Spoken from the Heart (4 page)

Once the soil was gone and the ground was thoroughly razed, the wind would blow clouds of sand and dust. We thought Midland had to be the worst place for sand in all of Texas because it sat at the bottom of this wind range. The land to the north, running up to Lubbock, had been turned into miles and miles of dry-land cotton farming. But for seven years, even what was called the "dry land" got no rain. In the 1950s, Texas suffered its worst drought in history, worse than the Dust Bowl. Not even a trace of rain fell in Lubbock for the entire twelve months of 1952. All those years, acres of rough, reddish sand would blow straight down into Midland, riding in thick swirls on the wind.

People latched their windows tight, not to keep out the heat or the desert cold in the winter, but to hold back the billowing sand. The sand covered our clothes drying on the line; sometimes they were hardly clean by the time Mother brought them in. My mother spent her days with a broom and a wet rag, wiping up the reddish grit that snuck in under the sills or attached itself to your feet or clothes and lodged deep in your hair or skin whenever the wind blew. And it seemed as if the wind was constantly blowing. There were sandstorms too, where the sand raced in so thick you couldn't see down the block or over to the next car. I remember the sand stinging my legs like a layer of acrid skin and its gritty taste in my mouth, peppering my teeth and tongue. When it blew, you scrunched up your eyes and stayed indoors. Only giant tumbleweeds roamed the streets with the wind. They traveled on the gusts until they butted up against something hard that the wind couldn't topple over. We'd find tumbleweeds wedged under cars or landing smack against front doors; one of the most popular pictures of Midland from the early 1950s is of a woman standing in front of a nice ranch house blocked up to the roof with tumbleweeds.

At Christmas, people gathered up the tumbleweeds, tied them together in threes, and sprayed them with white flocking to make desert snowmen for their lawns. Some even added jaunty hats or scarves, their versions of Frosty of the Wild West.

In West Texas, the wind and the sand were things you lived with. If you were born there, you never knew anything else. But if you moved there, it must have seemed sometimes to be a land forsaken. Cowboys who came out to work the Midland range in the late 1800s recalled that many days in the winter they did not hear a sound except for their own footsteps and the moan of the wind. I remember finding a Texas book from the 1920s called
The Wind
by a writer named Dorothy Scarborough. In it, a woman who has moved to West Texas ranchland eventually goes mad from listening to the wind's constant howl and drone.

But it wasn't just the wind. There was an underlying sense of hardship, a sense that the land could quickly turn unforgiving. One of the earliest stagecoach riders, in the 1850s, recalled passing through the grasslands and seeing a vast expanse of the remains of animals and men. "For miles and miles," he wrote, "these bones strew the plain." They were the bones of would-be prospectors who had attempted to cut through Texas to reach the burgeoning California goldfields. Later, in the 1870s, when the Indians battled the buffalo hunters, who had come to shoot the herds for money and sport, they would not simply kill them. The far crueler punishment was to take all the hunters' supplies and leave them to wander the plains, until they collapsed and died of thirst or starvation.

The first family to live in what would become Midland resided in a dugout: they dug a hole in the ground big enough for a room and strung a tent across for a roof. They burned mesquite roots for heat. Their daughter had no dolls; she tied strings to sticks to build a corral, collected rocks to serve as sheep, and played at ranching. One of Midland's oldest ranching families, the Cowdens, had a cow fall through the roof into their dugout room and land on a bed. They had to dig up their home to get the cow out.

By the time I was born in Midland, in the mid-1940s, not all of the local ranchers lived on their ranchlands. Many whose properties encircled the town like a giant, grassy ring, starting at the very edge where the streets dead-ended into dust, had already moved their families into houses inside Midland, mostly for the schools. Each morning, the dads would hop in their cars and head out to their ranches just like other fathers heading into the office. Only the cowboys stayed out on the range full-time to work the cattle and keep up the land. But Midland itself was barely two generations removed from the raw, hard days of the frontier. My grandmother Welch had been eleven when Midland (it was called Midway back then, because it stood exactly midway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the railroad line) got its first official building, an old railroad mail car that was shunted onto a siding to make a post office. Our own street, Estes Avenue, was named for a cattleman who had boldly driven his herd out onto the drought-scorched plains in 1886.

And living in town did not silence the wind.

It helped to be fearless if you lived in Midland. It wasn't so much an insular world as an isolated one. Aside from neighboring Odessa, any town of consequence was at least a two-hour drive away. The city fathers like to call Midland "the Capital City of the Great Permian Basin Empire," and they put out a huge write-up on the town, detailing everything down to the neon lights at Agnes's Drive-In. Still, whatever human empire there was, was sparse. What Midland had by the early 1950s were oil storage tanks and junctions of vast pipelines that carried petroleum and natural gas miles away to more populous areas. Sometimes there would be fires at the storage tanks, explosions followed by big, rushing plumes of flame that turned the sky a smoky red. The incinerating heat would pour into the already scorched air and sky.

Midland called itself a city although it remained very much a small town. There was still a blacksmith shop right at the edge of Main Street, its weathered wood siding emblazoned with the cattle brands of all the local ranches. Whenever the smithy designed a new brand, its mark was burned into a fresh section of dry wood.

Midland was so small that Mother and Daddy allowed Bully, our rather daring dog, who had come with the house on North Loraine, to trot down the sidewalks alone every afternoon. At three o'clock, Bully would walk to Daddy's office, and one of the men who worked for Daddy would buy Bully an ice cream cone, which he would hold as Bully proceeded to lick with his bright pink tongue until all the ice cream was gone. Bully also had a habit of following my mother to Anthony's on Main Street. Bully would set off behind her, and she would ignore him. Once they reached the store, Mother would walk inside while Bully sat by the front door waiting until another customer came along to let him in.

There were a lot of things about Anthony's that Bully liked, but he was particularly fond of the pneumatic tubes, which the checkers used to deposit cash and checks and then sent them flying with the push of a button to the cashier who sat high up on the mezzanine. Bully would hear those tubes take off, and he would take off too, chasing the tubes through the store. And Mother would pretend that she didn't know him. He was, she maintained, my father's dog, and everyone agreed that my father was a man who never met a dog that he didn't like.

Bully was a wire-haired terrier mix, and he was quite simply incorrigible. He once bit a passerby on the seat of his pants. The man had kicked Bully's best friend, Happy, a yappy little dog who lived next door. Bully raced up behind the man and bit him. Incensed, the man banged on our door and promptly turned around to show Mother his backside, hollering, "Look what your dog did."

Bully often ended up in the pound, which in Midland was a bleak fenced-in pen by a little shack, and each time Daddy would go to pick him up. Once when Daddy arrived, the gate was already open and all the dogs had bolted out except for one bitch, who was in heat and was locked up in her own little pen, and Bully, who sat waiting for her outside. The dogcatcher blamed Bully for opening the gate.

Eventually, Bully was sent to live with my grandparents in the upper valley of the Rio Grande above El Paso, where he could have more space to roam. They drove him to Midland whenever they came to visit, and we saw him anytime we went to El Paso. The moment he caught sight of my father, Bully would cry and jump on Daddy, because he never forgot him. But Bully was only the first of our many colorful pets--dogs, cats, a box turtle, a parakeet who lived on the back porch, and horny toads out in the garden, which Mother would gently coax into the palm of her hand. We laughed over the antics of our animals, and they were our beloved companions. We were warmed by their unconditional love. I played with the dogs and dressed my cat in doll clothes. Time and again, our animals found us, arriving as if by canine or feline navigation at our front door.

After Bully came Rusty, a cocker spaniel who was particularly close to my mother and was tragically run over on Big Spring Street. Then came sweet Roman, named because he roamed up to the house one day. Roman stayed with us for a few years and then roamed off again. In his lifetime, my father bought only one dog, Duke, a full-blooded boxer with papers, but Duke didn't last. He was a hyper barker who grew too big for our small backyard. Daddy finally sold him to another family in Midland. But for several years, he drove up and down the alley next to Duke's new home to make sure Duke was being treated well. After Duke came Freckles and then Bo, a beagle mix, who was remarkably dumb and was also dispatched to live out the remainder of his days in El Paso. Our last dog, Marty, came to us when I was in high school. He was a mutt, found in a litter of abandoned pups alongside a highway near Waco. One of my friends' sisters spotted them as she was driving home. He lived with Mother and Daddy until shortly before I married. When we left Estes Avenue, my mother adopted the first of several cats. The last cat actually belonged to the Robbins family, who lived across the street from Mother and Daddy on Humble Avenue, but when Daddy charmed him with cat chow, Henry moved in with my parents. After Daddy died, Henry stayed with Mother until she left for her retirement home. Only then did Henry pick up and return to his true owners across the street.

Long before the war, Daddy was ambitious. He had done his two years at Texas Tech, the new college in Lubbock, before he dropped out to help support his mother. His brother, Mark, was in medical school, so taking care of her fell to Dad. He had started at the bottom and worked his way up at CIT. But in Midland, Daddy hoped for more.

He had grown up in the Depression, in the Dust Bowl. His family and others had survived on backyard gardens and the fact that most people kept a cow tethered behind their homes. Otherwise, they had lost everything, so Daddy refused to waste anything. He did not buy fancy clothes, wouldn't spend the money to join a country club. He was generous, but he didn't give my mother Christmas presents. In his world, Christmas was for children. Adults had no need for frivolous gifts. If Mother gave something to Daddy, it was likely socks or pajamas. A couple times before Christmas, Daddy gave me a dollar to spend on gifts at Woolworth's. I counted out my change to buy dish towels and other sensible things. Daddy sold credit, yet he didn't like to have too much owed to the bank, and he always walked around with a wad of cash. Some of it was for the gambling, mostly gin rummy games played around the desks in other people's offices, but some was for the security of knowing that he had several hundred dollars, enough for at least a month, right there in his pocket, should everything dry up and blow away again. Much later, when his brain began to betray him and he was no longer able to go to the bank and withdraw a stack of crisp, green bills, he would reach into his pocket and then forlornly look over to my mother and say, "We're busted, honey, we're busted." And she would smile and flash her eyes, and say, "Harold, you may be, but I'm not."

In addition to working at CIT, Daddy soon began building houses on the side. After the big oil strike in the fall of 1946, landmen, engineers, geologists, roughnecks, and roustabouts began crowding into Midland and nearby Odessa, and there weren't enough new homes for all of them. Car financing was a good business. Home building might prove to be even better. And building a house was something that Daddy could make his own.