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DOBIE’S DISCIPLES AND THE CHOCTAW FIVE by Tim Tingle  Buck Wade died on Christmas Eve 2008, yesterday. So instead of enjoying a peaceful evening at home on Christmas night, I packed a suitcase and loaded my dog Duke and my best friend Doc onto a mini-van, drove a few hundred miles, and am now staying at a small motel in Hillsboro with a six o’clock wake-up call, on my way to my friend’s funeral in a small country graveyard a few miles south of McAlester, Oklahoma. Buck was the last of the Choctaw Five, my own designation for four men and one strong woman who altered my life in ways I am only now beginning to understand . I had been wrestling with how to narrow the focus of an article on the importance of the Texas Folklore Society in my life, and this seems about as good a place to start as any. Buck was a quiet man with a wry sense of humor, a Choctaw in his mid-seventies who never seemed to mind that his quips went unnoticed by many. He was tall by Choctaw standards, over six feet, with a growing paunch and thick eyeglasses. I met Buck seven years ago at the Choctaw Storytelling Festival in Eufala, Oklahoma, an event whose primary purpose is the recording of elders’ memories. In the first thirty minutes of our initial encounter, Buck told me of his grandfather, a preacher who made his living selling moonshine whiskey after church, a respectable means of livelihood during Depression days. But Buck’s granddad had other skills as well. According to Buck: I once saw him say a prayer, pick up an ax, and split a tornado in two. Saw him do it more than once. He’d hide himself in a thicket, call out a powerful prayer, and come out swinging his ax slow and thoughtful-like, looking for just the right tree. 43 44 What’s the Point? Why the Folk Come in the First Place When the funnel got close and he lined it up with the tree, he’d draw back and bury the blade of his ax deep in the tree trunk. Nobody, no matter how strong the tornado was, ever went running for cover, not when grand-dad was around, ’cause nobody wanted to miss seeing it half itself and flitter away like a dust bunny. Buck also told of once saving himself and two hunting buddies, “Just like I saw grand-dad do,” by praying and ax-splitting a tornado . His description of tornado-splitting, which I later found to be a not uncommon occurrence among Choctaw elders, inspired the pivotal scene in the short story “Brothers,” included in my first book, Walking the Choctaw Road. Buck also talked of Bigfoot creatures in the Kiamichi Mountains , the power of lightning-struck trees, and walking graveyard spirits. He was the best partner for graveyard prowling I ever met. Now that I think of it, Buck and I probably have our best graveyard prowling days ahead of us. I have seen ghosts in old Choctaw cemeteries before—one little girl in particular in the old cemetery at the Choctaw capitol grounds near Tushkahoma, whom half a dozen fellow Choctaws accompanying me actually thought was a small girl ’til we later compared notes of her doings—but I have never seen the ghost of someone I knew. (Okay, other than my father, when the floodwaters were creeping up on our home on Canyon Lake, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. And my stepfather Larry, dead by gunshot years before his time. And my brother Danny, drowned when his kayak flipped over a few miles from his home in Clear Creek. Which leads me back to the scope of this article.) Without the friendship of a man I was never privileged to meet, I would never have considered researching lore—ghostly, Choctaw, or otherwise. I would never have written a single book, never have reshaped vacations around sites of folkloric and historic interest. In fact, I more than likely would have dismissed the aforementioned happenings as the result of too little sleep or too much Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock as a child. I would still be making and marketing New Canaan Farms jellies and jams from our little factory in Dripping Springs, Texas, the best I could do with an English literature major and a history minor from the University...

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