Generations and Other True Stories (2 page)

I didn't know why we had come to Fort Davis, or why he hadn't come with us. If I asked, they didn't tell me. And I didn't know why my father had come now or why he was going away again. I didn't know why we were sitting on the Chevrolet in the dark, he on the left fender, I on the right, or why the other kids didn't come out of the cabins and climb on the car with us. I didn't know someone was making sure we were alone.

Nights were cool in those mountains, even in August. A breeze drifted through the apple orchard that separated the tourist court from the road, and through the huge cottonwood in front of the cabins. It was nothing like the sultry summer nights on the farm, with not a breath of wind stirring in the live oaks. It was a strange place to me, high in those rugged mountains—the first mountains I had ever seen—in that strange town with so many strange brown people speaking a language I didn't understand, where the white boys wore jeans and cowboy boots and hats to school and stared at my farmer's overalls and bare feet. It would have been worse if my grandmother hadn't been my teacher, I guess, and if Clay, the son of a rancher whose big stone house was just over the orchard fence from the tourist court, hadn't been my friend.

If there was a moon, it was hidden by the trees, and I couldn't see my father's face. I asked him, “Are you going to move here too?”

He was a long time answering. “Yes. Maybe.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Someday.”

“Will you live with us then?”

“I think so.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Don't worry.”

I don't think that's what he was supposed to say. They wouldn't have kept us alone if he was meant to tell me that. I think he was supposed to tell me I would never see him again.

It was at school, months—maybe a year—later, that I first heard the word “divorce.” I was lying belly down on the merry-go-round, dragging my hands in the dirt, when some kid mentioned to another kid that my mother and father had got one. The other kid asked me if that was true and I said yes, although I didn't know what the word meant. And they seemed impressed, as we had been in Carlton when the father of a schoolmate of mine was killed in the war. Well, I guess I did know what it meant, for I never asked. It meant that my father wasn't coming to live with us, which I had begun to suspect anyway, since so long a time had passed and he hadn't come. I had stopped expecting him.

Maybe that was how kids learned about divorce in those days. It was something that didn't happen often. I knew no other kids in Carlton or Fort Davis whose parents had got one. So far as I knew, mine were the first and, until I was much older, the last. And in that time and place it was a dark thing that nobody talked about. Whenever I was reminded by the earth or the weather of my father and asked my mother or grandmother where he was or the reasons for the divorce, their replies were soft and evasive, designed to tell me not to ask. Only once do I remember my mother's mentioning him, and that was two years later, when she discovered I had stolen a pocketknife from a store. She whipped me with my belt, and while I lay on my bed crying, she cried too. Her thin face, tight with fatigue and worry, was wet with her tears, and her teeth, clenched to hold back her anger and grief, ground against each other. She said, “Do such a thing again and I'll send you to your father!”

I can't describe the terror those words inspired in me. The thought of living away from my mother and grandmother and brothers and sisters, having them disappear from my life as my father had, was frightening in itself. But now the man about whom I had ceased to ask, whose features had dimmed in my mind, whom I recalled only as a tall, dark figure trudging across furrowed fields and as a shadow on the fender of the Chevrolet, entered my dreams.

“Will you live with us?” I dreamed myself saying.

“Yes,” the shadow replied.

“When?”

“Don't worry.”

What had once been a wish was a nightmare, powerful enough to end my experiments in crime. And when months of being good finally cleansed my soul, I no longer had the dream.

My brothers and sisters and I grew up without seeing him again, and I remember only one other mention of him during all that time. I was fourteen or fifteen, and Dick and I had climbed Sleeping Lion Mountain and were resting in the shade of an oak at the top, looking down at the town. Out of the blue, Dick said, “I wonder if any of us look like our daddy.”

His words startled me. “I don't know,” I said.

When I told Isabel all this, I was almost a year past my own divorce but still deep in its pain, still appalled that I had walked in my father's footsteps. My older boy, Ted, was eight when it happened, the age I had been in 1945. Patrick was five, as Dick had been then. But the world was used to divorce now. It had happened to friends of my children's; I didn't have to explain what it was. I had to explain why it was happening to them, though, and I tried to be honest. No, I wouldn't be moving to St. Louis with them. I probably would never live with them again, and they shouldn't hope that I would someday. But I would see them at Christmas and in the summers and would always love them. No matter what happened, I would always be their dad.

“I want to go there,” Isabel said.

“Where?”

“To Carlton, where it happened. Where you knew your father.”

Someday Isabel and I would marry, we had decided. She wanted to know things. “Who do you look like?” she asked.

“My mother,” I said.

It was a Sunday, and the day before my fortieth birthday. The late-morning sun glinted off the glass towers of Dallas as we hunted two-lane U.S. 67 in the maze of interstates and freeways. It was the church hour and the highway was almost empty. So was the countryside. The Volkswagen churned past white frame farmhouses surrounded by pickups and station wagons, signs that children and grandchildren had gathered at old family homesteads for Sunday dinner. But they were eating or already watching TV, and no children were out. Not even dogs. The gently rolling fields were pale August green, steaming under the huge, empty, brilliant sky.

“Is this prairie?” Isabel asked. Her Manhattan eyes, not used to horizons, were full of awe.

“Yes.”

“It looks like Russia. Something out of Chekhov.”

Two hours into the countryside, I expected the scenery to become familiar. I hadn't seen it in more than thirty years, but remembered unpainted houses, ancient cars and farm machinery sitting under trees, hounds lying under porches, cotton fields as brilliant as snow, awaiting pickers trailing long canvas sacks behind them as they moved along the rows on their knees. None of it was there. Where the cotton had been, exotic European cattle grazed on Bermuda grass. The fences that had separated the fields, even those that had divided the farms, were gone. The houses were gone, the sites of some of them still marked by a stand of trees in what had been the front yard or a stone chimney or a cluster of rusting metal. The dogs and people were gone. Everything was gone except the cattle, which hadn't been there before.

“It's all changed,” I said.

“Are you sure we're on the right road?”

“I think so.”

I found Hico and, farther on, the store at the Olin crossroads. The white frame store that my parents had kept for a short time when I was a baby had been replaced by a squat cinder-block building painted white. It was still a store, but the four or five houses that had stood around it and had been Olin were gone. There was a sign pointing toward Carlton at the crossroads, and the road had been paved. The farms between Olin and Carlton were gone, and much of Carlton was, too. At least it was smaller than I remembered it. But its landmark, the stone bank that had closed during the Depression and later burned, remained, its vault door still hanging rustily, Johnson grass still growing in the cracks of its concrete floor. I remembered some of the houses and even the names of some of the people who had lived in them. One of the grocery stores remained, and the other, across the street, had been converted to hardware. The blacksmith's shop was gone. The variety store was in ruins, like the bank. The Texaco station was still there. Everything still there was closed. No life was in sight. I stopped the car in front of a redbrick building with the word “Cafe” painted crudely on its window.

“This used to be the drugstore,” I said. “I got a nickel every Saturday when we came in from the farm, and I would buy an ice-cream cone here. My grandfather died here. He was the deputy sheriff, and he interrupted three burglars here in 1932, just before Christmas. They shot him with his own gun and dumped his body into a ditch. It was snowing. The posse didn't find him for two days. They kept driving past him but saw only his coat, and they thought he was an old car fender. They caught the burglars, though, two Indians and a white man from Oklahoma, looking for drugs. None of them would say who pulled the trigger, so they all got life. That was five years before I was born, when my mother was sixteen. My grandmother gave me my grandfather's pocketknife when I was a kid. I still have it.”

Isabel gazed at the building for some time. “Imagine,” she said.

“The Depression was rough around here. There were a lot of outlaws. He had no business being a deputy. He was only a farmer, and he took the job as a favor to the sheriff in Hamilton, who was his friend.”

“Why don't we get out of the car?” she asked.

“No. That's all there is to it, and it's all different now anyway.”

We drove past the Baptist and Methodist churches and the Church of Christ, out the road that memory told me led to the farm. As we were about to pass the old cemetery I pulled over and stopped. “Let's see if we can find his grave,” I said.

His family plot was near the road. His stone, standing among those of grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters, was larger than the others, etched only with his name and his birth and death dates.

We found the other too, my father's father, who had owned the farm. “He was a horseman and a hunter,” I said, “but he had diabetes and the doctors took one of his legs. When they wanted to take the other one too, he couldn't stand the thought. He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Before I was born.”

The Johnson grass stood as high as the posts along the fences that lined the road, and the great yellow sunflowers stood even taller, drooping from their stalks, nodding. I had forgotten that so many lanes intersected the road, that so many houses stood at the ends of the lanes. Probably fewer than then, but still too many for my memory to cope with. Most of the houses were too new; and others had been abandoned years ago and were rotten beyond recognition. I studied the natural landmarks, the low bluffs, creeks, stands of trees. They all seemed familiar, like photographs of old relatives whose names have been forgotten.

Isabel sensed my uncertainty. “Do you know where you're going?” she asked.

“It feels right,” I said, “but I can't be sure. It could be any of these.”

I turned into a lane that led to a house old enough to contain someone who might remember. When I stopped outside the fence, two black-and-tan hounds crawled from under the porch and stretched in the sun, just as they used to. A woman's voice spoke cautiously in the dark interior behind the screen door. A man opened the door and stepped onto the porch. He wore a billed farmer's cap and a stubble of black beard. His dark eyes studied my own beard, my long hair, my red VW.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I need directions. I'm looking for a place where I used to live when I was a kid.” I told him my name and my father's name and tried to describe the farm to him.

The farm, he said, was still called by my grandfather's name, the Gate Woolley farm. It was sold right after the war, he said, to a fellow named Henson. “I knowed your father once,” he said. “Lived over at Stephenville then. Had two sons, I remember. I guess one of them was you.”

“No, they would have been by a later marriage.”

“Oh. Well, your dad lives over at Meridian now, don't he?” The hounds stood by his legs, wagging their tails.

“I don't know,” I said. “I haven't seen him in a long time.”

He gestured, directing me past the farms of people I didn't know, telling me to turn left here, left again there, and to go south about a mile. “Turn right,” he said, “and in another mile or two you'll see the water tank standing back from the road. You can't miss it.”

I thanked him and returned to the car. The man went into the house and the dogs crawled under the porch again.

“They'll talk about us the rest of the day,” I said.

“Does he know where it is?” Isabel asked.

“Yeah,
he
does, but I still don't.”

We wandered, trying to guess which farm was which, which water tank was the one we couldn't miss. “It's hopeless,” I said. “Let's go back. You have an idea what it was like, anyway.”

“Ask him,” she said, pointing at a pickup coming down the road toward us. “If he doesn't know, we'll go back.”

I stuck my arm out the window and waved. The pickup pulled alongside and stopped. The man was big and old, smiling. I asked him if he knew where the Gate Woolley farm was.

His smile widened. “I ought to,” he said. “I've lived on it since '45.”

“Mind if we go look at it?” I asked. “I lived there when I was a child.”

“Sure don't,” he said. “Just follow me.” He backed the pickup, turned it around in the road and headed in the direction from which he had come.

I would never have found the place. The old house was gone, replaced by a larger, more solid one. The big frame barn was gone, blown down, Mr. Henson said, and replaced by a smaller sheet-metal one. The windmill and tank tower were gone, replaced by an electric pump. Was its small tank the one I was supposed to see from the road? But the fig tree that had grown beside the windmill was there, and the pomegranate bush by the fence, both still yielding, Mrs. Henson said as she poured us ice water in the kitchen.