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Chapter 21 The Ranch House and Mr. Norcross that the only way to deal with C. K. Norcross was on his own terms. His workmanship and integrity were so respected that most people needing a job done would wait until he was ready—wait for his crankiness to subside. Sometimes a pint bottle prolonged negotiations until gentleness set in again, and then, people said, that there was not a man around who could do a better job for you. My father held the secret of good rapport with Mr. Norcross. He sometimes loaned Norcross money to tide him over when carpentry work was scarce or he needed to hire a helper to work on a job. Sometimes my father made the loan out of his own pocket, if the circumstances were not right for an institutional loan. When the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company abandoned its mine in Old Gulf, near Matagorda, about , it put up for public sale a number of good wood frame company houses no longer needed for employees. My father bought one and had Norcross move it up the Matagorda highway to Bay City to fit it out as rental property that would provide some extra income for my father’s widowed sister, Emma Carleton. “Now, how much do I owe you, Mr. Norcross? You don’t want to delay any longer giving me your bill; it’s been too long now, and I want to pay you.” That question was the start of one of his favorite Norcross stories because the reply was so characteristic of the man. “All he ever said,” my father laughed, “was ‘Oh, just skip it, skip it!’” And that was the end of that. They both knew that skipping it was a way of repaying a personal loan, but Norcross was not going to lose dignity by going into details. People thought of him as a crotchety old bachelor, but he had once been married and had a daughter named Juanita, whom I came to know many years later when we both worked in a Houston bank. But something the ranch house and mr. norcross 137 must have gone wrong; he had obviously determined on being single and seemed to take pride in being grouchy or in making himself appear that way. Underlying the crust was vulnerability and good will. He was never sharp with us children even when we surely were in the way, watching him work. His softer side he hid with a scowl, a tightly clenched pipe, a wry sense of humor, and a craftsman’s attention to the business at hand. He had thick gray hair and never wore a hat or a cap even in bad weather. The story of his aversion to hats came to me from Miss Tenie. As a boy he had been required to dress nicely and to wear a cap he detested. One day he agreed to wear the cap at his mother’s insistence as he set out for school, but once out of her sight, he threw it into the pig pen, where the pigs helped create an unsalvageable mess of it. His daughter Juanita, by contrast, prided herself in budgeting to buy an occasional designer suit and Christian Dior hosiery. She and her father were not estranged; they simply had no needs the other could fulfill. Norcross set to work to reclaim the  Hawkins Ranch House. He put on his blue bib overalls with a loop at the hip for his hammer and a pocket for his fold-up carpenter’s rule. Several pockets at the chest housed a flat wooden pencil for marking lumber, his gold pocket watch and chain, and a tin of Prince Albert pipe tobacco. He hired two helpers and simply moved down to the Ranch House yard, camping there most of the time for more than a year while he worked on the house. As he required lumber and materials, he drove to town in his Model T Ford. Sometimes he made the trip back from town with two long flexible planks bent over the top of his vehicle, the ends tied to the front and back metal bumpers. When he needed large pieces, he hired a bigger truck. One huge piece of lumber that he used to reinforce the interior structure of the house was a secondhand piece, a very long sturdy board originally used, judging from the way it was cut, in a two-story staircase. Some of the original...

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