The Cotton Queen (13 page)

There was a startled shock around the room.

“Who?” somebody asked aloud.

Cheryl looked over at me. Her expression was pure venom. “I heard my mother and Aunt LaVeida talking about when your little brother was born. It was only seven months after your mother and Mr. Clifton got married. They both agreed that the only way he would have married her was if he had had to because she was pregnant.”

The other girls uttered a gasp.

“So,” Cheryl continued nastily, “your mom must have pulled her pants down and let him do that to her just because she liked it.”

“My mother never did that!”

“You’re supposed to be the math whiz,” Cheryl pointed out. “Can’t you count nine months.”

“My brother was born early,” I defended. “You can’t say those things about my mother.”

“Your mother thinks she’s a society hostess,” Cheryl said. “But if you ask the Hoffman family they’ll tell you that she’s a slut. She’s selfish and disrespectful to the memory of our uncle. She probably never loved him. He was hardly cold in his grave before she was doing it, probably for money, with Acee Clifton.”

I reached over and slapped her face.

But I never forgot what she said.

B
ABS

I
N
THE
SUMMER
of 1972 Acee ran for judge. With my duties as chairman of the Cotton Days celebration, the timing wasn’t perfect. Of course, he couldn’t be blamed for the timing. Old Judge Weatherford, who was at least eighty and had been napping on the bench for years, was, at long last, stepping down. Even when the state legislature had mandated old-age retirement for judges, he’d stayed on the civil court bench and continued to resist. Finally a bout of bad health forced him to call it quits.

In Texas, state and county court judges are elected just like mayors and senators and governors. In theory, they are then answerable to the people and the bad ones can be voted out of office. In practice, once elected, most keep getting reelected. So an opportunity to campaign without going up against an incumbent is not a chance to be passed up.

Early on, Acee seemed like the favorite. I admit to taking a certain amount of personal pride in this. Of course, his reputation was his own. He was smart and honest and well-respected by everybody from the town drunk to city officials. But I had turned those qualities into political capital. I was the person who’d kept his name and his success fresh in the minds of the socially prominent people of the community.

Acee wasn’t as interested in political life as he should have been.

“If I’m the right man for the job, the people will vote for me,” he said.

“Acee, the people will vote for you because you convince them that you’re the right man for the job.”

A campaign required little gifts for voters and supporters, something to help them remember your name. Acee came up with the idea of putting his name on fish scales with the imprint: Acee Clifton: Weighing Matters In Collin County. The handy gadgets quickly found their way into the tackle box of every man in town. I wanted him to say Weighing Things Fishy In Collin County, which was funnier and more truthful about what a civil court judge might do. Acee thought that was disrespectful both to the court and the voter. So I let him do it his way.

“We have to come up with a little something for the ladies, too,” I pointed out. “You need their votes as much as their husbands.”

He nodded. “I was thinking about a pot holder that says something like Protecting You In Civil Court.”

“A pot holder? Oh, Acee please, this is not 1957.”

He laughed. “Okay, make a suggestion,” he said. “What can I give them that will make me look really cool and hip to the ladies? A subscription to
Playgirl
magazine?”

“Only if you were running in Travis County,” I replied.

Finally we settled on tiny flashlights that attached to a key ring. They were so small there wasn’t room for any slogan beyond Acee Clifton For Judge.

I enjoyed the campaigning tremendously. We went door to door in neighborhoods I’d never walked in. We attended church picnics and Grange meetings. We stood outside Bird’s Supermarket helping shoppers with their bags and asking for their vote.

I loved all of it. I felt as if I’d found my vocation in life. All my training, a decade of social interaction, had been leading up to this point. I could, I was certain, be the perfect political wife.

Our parties had formerly been limited to the higher social strata of the community, those particularly charming couples and a few others that Acee considered his friends. Now I expanded the size and scope of our gatherings to include the less interesting but more powerful businessmen in the county. Many of them were new to the area. They were Dallas men or Houston men. They saw the future of McKinney as the future of America.

“When Central Expressway is completed,” one told me. “Living in McKinney will be as convenient to downtown Dallas as living in Highland Park.”

I smiled, but it honestly didn’t please me as much as the man expected. I still avoided trips to the city. I was anxious and jittery every minute I was there. But I smiled politely.

“We’re going to develop these old hay meadows and cotton fields into modern, family housing developments,” another said. “We’ll expand the community to twice the size it is today. Increase the tax base and bring a real boon to local business.”

That sounded nice.

One evening as a lawyer representing a big commercial construction company was leaving, he handed me a check.

“This is to help out with the campaign costs,” he said. “I know all those flashlights and fish scales don’t come free. I want to help.”

He gave me a little wink and I thanked him.

Someone else was leaving at the same time and distracted me. The man was long gone before I glanced at the check in my hand. Ten thousand dollars. That was more than our complete budget for the entire campaign. More than the total of all the other money we’d raised.

I was astounded and excited.

When I showed the check to Acee, he was furious.

“Do you know what he wants?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“He wants to build a big shopping center at the edge of the county,” Acee said. “The farmers who own the land don’t want to sell. He’s taking them to court to have the land reclassified as commercial instead of agricultural so that they can’t afford to farm it.”

“Oh, well, that’s silly,” I said. “He can’t do that.”

“He can if he buys enough legislatures and local officials and...” Acee held up the check. “Enough civil court judges.”

“I’m going to take this back to him tomorrow and throw it in his face.”

“No, Acee,” I soothed him. “That’s not the way to do it. If you don’t want to accept the money, simply don’t cash the check. There is no reason to confront him about it.”

“Just let him think I’m on his payroll.”

I shrugged. “People are free to think whatever they want to think. You’re not on his payroll, you have no obligation to do anything for him. But by the time he realizes that, the election will be over. It will be too late to offer support to some other candidate.”

“You want me to just let him believe that he’s bought me until after I’ve used him,” Acee said. “Babs, where do you get these ethics?”

“This isn’t about ethics,” I told him. “It’s about winning. Once you’ve won, your ethics will speak for themselves.”

He shook his head. “That’s not me, Babs,” he said. “That’s not the way that I deal with other people. It’s not the way that I live my life.”

“This isn’t life, Acee, it’s politics.”

I couldn’t convince him.

The next day he very publicly returned the money given to him by the construction firm. When the farmers in the corner of the county heard about it, they were very pleased and contacted Acee. He wouldn’t give them any assurances that he would help them.

“I have to rule based on the cases presented before me,” he said. “This issue has yet to be presented, so I cannot possibly say how I might or might not decide it.”

To Acee’s way of thinking, that was exactly the right and wholly ethical answer, true to both the language and the spirit of the law. But, of course, it was the death blow to his campaign. I’m not saying that the county was overrun with crooks and shady characters. Most of the people were good, honest folks, but they were suddenly suspicious. Before Acee had said anything, it was as if everyone trusted him. But once he attempted to show that he could be trusted, suddenly he was suspect. Virtually all the wealthy businessmen and developers withdrew their support. Even many of the people we’d socialized with for years suddenly made themselves scarce. We knew we’d lost two weeks before the ballots were cast. There seemed to be nothing we could do.

The night of the primary election, we put on our best clothes and our best smiles and went downtown for a party with our supporters and to await the returns.

Acee came in a respectable third. He seemed perfectly okay with that. I was devastated. There was the sense of failure, of course. But somehow it was more. There was also both the sense that your friends had let you down, and the feeling that you’d let them down, as well. I woke up every morning thinking about it. It was the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep at night.

“Let it go, Babs,” Acee told me. “It’s no tragedy. I’ve got a great job that I like to do. And the opportunity, by itself, was far more than so many other people get to experience.”

Intellectually I knew he was right. But my emotions just couldn’t seem to follow my thinking.

“You would have been so much better for this county than either of the men still on the ballot.”

He shrugged and shook his head.

“That doesn’t matter,” Acee said. “Hey, the first rule of politics is that the best man doesn’t always win.”

“I know,” I admitted with a sigh. “Well, at least we only have to wait a couple of years. And we can use that time to raise money and work out a thorough campaign plan.”

Acee turned to me with an aghast expression as if I were out of my mind.

“The new judge’s term is six years,” he said. “And unless he does something absolutely terrible, it would be fruitless to run against an incumbent.”

“Well, of course,” I said. “You can’t run for judge again anyway. But there are plenty of elective offices out there. We just have to pick one that’s vulnerable and go after it.”

Just the idea of a new campaign cheered me up.

Acee’s reaction was quite different.

“No,” he said simply.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean no,” he repeated. “I ran for this office because I really wanted to do that job. I’m not interested in politics or public office. I love the law. That’s why I went into practice. The lure of the political spotlight doesn’t tempt me.”

“Oh, you’re just thinking that way because we lost this election,” I assured him. “You’ll feel differently in a few months.”

He didn’t.

Instead he became interested in something absolutely awful. Sex therapy.

One morning he handed me a piece of the morning paper folded in such a way that it was impossible to miss the article he wanted me to see.

Men And Women Need More,
the headline read.

It was paraphrasing, incorrectly, a quote from Dr. William Masters. What he’d really said was, “men and women need each other more than ever before.”

The article was about sex clinics and the work they were doing with the intimacy problems of married couples. According to the article, all over the country men and women were rediscovering each others’ bodies.

I couldn’t quite repress an involuntary shudder.

“I think we need to check this out,” Acee said.

“Now dear,” I responded very calmly and with a certain haughtiness. “I’ve told you that I think the talks with Brother Chet help me far more than those highbrow Ph.D.s. I don’t want to start going into the city again.”

“This isn’t for you,” Acee answered. “It’s for us. We’d both be involved in the therapy. And you can believe me that I’d be a whole lot more comfortable talking about where I want to kiss you with some highbrow Ph.D. than with Brother Chet.”

I could hardly argue that.

“This is for younger couples,” I assured him with a chuckle. “Newlyweds who are just finding their way. We’re old married folks now. Our tenth anniversary is behind us.”

He nodded, very gravely.

“That’s right,” he said. “Ten years and I no longer believe that you’re going to get used to my touch. I no longer have hope that one night when I roll off you, you’re not going to jump up and race to the shower like the banshees of hell are after you.”

I blushed. I was scared. I was humiliated. I didn’t know how to defend myself, except with stubborn silence.

“Ladies just like to be clean,” I said. “There is nothing strange or abnormal about that. I’m sure that most of the women in this town feel the same way.”

“Maybe so,” Acee said. “But I’m not married to most of the women in town. I’m married to you and I would like for us to have a more physically satisfying sex life.”

“Eww, Acee please, don’t use the phrase sex life, it’s just...coarse. If you have to mention it at all, say intercourse or better yet, intimacy. Speakers of the English language invented euphemisms for a reason.”

“I don’t want euphemisms between us,” he said. “I don’t want anything between us. We’re married, we ought to be able to say and do whatever feels good between us.”

“Well, I think there may be a discrepancy between what we see as good.”

He sighed heavily. “Babs, don’t you ever just want me?” he asked. “Don’t you ever just feel...horny. I mean, right now, this very minute I could lay you across this kitchen table and rip that robe off you and kiss every inch of you. Especially those inches down between your legs that you keep covered up with cotton every minute of every day.”

“Acee, for heaven’s sake! It is seven o’clock in the morning and Laney is in the house. She could walk in this room any minute. I can’t believe that you’re discussing such things.”

“Honey, darling, sweetie,” he entreated. “I love you, but we’ve got to do better on this than we’re doing.”

“We’re doing fine.”

“I want to be a good and faithful husband,” he said. “But when I think that this cold, infrequent joining is all that I’ll ever have for the rest of my life, it just makes me so sad and disappointed.”

“Oh, so now you’re threatening me,” I said. “Either get better in bed or I’ll cheat.”

“I never said anything like that and I’d never meant anything like that. I just want it to be better between us.”

“The only reason I have relations with you is so that we can have a child,” I told him. “If we ever do, I’d be happy to forego that aspect of our marriage permanently.”

That statement brought Acee to his feet. He just stood there for a long moment staring at me. I wanted to recall the words. I wanted to begin the entire discussion over again. I should have played along and then let the subject drop. But that’s not what I’d done. I’d been honest and I’d crossed the line. I already regretted it.

“Call around today,” he said. “Find out who we can talk to and make an appointment.”

His words weren’t phrased as a request, but as an order.

“No.” The word was small, quiet, but I hoped final.