Otto Winterset died last week.  Just sat there outside the card parlor in Crooked Springs, Indiana, where I grew up, nodded off and never woke up.  I guess folks walked right by for a time before they noticed he wasn’t breathing much.  Otto was just an old, old man who’d lived in Crooked Springs like forever and liked to tell stories on folks who used to live there and once in a while on some still around.  The paper said he was only 94.  I took him to be a lot older than that when I was a kid listening to his tales.

There wasn’t no funeral where people dress up and go to church and look down on the dead person and say things like “Don’t he look natural–just like he’s a-layin’ there a-sleepin’.”  I never did pick up on that.  They always looked plenty dead to me.  Anyways, there way just a few of us that went to the graveyard where they placed old Otto in a hole and covered him up.  Pastor Russell read from the Bible–that part about lying down in green pastures–and that was pretty much it.  I sucked it up–didn’t even take out my handkerchief.  Not until I got back to my car, that is.  That’s when the waterworks began.  I just couldn’t hold back the tears.  Heck, I didn’t care all that much for that old feller ‘cept I loved his stories.  But I cried.  Ginny Lou saw me.  Dagnab it!  I sure didn’t want her to see me–a 16 year old–crying like a two-year-old, but here she came.  She hugged me.  I felt better.  I’d always had a notion that a hug from Ginny Lou might make me feel good.

My first thought was to go to town and have Dewey Millet go in to Fuzzy’s Tavern and get me a pint of Three Feathers.  Dewey was the Town Marshall and the feller we kids would go to when we wanted something to drink.  He’d go in a get it for us.  Old Otto told a story on Dewey one time that made both of us laugh a little.  Seems the sheriff had to lock him up once for slapping his wife around some.  Otto said the sheriff put Dewey in a cell while he was still wearing his .38 special around his waist.  Folks were pretty trusting, I guess.  Otto said he didn’t think the cell door was ever locked since Dewey didn’t have a way home.  The sheriff toted him back to Crooked Springs next morning after Mrs. Millet cooled down.