Oh come, Angel Band
Come and around me stand
Oh bear me away on your snowy wings
To my immortal home,
Oh bear me away on your snowy wings
To my immortal home.
ROSELLE, Iron County, Missouri – Redbud blossoms splashed the spring-green hills the day my mother called me home from Guatemala. The freshness in the air and the gentleness of the colors were medicine to my eyes, and yet they pained me, knowing as I did how my grandfather loved this time of year.
Normally, I thought, he would be out on his Missouri Century Farm planting right now, or standing on the banks of an Ozark stream or pond, reeling in a bucket full of fish to share with family and friends.
He was struggling to manage basic functions when I finally reached his bedside – breathing and swallowing were a painful chore. His already birdlike frame seemed even tinier and frailer than when I had left him in December. He was asking to be released, to be allowed to go home to his Lord.
He groaned when he saw me. “Oh, I didn’t want to be such a bother,” he managed to get out.
“Grandpa, it’s not a bother, it’s a gift,” I protested. “You know how much I love to come see you in the springtime. The redbud is blooming and it’s so beautiful!”
“Those sure were some good nuts you brought up,” he said, remembering the bag of Texas pecans I’d picked up on my last trip from Houston.
Grandpa spent his winters picking out walnuts and hickory nuts that he’d gathered on his farm, and he filled bags with them to distribute among family and friends. This had been a dry year and the harvest was thin, so Texas pecans filled in for Ozark hickories. It wasn’t much, but I was glad for it.
His last days were that way – filled with remembrances for each of his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, with words of appreciation for the tiny things we did. My mother and her sisters and brother hovered nearby, knowing that each word he spoke cost him dearly.
My grandfather the storyteller asked me to tell him about my trip. I did my best, describing the mountains, the jungle, the birds of Guatemala. Maybe I was too enthusiastic in my descriptions, because my aunt came in and put her hand on my shoulder.
“He needs to rest,” she whispered. Grandpa didn’t miss a beat.
“I’m talking to Tracy,” he rasped.
“Oh! OK,” said my aunt and retreated respectfully.
My sister came in with an arrangement of redbuds beautiful as a poem.
“I just want to go sing praises to the Lord forever and ever,” he told my father.
I swabbed his parched mouth with water as the family gathered.
One by one my sisters and my aunt began to sing “Angel Band,” and I felt the angels gathering in the background. The next day, he was gone.
***
Chris Lloyd “Pete” Hicks was born to a dirt-poor farmer and trapper in the Missouri Ozarks on Nov. 7, 1917. Grandpa’s mother, our great-grandmother Esta Stahl, daughter of a German immigrant, had come to these parts from the Ohio foothills in a covered wagon when she was only two. Her father fought in the Civil War right here in these Ozark hills. Grandpa’s father, Jesse Hicks, had accompanied his own father, William, to Cripple Creek, Colorado during the gold rush days and they had earned enough to buy the farm. But farming wasn’t for Jesse, and when he grew up he let the farm run down while he trapped furs for a living.
As a young boy in the Great Depression, Grandpa was pressed into service with his father, and he told us stories of rising at dawn to hunt with his father, then going to school with the stink of animals on his clothing. He learned to laugh about it. His stories always drew a crowd – stories about carving out a life in the wilderness, about rising above hardship, about outsmarting rivals, about working hard but always taking time to have a laugh.
I asked him once if he’d known any moonshiners there in the Ozark Hills, which were famous for their illicit whiskey production during the Prohibition.
“Well, some people called ‘em criminals, but sometimes they was just good people tryin’ to provide for their families,” he told me.
Turns out some of those good people were his uncles, and he told of the elaborate system they’d devised to conceal their labors. When the “Revenuers” came over the hill on a raid, someone was always on the lookout, and the trap door would come down over the still. Nobody was ever caught.
Grandpa told with a mischievous grin about when he and his friends would sneak into the barn to make off with a little of that “mountain dew.” But one of his friends died after drinking too much of a bad batch, and he steered clear of the stuff after that. Or so he told me.
Grandpa was as devout and humble a churchgoing man as you’d ever meet. He was a deacon at New Hope Primitive Baptist Church and he never missed a meeting; he loved the singing and the preaching and the fellowship as much as he loved anything.
“Keep looking up,” was his most frequent advice to me. He wasn’t one to wear his religion on his sleeve, as Brother Travis Eye said at his memorial service. Instead, he lived his faith every day, dedicating his life to the service of others – friends and family alike. He lived in gratitude, celebrating the joy of a sunrise, a good catch, an abundant harvest, a visiting grandchild.
At Grandpa’s funeral, we met a friend of his that he loved like a son – Chris Schillinger, the owner of Baylee Jo’s Bar-B-Q and Grill in Ironton. My sisters and I had heard about Chris over the years, a fishing buddy who took him camping and whitewater rafting when Grandpa was in his 80s. But it wasn’t until Chris invited us all to his restaurant for a sumptuous home-style dinner after Grandpa’s funeral service – about 150 of us, and then he refused to take a dime – that we met this remarkable man, and we got a glimpse into a different side of Grandpa.
“Your grandpa was a heck of a man,” Chris declared, with tears in his eyes. “You know, he never judged me. I was a single dad, and I had a few girlfriends, but he never cared about that.”
He showed us the place near the cash register, behind the bar, where he would hang our grandfather’s photo, right next to that of another buddy who had died.
There were a few stories he could tell us sometime, he went on, but maybe not now. The crowd fresh from the church milled around outside while the tattooed bikers dined inside. We begged him to tell.
“I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but your grandpa liked to have a beer or two every now and again,” he began. Not a secret, but not exactly his public image.
“Well, once he told me about the bottle of whiskey he used to keep up in the barn – he said, ‘I’d drink just a little bit in the winter to warm me up.’
“’But when July rolled around and I was still drinking it, I knew I had to quit!’”
As Chris spoke, the Norman Rockwell watercolor of our grandfather faded and a real flesh-and-blood human being with all his strengths and foibles came into rare view. We laughed together and loved him all the more.
We went to Grandpa’s house after the dinner, a beautiful home he had built for my grandmother from pink Ozark granite. Tuckpointed in white and framed with two tall oaks, the home has been a picturesque part of the scenery in these parts for three generations. The tulips he planted in front of the house swayed in the breeze, and the birds he loved sat in the branches above, waiting, perhaps, for him to come fill their feeders.
All his children and most of his 48 grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren were there. We walked across the fields he had nurtured with his own sweat, and we took turns choosing mementos from his belongings.
It was a heartfelt evening and we wavered, as we had all week, between sorrow and joy. Grandpa was where he wanted to be, and he was still giving to us. Cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles reconnected after years apart. Children and grandchildren looked through his pocketknife collection, his tools, his books, Grandma’s dishes and knickknacks, each of them just as likely to find something for someone else as for themselves. Giving was the order of the day.
I chose a couple of photos of Grandpa, a couple of pocket knives, a Zane Grey novel and a John Deere pillow my aunt Cheri had made for him. I slept with that pillow, and the next morning, I awoke with the sunrise, as Grandpa always did. I felt his presence powerfully, and he was everywhere.
Our little grandpa isn’t little anymore, I realized, and I smiled.
***
I invite any and all of you to share your own memories of Pete Hicks here, and pass this along to those who loved him. He was indeed a heck of a man. Please, share your thoughts and memories in the comment section below, or if you’d like to share photos or a longer piece, write to me at tracy@tracybarnettonline.com.
Here is a link to a video presentation I put together with help from his son Kevin Hicks, his grandson Brent McClane, his daughter (my mother) Judy Brunk, and me.
Chris Lloyd “Pete” Hicks: A life well lived from thirstyboots07 on Vimeo.
Here are a couple of Flickr slideshow collections for download by family and friends.
Pete Hicks’ Birthday Book, by Kevin Hicks
Pete Hicks photo collection – photos by Brent McClane, Kevin Hicks, Judy Brunk and others
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