Martin Marprelate
Open Source since 1588
Tumbleweed
Leaving Texas
I. Abilene December 26, 1929
These are the moments that catch me. I veer away from the dining chair I occupied for thirty-five years, hoping that no one saw me about to sit down.
I am the one who insisted that Gray and Caroline sit at the head of the table the day of Wooten’s funeral. Gray resisted. He thought there should at least be some waiting period. For what? Wooten isn’t going to reoccupy the position. Our generation’s king has died and a new generation has assumed the throne. Long live the king.
Besides, the day would not be any easier if we just left Wooten’s chair empty.
Change is inevitable. It can’t be resisted. So everyone shifts in the dining room. Gray becomes the head of the family and I am put to the side with the children where the dowager queen belongs.
Still, it seems to take a long time to adapt. When do well-ingrained habits disappear? It seems I forget that he’s gone ten times a day. I look at the hatrack and expect to see his hat. I hear footsteps and think it is him. I start upstairs to tell him something and then get jolted with renewed awareness on the first step.
Just like tonight when I started to sit in Carolyn’s chair.
It has been almost two years now. It’s annoying.
Jay has jumped up to pull out my chair, which is next to him. He gives a quick triumphant glance at his cousin, nine-year-old Hoot who pretends not to notice.
Jay pushes in the chair with all of his five-year-old weight, a futile act until I lift myself awkwardly and then he almost slams me into the table. Looking proud, he sits down next to me.
I give Jay a solemn nod as I sit. Children don’t need praise. They just need feedback. “Thank you.”
I look at him, waiting.
“You’re very welcome,” he says and I smile.
Carolyn comes in and lights the candles in the center of the table. We’ve had electric lights for years, of course. But Wooten always liked to eat in candlelight. “Food tastes better when you don’t look too closely,” he would say and then add, “Which is not insulting to the cooks.” Because, of course, it was insulting to the cooks.
Four-year-old Evelyn carefully brings in the rolls, holding the plate in front of her as if they would spill on her dress. Hoot jumps up to help her, putting them in the center of the table.
He looks at me and I nod my head just slightly.
He smiles.
Honestly, what could be better than this?
When Wooten built houses for Gray and Lora on our lot, he asked only that evening supper be taken together. For him, this was the culmination of the day. He and I would sit at the head of the long table, with our son Gray and his family on one side and our daughter Lora and her family on the other.
Wooten beamed at them every night. “More valuable than gold!” he’d say.
“Good, because we have more family than we have gold,” I’d answer.
He’d wink at me.
The men are coming in together. The children jump from their chairs to greet their fathers. “Daddy, we have new chicks,” Evelyn announces as Hoot says, “I got a home run today.” Julian bends down to each of them.
Gray picks up three-year-old Junior and squats so that Jay can display his boo-boo.
“More valuable than gold,” I tell Wooten in my mind.
But when they straighten up, I see that Gray and Julian both look haggard.
Christmas this year was sparse. All four of them – Gray and Carolyn, Julian and Lora – were struggling to make the holiday festive for their children. Their gaiety was forced. Their footsteps were heavy when they thought they were alone. The couples stayed close together, words quietly spoken between them.
Caroline and Lora are putting the dishes of mashed potatoes, black-eyed peas, and fresh ham down on the table. They don’t look much better than their husbands.
Everyone sits and Hoot does the blessing. “Bless this food to our use and us to thy service. Amen.”
I remember the preacher from the East coast who was visibly surprised by our short blessing. Wooten told him, “In Texas, everything is big – even our appetite. We just tell God what he needs to know and dig in!”
I frowned at Wooten.
The Reverend laughed and he dug in.
The four adults at the table talk of weather but just short of meaningful weather. No one comments on the lack of rain or the incessant wind. They talk of customers at the shop, but not of the unsold inventory and unpaid bills. They talk about how the gamblers in the East have had their comeuppance with the crash of the stock market in October and assure each other that Texas will be unaffected.
“One advantage to being a frontier,” Carolyn agrees.
“And not having money to gamble away,” Lora adds.
“Nothing to lose,” Gray says and the words seem to fall off the table because everyone looks down.
This is not going to be a good year. Or, as Wooten would say, “Next year will be better.” The man was an optimist.
He and the town newspaper…. Trying to get actual news from the Abilene Reporter is like squeezing the final drops out of a lemon. The worse the news, the more the Reporter cheers everyone on. New Yorkers are jumping out of windows but Texas won’t be affected. There’s a drought but creative Abilene farmers are simply growing other crops.
As if other crops need less rain than wheat…
A drought is bad enough but this disaster has come in threes. The drought makes it harder to produce a bushel. Each bushel is worth less than half of its value during the Great War. And whatever was saved during the good years has been lost by the failure of the rural banks.
During the Great War, a bushel of corn sold for $1.60. It is now sixty-seven cents. Less than half the revenue for the same amount of work. As Wooten always said, when prices go down expenses can be cut and cut until there’s nothing left to sell.
Rural banks have been failing since the War ended. These banks serve their community. Farmers deposit money borrowed by farmers for land and equipment. When commodity prices drop, depositor farmers want to withdraw their money from the bank at the same time that borrower farmers are unable to pay. Five thousand rural banks failed between 1921 and 1928. Two billion dollars of deposits were lost by people who could not absorb the loss.
I mentioned this to Gray before Christmas but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. He became unusually irritable. “Mother, Julian and I are doing what needs to be done.”
Clearly I have gone from Queen to Dowager Queen.
Wooten and I would talk, but he frustrated me. His optimism addled his brain.
Christmas is over. I wasn’t going to create problems before Christmas but it is time for the kids to tell me what’s going on. I dealt with financial issues long before they were born. Tonight they are going to tell me what I need to know.
The brief silence is broken by the loud sudden squeal of two-year-old, Carrie. “A joy explosion,” Lora calls it. Carrie, still holding her little arms in the air, looks expectantly from one adult to another. Usually everyone laughs.
Not tonight.
“Not at the table,” Carolyn admonishes quietly, handing her a carrot.
Carrie throws the carrot and it bounces on the table. This would normally get an immediate reaction. Instead, Carolyn lifts the tray over the baby’s head and pulls her out of the high chair. Carolyn clutches her, as if the child were a shield.
The boys are feeling the tension too. Hoot and Jay are kicking each other under the table. Jay kicks me. Hard. It hurts. His eyes wide, he turns to me, words about to tumble from his mouth.
I shake my head and frown. He looks relieved.
We have an unspoken agreement. They will treat me like the fierce old lady I am and I will, in turn, keep our secrets.
I’ll bet there will be a bruise on my shin.
“May we be excused?” Hoot asks, looking at me. Somehow I retained the power to start and end the meal even with Gray and Carolyn in the throne seats.
When I nod, they scoot back their chairs, shout “Thank you!” over their shoulders, darting out the door, their chairs left askew. Evelyn and Junior climb off their chairs and toddle after them.
My cowardly adult kids look down at their plates with unusual concentration.
“What’s going on?” I demand.
All four of them look up and lower their forks. I’m sure I sense relief. They’re like little kids who have done something wrong waiting for their mother to find out. Gray is forty years old. Lora is thirty-six. Still afraid of Mother?
They all look to Julian.
Julian looks down for a second, adjusts his napkin. Then he looks up, meeting my eyes directly.
“I am taking the family to California. We are hoping you will come with us.”
There it is. Straight out. That’s Julian.
He looks more like Wooten than his own son does. Gray is built like me. He’s medium height, more petite than bulky. Julian is tall and solid, exaggerating both with his big Stetson and heavy boots and walking like he just got off a horse – the way his father-in-law did.
But where Wooten would have prepared a long wind-up story, Julian just lays it out.
I approve. Wooten made much ado over nothing.
When I look at Gray, he says immediately, “I am staying. And you are welcome to remain here with me.”
I am welcome to stay here with him? This is my house. Wooten and I built this house. I designed the kitchen we are sitting in. This is my house – not his. He might be welcome to remain here with me… But I am not remaining here with him.
I close my eyes. I know I’m being irrational. It is almost as if I am looking for a reason to lash out at Gray instead of Julian.
This isn’t a decision to be made. It is a decision that has been made.
“There is peace in impossibility,” my father used to say. “When something cannot be changed, you decide to accept it and be happy or you decide to be unhappy. Your feelings won’t change anything.”
Julian and Lora have decided to move to California and I can stay here or come with them.
In any case, all of this will be gone.
Everything we have here tonight will be gone.
This meal with my children and grandchildren will be a precious memory. The candles that have flickered in the center of the table for forty years will be dark. The sounds of cousins playing like siblings will fade away.
I can handle this. I’m not going to dwell on this right now.
When I look up, I see that Julian has been watching me. He says now, “The business here in Abilene cannot support two families anymore.”
I look at Gray. Will it be able to support one family? I don’t dare ask.
Did Wooten know?
Of course he did. Like the newspaper, he was overly optimistic those months before he died. He promised a world cruise. “We are going to spend three months just seeing the world,” he whispered as he held me tight in his long arms and forced me to match his dance steps with no music. “I’ll show you London and Paris and Rome…”
I should have known things were bad.
Wooten had this silly idea that any promise he made to me had to come true. He took his word seriously. He pretended that he was joking when he said that a promise was sacred, his fist against his heart. But he meant it. In thirty-five years the man never broke a promise – even to me.
So he probably thought that all he had to do was make the promise and then everything would be alright.
He believed that the universe would never let him disappoint me.
Had this been what caused his stroke? He wasn’t that old. He was just seventy-two years old.
Credit, Gray is explaining. The government was pushing merchants to offer credit so farmers could buy equipment to increase their production. And the interest rates sometimes went as high as 10%. With a ten percent profit margin, what merchant wouldn’t offer credit?
They called it an installment plan.
And it worked. Wooten’s automobile shop had been booming all through the 20’s. The lumber company was hardly able to keep lumber in inventory. Business was great.
But when the crops fail, lenders don’t get paid.
“Surely everyone didn’t default on their payments?” I ask.
Julian looks down. The others are looking to him. He looks up and says quietly, “We have defaulted on ours.” He takes a deep shaky breath. “There is no money.”
No money. How can there possibly be no money?
No one is looking at me. Their heads are down as if they are praying.
We still have the lumberyard and the farm and the automobile repair shop. Even if things are tight, they generate money…
Gray takes a deep breath. “Everything was mortgaged.”
His voice breaks and his eyes shine in the candlelight. “Everything except this house.” He wipes his whole face with the napkin and a part of me wants to admonish him. Napkins are for the lips.
“The shops, the fixtures, the tools, the product, the trucks… They’re all gone.”
Gray adds, “He didn’t want to foreclose on his neighbors.” His voice breaks.
Carolyn, so far away on the other side of the table, squeezes the baby, tears in her eyes.
Lora and Julian are holding hands under the table.
Wooten’s inability to hurt other people had just broken up his family.
I am furious. “I don’t have any problem going to each one of those farmers and collecting from them, hardship or not. I will take the chairs from their tables and the cows from their barns. My family or theirs – it won’t be my family that suffers!” I have to restrain myself from standing up and marching out right now.
Gray shakes his head sadly. “Mother, it’s over. We were in default when Pop died. We tried to negotiate but the bank would not even consider it.”
The bank? One of the managing partners is Horace, Wooten’s half-brother. He wouldn’t foreclose on his brother, would he?
Of course he would. He’s building his big hotel.
Wooten would not take his friends’ assets but his brother – half-brother – had no such qualms.
Wooten always said that Horace would scalp his mother for a dollar. But he thought he was kidding.
Apparently he wasn’t.
How did this happen? Wooten was so good at business. How did he miss this? He bought a farm, then sold it and opened a livery stable before he had any horses. In 1915 when only a few people had automobiles he bought an auto repair and supply shop. He had the first phone in town. When the railroad came, he opened a lumberyard. This was a man who had moved seamlessly from livery to car park, from flophouse to hotel, from carriages to automobiles.
As one business dipped, he was always able to find another.
Perhaps he had just been exhausted. He had remade himself so many times. Maybe he had consumed his prodigious energy and death was preferable to starting over.
Oh, Wooten. Why didn’t you share this with me? Or even the boys?
That weight carried alone would have caused anyone’s arteries to burst.
Now I understand Amanda’s behavior yesterday. I ran into her at the general store and the whole time we talked she acted like she wanted to run away. Her shoulders were twisted away from me even while she was looking at me.
Amanda’s husband is a farmer. Ostensibly, or at least yesterday, he was one of the more successful farmers. He bought up land whenever he could. He probably has more than a hundred acres now, most of them under cultivation.
And I’ll bet he owed Wooten a lot of money. Those barns were built with Wooten’s lumber. The paint was bought at his yard. The tractor was bought from Wooten.
At least Wooten could have taken the tractor. Someone might still be able to afford to buy a tractor. Wooten wouldn’t do that. We’d had that discussion before. “How can he pay me back if he doesn’t have a tractor?” he would ask. “He can’t farm without a tractor.”
Oh, Wooten, look what you’ve done…
Who else? Probably everybody. The whole town owed Wooten money.
Wooten would never have turned anyone away.
Amanda and everyone in Abilene knows that Wooten’s family has been destroyed because he wouldn’t destroy theirs.
No wonder she was so uncomfortable.
“So California it is,” I say.
And we women get up to clear off the table.
I. Possibilities
I am already missing Abilene and we won’t be leaving for another three months. The house in Beverly Hills is supposed to be finished in April. If it isn’t done, Julian said that he will be renting an apartment for the five of us, Julian, Lora, Hoot, Evelyn and myself.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Julian would want to move. We talked about it a few months before Wooten died. But I thought it was just usual talk. People don’t do everything they think about.
He was clearly thinking about it.
It was September 1927, right before the big county fair. The newspaper was touting the benefits of Abilene to lure fairgoers into bringing their business here.
I really should change my attitude about the Reporter. It provides a wonderful service. It promotes Abilene the way a man tells his mother about his fiancé. But I like facts, not propaganda, and it had particularly irritated me that day.
I had tossed the newspaper next to me and was on the porch shelling peas for dinner.
Wooten opened the door from the house very slowly, sticking out only his head. He looked to the left and right and pretended not to see me. He whispered something to the children behind him. First Hoot, then Jay, and finally Evelyn carefully slipped out while Wooten held the door, looking to the left and right as if scouting for opposition.
I remained intent on the pea pod in my hand.
The children tiptoed down the porch steps and suppressed their laughter as they gathered behind the sycamore tree. In plain view of me, of course.
Wooten carefully closed the door so it didn’t make any noise. He turned to me and winked.
Then he stealthily joined the kids at the tree and they walked down the street, checking behind them frequently to see if anyone knew they had escaped.
This was an old game. He would sneak the kids out for ice cream if they promised under penalty of death-by-arrow-from-Robin- Hood-himself that they would never ever tell Mother or Grandmother Wooten.
Shortly after the escapees disappeared down the road, Julian came out. He sat down on the chair beside me and reached for the newspaper.
“So President Harding has shocked the nation by asking for wooden toothpicks,” I said.
“That is appalling,” Julian agreed.
“Front page news.”
“Of course.”
“First time a large box of old-fashion wooden toothpicks has ever graced the White House table.”
“An impeachable offense,” Julian said agreeably.
He bent his head to begin reading but I gave him some peas instead. “I’ll tell you everything it says. Abilene is the center of the greatest agricultural section in the United states. It is the very best place to live with growth in every section of its economy. And, of course, it’s weather is perfect.”
“Indeed.” He expertly pops peas from their pod, and pops some in his mouth.
“And we produce five percent of all of the cotton grown in the state, if you include Jones and Runnels Counties. Five percent. That’s impressive, right?”
This is when Julian from Dallas has to tread carefully. Although he had lived in Abilene for ten years, Julian still let it be known early in conversations with strangers that he was from Dallas – intending to make sure that they knew he was not from Abilene.
He didn’t need to say it.
He doesn’t have the Abilene twang. In fact, he has almost no accent at all. People would know that he wasn’t from California, perhaps, but they would have a difficult time isolating his origin. When he is around people, he tends to adopt their accents and mannerisms. That’s Julian. Trying to make everyone comfortable.
I must have been bored because normally I would not keep pushing. Admittedly, it was a bit of a challenge to goad Julian. “Five percent. That’s impressive, right?”
Julian looks at me and sighed. Obviously, he knows me too well. “Well that’s about 3000 square miles. Texas is about 270,000 square miles. So five percent isn’t bad. We’re about 1% of Texas.” He doesn’t sound either enthusiastic or impressed.
“Outlook is good for business,” I say. “More than two dozen Abilene firms have branched out. In almost every kind of business.” Branched out, I think. It could be because business is doing really well. Or it could be that they need new markets.
He shucks a few pods and then pops some peas in his mouth. I wonder how many are getting to the bowl. “Impressive.” He does not sound impressed.
“I get worried when the paper starts having whole sections devoted to the wonders of Abilene,” I said.
“That’s all for people coming in for the fair.”
“They interviewed Horace, but I don’t see that they interviewed you. They ask a good question. Why are you here and why did you stay?”
He says nothing.
“So what would you say if they interviewed you? Why are you here and why did you stay?”
“I am here for my family and I stay for my family.”
I was irritating the man. Julian is one of those people who finds it impossible to say something he knows is untrue. And he doesn’t like conflict. He tries to evade direct questions that would require him to be impolite or hurt someone.
I am not that fragile. I kept pushing.
“What do you think Abilene needs?” I asked.
“All the things that paper says we already have.”
“But what’s really missing?” Now I was really curious.
I could see him surrender. He shrugged. “It’s not a city.”
“What’s the difference between Abilene and a city. Why isn’t it a city?”
He looked around.
I still remember how it looked that day. It was fall – the most beautiful time of the year in Abilene. The street and the trees were scattered with reds, yellows, oranges and browns. There was a soft breeze causing the tree leaves and branches to dance shadows upon the new sidewalks. There were tiny puffs of white clouds against a blue sky.
“Possibilities,” he finally answered slowly. He put some peas into the bowl. “Possibilities,” he repeated. “There just aren’t very many possibilities here.”
Possibilities.
I knew immediately that word would stick in my mind and I didn’t like it. I tried to push it away with a laugh that sounded strange even to me.
So I said: “Possibilities? What more could you want?” I nodded to the paper. “We have great schools, diverse crops, successful businesses, healthy air, good water, and lots of land.”
When I was intentionally obtuse, Wooten would laugh.
Julian dropped a pod in the basket for the chickens and then looked right at me, turning his body towards me. “Look, I can’t make money unless people have money. Poor people buy only what they need and nothing more. How can I make money selling anything when no one has money to buy?
“If I have a product worth a dollar, I hope to get a profit of ten or twenty cents for its sale. But if nobody has a dollar my product is useless. The best product in the world won’t sell if people don’t have the money to buy it.
“In Abilene, we are trying to pull water from dry wells.”
He leaned back, as if already regretting his outburst. More quietly, he said, “I can’t make money in a place where no one has money.”
I felt terrible.
I thought I was being intentionally obtuse. In fact, I was just obtuse.
And now I knew how intensely shackled Julian felt in Abilene.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything.
We saw Wooten coming back with the children. Hoot was walking bent over a little with his hands on his stomach. Did Wooten give them two scoops?
Julian smiled as he watched them. “This is a good life,” Julian said and he sounded like he really meant it. But I remember thinking that he wanted to add some caveats to that.
It wasn’t good enough.
At the table the children were unusually quiet. Jay said the blessing and then I lifted my fork and everyone was supposed to eat. Hoot and Jay and Evelyn looked down on their full plates with looks of dismay. Evelyn actually had tears in her eyes. But when Hoot slowly forked a piece of chicken and raised it to his mouth as if he were about to eat poison, Carolyn started laughing.
Then we all started laughing.
Wooten was chided by everyone and took the scolding in good form.
Wooten shook his head sadly. “You can’t buy happiness. You can buy ice cream but…”
Then all of us together said, “You have to eat it before it melts.”
And we laughed.
Wooten and the children were sternly excused from the table, the children consoling him as they left the room.
Really, Julian, what was the value of that moment? Could we have had that moment in California?
Could we have had it without Wooten?
Change is inevitable. Unavoidable. That’s what makes moments like that so precious. It isn’t just that you don’t know when you’ll have those moments again.
It is that you won’t ever have them again.
II. Leaving Texas
I can’t sleep. Leaving Texas. Leaving Abilene.
People talk about having roots. I’ve never thought about what it means before. But roots must hold people the way they do plants because I feel them tightening inside me.
“This is a seed,” my mother said. “It dies when you remove it from the soil.”
I am sixty-five years old. I have spent all my entire life in Taylor County, Texas – born in Buffalo Gap before there was a county. I’ve never left the state.
Now I am going to California.
I can never be a Californian. What will become of the children?
My father used to say that there were two types of people. Texans. And everyone else.
Though he had come from Tennessee and then Missouri, he considered himself a Texan. It was a badge of honor, courage, persistence, resilience and strength. “I am a Texan” meant so much more than “I was born in Texas.” No one is just born in Texas. People are born into Texas or of Texas or out of Texas. People don’t become Texans.
They are Texans.
“You are a Texan,” my father said as he lifted me up onto his shoulders for a piggy back ride. “You are a Texan,” my father told me when he lifted me onto my first horse. “You are a Texan,” my father said as he threw the last shovels of dirt on my son’s grave.
Texans endure.
I was the only one of the three children my mother birthed in Texas to survive. It made me not only a Texan by birth but also a Texan in spirit.
I am a Texan before I am an American.
Texas is a part of the United States but the United States is not a part of us. The rest of the country is the East or the North.
“Texas was its own nation the year that you were born,” my father said
Though Texas joined the Confederate States of America our intent was for Texas to become independent again. Texas was never controlled by the English or Dutch or even the French. Texas was a part of Mexico. And when it rebelled from Mexico, it was its own country, its sovereign government sharing the continent with Mexico, the United States and Canada. For ten years, we were the independent Republic of Texas.
We reluctantly joined the United States 15 years before the Civil War began.
In our view, it was perfectly acceptable for us to withdraw from a union we voluntarily joined. We weren’t confederates. We were Texas.
Texas didn’t give up easily.
We are not Americans by choice.
We did not surrender when the Confederate States of America surrendered on May 9, 1865. We were occupied, but still resisting.
It was not until August 20, 1866 that President Johnson could finally proclaim that “peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole United States of America.”
Even then, Texas did not have a place in Congress for another 4 years — until March 30, 1870.
We may have lost the war but none of us actually surrendered or submitted. We remain Texans.
Though we joined the Confederates, we are not southerners.
No Texas man would ever be mistaken for a Virginia gentleman or a Georgia dandy. It would be an insult to his manhood. Texas men are Texans.
And strong men need fierce women.
Texas women don’t ride side-saddle. We don’t go fox hunting with fake baits either. We can rope a calf and shoot birds out of trees.
We can don the gowns and smile the smile. We can flirt and dance and giggle like any debutante.
But beware a smiling Texan in a ballgown.
She might have a gun under her skirts.
We detest the southern belles and their tepid expressions. We laugh at the lives of ridiculous women in the moving pictures. The weak and the frail are chosen by birth and the herd should be culled as needed.
My father always said, “Safety first.”
We greet strangers first with our gun and then with smiles. I learned how to shoot and aim a gun as soon as I could carry one. By the time I was ten years old, I could shoot a rock from across our yard.
Ten years ago, in 1920, the Feds amended the constitution to allow women the vote. Texas was the first southern state to ratify that amendment. Women had already been voting in Texas for two years. We never needed the federal government to give us our equality.
We took it straight from our men.
That’s why everything in Texas is bigger. With women like us, men have to be bigger and stronger too.
Only the best survive Texas.
In 1930, it might seem like this is exaggerating. It is difficult to slip into memories and accurately judge the feelings they represent.
But only someone who is immune to deep love would fail to understand the relationship between land and the people who dwell on it. Texas air smells like bluebells. Texas sounds of crickets, bluejays, and the wind blowing through trees, The heat and humidity feels just right. Surrounded by sweet familiarity, the body sinks into a cloud of trust, like the child asleep in the arms of the mother.
These are the sounds and smell and feel of home. My home. Abilene, Texas.
Nothing else will ever feel like that.
Texas has changed a great deal in the sixty-five years since I was born.
When Father and Mother first arrived in 1857, there were Indian and animal paths – no roads. Taylor County didn’t exist. There was no government, no taxes, no services, no security. My father was told: travel in one direction, find land you believe is unclaimed, build a ranch, gather cattle, and put up fences.
That’s what they did.
We would call them squatters now. They claimed land just by being there.
“We could always move if it was staked,” Father said. In those days, it was move or fight when property rights were challenged. Truth was with the person who had the most fire power.
When the county incorporated and could collect taxes, they gave Father title to the land. He gratefully paid the taxes to claim title on the land. “Words on paper are more powerful than a gun. Especially as you get older,” Father told me.
To say the ranch was isolated is to understate the obvious. Unchallenged land, even in Texas, was not along well-defined roads. Even the animals hadn’t left trails to our ranch. If a cowboy or even an Indian came to our ranch, we assumed they were lost.
The closest town now would be Buffalo Gap.
In 1880, the “roads” for Buffalo Gap had hardly been graded. They had four streets in one direction and three in the other but the streets tapered off rather than ending. There was nothing else. No sewer. No running water. No electricity. Just graded roads and dirt.
The investors sold these lots for cash or “county script.” County script was a mortgage backed by the investors who owned the county. In 1880, they held an action. There were five commercial and twenty-four residential lots sold for a total of $850.00. A total of $50 cash changed hands. The rest were sold by company script.
The rumor was that the investors simply traded each other’s property back and forth to make people believe that the town was attractive to people. Horse auctions work like that. If no one else wants a horse, then no one wants a horse. Bidding needs to be primed. If several people want the horse, then the desire for the horse increases.
Even then, there were only two sales.
They couldn’t give the dirt away.
I love Texas. I love Abilene. I love Buffalo Gap.
But this is not the sickly blind love of infatuation. This is the hard-earned love of scraping the dirt until plants arise from it. This is the love of surviving together days and nights of unrelenting humid heat. This is the love of dependency, of searching the sky for clouds and hoping the cloud in the horizon is not one of the plagues.
I have a Texan love for Texas. Like we earned each other.
East Texas was cattle country. It was all about cattle – wild beasts that needed to be controlled and moved across space. This required people – men. Young men, adventuresome men who could endure the long days on the saddle and the dangers inherent to pushing around wild animals with long horns on land crawling with rattlesnakes and wolves and skunks and mountain lions.
The original Americans were still scattered through Texas – having fled the more hospitable areas as the English flooded the continent. We had strong Comanches, who specialized in fast raids – especially of the best horses and fattest cattle. The Kiowa were more stable but not friendly to cattlemen trampling their land with a few hundred head of cattle or the young men who tormented their young ladies and kill their young men.
And there were the thieves. No better place to be a roadman than in Texas where might is right and the gun is law. Rustlers risked death in their vocation but they had the advantage of surprise and nothing was more profitable.
While the land of East Texas remained stable, the people moved on it like a circus.
Buildings had false fronts to make a one-story box look grand and were used for multiple purposes. Upon arrival of the cattle drive, Buffalo Gap had a hotel, general store, multiple saloons, several lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Merchants followed the cattle drive with alcohol, warm beds, shoes, weapons, bullets, girls, and clothes.
Buildings emptied as one cattle drive left would fill when the next one returned Add cots and call it a hotel. Bring merchandise, and call it a general store. The same building becomes a saloon when furnished with liquor and chairs. The cattle drive comes and leaves, only scuffed up dirt, trash and human excrement to prove the town was ever inhabited.
The newspapers in the east didn’t know the difference between truth and fiction.
Depending on the source, in about 1880 Buffalo Gap had five saloons, three general stores, blacksmith shops, tailors, lawyers, and bakers. I’m not sure where they were…
Buffalo Gap was never more than a small strip. After a pathetic start, it became even more isolated when the railroad decided to go through the new town of Abilene instead. Then the county seat was moved from the Buffalo Gap to Abilene, striking the final blow for Buffalo Gap.
It didn’t make any difference to my father and mother. “We were here before Buffalo Gap and we see no reason to leave,” my father said when I suggested that he move to Abilene with Wooten and me.
I wasn’t surprised. My mother despised Wooten.
III. The trail
We will be driving to California on Route 66, the new national highway. Beverly Hills is 1,265 miles away. We’re leaving in April when the weather is mild, even through Arizona and the California desert.
So our family is on the move again…
I will be finishing my parents’ journey. From Tennessee to Missouri to Texas to California.
Assuming no deviations for water or food, my parents walked 1,689,600 steps from Larue, Tennessee to Abilene, Texas. In 1848, with two sons, aged one and two, they walked about 400 miles from Tennessee to Missouri where they were driven out by rocks as white trash. From Missouri to Texas, they walked another 600 miles with six children – three under the age of five where they were driven to the empty land.
I asked my father why he left. “Poverty is like being in a well. Even when you can get a foothold, it is slippery. Getting out seems impossible,” Father explained.
“So we just walked away.”
Part of the Martin Marprelate Returns collection