Brother Alex Jenkins brought Mac, his Tennessee Walker, over to the parsonage on Lee Road in Covington, Louisiana, on the Reynolds’ second day there. Spot, the rat terrier, got his first whiff of horse odor, looked up to see what was blocking out the sunlight and not recognizing the beast, rushed forward barking for all he was worth. Randy and Ricky bounded off the porch and not knowing any better, ran to the sorrel gelding and started stroking his nose and lips and hugging his front legs.
“Great day in the morning!” said Pastor Gene.
“Your boy said he wanted a horse,” said Brother Alex.
“He’s too big,” said the pastor's wife Violet from the living room, locking the screen door as if that would keep her and her daughters safe.
Brother Alex said, “He’s big, but he’s real gentle. They could walk under his belly and he wouldn’t do anything. Go ahead, walk under him, boys.”
Randy walked under the horse’s belly. Ricky followed.
“See, he don’t kick!” said Randy.
“Can we keep him, can we keep him, please?” said Ricky.
“We can’t afford a horse right now,” said Gene.
“Oh, Mac’s not for sale. But y’all can keep him as long as you want, huh?” said Brother Alex.
“No, Gene. The boys will break their necks,” said Violet.
Brother Alex said, “Take the roosts out of that chicken coop in the back yard and it’ll be a good stall, but he don’t much need one. Just graze him in the backyard after you get some kind of gate on it. For now you can just tie a rope to his halter and stake him out.”
Gene said, “I’ve been around mules all my life, but I’ve never saddled a horse.”
“Here, let me show you,” said Brother Alex.
The next morning, Randy and Ricky got up at dawn and went out back where Mac was staked out with Brother Alex's rope and a length of chain Gene had found in the little shed immediately behind the parsonage. Mac opened his mouth for the bit and Randy put the bridle on him. No sense trying the saddle since the horse was taller than Randy, so the boys took a five-gallon paint can out of the shed and climbed, with some effort, from there onto Mac's broad back.
Randy kicked the horse lightly in the ribs to get him going.
“Don’t kick him!” said Ricky.
Mac accelerated into a fast but smooth gait.
“Don’t make him run,” said Ricky.
“This ain’t running. This is single-footing,” said Randy.
“Well, don’t make him single-foot too fast."
They crossed Bush-Folsom Road into a forest that used to be a tree farm. The trees had been planted in rows and thinned out many times and now there were wide avenues of flat ground with a carpet of pine straw. Despite clusters of undergrowth and a rotting stump here and there it was an ideal place to ride.
The Reynolds boys believed in prayer. They prayed at church. They prayed at meals. They prayed at bedtime. But they had never prayed before like they prayed for Mac when he got his foot caught in the chain one night while grazing in the yard. The flesh of his right rear fetlock was a bloody mess, scraped down to the bone.
Brother Alex came over with a horse trailer. “He must have got tangled up early and kicked all night.”
“Listen, I’ll pay the vet bill,” said Gene.
“No need for that. I’ll take him home and put some ointment on it to keep the flies away. It’ll probably heal in a few weeks."
“We’ve been praying for him,” said Randy.
Brother Alex patted Randy’s crew-cut scalp with his three-fingered hand. “The Lord answers prayers.”
“Amen,” said Gene.
A few days later, Brother Alex took Gene to the Thursday livestock auction in Bogalusa to buy the boys a horse.
“I really can’t afford it,” Gene said.
Brother Alex said, “It’s on me. These boys trusted the Lord for a horse, and the Good Lord told me to buy them one.”
Brother Alex paid $38.50 for a blind-in-one-eye bay gelding with a personality that was the opposite of Mac’s. No child would ever run under this horse’s belly. The brothers would never ride double on him, and Randy would seldom ride him in the woods without getting thrown one or more times.
Gene, who liked R’s, named him Ranger.
Ricky lost interest in being a cowboy after Ranger swept him out of the saddle by running under the clothesline. So Ranger became Randy’s horse.
Ranger was shorter than Mac, so Randy had no problem putting the saddle on him. Or so he thought. Ranger took a deep breath and held it. Randy tightened the cinch then mounted up. Ranger let out his breath.
Not yet feeling the looseness of the saddle, Randy urged Ranger into a run. The horse got the bit in his teeth and ran straight toward a fence.
Randy yelled, “Whoa! Whoa! Stop, horse!”
But it was not until Ranger, at full speed, happened to jerk his head in such a way that, for a fraction of a second, his one good eye noticed and transmitted to his pea-brain the fact that a fence was coming up that he stiffened his front legs and slid to a stop, causing the saddle to slide to his side, then completely beneath his belly. Randy hit the ground hard and rolled over to see the crazed horse kicking at the dangling saddle with his rear hooves as he bucked across the yard, onto the pavement of Bush-Folsom Highway and disappeared toward Bogalusa.
The man who caught him two miles away happened to know whose horse it was. He'd noticed just such a horse several times lately at the church he passed on his route to work. He walked Ranger back to Shepherd's Fold and warned Gene that it was a dangerous animal and he ought to get rid of it.
Randy yelled, “Whoa! Whoa! Stop, horse!”
But it was not until Ranger, at full speed, happened to jerk his head in such a way that, for a fraction of a second, his one good eye noticed and transmitted to his pea-brain the fact that a fence was coming up that he stiffened his front legs and slid to a stop, causing the saddle to slide to his side, then completely beneath his belly. Randy hit the ground hard and rolled over to see the crazed horse kicking at the dangling saddle with his rear hooves as he bucked across the yard, onto the pavement of Bush-Folsom Highway and disappeared toward Bogalusa.
The man who caught him two miles away happened to know whose horse it was. He'd noticed just such a horse several times lately at the church he passed on his route to work. He walked Ranger back to Shepherd's Fold and warned Gene that it was a dangerous animal and he ought to get rid of it.
Randy took all the blame for the incident and was allowed to keep the horse. The saddle was destroyed but Uncle Barney King—the “Uncle” being a mark of respect, not an indicator of relationship—got another saddle from somebody who owed him a favor and loaned it to the preacher's son.
Uncle Barney’s estate, that he would later name Pine Knoll and turn into a private golf course, was just south of the church on Lee Road. His house was where the survivors would go the night the horse from hell burned the parsonage down.
OLD RANGER BURNS DOWN THE PARSONAGE
by Randy Reynolds
For a few glorious weeks at the end of the summer of 1960 my eight-year old sister Ronda Jean Reynolds had her own bedroom for the first time ever. Our three younger sisters shared a room together. My 9-year-old brother Ricky and I (age 11) shared a room. But Ronda, for the first time ever, had a room of her own, a tiny plywood afterthought at the back of the Shepherd’s Fold (Louisiana) parsonage, flimsier than the rest of the structure, but it was hers. True, the TV set was in there but she, knowing as well as anyone that a preacher couldn’t be caught with a TV in his front room, didn't mind all that much. Previously, at our parsonage in Bainbridge, Georgia, this same little Philco with a coat hangar for rabbit ears and tin foil on the coat hangar to boost reception, had been in the boys’ bedroom, so having her room be the TV den this time was turn about— an inconvenience she gladly put up with because when Daddy turned the Philco off early every evening and sent the rest of us to our rooms, the little add-on TV room became hers and hers alone once more.
It was the first room to burn when my one-eyed horse Ranger started the fire. Flames shot through the back window above the tiny bed, and the room filled with smoke but Ronda didn’t know because she was out cold.
Daddy had smothering spells sometimes, usually when he was keyed up about something such as watching Mr. Kennedy make his acceptance speech in Los Angeles . She knew Kennedy was a Catholic and she was afraid of Catholics because she had heard preachers at the district meeting—though not her daddy—say that people shouldn’t vote for a Catholic because he would let the pope run the country. She didn’t know what a pope was but he sounded scarier than Morgus the Magnificent on Channel 4, so she was hoping Kennedy wouldn’t win.
Daddy sometimes got up in the middle of the night and sat at the kitchen table to pray, because he could breathe better sitting up. Ronda would join him in the kitchen and I, breaking the rules and listening to KAAY in far-away Little Rock on my portable radio under the covers, could sometimes hear them:
“Hello, girl, you’re supposed to be in bed.”
“You woke me up."
“Well, since you’re up, we may as well make some cocoa.”
The cocoa seemed to calm him down and he’d quit smothering till the next time. But he wasn't awake the night Ranger burned down the parsonage.
Ricky said often said that Ranger was a mean horse, but Ronda felt sorry for him. (For Ranger, not Ricky.) The poor horse had only one good eye and when things moved or made a noise on his blind side it spooked him. He was old and not very good looking, even for a horse. He was so skinny she could count his ribs so it was no wonder that he was always trying to break into the shed a few steps behind Ronda's room to get at the bale of hay that was stored there. The shed wasn’t big enough for the horse and the washing machine both, but he could push open the door with his nose and get his head and neck and front feet in there. Daddy would shut the shed door tight but Ranger would push and paw at it during the night and wake up Ronda. She yelled at him through her back window sometimes, but when Ranger wanted to do something a little yelling didn’t have much effect.
Daddy said it was dangerous for Ranger to stick his head in the shed because there was a hot water heater in there and if the horse pushed any hay against that flame the shed could catch fire. Whether that’s what happened the night the shed caught fire and that fire caught the house on fire, Ronda didn’t know. She didn't remember hearing Ranger working to get the shed door open but she didn’t remember much of anything from that night.
One moment she was asleep in her new room for the very last time ever. The next thing she knew Daddy was screaming her name and jerking her out of her almost twin-sized bed. Gripping her in one arm and his shotgun in the other, he whirled around and took a giant step toward the kitchen as the back wall caved in behind them. Daddy told her this later because she didn’t remember it detail for detail.
The reason Daddy had a shotgun in his hands was because of Mr. Willie Taylor who has seen the shed fully engulfed in flames and the back of the house on fire when he turned from Bush-Folsom Road onto Lee Road on his way to work. He drove into the yard and ran up on the porch yelling at the top of his lungs “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” He didn’t say anything about a fire—just banged on the door and yelled “Wake up!” over and over.
Daddy thought a crazy man was trying to break in so he loaded his .410 and was going to shoot through the door but then he smelled the smoke. Still holding his shotgun he yelled, “Wake up, Violet! The house is on fire!”
He ran to Ronda’s room and Mother ran to room and grabbed both me and Ricky by an arm. “Get out of here! Now! Fast! The house is on fire!”
I picked up the new jeans she'd bought for me the day before at Bill’s Dollar Store in Bogalusa , but she jerked them out of my hands and said, “We don’t have time for that. Run! Run! Get out!”
So Ricky and I, wearing only our jockey shorts scrambled for the front door as Mother rescued the three youngest girls.
Once outside, all we could do was stand and cry and watch the parsonage burn.
Daddy held Ronda in his arms.
“You need to move your car before it catches on fire,” said Mr. Taylor.
Daddy felt in his pants pockets but couldn’t find his keys.
“Maybe we can push it away from the house,” said Mr. Taylor.
Daddy wouldn’t let go of Ronda.
Men materialized out of the dark—some of them headed to work, others who had gotten phone calls from Uncle Barney who lived up the road. Sister Jessie, Uncle Barney’s wife, showed up with their teenaged daughter Cheryl, and Ricky and I stood before them in nothing but underwear, trembling with embarrassment.
The Reynolds family would never know who all the heroes were because it was dark and there was a lot of confusion, but one we knew for sure was Floyd Jenkins. He was the first man into the burning house, followed by several others. They couldn’t put out the fire but they would save what they could. They grabbed dresser drawers and boxes and clothes, anything they could get their hands on, and threw it into the yard.
Mother was forever grateful that Floyd saved the family photos.
Ricky and I were forever grateful that Cheryl and Jessie King rushed home, got some bed clothes and brought them to the fire. Ricky and I wrapped ourselves in a single sheet and stood out of the way. Eventually the volunteer fire department got there but it was too late for them to do anything.
As the sun rose, Ranger went running by.
As the sun rose, Ranger went running by.
Jeff Salter I see other comments posted at the site, but I still can't find a box or a button.
Anyhow, fantastic story. Got my heart rate up as I read. Wow. I can smell the smoke!
Anyhow, fantastic story. Got my heart rate up as I read. Wow. I can smell the smoke!
