Waylon (2 page)

There’s a saying, “He’s in high cotton now,” which means it’s easier to pull. Or to pick it. You don’t have to bend over.
For low cotton, which is thicker on the bush, you haven’t lived till you’ve bent over all the way down a row, which may be
three quarters of a mile to a mile long, and then tried to stand and straighten your back. Or bent over to get that stuff,
pulling a crying kid on a sack. My momma pulled bolls; we didn’t pick it like they did in East Texas. You’d pull the boll
and the cotton off the cotton stalk and then they’d have a cotton gin that would separate the boll and the seed. The boll
was green, and when it dried out it would open and be real brittle. It would just cut the shit out of your hands if you didn’t
wear gloves.

In the late summer and fall, Littlefield would be full of transient laborers from Mexico. You couldn’t walk down the street
on Saturday afternoon, they’d be so packed. We were working right there alongside of them. They delayed school two weeks at
the start of every year to chop cotton and gather in the harvest. In the summer we went barefoot, mostly because we couldn’t
afford shoes, but every fall till I was fifteen we went out there to get the money to buy our school clothes. I hated the
cotton patch.

There’s nothing I have ever heard in my life as mournful as the whistle of a steam freight train in the distance when you’re
kneeling down in a field. It sounds like death. I’d be out in the cotton patch, dragging a sack twelve foot long and half
full, putting in dirt clods to bring up the weight, and that lonesome howl would just go plumb through me. That train was
on its way out of town and I wasn’t on it. I knew that there was a better way somewhere else. I didn’t know where, but all
I had to do was go looking for it.

The last time I was pulling cotton I was about sixteen. I said, “I didn’t plant this shit, and I ain’t never gonna pull it
up no more.” And I quit. I left that sack sitting right there. It may be there to this day, as far as I know.

The Shipleys and the Jennings were complete opposites. My grandpa Jennings wouldn’t take a drink or say a cussword if he had
to. My dad was that way, too. We couldn’t keep dice or even mention the word “sex” in our house.

My grandpa Alfred Blevins Shipley was a hard-working man and could get drunker than ole Cooter Brown. It was not a sickness
with him. It was just something he liked to do, but not until there was plenty of food in the house. He was a strong man,
a good provider and protector of his clan. He was the boss ’til the day he died. In a lot of ways I’m like him. I wanted to
be. He may have been where I learned to cuss—he was good at it—but I couldn’t get into the snuff dipping. He was good at that
too.

He drove a truck all his life, bringing fruits and vegetables back and forth from South Texas. I don’t know how he ever made
any money. He would go down to San Antonio, load up, bring it back to Littlefield, give half of it away, and sell the rest.
Then he would repeat the whole process again. When he started home (four or five hundred miles away), if he had any money
left, he would buy some whiskey and get drunk. I’m talking about
drunk.
Stone blind and weaving drunk. Trying to keep it between the lines. (In twenty years, the only accident he had, he went off
the road into a ditch.)

There were two kinds of people Grandpa didn’t trust, a preacher and a cop. He’d say “They both think they’re sanctified in
everything they do.” It’s no wonder he was always arguing with Grandma. Grandma, Dessie Bell Shipley, was a Jehovah’s Witness,
and I swear Grandpa would study the Bible just to tell her how wrong she was about it, and nothing made him madder than catching
her on a street corner selling the
Watchtower.
They fought most of their lives and I never heard them say much good to each other. But that was between them, and no one
else had better join in.

The Shipley line had come to Texas through my great-grandfather, who was a farmer and a lawman. He rode a horse all the way
from Tennessee and had a handlebar mustache. He wound up in Hart Camp after being a constable in Leon, Oklahoma, and a sheriff
in Marietta. Along the way, a lot of Indian blood mixed in. My grandmother Dessie Bell’s maiden name was West, and her father
had been a cotton farmer. He never worked a day in his life. His six boys did most of the hard labor. He was really a trader,
and could make fifty dollars in an afternoon just sitting on a sack of beans. I heard he was part Comanche, and her mother
was Cherokee. Full-blood.

She had traveled the Trail of Tears to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where she went to school till they burnt the fort down. My great-grandfather’s
name was Wily West. He was so skinny that he could go somewhere, sit down, cross his legs, and both feet would lie flat on
the floor.

Let me get this right now. If I don’t, I could get shot by some relatives. My great-grandfather West married a woman who already
had a daughter about twelve years old. He had another child by this woman, whoever she was, which was my grandmother. Now
my grandmother had a sister, right? We thought that my grandmother’s mother had died, but we found out later that wasn’t true.
She had run off and left both kids with him. So he married the original daughter, which made my grandmother’s sister her stepmother.

Nobody knew this until Grandma Shipley died. Then it came out. On the marriage certificate for Great-grandfather West and
Grandma’s stepsister, it said her mother was colored. That was the way they referred to Indians in those days. I guess that
happened a lot back then, her half-sister becoming her stepmother. Being out in the middle of nowhere will do that to you.

It might’ve been even more complicated had not Wily West been such a rounder. Great-grandpa West, my grandmother’s father,
and my grandfather’s mother, Delilah Shipley, had known each other when they were young. Supposedly they’d been in love. He
called her Lila; she was some piece of work. She was beautiful and carried a gun. They might’ve been going to get married,
but he went off on one of his tears and he took off. When he came back she was gone. She’d married the sheriff of Ardmore,
Oklahoma. They never saw each other again until his daughter and her son met and were married.

Years later I took him up to see her in an old folks home in Lubbock. He stayed with her, and I went and did my business and
then came and picked him up. On the way back, he was sitting real quiet, staring out the window. All of a sudden he blew his
nose and you could see he’d been crying. “When Lila was young, there wasn’t a handsomer woman alive,” he said. “You never
know how things are gonna turn out.”

The Jennings were a different breed. Irish and Black Dutch, as far as I could tell, and as God-fearing as they come. They
belonged to the Church of Christ; my Dad was as close to being a preacher as he could without being a preacher.

Daddy was truly my hero. He would never punish us kids—me and my three brothers—for something he himself did. Anyway, he could
never hurt us. He’d sooner put a foot of quilts over us and beat the hell out of that cover with the belt. His motto was “I’ll
never whip one of ’em for what I do in front of them, what I do and they know that I do.” Like smoking. Or cussing. He’d not
even say “dang it.” Instead of tobacco, Daddy chewed ice. We just watched what he did and knew we were expected to do the
same. He had a quiet strength.

He was built stockily, like his dad. It came natural from his side of the family. All of them were heavy, and big boned. My
grandpa Gus weighed close to three hundred pounds, and always wore his belt buckle to the side. I used to think he liked the
look of it better over there, but my cousin Wendell Whitfield says it was probably because there was no room for it in front.
He also wore a black hat.

The Shipleys were slim. When they gained weight, it went to the face and stomach, just like it does to me. When I gain weight,
my face gets real wide even if my legs stay thin.

We had to ride in the back of the truck out to Grandpa Jennings’s place, no end gate to it and just a tarp flapping. We’d
ride in the back of that truck all day long; they didn’t go that fast then. If you fell out of one it wouldn’t hardly hurt.
You could run and catch up with it, chasing down Route 54 straight as an arrow till it took a right-angle zigzag around Bula
High School, near the spot where I first heard Johnny Cash sing “Cry, Cry, Cry,” bouncing over a buffalo wallow that we thought
deep as a canyon, and out to the Jennings farm.

Grandpa Jennings never let anything bother him. He thought no matter how bad it might look today, it’d probably be all right
tomorrow. He’d set and twiddle his thumbs and look off in the distance; he was kind of a homebody. His cotton planting day
was June 6, unless it fell on a Sunday. Everybody else had already planted twice; they’d be hailed out and have to go back.
Grandpa just waited for his day.

As you’d expect, we ate good there. We’d get up in the morning, always before daylight, and fix big platters of eggs, frying
or scrambling them. We’d just scrape off what we wanted. Then there would be bacon, pork chops, sausage, and butter. Homemade
butter, that you would churn “frush.” I used to do that myself.

Breakfast was the big meal. Lunch was called dinner, and we’d have fried chicken and eat the leftovers after five that night.
Grandma Tempe would keep the butterbeans going for at least two days. There’s one thing I could never understand about her.
After church on Sunday we’d go back to the farm, and she’d put on her old feed-sack dress, grab some poor chicken by the neck,
and wring its head off. Now I know it was Sunday dinner, and we all had to eat, but some transformation happened between the
hymn and closing prayer and jerking that poor chicken’s neck. Grandma Jennings was a stern woman. I can still hear her muttering
“nasty nasty nasty” anytime she’d catch us calking about girls. In later years, after I’d have sex, it seemed like someone
ought to come up and shake their finger at me, saying “nasty nasty nasty.”

Supper wasn’t that important, though it was probably the most fun. You’d dip corn bread into sweet milk, and Daddy was always
taking peanut butter and putting it in karo syrup, stirring it up. You’d have a little bread with it. Our staples were coffee,
bread, and sugar: We would take biscuits and open them up, butter the breads, pour sugar on them, and pour coffee over that.
Momma used to make milk chocolate and pour it over crackers. We weren’t so much poor as pour.

The depression sure bred some strange things. For greens, we’d eat lamb’s-quarter. It was a wild weed that looked a lot like
spinach. We used every part of the hog we could. We didn’t waste anything. We even made tallow and soap out of the skin. Lye
soap, like to take your flesh off.

If you had any left, that is, after they got finished with you in Sunday School. We were staunchly Church of Christ, especially
my dad.

Of all the religions I’ve run into, the Church of Christ has probably got it wronger than anybody. They’re self-righteous,
narrow-minded, and truly believe they’re the only ones going to Heaven. If you don’t believe the way we do, they say, you’re
going to go straight to hellfire and damnation. With a side order of brimstone.

They don’t allow women to speak in the church. They think it’s a sin if you have music in the church. They say, bring your
organ over here. Mr. Organ, would you lead us in prayer? If it leads us in prayer, then it’ll be all right. Well, what’s the
whole building for—the pulpit, the pews, the carpet, the microphones—if not to lead you in prayer? It’s people that do the
singing.

Once I even gave preaching a shot. Momma wanted one of her boys to be a preacher. I was trying to please, but it was the scaredest
I ever was in my life. On Wednesday nights they let you give talks. My mouth was so dry, I thought I was going to pass out.
I thought, if I don’t do it I’m going to hell, and if I do do it, I’m going to stunt my growth. I knew what I was saying was
fear, was instilling terror in people, and when I got up to speak, I was living proof.

Their concept of God was of a Father who told His offspring, “I created you, but I’m not going to be there ever. You’re not
going to see me or hear my voice, and I’m going to give you a book that is not easy to read at all, it’s hard to understand,
but you are not to question it. It’s a sin to question it. If you don’t follow my words, and do everything that book says,
even though you’re my child and I love you, and I’m your Father, I will throw you into a lake of fire and you will burn eternally
and I’ll hear you scream for the rest of eternity.”

That’s what the Church of Christ teaches, and it’s not my concept of believing. If God knows yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
why would He cause us so much misery in this world? I don’t think God would destroy the earth and let Satan live again. Or
blame us for the Forbidden Fruit. That’s our sacred knowledge, the emotion that we’re able to give back to God. It’s what
makes us human.

I’ve read the Bible. There are thousands of religions derived from this book, and it seems to me that the inspiration of that
book lies in what it says to you, individually and as a person. You should live your life, and your religion, according to
that.

Love is one of the truest feelings in the world, and it’s based on the attraction a man feels for a woman, not to mention
vice versa. The Church of Christ called it lust and said it was a sin. You should only make love for the purposes of procreation.
That’s bullshit. I’ve never been able to believe that. I look at Jessi and have to watch myself. I want her every day of my
life. And as for playing music…

I thought, man, I’m going to hell, ’cause everything they tell me is a big sin is something I like. A lot.

Of course, once outside of church, everybody pretty much went about their own business. Me and some of my friends would go
over to where the Holy Rollers met and find the tobacco where they’d thrown it out the window when they’d get saved, and we’d
get it and smoke it. A lot of times we’d be there the next morning and find they’d been out there looking for it themselves.