Chapter
1
I T WAS THE year none of the seasons followed their own dictates. The days were warm and the air
hard to breathe without a kerchief, and the nights cold and damp, the wet burlap we
nailed over the windows stiff with grit that blew in clouds out of the west amid sounds
like a train grinding across the prairie. The moon was orange, or sometimes brown,
as big as a planet, the way it is at harvest time, and the sun never more than a smudge,
like a lightbulb flickering in the socket or a lucifer match burning inside its own
smoke. In better times, our family would have been sitting together on the porch,
in wicker chairs or on the glider, with glasses of lemonade and bowls of peach ice
cream.
My father was looking for work on a pipeline in East Texas. Maybe he would come back
one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and
crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever. I ascribed the signs of
my mother’s mental deterioration to my father’s absence and his difficulties with
alcohol. She wore out the rug in her bedroom walking in circles, squeezing her nails
into the heels of her hands, talking to herself, her eyes watery with levels of fear
and confusion that nobody could dispel. Ordinary people no longer visited our home.
As a lawman, Grandfather had gone up against the likes of Bill Dalton and John Wesley
Hardin, and in 1916, with a group of rogue Texas Rangers, he had helped ambush a train
loaded with Pancho Villa’s soldiers. The point is, he wasn’t given to studying on
the complexities of mental illness. That didn’t mean he was an ill-natured or entirely
uncharitable man, just one who seemed to have a hole in his thinking. He had not been
a good father to his children. Through either selfishness or ineptitude, he often
left them to their own devices, even when they foundered on the wayside. I had never
understood this obvious character defect in him. I sometimes wondered if the blood
he had shed had made him incapable of love.
He hid behind flippancy and cynicism. He rated all politicians “somewhere between
mediocre and piss-poor.” His first wife had “a face that could make a freight train
turn on a dirt road.” WPA stood for We Piddle Around. If he hadn’t been a Christian,
he would have fired the hired help (we no longer had any) and “replaced them with
sloths.” The local banker had a big nose because the air was free. Who was my grandfather
in actuality? I didn’t have a clue.
It was right at sunset when I looked through the back screen and saw a black automobile,
coated with dust and shaped like a shoe box, detour off the road and drive into the
woods behind our house. A man wearing a fedora and a white shirt without a tie got
out and urinated in front of the headlights. I thought I could hear laughter inside
the car. While he relieved himself, he removed his fedora and combed his hair. It
was wavy and thick and brown and shiny as polished walnut. His trousers were notched
tightly into his ribs, and his cheeks looked like they had been rubbed with soot.
These were not uncommon characteristics in the men who drifted here and yon through
the American West during the first administration of President Roosevelt.
“Some people must have wandered off the highway onto our road,” I said. “The driver
is taking a leak in front of his headlights. His passengers seem to be enjoying themselves.”
Grandfather was sitting at the kitchen table, an encyclopedia open in front of him,
his reading glasses on his nose. “He deliberately stood in front of his headlights
to make water, so others could watch?”
“I can’t speak with authority about his thought process, since I’m not inside the
man’s head,” I replied. I picked up the German binoculars my uncle had brought back
from the trenches and focused them on the car. “There’s a woman in the front seat.
A
1
I T WAS THE year none of the seasons followed their own dictates. The days were warm and the air
hard to breathe without a kerchief, and the nights cold and damp, the wet burlap we
nailed over the windows stiff with grit that blew in clouds out of the west amid sounds
like a train grinding across the prairie. The moon was orange, or sometimes brown,
as big as a planet, the way it is at harvest time, and the sun never more than a smudge,
like a lightbulb flickering in the socket or a lucifer match burning inside its own
smoke. In better times, our family would have been sitting together on the porch,
in wicker chairs or on the glider, with glasses of lemonade and bowls of peach ice
cream.
My father was looking for work on a pipeline in East Texas. Maybe he would come back
one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and
crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever. I ascribed the signs of
my mother’s mental deterioration to my father’s absence and his difficulties with
alcohol. She wore out the rug in her bedroom walking in circles, squeezing her nails
into the heels of her hands, talking to herself, her eyes watery with levels of fear
and confusion that nobody could dispel. Ordinary people no longer visited our home.
As a lawman, Grandfather had gone up against the likes of Bill Dalton and John Wesley
Hardin, and in 1916, with a group of rogue Texas Rangers, he had helped ambush a train
loaded with Pancho Villa’s soldiers. The point is, he wasn’t given to studying on
the complexities of mental illness. That didn’t mean he was an ill-natured or entirely
uncharitable man, just one who seemed to have a hole in his thinking. He had not been
a good father to his children. Through either selfishness or ineptitude, he often
left them to their own devices, even when they foundered on the wayside. I had never
understood this obvious character defect in him. I sometimes wondered if the blood
he had shed had made him incapable of love.
He hid behind flippancy and cynicism. He rated all politicians “somewhere between
mediocre and piss-poor.” His first wife had “a face that could make a freight train
turn on a dirt road.” WPA stood for We Piddle Around. If he hadn’t been a Christian,
he would have fired the hired help (we no longer had any) and “replaced them with
sloths.” The local banker had a big nose because the air was free. Who was my grandfather
in actuality? I didn’t have a clue.
It was right at sunset when I looked through the back screen and saw a black automobile,
coated with dust and shaped like a shoe box, detour off the road and drive into the
woods behind our house. A man wearing a fedora and a white shirt without a tie got
out and urinated in front of the headlights. I thought I could hear laughter inside
the car. While he relieved himself, he removed his fedora and combed his hair. It
was wavy and thick and brown and shiny as polished walnut. His trousers were notched
tightly into his ribs, and his cheeks looked like they had been rubbed with soot.
These were not uncommon characteristics in the men who drifted here and yon through
the American West during the first administration of President Roosevelt.
“Some people must have wandered off the highway onto our road,” I said. “The driver
is taking a leak in front of his headlights. His passengers seem to be enjoying themselves.”
Grandfather was sitting at the kitchen table, an encyclopedia open in front of him,
his reading glasses on his nose. “He deliberately stood in front of his headlights
to make water, so others could watch?”
“I can’t speak with authority about his thought process, since I’m not inside the
man’s head,” I replied. I picked up the German binoculars my uncle had brought back
from the trenches and focused them on the car. “There’s a woman in the front seat.
A
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