ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612030122
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Don McCaig
I don't believe more than a hundred people live in the countryside around Williamsville, and there are fewer than a dozen in town. In a community where everybody knows everybody, it is easy to see that John Donne had it right: No man is an island. Every man's death diminishes the rest of us.
We buried Uncle Pee Wee Wednesday. Preachers and the tax man knew him as Andrew Stephenson, and that's the name he was given 97 years ago. He was "Uncle Pee Wee" to everyone for miles around, many unrelated to him. There is no way anyone can aspire to unclehood or campaign for the honor. Though old age is part of it, most old people don't ever become a community's uncle or aunt. Wisdom is one requirement. A generous spirit is another. An uncle or aunt is someone grown men or women wish they could become.
I first met the man 25 years ago when I was 30 and he was 72. Pee Wee had made the hay stored in my barn and drove down every other day to take a load on his pickup. The bales weighed 50 pounds, and they were awkward and the twine cut my fingers. Uncle Pee Wee was half my size and twice my age, and he bucked two bales to my one. When we finished he asked me how much he owed me for my help.
The men Pee Wee Stephenson learned from and admired as a boy were veterans of the War Between the States. They taught him the world they knew and some of the world their fathers had known.
The influenza epidemic of 1918 hurt this community. Entire families died within a week. Pee Wee and his brother Bob took up smoking the new tailormade cigarettes and believed the smoke kept off the germs and saved their lives.
When the first car he ever rode in got up to five miles an hour, Uncle Pee Wee said he felt like he was flying. He tried flying too, once - one of those barnstormers who took people up for a dollar. Pee Wee didn't care for it.
Uncle Pee Wee was a brilliant horseman and rode in jousting tourneys where the horseman gallops breakneck to pierce a small brass ring on the tip of his lance. Uncle Pee Wee won his last tourney at the age of 76. He was the Knight of Williamsville.
Excepting Sundays, Uncle Pee Wee worked with his hands every day of his life, and though he never got rich, he reared two children, took care of his family, was an elder in the Williamsville church and owned his own land. He was a horse logger and farmer. He always kept hogs, chicken, horse, cows and sheep.
Three years ago, in wintertime, 94 years old, he waded the Bullpasture River hip-deep to check on a newborn calf. The calf was all right, but on his return trip, Pee Wee stepped into a hole and was swept downstream 300 yards until he could crawl out. It took him two hours to get back upstream to where he'd left his pickup. For three days he never came out of doors and we all held our breath. But on the fourth day, Uncle Pee Wee came out to look after his animals.
Two years ago, when his wife, Pat, got sick, Uncle Pee Wee cared for her, back and forth to the hospital, and was heartbroken when she died. We feared the blow might be too much for him and perhaps it was.
Every community is a gathering place moving through time and when Uncle Pee Wee died, we lost what he knew but we never thought to ask him about. His humor leavened us. We lost that too. With the death of our last 19th Century man, Williamsville has moved entirely into the shiny new 20th Century and the ex-Confederates Pee Wee knew so well have slipped farther back into the darkness.
At the end of his life he did not spend many weeks in the hospital and nursing home but they were more weeks than he wished to spend there. Uncle Pee Wee wanted to come home. Now he is home.
Don McCaig, a sheep rancher from Highland County, raises champion border collies. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and is the author of several best-selling books about sheep dogs including "Nop's Hope" and "Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men."
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. Author Don McCaig (above) wrote theby CNBfollowing elegy of his friend Pee Wee Stephenson. It aired on
National Public Radio in October. color.