CHAPTER III

 

SOMETIME BACK I REMEMBER

 

CAP IN THE MOLASSES

 

Immersion baptism for Mormon children is often celebrated with as much family tradition and involvement as is bar mitzvah for the young Jew. In early days it was the custom to baptize the young covenanter on the exact day of the eighth anniversary of his birth. Clem turned eight years old on the sixteenth of January but his baptism was postponed until the summer of the following year. Everything was frozen over on his birthday, and no amount of chopping could provide a hole in the ice big enough for a man and a boy to get in at the creek dam. But when the ordinance was finally performed, he received a new cap and a stick of molasses candy for a present.

 

            It was his natural disposition to be friendly with most everyone, but he had already learned to his disappointment that all other people of his small world were not so constituted. His mother's observation that, "Some­times you don't have to make enemies, they're just there," didn't console h: very much. His first enemy was a young bully whose impudence left its mark upon Clem for the rest of his life.

 

            Across the road from the house a small molasses mill with rollers made of maple had been set up in the stack lot to run by horse power. Sugar cane stalks were fed into the rollers to crush out the sap. On the day of Clem's baptism they were pressing syrup from the cane to make molasses. He remembered that, "There was a boy about eleven years old from a neighboring fam1ly. He was a bad one, a real scoundrel, and had been ornery with me for sometime. When he saw me with my new cap he was jealous. First thing I knew he grab it from my head and threw it in the molasses press. Of course, it was pretty well ruined. We got it out and Mother washed it but it never fitright again. He got a thrashing for what he did and that made him even more out of sorts with me.