The Bridge To Paradise

Disclaimer

The story that follows is pure fiction.

While it is based on the lives of two young people who grew up surviving events of the 20th Century such as The Great Depression, the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, WWII, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the unimpeded advancement of technology, the setting, including names of cities and towns, religious denominations, historical events, and business names though real are not necessarily depicted accurately.

Although the characters are composites of real people and real situations, they represent people from small, American towns across the country from this time period.

The dialog is completely fictional. It comes exclusively from the author’s imagination, and the author’s personal experiences.

Endorsements

In The Bridge to Paradise, Fred Dickenson weaves together the best of history, romance, family, and faith to sweep the reader through the Twentieth Century. He opens the reader’s eyes to see how only faith can bring us through the troubles of poverty, war, and loss which is as old as the century, and yet as fresh as today. This story allows us to see through the eyes of Lafayette and Louise (who could be anyone’s parents or grandparents), their hardships, and their triumphs with God on their side. It is the story of two families who not only kept the faith, but by example taught their children and beyond to several generations to do the same. Lafayette and Louise put God before themselves and others because they knew it was truly the only way. They were able to endure hardships as children, to remain faithful to each other, and live successful lives with God as the center of their marriage. God’s unfailing love sustains these two and their families for the better part of a century, and into the future across The Bridge to Paradise.

Amy Hotchkiss (Finn)

Former Student,

Journalism UIL Team Member (State Qualifier)

Keep the tissues handy as the author takes you on an evocative ride through pages and time. Follow the paths of Louise and Lafayette in The Bridge to Paradise, where the reader is carried away into a nostalgic place in mid-America and where one may cross their own bridge of promises on their journey to Paradise.

Donna Weeden

Paradise Historical Society

Paradise, Texas

Dedication

I dedicate this book to all my family. From those who came before me to pave the way, to those who have shared my life that began half way through the 20th Century, to those who are on the threshold of their lives, to those nameless faces who are beyond my view in literal and figurative sunsets and sunrises to the time when I come full circle to the source of all life—an eternity with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in Heaven with all those loved ones once more. To my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and before. To my siblings. To my cousins—first, second and beyond. To all the in-laws, outlaws and by laws. To all the special family and friends throughout my life who contributed to the sum of the parts that made up the whole of me. This story is a blending, melding, merging, melting together of all the tales you have shared with me, and those I have shared with you. It is these things we share, these feelings, emotions, we stir up in ourselves and in others. Without folks like you, the stories would be lost. Without you, they would ring hollow. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Most folks don’t understand that in order to self-publish, a writer needs a war chest to finance such things as editing, design, print-on-demand printing, advertising, copyright, and a myriad of steps that have to be done to get your book in distribution. I have been amazed at how many have helped me in this endeavor. Thank you, all of you who bought Wah-Who? Boards, and to all who have bought books one and too of the Hard Knocks and Consequences series. The proceeds from these have gone to pay for all those services and fees. Finally, a special thank you to the lady who handed me a plain white envelope at a yard sale and said, The Lord told me to give you this. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me. It’s not important how much money was in the envelope, but suffice to say it was enough to push me to finish this manuscript and go to the publisher. Thank you, Jesus, for sending her my way!

Prologue

Paradise

The peace and tranquility of a simpler time and place,

The never-ending ebb and flow of gentle waves of love

Washing away the tensions of the day—

Paradise

Though I may never see such a place in this real world,

Though the places may be too distant, too unattainable, too far out of my reach,

When I escape through the pages of all the volumes I have explored

No one can keep me away from—

Paradise

Through the flights of fancy and fantasy

I can visit places both real and imaginary

That no one can take away—

And someday, when the bonds of this world

Break loose.

I will give up this imaginary world and finally escape to—

Paradise.

~ Fred G. Dickenson

Chapter 1

Before the Earth was formed, you knew our names.

Your plans for us were never in dispute.

You lit in us a fire and fanned the flames.

Louise, he whispered. I was just sittin’ here thinkin’ ‘bout how it all started. Ya remember?

As she lay drifting in and out of awareness, Louise found it difficult to separate the here-and-now from the long-ago to the increasingly clearer images of what was about to become the beginning of a new existence, the fulfillment of a promise God made to her as a child. She knew that her life would unfold according to God’s plan, as it always had, and that her steps would be ordered by The Lord. Now in her seventy-first year, she could see the other side of the bridge. She reflected on the years as she took those few final steps and one by one vivid images unfolded before her. More than 50 of those years included one special man—Lafayette.

That same Lafayette sat at her bedside in the here-and-now, as he always had and comforted her as best as he could in his own seemingly detached way with his emotions drawn in close and private—personal.

The mere sound of his voice was enough to ease her mind as she sank deeper into rest. It also seemed to stir more memories of the life she knew. It was long enough ago to almost defy memory and at the same time vivid enough to have happened just yesterday.

How Lafayette and Louise ever got together is a complete mystery. Some might call it fate. Others would label it chance. For the true believer, there is no such thing as either. Instead, they are governed by the will and plan of God as it applies to them individually and collectively. They were as polar opposite as two ends of a magnet. They were the epitome of opposites attracting, but they had to at least cross paths if ever they were going to be. That seemed unlikely to happen. Not only were they seven years apart in age, but he was satisfied to get no more than an elementary school education, while she was just as determined to get all the formal education life could afford her or that she could afford.

Oh, it was possible for them to meet. In some respects, it was almost unavoidable. They grew up as close as a mere eight or ten miles from each other, but in the early part of the 20th century, it might as well have been half a continent away. When they were close geographically, they were still separated by age and ambition.

He was born Lafayette Leo Johnson in the rural area of Chico, Texas, at the foot of Cactus Hill, where his grandmother (Alice Caroline Wright Austin Johnson) had been born in 1859, of Irish immigrant James C. Wright, who had come to mid-America hoping to stake his claim in Oklahoma and build an empire in the heart of the promised land. Great-grandpa Wright had the first blacksmith shop in Decatur on the slope of the hill on the west side. He later put his smithy skills to use as a stationmaster of a stage coach line. The stop was at the foot of Cactus Hill. It was in Oklahoma that he met and married Cherokee Molly Irene Taylor Johnson, whose ancestors had come to the territory on the Trail of Tears. George and Molly moved from Cactus Hill to Chico when she was in the fifth month of carrying Lafayette. In the wee hours of the morning of September 20, 1918, his first screams pierced the darkness and announced his arrival.

Looks like we got us a baby boy, said Uncle Henry.

Yep, said Papa George, I’da knowed it was a boy. You could hear him all the way to the back forty.

That was the extent of the fanfare for his birth. It didn’t take long for the realities of life to open Lafayette’s eyes to the world. Within days of his birth, Lafayette began going to the fields daily, strapped to his mother’s back. He would learn quickly how to plow and plant, to hoe and pull weeds, and pick, pull and harvest tomatoes, potatoes, peas and squash. He had the misfortune of fate to be born into poverty, but by the Grace of God, into a family with a strong spiritual foundation—at least through his mother. Fact is though, when folks who lived off the land the way the Johnsons did, they didn’t notice too much change when things got bad. They were bad to start with. You just had to tighten your belt a notch or two and keep on keepin’ on—As Paw used to say.

Lafayette was close to his seventh year when Louise saw the light of day. She was born Louise Lyn Schmidt a descendant of German immigrants, a fact that later in life would almost keep Lafayette and Louise apart forever. Louise drew her first breath March 20, 1924 in the west bedroom of the old Harms place atop Grub Hill, in the Grub Hill community of Wise County, Texas. She was the first-born child of the five children of Carl and Caroline Schmidt and began her life on a small 80-acre farm right in the middle of Wise County. The closest little town was called Paradise, but life on the farm as the eldest was anything but Paradise. It was hard work, from dawn to dusk and sometimes into the darkness, under lanterns and coal-oil lamps.

Even as a child, she could see this was not the life she wanted to live. She wanted to see more of the world than Wise County. Her mother, Caroline, was to blame for that wanderlust, as some called it. She was determined that her children would know as much as she could teach them about the rest of the world. She told Louise and the other children as much as she could about faraway lands and times and places that could only be imagined in the mind. As often as she could afford, she would buy travel magazines like Holiday (put out by Reader’s Digest) and Walkabout, from Australia. She would share the pictures with her children.

Most importantly, she read the Bible. What a marvelous work of literature loaded with adventure, love and romance, history, the supernatural, poetry, faith and predictions of the future that Louise wanted to see and be a part of. God had made her a promise while she was yet a child; a promise to someday witness many people about His goodness and mercy. It was on this promise Louise stood and dreamed of the day it would be so. She just knew that in order to accomplish this dream, she would have to get away from Paradise.

She wanted out!

If anyone was going to get out—it would be Louise.

When she first met Lafayette, Louise was in high school and well on her way to a scholarship to college and nothing was going to stand in her way. This Texas-born German girl would be somebody someday. Seventeen was a long way off. She had a lot of growing up to do, as Papa would say, and prayed every day for guidance to bring up Louise (and all his children) in the fear and admonition of The Lord.

I knew she was special before she was born, Caroline said to Carl. "The Good Lord came to me in a dream.

I saw her a’standin’ in front of a whole bunch of people, speechifyin’ and gettin’’ applause from the whole crowd. It was like they just hung to every word. I couldn’t hear the words she said, but somehow I knowed that she was talkin about the Lord. Nothin’ else could have that much power.

Well, afore you get her all famous and everythang, said Mr. Schmidt, She’s gonna larn what it’s like to live off the land and be a good wife and mother, like you Caroline, and then she can be somebody important.

What better place to bring up a child than a small farm in Paradise?

Folks called the Schmidt farm The Old Harms place for Carl’s Grandpa Harms. Everyone knew why it was called the Old Harms place, but nobody knew exactly why the only real bedroom in the house was called the west bedroom. Oh, it was on the west side of the house, but it really was the only bedroom. Perhaps the intention was to add another bedroom someday—on the east. Fact is, the weather beaten frame farm house was at least 40 years old by then. It wasn’t likely to ever be much more than it was. To Carl Schmidt, it was his Mansion Over the Hilltop sitting in the middle of his modest 80-acre farm. It wasn’t much to look at, but it had all the amenities of a working farm. Mr. Schmidt’s place had a barn, with corrals for the three or four Jersey cows he would need to provide milk and a calf now and then to sell at the auction barns for real money to pay for things you couldn’t raise for your own consumption or barter for at the trade grounds.

He also kept a hog or two for the meat. Caroline kept a few chickens for the eggs and occasionally a pullet to fry up on Sunday when relatives or the pastor would come over for dinner. She preferred the pullets, because the young (less than a year old) chickens would make more tender fryers for special occasions. As for other meats, Papa would use his old Remington single-shot .22 caliber rifle to bag wild game once in a while. That meant rabbit or squirrel. Carl said he never understood why some folk liked opossum or raccoon, Never took a likin to either one, myself, he said.

For crops, Carl would put in a few acres of corn, high gear for stock feed, watermelons and cantaloupes for trade days, and hay for the animals and a few bales of hay to barter.

Caroline finished off the farm’s production with a couple of acres of truck farming. She grew okra, black-eyed peas, tomatoes, squash (mostly yellow squash), bell peppers, onions, butter beans, potatoes, and a variety of herbs. She churned her own butter, helped milk the cows, canned everything that could be canned and either sold them at the trade grounds or fed them to her own family, the neighbors, and in years to come a houseful of children and grandchildren.

She also took advantage of the bounty God provided each year by harvesting wild plums, mustang grapes, blackberries and boysenberries, pears and prickly pears from the cactus plants. From all that, she made the best preserves and jams and jellies in the county.

Nobody really noticed, though, until a neighbor said to her once, Caroline, you oughta take some of your cannin’ over to the Wise County Founders Day Reunion in Decatur. You could win somethin’ and make a little spendin’ money at the same time.

She did and won two blue ribbons the first year. After that, she was an annual winner at the fair for her preserves, canned black-eyed peas and the pies and cakes she produced from her bounty. Of course, the side benefit was that she earned a little pin money for niceties throughout the year.

One of the