I Know a Story: The Straw Ox

 

I Know a Story (1958 Edition, Row, Peterson and Company) was one of my first readers back in 1969 when I was in First Grade.  It contains seven traditional fairy tales, retold by Miriam Blanton Huber, Frank Seely Salisbury, and Mabel O’Donnell, and illustrated by Florence and Margaret Hoopes. I was able (only fairly recently) to track it down and identify it, ordered it, and now I’ve read it again for the first time in 52 years.

I was most interested in the story “The Straw Ox”, a retelling of an old Ukrainian fairy tale. It was indeed by this story I was able to track the book down at last; it is not very widely disseminated. In it a poor old couple cannot afford any livestock, but at the old woman’s direction the old man (who is a pitch-burner) builds a Straw Ox and covers it with tar. They set the Ox out in the field to ‘graze’; passing animals (a bear, a wolf, a fox, and a hare – in this Reader’s retelling the hare is replaced with a dog) ask to take some of the Ox’s tar for various reasons. He agrees and they end up stuck to him (a la the Tar Baby). The old man throws the animals into the barn and only releases them when they promise to bring him livestock in return. The old couple get so rich from the proceeds that they need nothing more, and in the original ending (not used in the Reader) the Straw Ox, no longer being necessary, “stood in the sun until it fell to pieces.”

What interested me about the story (besides its rarity – it was no ‘Red Riding Hood’ or ‘Goldilocks’) was of course the Straw Ox itself. At six years old I already had an attachment to “The Wizard of Oz” and “Pinocchio”, with their stories of inanimate simulacra coming to life. The Ox seemed to me to be in this tradition and worthy to be added to the list. I clung compulsively onto its memory for half a century.

What strikes me now at this distance in time are things I never thought of at six. Was the old woman who came up with the idea of the Straw Ox merely wanting a sort of substitute or ersatz symbol of prosperity, or did she really have a plan to trap the animals? Where did the wild animals get the cow, sheep, and barnyard fowl to pay their ransom? They must have taken them from somewhere, and the old couple were receivers of stolen goods! The Straw Ox disappears halfway through the story, his task accomplished, and is given no follow-up. Perhaps the writers thought it was just too depressing to conclude “it fell to pieces.”

The other stories are 'The Gingerbread boy' 'The Three Bears', Billy Goats Gruff', 'Mr. Vinegar', 'Little Red Riding Hood', and 'The Boy Who Went to the North Wind'. The book itself is in very good condition for a school reader of its age. Besides the usual school property stamps there is only the name ‘Jamie’ (in a bold, sure, cursive hand) on the inside cover and the inside front page. Inscribed by a grown-up to a child named Jamie, I’m guessing. What was surely a memory for him has become my memory now. And so the Continuum … er … continues.