Generations and Other True Stories (23 page)

“If we're here, why can't somebody be somewhere else?”

May 1994

My earliest memories are of a farm in Comanche County, Texas, near the Hamilton County line, and Carlton, a tiny community on the Hamilton side of the line. In those places, I spent the first eight years of my life. The farm is the one described in “Generations,” the first piece in this book. The town is the one mentioned in “Mrs. Miller.”

A great sadness comes over me whenever I remember those places
.

A Memoir of Hamilton and Comanche Counties

The Baptist Church stood on one side of the square, and the Methodist Church on the other. The Church of Christ was just across the road. In the middle of the square stood a large shed with a shingle roof. All the sides of the shed were open. Under it were rows of crude wooden benches with an aisle down the middle, and at one end of the shed was a platform for the choir and a pulpit for the evangelist. The shed was called “the Tabernacle,” and it was used by the churches for their revivals in the summertime.

The main purpose of the revivals was to save souls—to persuade us to desert the deadly pathways of sin, accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, be baptized into whichever of the households of faith was occupying the Tabernacle at the moment, and live thenceforth in the knowledge that death would not be our end, but the beginning of our eternal life of joy with God in his heaven. For those whose souls already had been saved, the revivals offered a chance to revive the spirit, to shore up a rickety determination, to suck in the gut of faith and persevere with the righteous life. And for everybody they were a chance to get together and talk about the weather and the children and the war—World War II—in which many young men from the town and the farms were fighting, in Europe and Asia and Africa and the South Pacific, half a world away from Carlton, Texas, and everything they had ever known.

There were two preaching services a day during the revivals—one in the morning, which was supposed to end about noon, and one in the evening.

In the evening, when the young men had finished their work for the day, and the young mothers had washed and put away the supper dishes and dressed their sons in clean shirts and overalls and their daughters in pinafores, and the families were arriving in the square in their old Fords and Chevrolets, there was a festive air about the revivals. Before the service, the men would lean against the cars and talk, their cigarettes glowing like orange lightning bugs in the darkness. The young women would hustle their babies and toddlers into the Tabernacle and arrange them along the benches, and visit with the mothers on the bench ahead and the mothers on the bench behind. We school-age kids—six to ten or so years old—would play tag or hide-and-seek among the cars until a father or mother came to herd us to the Tabernacle.

Sometimes we children would stand in front of the congregation and sing a song that we sang only at revivals:

The morning service was attended mostly by the older women and men of the town and whatever children could be dragged to it. I was about six years old when my grandmother began taking me along.

The word that comes into my mind as I remember those interminable hours of squirming on the hard wooden benches is “hot”—the perspiring faces of the women and the faint
whit, whit
of their cardboard funeral-home fans trying to stir a breeze into the sticky air; the torrid white sunlight just beyond the edge of the Tabernacle roof; the sweating evangelist, coatless, his necktie loosened, leaning over the pulpit, and his detailed description of the eternal fires of hell and the everlasting agonies of those doomed to dwell therein; the fervent tears of the repentant as they plodded down the aisle, hunched under the weight of their sins.

Outside the Tabernacle, beyond the edges of the town, under the pale, blinding sky, locusts were whirring in the creek bottoms, milk cows were grazing, and the crops that gave us our livelihood and were Carlton's only reason for being—the corn, the maize, the oats, the hay, the wheat, the cotton—were creeping silently upward from the dark earth.

One of the farms belonged to us. Our hogs were grunting in their pen, wallowing in their mud, seeking coolness. Our chickens—white Plymouth Rocks and a few bantams—were strutting about the barnyard, pecking at the ground, their yellow eyes blinking. On the front porch, my father's hounds—asleep and perhaps dreaming—were thumping the floorboards with their tails. Whenever a puff of breeze came up, the windmill wheel would groan and turn a time or two, and the sucker rod would move slowly up the pipe and drop a dollop of cool water into the tank.

Except on the days when my father cranked up our old Farmall and drove it out of its shed to work the fields, and the days when my mother or my father started the car for a trip into the town, there were no noises of engines or motors on our place. The only other machinery sounds I remember were the
thunk, thunk
of the windmill sucker rod and the clatter of the old Singer sewing machine on which my mother made nearly all our clothes. It was powered by her feet on the treadle.

Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn't yet brought electricity to our house, nor to any farmhouse in our part of Comanche County. My mother washed our clothes in a big iron pot that was sitting on a wood fire in the yard. She scrubbed them on a washboard with soap home-made of lye and the fat of our butchered hog, and ironed them with heavy irons heated on the burners of her kerosene cook stove. I sounded out the words of my first-grade Dick and Jane reader by the light of the coal-oil lamp on the round oak dining table. In winter, the only heat in the house was provided by a wood stove in the living room. When my father would pile in the logs and the kindling and douse them with kerosene and throw in a match in the chilly morning, we would huddle shivering around it, holding out our hands to catch the first waves of warmth, watching the walls of the stove slowly brighten to a rosy glow. Our milk and perishables were kept in a washtub with a big block of ice on the back porch. We brought the ice from town once a week, and covered the tub with an old blanket to hold in the cold. We owned a radio, but it was powered by car batteries, and our batteries were old and wouldn't hold a charge. Since the war made it impossible to buy new ones, we didn't hear the radio often. There was no telephone.

We had a cold-water faucet in the kitchen. It was the only plumbing in the house, but it was more than many of our neighbors had. We bathed in a washtub in water heated on the kitchen stove, and went to an outdoor toilet that stood some distance from the house. In the winter, our visits there were infrequent and brief, especially at night and when a norther was blowing. In the summer, copperheads sometimes would be attracted to the toilet's shade, and there were always spiders.

I was born during the Great Depression, the eldest of five. Ours wasn't the most prosperous farm in the county, but it wasn't the poorest, either. My mother says the country people didn't feel the Depression as acutely as the people in the town. Being a child, I didn't feel it at all. Only years later would I learn I had been born during hard times.

We were almost self-sufficient. Our cows provided all our milk and butter. Our chickens provided our eggs and part of our meat, especially for our Sunday dinners. My mother raised a large garden. The vegetables we didn't eat fresh, she canned in Mason jars and stored in the cellar. We knocked pecans out of the trees in the creek bottoms. My father shot squirrels and rabbits and doves and quail and brought them home for us to eat. He raised most of the feed that our animals ate. Every winter, we butchered a hog, which provided not only bacon, ham, sausage, and pork chops, but lard and soap as well.

Hog-killing day was one of the days it was fun to be a child on the farm. Despite the terrible scream the animal would make as it died on that cold morning, it was a day of laughter and good feeling.

The neighbors—two or three families of them—would come. The men would kill the animal, scald its bristles off in a barrel of hot water, and butcher it. The women would salt the bacon and ham, sew the cloth sacks in which the meat would be hung in the smokehouse, grind and season the sausage, build a fire in the yard, throw the fat into my mother's iron wash pot, and render it into lard. While the fat was boiling, they would toss strips of the hog's skin into it and dip them out a few minutes later as golden, hot “cracklings,” a delicacy only faintly akin to the dry, cellophaned “pork skins” sold now in supermarkets.

A lot of the work was done that way—neighbors helping each other out. The neighbors would help us butcher our hog or pick our cotton or reap and shock our oats or wheat, and we would help them with theirs. The women worked together on their canning and quilting. Everybody brought his own tools to whatever job needed doing. No money was offered or accepted among neighbors, but sometimes, when cash was needed, we would hire out to others. I remember dragging a cotton sack down the rows of Walker Bingham's field with my parents one long, hot day, and when the work was over, Mr. Bingham—one of the more well-to-do farmers of the county—gave me a shiny quarter. It was the first wages I ever was paid. I remember how hard and sharp the cotton bolls were. I remember how tired my mother was that night.

Threshing the grain was more fun than cotton picking. My family and the neighbors would reap the crop with a horse-drawn reaper not much changed from Cyrus McCormick's original design. The machine would move around the field, cutting the plants, binding them into sheaves with twine, and spitting them onto the ground. Or was there another machine that bound the sheaves? I was very young. The rest of us would walk behind the reaper, stacking the sheaves into neat shocks. After the shocks had dried in the sun for a few days, the thresher would come.

A truck pulled the huge machine from farm to farm. Its crew came with it. The thresher, our mothers warned us every year, was dangerous, full of pulleys and gears and belts and teeth. It took special knowledge to avoid its perils and, even so, many men lost arms in threshers. Each farmer paid the owner of the thresher in cash or in a share of the crop for the services of his machine, and the owner paid his crew.

They would park the thresher in the middle of the field, and the neighbors would come with their pitchforks and help my father haul the sheaves to the thresher and the threshed grain to the barn in mule-drawn wagons, and help my mother cook the huge meal that the thresher crew and the field hands would consume under the live oak trees beside the windmill at noon.

I was too young to know it then, but the work was brutal. Having so many people on the farm—normally a lonely place—was what made the day so full of laughter.

Now all the work that was done by all those people can be done by one man on a combine. He can bring his lunch to the field with him and eat it alone in his air-conditioned cab and listen to his radio for company.

The combine and other machines—huge, costly contraptions that have replaced the brawn of humans and animals with steel and internal combustion engines and fossil fuels—are part of the reason the countryside of Hamilton and Comanche counties has changed so much since I lived there. It doesn't take as many heads and hands and shoulders and backs to run a farm now as it did then. Many families have lost their lands to markets and weather and banks, too. And many fields—those where King Cotton reigned too long—are worn out and good only for grazing now.

So there are fewer farms than there used to be, and fewer farmers, and fewer neighbors. The fading remains of abandoned farm homes—leaning piles of rotting lumber, lone chimneys pointing skyward like work-worn fingers, groves of shade trees marking the home sites of long-departed families—dot the hills and prairies.

But the dwindling few who still live on the land don't have to do their laundry in the yard or read by lamplight or keep their food in washtubs or go to outdoor toilets. President Roosevelt's electric lines reached their houses long ago. They own stereos and VCRs and computers. Television comes to them by satellite. They buy most of their food in supermarkets and most of their clothing at shopping centers and discount stores, like the people in the cities. Their cars and trucks take them as far away as they want to go, and all or most of the way is paved.

Nearly all the young people ride those roads into the cities now, to schools and jobs that will divorce them from the land forever. There's neither room nor livelihood for them anymore on the land of their ancestors.

No one who lived through the old times and has a good memory would say all the changes in the rural places are bad. Most of the people who left have no serious yearning to go back. Not to stay. Not to work there as their parents and grandparents did. Not to try to wrestle a living from the stubborn soil in the old way. To build a little weekend retreat in the country someday, maybe. To go hunting or fishing. To try to find old landmarks that still live in memory. To visit the graves of their forebears.

I don't know how long ago my ancestors—the DeVolins, the Gibsons, the Whites, the Woolleys—settled in Hamilton and Comanche counties. Some of them, I know, moved there while the Comanches still roamed the land. All my great-grandparents and grandparents but one—my maternal grandmother, Clora DeVolin Gibson—are buried there. But no living member of any of my ancestral families is there now.