Things got hot now and then in quiet old Hill Country hamlet
PEORIA — This little Hill County hamlet between Whitney and Hillsboro, named for a settler’s Illinois hometown, had high hopes for itself in the beginning. But when the railroad passed it by in 1890, the town went into decline — and hasn’t recovered yet. About all that’s left is a historic community center and cemetery and a scattering of small houses and mobile homes.
My people on my dad’s side were Peorians, so on those rare occasions when I pass through town, I’m usually thinking family thoughts. This time of year in particular I think of a Thanksgiving long ago when we spurned the usual turkey and dressing at home and instead had broiled steaks and baked potatoes prepared in the woods of our granddad’s Peoria farm.
In my mind’s eye, I see three little boys scuffing through fallen leaves in a post-oak thicket, their dad following behind among trees where, when he was their age, he cut firewood on winter mornings. An exuberant rat terrier scampers ahead, sniffing out rabbits and squirrels.
That’s one Peoria memory. Driving through town a few days ago, I thought of another, a vicarious memory of a great-uncle I never met who was the subject of family lore long after his death.
Joe Cochran, my grandmother’s brother, grew up around Peoria. Papa (my grandfather) told me he was a hellraiser, but everybody liked him anyway. Just a big, gangly boy, he was constantly fighting, gambling, drinking. On Sundays, he umpired baseball games. “People weren’t disposed to argue with him,” Papa said.
At one point he was in so much trouble he fled Hill County until the heat died down. Rumors filtered back that he’d gotten himself killed out west. Months later, a friend of his named Ev Hart was riding his horse along a country road when he saw a rider top a rise some distance off. Hart noticed that the horse had a distinctive gait, almost a limp, just like his friend’s.
“Wonder who ended up with Joe’s horse?” Hart asked himself.
As he got closer, he saw that the man on the horse was Joe himself.
“You don’t know how happy I am to see you,” he told Joe. “I’d heard you were dead.”
“I’d heard that too,” Joe said, laughing. “Soon as I heard it, I knew it was a damn lie.”
These days, along the highway where a few businesses used to be, is a ramshackle building that was a combination garage, gas station, blacksmith shop and grocery store run by the Atchesons, Joe and Jewel. Joe died long before Jewel — everybody called her Peewee — and for years she ran the business herself. The last time I saw the widow Peewee, she was climbing onto the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Wearing jeans, boots and a leather jacket, she would have been about 80 at the time.
‘A handsome couple’
Peewee had grown up across the road from the Cochrans. She told me years ago that when Joe Cochran finally left Hill County for good, he had 18 bills against him. Most were misdemeanors, but the last one was more serious. By then Joe was married to Ann Webb.
“Oh, they made a handsome couple,” Peewee said, recalling that Ann was a small woman with jet-black hair and beautiful skin.
“She could talk the horns off a billy goat,” she said. “Such beautiful clothes they both wore, and Joe always drove the finest horses.”
Joe loved Ann and she loved him, Peewee said, but they couldn’t get along. “Ann Webb was the same kind of bird Joe Cochran was,” she said, “and that’s how come ’em to flock together. Ann was a bugaroo!”
Pete Campbell wanted her. I had never heard of Pete Campbell, but as Peewee described him, I could see a big man with a handlebar mustache wearing a black derby hat and driving a handsome bay horse hitched to a fine trap buggy. She remembered the lap robe he carried in that buggy — black, she said, with a gold tiger stitched into it. The tiger had a glass eye.
“Pete Campbell would kill you,” Peewee said. “Course you know he ended up in the penitentiary for killing a man.”
What happened, as my dad and uncles told the story, is that Joe and Pete ran into each other on the square in Hillsboro one morning, and Pete pulled a gun. Ann had left Joe by then.
“You stay away from her or I’ll kill you,” Pete said. Joe said he wouldn’t stay away, that she was still his wife. Pete pulled a .38 from under his coat and shot him, right there on the street. Joe slumped and grabbed hold of a telegraph pole to keep from falling to the ground. The bullet had ripped into his shoulder, but he was not seriously hurt. Using his good arm to grab the saddle horn, he climbed on his horse and rode to Charlie and Dell’s place.
Mary Della, my grandmother, called Doc Treat and then urged her brother to ride back to town and turn himself in. Joe told her he would and was almost to Peoria when he met the deputy sheriff. They got off their horses, and the deputy told Joe he was coming to arrest him. (Why Joe and not Pete, I don’t know; maybe the deputy intended to arrest both.)
“I was coming in anyway,” Joe said. “Why don’t we ride in together?” The deputy said that was fine and reached in his saddle bag for a pair of handcuffs.
“You don’t need those,” Joe told him, but when the lawman insisted, Joe hammered him to the ground with his one good arm. He climbed on his horse and galloped westward, never to return to Hill County.
Joe Cochran ended up making a life for himself in San Angelo in the early decades of the 20th century. A respected family man with a wife and two daughters, he was the concessions manager at the downtown Elks Club. He also was a big-time bootlegger, card shark and business partner with a local madam, but that’s a tale for another time.
‘The twisted apples’
I have a lifetime of stories about aunts, uncles and other relatives, but it’s the scoundrel, Big Joe Cochran, who intrigues me. It’s the same with that long-ago Thanksgiving in the Peoria woods.
After our morning hike, we got back to our campsite famished, the smell of broiling steaks a mesmerizing lure as we walked out of the woods. We found Mom kneeling by the grill. Crying. We begged her to tell us what was wrong.
Drying her eyes, she explained that it was a bit windy in the clearing when she was trying to get the coals to catch, so she parked the car near the grill and opened the front door to shield the flame. Turning the steaks, she laid the red-hot tongs, without thinking, on the front seat and — whoosh! — the seat covers went up in flames. (Cars had seat covers in those days.) I’m sure she thought the car itself was going to explode.
As it turned out, the front seat was singed, but it didn’t burn. Mom was fine. And the steaks were great!
Memories of Norman Rockwell turkey-and-dressing Thanksgivings meld into one another over the years. It’s the scoundrel Thanksgiving we’d recall and retell. We’d glance across the turkey-laden table at Mom and laugh, and so would she.
In the classic “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson wrote of gnarled, twisted apples, the less-than-perfect apples that pickers left on the trees. “Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples,” he wrote.
Actually, I think we all know the sweetness of the twisted, the less-thanperfect. I know I do. Particularly when I drive through Peoria.