather died, and the boys were excellent hunters and gatherers. I tell
this part to explain that my father grew up in the woods hunting, and
by hunting I don't mean sitting in a blind with deer feeders settle on timers
to get the deer trained again at the right time. I'm talking about real
hunting is what Dad and his brothers did daily to provide food. Each boy
left home in a different direction and would not return home without game, be
it rabbit, squirrel, deer, even a hog. My father feared nothing
and would frequently go out in the dark without a flashlight. He really feared
nothing except one thing, or should I say, one place. It wasn't
until I was seventeen or eighteen that I found out he had a fear at
all and exactly what that fear was. My father was forty when I was
born. I was what was referred to as a late runner. My sister
was sixteen and my brother was twelve when I came along. Always a hard
worker and always trying to provide better for his family, my father managed to
save money here and there and eventually opened a gas station. Then he opened
in a small grocery, followed by a trailer park, in several rental properties,
and then he ventured into cattle. He was good at everything he built,
but he excelled in the cattle business. To say that he was my
hero as an understatement, but to add to his legend, he was legally
blind. He was declared legally blind at ten years of age, and he
was sent to the Texas School for the Blind in nineteen thirty five, where
he stayed for less than a year. He learned to read braille, but
he cheated because he could actually see the words. He explained his blindness as
drinking a glass of milk and then holding the empty glass to your eyes and
looking through the milky residue. But he managed to do everything he needed,
and he even held a driver's license. Of course, his brother went and
got that in his place. When I turned sixteen, I became his driver
in his right hand. We would hit three livestock auctions per week, on
Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. It was a Saturday auction that brought out
my father's only fear. Dad bought a fine slaughter beef and our deep freeze
was running low and it was time to fill it back up. Once loaded
in the trailer, we started for the slaughter house in West Columbia. We
traveled on Highway thirty five between Angleton and West Columbia hundreds of times, but
on this day the auction ran long and it was after dark. As we
made the turn onto Highway thirty five at Bailey's Prairie, my dad gasped as
if he had seen something that scared him. I asked if he was okay.
I was afraid he was having a heart attack, and the suddenness and
intensity of the gasp surprised me. His eyes were wide but distant, as
if he were seeing a memory, and he barked at me loudly to turn
back to FM five twenty one. If Farm to Market five twenty one travels
south from Angleton Auction Barn to Brazoria Highway thirty five west. From there,
the two roads don't exactly cross. You have to turn onto Highway thirty five
and then travel two hundred yards to continue on FM five twenty one. I
made the turn west, and Dad panicked and he had me make the turn
south. It all happened so fast that after making a quick turn and pulling
my heart back out of my throat, I started to pull over to check
on Dad. Well, this seemed to really set him off, and he
angrily yelled at me drive God damn it. I never questioned my father.
He seemed to always be exact and right, but on this one I was
completely perplexed. I asked him why we were going away from the slaughterhouse.
Were we going to take the beef to the slaughterhouse tomorrow? He cut me
off and he said that we're going to the slaughterhouse by way Brazoria. Well,
this was ridiculous. That was adding an hour to our trip home.
We delivered the beef and then made the now much longer trip home in silence,
and I just drove, not knowing what was wrong or how to ask.
And once inside the house, I sat silently at the dining table,
which was where all business and talks took place. Dad broke the silence.
He said, tea, I'm real sorry. I yelled at you back there,
but I got scared. My jaw hit the floor and he took notice
of my gas being expression to me that was like Superman saying I'm not strong
enough. It was then that he told me a story, and it explained
everything. In late nineteen thirty nine, my older and younger brother and I
made a deal with a cafe in West Columbia to provide them with bullfrogs.
They were adding frog legs to their menu. Halfway between West Columbia and Angleton
on Highway thirty five is a big slew that the area of Folk called Middle
Bayou. Our plan was to walk up the slough a mile or so and
then fill our tote sacks with frogs. We had car byed headlamps that gave
very basic dim light, but enough to see where you were stepping, but
the dim light made frogs and snake eyes shine. They were enough. My
older brother pulled his car off thirty five into the ditch and we got our
gear ready. He left his keys in the ignition, and I asked him
about it, and he said, there probably wouldn't be a car coming by
the rest of the night, and did we really want to risk losing the
keys and trying to find them out there in the swamp. He had a
good point, so we left the car windows down and proceeded down the slough.
We crossed three barbed wire fences and were hearing frogs croaking everywhere, along
with crickets and locusts. Just as we approached a fourth fence, maybe ten
or fifteen yards from it, my older brother froze in step and my younger
brother ran into me as I stopped suddenly. I asked my older brother,
Isaac, why he stopped, and he just pointed silently up ahead of us.
In the low moonlight, I could see a wide silhouette of shoulders and
a head slightly swaying across that fourth fence. The carbyed light made this thing's
eyes glow the color of amber. The eyes were ten inches apart, and
they had to be eight feet off the ground. It was then that I
noticed that the slew had gone silent. Hoyt, my younger brother, said,
what the hell is that. Isaac turned to us and said, sh
this is something real bad. It seemed like we were in a stair down
with this thing, and Isaac started pushing us back real slow. It kept
slowly swaying back and forth until we had moved far enough back that the glow
of its eyes were a faint glimmer. Isaac told hoy to turn around and
slowly start walking back to the car, and then he told me to do
the same slowly. But just as I turned this thing let out a roar
that scared us to death. If you mix the high trumpet of an elephant,
the deep rumble of a male line, and the bellow of a bull
all at the same time, that's what it sounded like. I felt that
sound all the way through my body panicked. As we were we continued to
slowly walk back, it yelled at us again, and we heard the heavy
thud and the sound of a barbed wire fence being stomped down, and at
that time a second yell came from the opposite side of the slough, and
that one was crashing towards us, and Isaac yelled for us to run.
The creatures moved parallel to each other down both sides of the slough, and
now they were screaming non stop. I never ran that hard in my life.
Te Isaac kept a hand on my back as he got to the third
fence. We hurried through the wires and got back to a hard run.
That thing behind us had closed the distance quite a bit. When we got
to the second fence, we could hear the one on the opposite bank moving
closer, and the footfalls behind us were approaching. We got past that fence
and the brush had opened up, and we could finally run at full speed,
but so could the creatures. The first fence came into view this time
there was no stopping and pulling wires apart. White ran through it, tearing
his shirt off, and Isaac and I dove over it. We all came
up running in a mad sprint to the last tree line, trying to get
to the car. We crashed through the last bit of brush and we dove
into the car. Whatever that thing was, it stopped inside the tree line
and it let out one final screen. Isaac had started the car. It
was in gear and moving in seconds, and he floored it back to Highway
thirty five. None of us spoke a word about this until we got home.
We dropped off shirtless and scratched up Hoyt, and then Isaac dropped me
at home, and it was still not a word spoken by anyone. It
was a long time before the three of us talked about any of it.
In fact, to you're the first person I've ever told the whole story to.
As I wrote earlier, my dad wasn't afraid of the dark or anything
else, but that night put a fear in him that lasted until he died
many years later. In nineteen eighty eight, my group of friends loved to
go out at night and get a good scare. It was a pastime for
us. One of the kids had come home from basic training and was ready
for for a fun night out. I had an idea. There was a
new residential development under construction near where my father and his brothers had their experience.
The new subdivision was called the bar X. A story had been told
that when the bar X was first being developed, there was a construction trailer
sitting in the back of the property, and they were having a hard time
keeping night watchmen hired to stay there late at night. Something would come up
and bang on the trailer and turn things over. After several night watchmen had
quit and the story had gotten around enough that they couldn't hire anyone to do
the job, they closed off that section and removed the equipment, and it
stayed closed for many years. This was all I needed to hear to put
together my best scare ever for my friends. I would take my buddy and
his girlfriend there and I'd tell them the story my dad had relayed to me,
and then I'd get them to walk down that dirt road and scare them.
But Jesus out of them, no one knew where we were going except
me. We piled into my mother's nineteen seventy seven Ford Ltd. Which actually
could sit six people comfortably, and I began to tell the tale. Within
minutes, all their eyes were huge and their mouths gaped open, and not
a sound being made as they listened. I pulled onto the road and announced
somberly that we had just crossed over middle By you. Yep, it was
the same middle By you that Dad had been run out of fifty years before.
We pulled in and circled to the right and stopped at the opening of
the dirt road. The guys jumped out, and they wanted to show they
weren't scared. They were showing off for the girls. Reluctantly, the girls
followed along and we headed for the gate back into those woods. The moonlight
gave the area an eerie feeling, and I remember a strong wind at my
back. I was in the back of the group, and I would blast
out a horrible screen as they walked to the gate. Everything was working great
until as I inhaled to get out that roar, I became aware that there
was something beside me, just off the road, in the darkness. In
my peripheral I saw movement in black on black. I froze in step and
I turned to face the blackness, straining my eyes to see what had moved.
The two brothers saw that I had stopped and came back to join me.
I didn't notice them. I was leaning over, looking hard into that
blackness, trying to make out whatever had moved. They asked me what I
saw, and I told them something wasn't right and to go get the girls
that we needed to leave. They could hear in my tone that the gag
was over and something really was wrong. I heard the girls of approaching.
My buddy was leaning over my shoulder, looking into the dark with me.
There's something right there, I said, lifting my hand to point at the
thing I was looking at. And the wind that had been blowing stopped,
like someone had turned off a fan. Everything went silent, and it was
as if the earth stood still as death. A stale odor came out of
those trees. Could have been a skunk, but it was worse. All
of us smelled it, and the girls showed their hands across their clenched noses,
trying to wave the odor away. A black shape rose to its feet
in a fluid motion. It hid its head on a limb, raising it
up in the moonlight for a second. It went still again, and we
could all now see its shape, and then it turned and crashed away into
the woods. We dashed for the car, and as we ran we could
hear it crashing through the brush behind the new cult a sack. As fast
as I could, I got the car started and I fish tailed into the
curve, heading out over Middle Value crossing, my headlights picked up the back
half of this thing, having already crossed the road and heading back into the
brush on our side. We saw its back covered in hair as it ran,
and as we got parallel with it, it turned its head and roared
at us. It was the same roar my father had described. We raced
away and turned on to FM five twenty one, and everyone started to whoop
and holler at the great scare that is what we had gone there for,
But not me. I was thinking about my father and the real terror he
must have felt that night, all those years ago. We went back there
the next morning, and the limb that the creature bumped his head on was
seven feet eight inches off the ground measured it. The creature was taller than
eight feet, but there were no tracks due to the leaves covering the ground,
and we didn't think to look for anything else. While we looked around.
A thought was running through my mind. I had been so close to
this thing while peering into the darkness the night before, trying to make out
what I knew had caught my eye. It was so close, only a
short reach, and it would have had me. I'm a big man,
and this thing was three times my size. I would have not had a
chance. When we got home, I told my father of the story.
He leaned back in his chair and took a long drag off a cigarette.
I'm sorry you had to go through that, he said. It scared me
enough to make me sick to my stomach when I think about it. How
do you feel right now, same as you, dad, I said,
t Roy, you saw a wood burger. Don't ever talk about it to
people. Folks will think you lost your mind. Just keep it to yourself.
That was the last time we ever talked about it. These days,
I don't care what people think about me. I know what I saw,
and I know what my father and his brothers saw. You can believe whatever
you want.