Generations and Other True Stories (3 page)

The Hensons knew our history and the histories of all who had lived around us. Some remained but most had moved away. She mentioned a boy I had started to first grade with. “He's had three wives,” she said. “The first one was rotten. She run around on him. The second one died. He's married to a nurse now. Widow with four kids, and three kids of his own. Getting along well, I hear. He sells Fords over at Stephenville. How long have you two been married?”

“We aren't married,” Isabel said. “I live in New York. I'm just in Texas for a visit.”

“New York! My! You're a long way from home, just to visit!” Mrs. Henson was storing up mental notes. “How often do you see your daddy?” she asked me.

“Not since we left here,” I said.

“Really? He lives at Meridian now,” she said. “He has heart trouble, they say.”

“Mind if I look around outside?”

“Help yourself,” Mr. Henson said. “Better stay out of the fields, though. The snakes are bad this year.”

Less had changed than I thought. The old corncrib, where my father used to kill rats and copperheads, was still there. So was the stone watering trough, down by the barn, and the weathered old smokehouse, which had served as a storeroom in our day. I had found my grandfather's trunk in there, and opened it and discovered his pipe and reading glasses and straight razor and hypodermic syringes. I took them to my mother and asked if I could have them. She put them back and told me never to open the trunk again. My mother's garden was still behind the smokehouse, still yielding, I guessed from the withered bean vines and cornstalks. Gazing at the far field, down by the creek, I imagined I saw my father on his tractor, and myself carrying him a jug of water.

“We just passed the road to Meridian,” Isabel said. “Let's go by.”

“Why?”

“To see where he lives. Aren't you curious? We've got time.”

I took the road. We stopped in the town square, and Isabel got out and asked an old man where my father lived. “He must be important,” she said, getting back into the car. “He asked, ‘The business or the residence?'”

The residence was a mile or two outside the town, easily recognized by the neat white wooden fence that the old man had described and the neat white barns and brick house that sat about fifty yards back from the road. Even in the dusk it was obvious that he had prospered. I drove slowly, trying to take it all in and keep my eyes on the road at the same time. As we passed the gate I happened to glance up the driveway.

He was sitting in a chair in his backyard, silhouetted against the buttermilk sunset. From the way he was sitting, the slope of his bones, I recognized him. “That's him!” I said. “I'm going to say something to him!” I turned the car and headed into the driveway.

“What are you going to say?” Isabel asked.

“I don't know.” My heart was beating fast. I was almost giddy. I drove up the driveway, into the backyard, and stopped a few feet from his chair. A gray-haired woman was sitting facing him, hidden from the road by a shrub. She looked up, alarmed. I knew then that I couldn't identify myself. She might not know I existed. I got out of the car and walked to my father and stood facing him, my back to her.

He was heavier, a little gray at the temples, but he hadn't really changed. He sat in khakis and white undershirt, barefoot, as he always did. His cheekbones were as high, Indianlike, his eyes as dark and steady through his glasses. He held a chew of tobacco in his cheek and didn't move, only stared into my eyes, never looking away, saying nothing.

“I seem to be lost,” I said. “Can you tell me how to get to the Dallas highway?”

“Which way you coming from?” he asked. His voice was as steady and dark as his eyes. It hadn't changed.

“From Meridian.”

“Well, you missed it. Go back to town. A sign in the square tells you which way. Highway Sixty-seven.”

I made no move to go. We kept staring into each other's eyes. He frowned slightly, as if trying to recall something. The woman behind me coughed and shifted in her chair.

“How's that again?” I asked.

“Highway Sixty-seven's the one you want. Go back to Meridian. There's a sign in the square with an arrow pointing to Sixty-seven. Turn that way. When you get to the highway, turn right. It'll take you right to Dallas.” He didn't move, didn't gesture.

I waited for him to say more. He didn't. “Much obliged,” I said. I felt strangely light, as if relieved of some dark, indefinite duty. I turned toward the car.

Isabel was staring through the windshield, wide-eyed. When we were past the gate she asked, “What did you say to him?”

“I asked directions to Dallas.”

“That's all?”

“I asked him to repeat it.”

“He knew you. His eyes never left you. It took my breath away.”

“Maybe he thought he ought to know me.”

Isabel touched my arm. “Don't just leave it at that,” she said.

The next morning I wrote to Ted and Pat. “I'm having a special birthday,” I said. And I wrote to him and said, “I'm the man in the red car, and I'm your eldest son.”

Only Ted and Pat replied.

“Maybe he never got the letter,” Isabel said.

“I don't know,” I said. “Don't worry.”

I remember seeing Audie Murphy on the cover
of Life
with his Medal of Honor hanging around his neck. The most decorated American soldier of World War II. He looked about twelve years old. As I was growing up, I saw all his movies, I think. Or nearly all. He never seemed to grow older, maybe because he already was old
.

The Hero's Hometown

The young woman at the cash register in Woody's store regards the visitor with blank wonderment. “I never heard of him,” she says.

“Audie Murphy. The most decorated soldier of World War II. He was from here.”

“Oh. Well, I wasn't born then.”

She hasn't read the historical marker that stands forlornly beside U.S. 69 on the southern edge of town: “Most decorated soldier in World War II. Born 4.5 miles south, June 20, 1924, sixth of nine children of tenant farmers Emmett and Josie Killian Murphy. Living on various farms, Audie Murphy went to school through the eighth grade in Celeste—considered the family's hometown.”

The marker's flat prose goes on to sketch Audie's childhood of bleak poverty, his war record of extraordinary courage and bravery, his career as a movie actor. He was one of the most popular Western stars of the 1950s, but his most famous role was as himself in
To Hell and Back
, his memoir of his war experiences.

The marker's last lines tell of his death in the crash of a private plane in 1971. He was forty-six years old, survived by a widow and two sons.

To those born after V-E Day, it's just history, as remote from their own lives as the War of the Roses. But a few in the town and the surrounding countryside still remember the baby-faced buck private who marched away to fight the Nazis and the somehow different first lieutenant who returned three years later as the most honored soldier in American history.

Audie was credited with killing or capturing more than 240 German soldiers. He had received a battlefield commission and thirty-three military citations and awards, including the Medal of Honor and every other medal for valor that the United States can bestow, plus three awarded by France and one by Belgium. He was wounded three times. When he was discharged, his face was on the cover of
Life
. And when he came home, he wasn't yet twenty-one years old.

Audie's life was never easy, his old friends say. Even after the war, even while basking in the nation's adoration and winning wealth and fame in Hollywood, he always seemed under an invisible burden that he couldn't lay down.

“He come back here after the war in a brand new Buick convertible and decided we needed to go rabbit hunting in that car that very night,” says Monroe Hackney, Audie's closest boyhood buddy. “We went flying over them back roads. We had a ball. But Audie never was really happy after the war. He never could get settled down. The war had a whole lot of effect on him.”

“He was a very private person,” says Mr. Hackney's wife, Martha. “He was shy. He didn't like the praise he got when he come home. He said the real heroes of the war was those that was killed. He sat down and visited with me for two hours one morning after Monroe had gone to work. He told me things. He wasn't happy with Hollywood. He said, ‘Martha, I think I should buy a section of land in West Texas, and you and Monroe can live on it. It would be a place for me to hide out. I am so tired of crowds.' ”

He never bought the land in West Texas. He never lived again in Celeste after the war, nor in the community of Kingston, where another historical marker stands near the site of his birth, nor in Farmersville, which erected a stone monument to him in its square, nor in Greenville, whose public library has an Audie Murphy Room full of photographs and paintings of him, nor in Addison, where he owned a ranch for six months, then sold it. (His house is now Dovie's restaurant.)

“Every town in this area from Bonham to Greenville claims to be where Audie Murphy lived,” says Danny Lipsey, proprietor of Lipsey's Grocery in Kingston.

But Audie remained in Hollywood, a place whose culture he hated, according to his biographers. There he married a starlet and divorced her and married again. He gambled heavily and suffered recurring nightmares about the war, and would wake up screaming, gun in hand, and shoot at mirrors, lamps, and light switches.

But he returned often to visit with those who had befriended him in the days when he and his mother and his eight brothers and sisters were living on the brink of starvation in a country town where nobody else had much, either.

Neil Williams, who still lives in a white frame house about a mile from where Audie was born, worked beside him in the cotton fields when they were fifteen or sixteen years old. “Those rows were only thirty-six inches apart,” he says. “When you're hoeing cotton up and down them all day, you get to know each other pretty well. Audie and I even had to share the same bed in the upper story of that old farmer's house.”

The historical marker is incorrect, Mr. Williams says. “Audie never got to the eighth grade. He had four years of schooling at Celeste and one over there at Floyd. Then his daddy run off, and Audie had to quit school to take care of his family.”

Emmett Murphy—a “drinking man,” they say in Celeste—simply went away one day and left his wife and children to fend for themselves. Audie, who was about eleven at the time, became the family's chief breadwinner.

“He really come up the hard way,” Mr. Williams says. “I mean, just really
hard
. The Depression was on during the time we was growing up, and not anybody had any money hardly. But the Murphys was as broke as the Ten Commandments. They actually didn't have enough to eat sometimes. A fellow I knew had a turnip patch. One winter, when the ground was froze, he looked out the window and saw Audie out there with a short-handled grubbing hoe, trying to dig some of them turnips out. His family was living in a boxcar at the time.”

The blackland prairie of Hunt County was cotton country in those days. Little one hundred-acre family farms surrounded Celeste, and the farmers raised enough cotton to keep four gins busy. U.S. 69, the town's main street, was lined with grocery and drugstores, cafes, gas stations, a couple of honky-tonks, and four doctors' offices. When the 1940 census was taken, 730 people lived there.

“It was a good little town,” says Bill Caldwell, who grew up in Celeste but lives twelve miles down the road in Greenville now. “We had a hardware store, a washateria, a cafe. There was a place that sold coal and grain. There was a couple of hotels.” They all huddled at the foot of a tall water tower in the town's center. “Celeste was poor, but everybody seemed happy,” Mr. Caldwell says.

Neighbors gave milk, eggs, butter, and chickens to the Murphys sometimes, and Audie worked for whoever would hire him to do whatever needed to be done. In his spare time, he wandered the prairie with his single-shot .22 rifle, hunting squirrels and rabbits for the family table.

“Audie could hear a squirrel walking two miles away,” says Mr. Hackney, who often accompanied him. “He was an excellent shot. You know them Big Little Books kids used to have? Me and him would hold them up and shoot them out of each other's hands with our rifles. That was real stupid, but neither one of us ever got shot.”

Audie loved guns, his friends say, and would play dangerous pranks with them, firing over people's heads or near their feet to frighten them. “He always had some kind of firearm close by,” Mr. Williams says, “and he didn't seem to fear them much. My daddy taught me when I was a small boy to respect those firearms as dangerous. Audie didn't seem to think they were. He was a good shot, though. He never hurt nobody.”

Mr. Caldwell remembers buying a revolver from Audie when he was only twelve years old. “My grandmother had died, and they split up the inheritance,” he recalls. “I got ten dollars as my part. Audie had this old pistol that he had gotten somewhere, and I paid him my inheritance for it. Then I got afraid my dad was going to find out about it. I tried to find somebody to buy it off of me, and finally a guy said he wanted it. I sold it to him on credit and never got my money for it.”

Although small of stature—5-foot-7 and 130 pounds when he entered the Army—Audie is remembered in Celeste as a hot-tempered scrapper and a daredevil.

“He had more nerve than anybody I ever knew,” Mr. Williams says. “One time him and Monroe, his best friend, and Robert Cawthon climbed the water tower, to that platform that goes around the bottom of the tank, and Robert and Monroe was sitting there with their legs dangling over the side, and they noticed Audie wasn't with them. They went all around that tank looking for him, but he wasn't there. Then they saw this little bitty ladder that led to a big ball on top of the tank. And Audie had climbed that little bitty ladder and was sitting on that ball, right on the tip top of the tower.”