Bessie's greatness surfaced during flood

By Rose Hooper

She was brushed and scrubbed, pampered and loved better than Buddy and Socks, the presidential pets. Fat chance that Bessie's rear would ever end up on somebody's dinner plate.

In fact, in the Hamilton household, she became known as "Bessie, the Sacred Cow."

My grandfather was of Scotch-Irish descent while my grandmother's heritage was Cherokee, so the sacred cow had nothing to do with the Hindu religion. Instead, it was all because of the flood of 1940.

Before the flood, Bessie was just an ordinary brown and white jersey cow that my grandfather pastured near the Zacharys' farm in the daytime. At night, Bessie stayed in a barn my grandfather and his friend Ralph Queen built on Blackwood Lumber Co. property in what was called "the bottom." Now it's the site of East LaPorte River Access Park.

My grandmother told me tales of how it rained and rained that fateful Friday (Aug. 30). All the Blackwood families who lived in company houses got worried as the waters rose, especially those in "the bottom." When Queen's house washed away, he rushed his family into the barn. Then the waters swept into the barn.

Sometime after midnight (Aug. 31), my grandmother remembered Carter Wike knocking on their door to tell my grandfather he better go get Bessie. So my grandfather grabbed a lantern and headed down the road in the pouring rain. The lightning was so intense that it periodically flashed across the night skies in a surrealistic strobe-light effect.

Alfred Hitchcock couldn't have done better on any movie set.

By the time he got to the barn, my grandfather was waist-deep in water. Suddenly, flood waters burst from Caney Fork to join the raging Tuckaseigee River. Emmit Bryson's company house lodged against the bridge, sending a surge of roaring water right towards my grandfather.

At the same moment my grandfather slipped his rope around Bessie's neck, the torrential waters sucked him under. On higher ground, through the strobe lightning, my grandmother and Carter watched helplessly in horror.

"Swim, Hagan, swim," Carter yelled, his voice drowned by the pounding rain. But my grandmother knew her husband's deep, dark secret - one he never even told the children. He could not swim a lick. But then, she couldn't either.

"We've got to save him," she screamed in terror. "What's that?" she said as she wiped her black rain-soaked hair from her eyes. Were her eyes playing tricks on her? Was that Hagan's head she saw bobbing from the water? And what was that in front of him? Why, it was Bessie!

Bessie, pulling my grandfather behind her, was swimming home. She knew the route well to the Zachary pasture on higher ground, and that's where she was going, come hell or high water. Her sturdy legs paddled furiously through the rushing current. Spewing water from his mouth, my grandfather hung on for dear life.

As the waterlogged pair approached her, my grandmother rushed from the porch to greet them. She hugged and kissed my weary, but safe, grandfather and then kissed the cow, saying, "Bessie, you sweet thing, I never even knew you could swim!"

Ever since the night of the great flood, when she saved my grandfather's life, Bessie was the family's sacred cow.

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