3/30/2023 0 Comments Sugar sugar archies ear rapeHe sang plain and square-cut, “Brandy’s brandy, any way you mix it, a Texian’s a Texian any way you fix it,” and the listeners laughed at the droll way he rolled out “fix it,” the words surely meaning castration. Sad and flat and without ornamentation, it expressed things that were unsayable. It was a straight, hard voice, the words falling out halfway between a shout and a song. There had never been any sense of kinship, fictive or otherwise, between them, and Bunk Peck fumed over the hundred dollars his mother had left Archie in her will.Īrchie McLaverty had a singing voice that once heard was never forgotten. Peck as a buffer, the relationship became one of hired hand and boss. Peck died, caught in a grass conflagration she had started while singeing slaughtered chickens, Archie was fourteen and Bunk in his early twenties. He was a quick study for a tune, and had a memory for rhymes, verses, and intonations. Sarah Peck, a warmhearted Missouri Methodist widow, raised the young orphan, to the great resentment of her son, Bunk.Ī parade of saddle bums drifted through the Peck bunkhouse, and from an early age Archie listened to the songs they sang. The family wipeout removed the Irish influence. Before Archie’s mother died, she had taught him dozens of old songs and the rudiments of music structure by painting a plank with black and white piano keys, sitting him before it, and encouraging him to touch the keys with the correct fingers. His mother’s death from cholera when he was seven was followed a few weeks later by that of his father, who had guzzled an entire bottle of strychnine-laced patent medicine that was guaranteed to ward off cholera and measles if taken in teaspoon quantities. A faint brogue flavored his sentences, for he had been conceived in Ireland and born, in 1868, in Dakota Territory, of parents arrived from Bantry Bay, his father to spike ties for the Union Pacific Railroad. “Yeah, if the bastard don’t bite somebody,” Archie said, flexing his right forefinger. Archie dug into the side of the hill and built a stout meat house, sawed wood while Rose split kindling until they had four cords stacked high against the cabin, almost to the eaves, the pile immediately tenanted by a weasel. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of the evening with their feet on the great stone and watch the deer come down to drink and, just before darkness, see the herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been eyes of wind. One day, Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for a doorstep. They chinked the cabin with heavy yellow clay. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle himself, with a little help from their only neighbor, Tom Ackler, a sun-dried prospector with a summer shack up on the mountain. ![]() It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The first summer, they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. He lied about his age to anyone who asked-he was not twenty-one but sixteen. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and his springy waves of auburn hair, which seemed charged with voltage. ![]() Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface, as though scratched in with a knife. Weed, a gold-seeker who had starved near its source. BUTCHER/NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETYĪrchie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature obnoxious flora but for P.
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