The Heart of Elba Catworth

From a distance, an observer with a whimsical streak might have seen the Catworth place as an abandoned fortress strategically placed on a rise of land to ward off enemies of old. But a closer look revealed two carefully tended stone buildings with slate roofs, one a farmhouse with two bedrooms and a main room, and the other a sizable barn. The stones came from the one hundred acres of land now tilled by the Catworths. Another fifty acres served as pasture for their Herefords. A porch adorned the house, a wrap-around affair of hewn oak dressing the south and east sides. The barn sported a copper weather vane.

This citadel nestled in northeastern Indiana farmland. To the north ran the St. Mary River. To the south and west stretched hundreds of square miles of tilled fields and oak forests. A small but industrious town, Wolf Lake, did its business a few miles to the east. All in all, the Catworth cattle farm, a part of the agricultural boom of late-nineteenth century America, made one thing clear: it was here to stay.

Jonathan Catworth started it all. He was an immigrant from Herefordshire, England and a member of a long line of cattlemen. He and his wife had four children, three girls and a boy, Roy. A typhoid epidemic killed the mother and daughters in the space of a year. Jonathan and Roy managed the farm alone until Jonathan succumbed to years of back-breaking labor at the age of 85. The dawn of the twentieth century found a young Roy Catworth running the place with the help of his wife of seven years, Hazel. Roy raised enough grain to maintain a modest herd of Herefords while Hazel tended to everything her husband didn’t have time for. She also bore him two children, Zeb, currently age six, and Pauline who was four. On the afternoon of November 10, 1900 she did her best to give Roy his third child.

“Oh, God in heaven help me!” cried the laboring woman, a sound that pierced the closed bedroom door and echoed in the main room of the farmhouse.

“Is mama ok?” asked Pauline of her father. Pig-tailed and thin as a reed, she sat cross-legged at the hearth in the main room. A fire in the cavernous stone fireplace kept her warm.

“Doc Phillips is with her,” Roy answered. “No need to fret. Asides, you seen a cow calf. It’s just like that.”

As Pauline turned her worried brow toward the glowing fire, her brother Zeb barged in the room, his wool coat covered with sleet. Without a word, he hung his wet coat near the fire and rubbed his hands together over the coals. The winter hat, an old one of Roy’s, stayed on his head.

“You get all them chores done proper?” Roy asked.

“Yup.”

“Even the chickens? You tend to slack when it comes to the chickens.”

“Yup.”

“Weather turnin’?”

“Yup.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“God, as I live and breathe, get this child out!” The scream said.

The three Catworths fell quiet, the only sounds in the room coming from the crackle of the fire and the pelting of sleet on the slate roof. Roy loaded his pipe, Zeb turned his back to the heat to warm his rear, and Pauline hugged her rag doll. They waited for another cry from the bedroom, but heard nothing for a good while. Finally, the girl spoke.

“Tell us a story, Papa,” Pauline said.

Roy looked at his daughter and then at his son, who nodded in agreement. “Why not,” the man said. “It’s a might better than this.”