The County Legend of Cebern Barlow
By Gale Sparks
Cebern Barlow lived deep in one of the hollers below our house. Although he lived the secluded life of a hermit, he was always happy to have company. Cebern lived in a house left to him by his late mother in law. The house wasn’t much more than a four-room tarpaper shack, where Cebern and his fifteen some odd mix bred beagles lived quite happily.
Whenever you knocked on the door he would holler, “Come on in!” over the clamor of his dogs. Any unsuspecting person would think from the sound behind the door that they were about to be eaten alive if they dared to open the door.
What I always found amazing was when you opened the door all of these mixed up half-breed beagles lined up on two worn out sofas barking, but never getting down.
Cebern never bothered to get up, he would be stretched out in an equally worn out recliner. Bare floorboards showed through where the floor covering was worn away.
Out in front of his house, a little shed sat fenced in below his spring. Inside fence Cebern kept a couple of mangy looking goats and his Shetland pony, Daisy.
I would see Cebern around a half dozen times a year, usually in mid April when I prowled through the holler behind his house hunting for the sponge morels that grew along the banks of his spring. If I got lucky and found a few, I would carry them home, fry them in butter, and carry a helping back down to Cebern.
I assumed that since all I ever found in the trash pile behind his outhouse were sardine and Spam cans along with a mountain of Budweiser empties, that he would appreciate any kind of change in his diet.
When walking back to hunt morels, I passed Cebern’s rhubarb patch. His late wife, Virgie planted it year’s back, but now that Virgie was buried in the cemetery behind the Methodist Church across the road from Cebern’s, no one cut the rhubarb anymore, except me. I would go back to his house in June, and cut a grocery sack of the rhubarb. Then take it home, clean it, cut it into pieces and give it to my wife, who would use it to bake pies with; one for me and old Cebern. Just seeing his nearly toothless grin when I sat the warm pie in his lap warmed my heart as much as the pie probably warmed his belly.
Late in August I stopped at Byrd’s General Store for a bottle of Dew, while on my way to Writersville to pick up our mail and run a couple of errands. Tied to the light post in the middle of the store’s small parking lot stood Daisy, saddled, and bridled, her mane and tail trimmed.
I went inside expecting to see Cebern as I walked to the cooler. Walking down the aisles kept trying to spot Cebern, but he wasn’t there. When I returned to the counter with my soda I asked the clerk where he was.
She seemed surprised, “He bought two six packs of Bud and a couple cans of sardines and walked out, I thought he’d left.”
“His pony is tied outside to the lamp post,” I answered.
“Pony? I didn’t know he had a pony, I thought somebody just brought him up.”
I shrugged and walked out the door. This was the first time I ever saw that pony outside of its pen, less alone saddled and tied to a lamppost. As I walked to my truck the pony never raised its head.
I started to climb in my truck when I heard a muffled, “Hey Bo.”
I looked around and found Cebern sitting with his back against a big Live Oak tree in the back yard of the store. I walked between the store and the out building where they stored their feed and seed. When I got to Cebern, I noticed he’d drunk two of his Buds, one from each six-pack. I thought that seemed a little odd but refrained from commenting. He stood slowly, and I helped him pick up his empty beer cans and sardine cans, and then we walked back to the parking lot.
After he dropped his trash in the fifty-five-gallon trash barrel at the side of the store, I realized why Cebern drank one beer from each six-pack. He took the empty plastic ring from each six-pack and slipped them over the saddle horn one on each side.
After his six- packs were adjusted on his mount, he bent over, reaching down behind the concrete pillar of the lamppost and picked up one of the oldest cowboy hats I ever saw.
I stepped back as he untied the reins from the post, and when he tossed the reins over the pony’s head she stumble back. I leaned forward and took a firm hold of the chinstrap on the pony’s bridle; holding the pony still while the old fellow wobbled into the saddle, his foot slipped out of the stirrup and the saddle slipped to the left when he put his weight on it. Apparently he hadn’t been able to cinch the saddle very tight, but I thought they would be all right. After he settled in the saddle, I stepped back to take in the whole picture.
When I headed back near my truck, Cebern pulled a beer from the saddle horn and popped the top. I really regret that I didn’t have a camera that day.
Cerburn sitting proudly on his steed, wearing an old football kind of jersey white with green trim and a big number 72 on the front and back. To finish his riding ensemble he wore a pair of old jeans, along with a pair of black Converse All Star basketball shoes, all topped off with his beat up cowboy hat.
His legs hung well below the stirrups, in fact his feet didn’t lack much more than a foot from touching the ground. He reined the pony around and they started back towards the holler. After I saw that my modern day Don Quixote was safely headed home I continued to Writersville to finish my errands. I couldn’t help smiling and chuckling to myself the rest of the day every time the picture of Cebern would come to mind.
Little did I know that this was to be the last time I would see the gentle old hermit alive. Late that evening I was sitting in the porch swing sipping a glass of tea when I heard the wail of sirens down in the holler towards Cebern’s house, a lot of sirens. Our, road is very sparsely populated and the sound of sirens brings nearly everyone to the scene. I’m not any different; even though now I wish I had stayed on the porch.
Before I got to the small rise at the Methodist Church I could see what looked like thousands of red, white and blue strobe lights flashing off of the trees in front and all around me. I pulled into the parking lot only a few feet from the beginning of Cebern’s lane. When I got near the scene, a deputy stopped me from getting any closer.
I retreated to the church, walked up the steps to the front door and turned to get a better look. I starred where the spotlights were focused, and could see they were trained across the road on the other side of the creek that ran next to the road.
My heart sank as I saw that the winch of the Rescue truck was strapped around Daisy, a very bloody, very dead, Daisy. The winch tightened as it started to pull the pony off the muddy bank. Four firemen were trying their best to guide her through the trees and back up to the road. I starred in shock as Daisy was being winched up the bank. I heard a fireman holler for a stretcher. Hidden underneath the pony, imbedded in the mud and weeds was Cebern. It didn’t take long for me to realize he was every bit as dead as Daisy.
A few days later I was a pallbearer at Cebern’s funeral, nothing fancy, in fact, you could say it was close to a pauper’s funeral. The casket wasn’t much more than a heavy cardboard box covered with some kind of cheesy pressed felt. As I helped carry the casket to the gravesite I could feel the cardboard flex under the weight. Silently, I prayed that the handles wouldn’t pull loose from the casket, letting Cebern fall out and start rolling back down the hill through the cemetery towards the back door of the Methodist church.
I let out an audible sigh of relief as we eased Cebern safely down on the nylon straps that would lower him into the ground next to his beloved Virgie. The minister said the final benediction, and we made the slow walk back down the hill through the cemetery.
The turn out was small, since Cebern spent most of the time he lived in Writersville as a hermit. All of his kin were already gone, and the only people that attended were the folks that lived in our holler and knew him.
As always happens in little close-knit communities the rumors flew, as well as a few facts that someone got from one of the deputies. Cebern was the victim of a hit and run. The autopsy revealed that a huge full sized four-wheel drive truck hit Cebern and Daisy. When they examined Daisy, they could clearly see where a brush bar of a jacked up truck crushed her midsection, the bumper apparently hit Cebern.
The point of impact was only twenty feet from their lane. The police finally found that the last person to see the two of them alive was old Dudley Dunbar. The TBI detectives were back tracking Cebern’s path home the day that I’d seen him, in fact they came up to my house and I told them about seeing him and Daisy at the General Store, but I neglected to tell them about the six packs he’d wrapped around the saddle horn.
After they finished talking with me they backtracked a little further until they came to old Dudley’s house. What they got from Dud was, Cebern sat on his porch and they finished drinking the rest of his beer. Just before dark, Cebern went to climb up on Daisy, and the saddle slipped off to the side. Daisy took off around the back of Dud’s place, circled the house and headed down the road towards home. A couple of houses down, a kid that was working on his truck and he remembered seeing Cebern walking his pony by the reins down the road towards his house.
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