Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  I get up and go back to the ghosts on the square.

  It’s hard to concentrate on dinosaur tracks, a soapbox cart, and whirling dust while the living sit and sniff back their snot.

  inside the courthouse, seated behind a metal desk, I find a portly, elderly security guard in a light brown shirt, the butt of a pistol visible in his belt holster. Discovering that I’m Gussie’s grandchild, he throws up his arms in joy. Miss Walter! She was good people! Like most people here, my grandmother taught him in fourth grade. He has lived in Lockhart all his life. His thin gray hair is combed across his scalp. Formerly in the air force, he is retired now and tells me he can just as well sit here and guard the courthouse as guard his home. By rights the public are not admitted to the courtroom upstairs, but for Miss Walter’s grandchild, he gladly makes an exception. Step right in, he says as we stand in the doorway and peer inside. My grandmother used to give him a ride to school. She kept a jam jar in her cupboard, full of nickels and dimes. If someone needed money for milk at school, they could go to the cupboard and borrow some. She was good people, he says again, before I go back out into the sun.

  connecting with a place is difficult with four wheels underneath you, so I leave the car on the square and walk. I’m the only person on the sidewalk on the way out to my grandmother’s house. Enormous trees with dark green foliage look like they have been offering shade here for at least a hundred years. The biggest of the houses are those closest to the square. They resemble old steamships moored at quaysides, their sweeping, white-columned porches with wicker furniture make me think of chinking iced tea sipped copiously through the years.

  The time I visited my grandmother, she insisted on driving me into town and back. A one-mile walk, even in spring, was considered to be madness. I suspected her of being motivated by other, less altruistic considerations than saving her grandchild from heatstroke. She had just bought a new car from the Ford dealership, whose blue, red, and silver-colored triangular pennants still flutter between the lampposts on this street, I see now, and which apparently is owned by some other descendant of the Ur-Clarks—a second cousin of my father’s twice removed—and his sons.

  Gussie was ninety-two years old and wanted to show off her new Ford. It was only slightly faster than walking. We crawled along at fifteen miles an hour, windows down, my grandmother with the stem of her glasses between her teeth, the lens parts dangling beneath her chin. You may have noticed I’m wearin’ my glasses in a strange way, she said with a mischievous gleam in her eye. The doctor who had approved the renewal of her driving license had done so only on condition that she never drove without her glasses. It says in the driver’s license I have to wear ’em, she said, glasses in mouth. But I can’t see a hoot with ’em on. So this is how I wear ’em, in case anybody asks.

  Gradually the big houses are superseded by medium-sized ones. An elderly lady is holding a yard sale, as Gussie sometimes did, her lawn strewn with items. Wicker baskets, a lawn mower, a faded cooler box. Three women, backsides in the air, rummage through a wooden chest. I find a small rectangular bowl made of glass for a dollar. Can you guess what it was used for? the lady asks. I stare at the item. Business cards? Cigarettes! We laugh. No one offers their guests cigarettes any more.

  Down a side street are some lots with portable sheds on them, littered with junk. On one, an uprooted sign in the tall grass says: city of lockhart notice: Offensive conditions of the Code of Ordinances for the City of Lockhart. Underneath, a cross has been put next to Bush on premises.

  Farther along are some storehouses and wooden huts with peeling paint, sealed off with a rusty padlock. A sign: Wilson & Riggin Lumber Co. Finding beauty in the decay, I start to photograph, until a voice shouts out behind me: Are you from the insurance company? No. Well, photos are prohibited!

  I wonder how long they had been watching me on their video surveillance.

  Back on the sidewalk, I eventually come to the last house on the street, one of the smallest, but neat and respectable. An oblong of narrow horizontal boards painted yellow by the new owners. 930 W. San Antonio Street. I cannot think of that address without seeing my grandmother’s handwriting, her perfect, teacherly cursive slanting across the surface of a long, white envelope.

  •

  I go around the back in the hope of finding Preston’s pecan tree, but the only thing left of what used to be my grandmother’s pride is a rotten stump. Just as I’m leaving, a small pickup turns into the driveway and pulls up. The man who gets out doesn’t seem to mind me being on his property. I tell him I know his house. Without hesitation, he invites me in. It’s a little messy, I hope you don’t mind. A moment later I find myself standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, which now belongs to Leo and Desiree. It still has the same cupboards, the same pistachio-green walls. Clothes are dumped everywhere. Inflated balloons from a recent party. A banner on the wall says Feliz Cumpleaños! The door that led into the dining room has been replaced by a velvet curtain, and the dining room is now a bedroom. Dark curtains are drawn in front of the windows. Where the TV is, Gussie once kept the stones she guarded with such zeal, anyone would have thought they were twenty-four-carat gold nuggets. Seen through the filter of time, the things we choose to give meaning in life can seem so comical, so touchingly desperate. Our feeble gesticulations against the passage of time and inevitable death.

  The couple’s nephew sleeps in what was my dad’s and Peggy’s room, their son in my grandmother’s. We stand in the doorway. It’s cooler in the back, says Leo, moving a pink laundry basket off the bed and putting it down on the floor. It reminds me that my grandmother always gave that same reason for keeping to the bedroom and kitchen. Between the doors of the wardrobe where Gussie kept her clothes is a children’s drawing of a skull in bold colors. The eyes are marked as small yellow circles and seem to be staring at something far away, something very distant, perhaps not even visible.

  I don’t know if you believe those kind of things, says Leo. But my wife tells me she sometimes feels the presence of an old lady in this room.

  I tell him it was almost the only room my grandmother used, apart from the kitchen.

  He glances at his watch. His wife should be home soon. If I care to wait ten minutes, she could tell me about the presence she sometimes feels. The narrow band of light between the curtains tells me the afternoon is coming to an end. For some reason, I choose to decline Leo’s offer. I need to be on my way, I tell him. I’m not sure what I’m most afraid of. Finding out that my grandmother is still there in her bedroom, confused by the balloons, unable to find her glasses—or that she is not.

  Outside, Leo jabs a thumb at the stump. There was an old tree there, he says. We did what we could to save it, but after a drought, it just gave up. We gave it water, but it wasn’t enough. It dried out, he says. And that was it.

  They had a man come out and remove it, but the roots were so long that the whole property would have to be dug up. So they made do with chopping it down and leaving the stump behind. I hurry to say my goodbyes, nervous about Desiree coming home. It pains me that I can no longer hear my grandmother’s voice.

  the father has emerged in my dad. Since I was sixteen, I’ve traveled the world on my own, but only now that I’ve arrived in his hometown, do the realities of what this involves occur to him. This morning there is an email. He won’t be here for another ten days, and in the meantime he’s worried about me driving around Texas on my own with such limited experience as a motorist. Minor roads are one thing, interstates another. It’s every man for himself here, he writes. Or, he corrects himself, every person for every person’s self (this pc language is getting ridiculous).

  The matter is not improved by my occasionally having to find my way to a particular address and, at the same time, concentrate on driving the vehicle. So he’s bought a gps for me to use, and has even taken the trouble to explain to me that a gps is a device that knows the way to any address and can give me instructions as to how to get there.

 
; He’s having this gps sent to Doug Field, who was grandmother’s investment adviser, and is now managing my dad’s pension scheme. Doug’s office, my dad writes, is around the corner from the square, right opposite the place with the knives hanging from chains on the walls where we had barbecue; Kreuz’s was the name of the place back then, but now it’s called Smitty’s.

  Doug Field is as big as a phone booth. He comes forward to greet me as I step through the glass door of his office. You must be Mathilde, he says. Your dad called—something about a package? We shake hands, mine completely engulfed by his fleshy fist.

  Your grandmother was really somethin’ else, he says. She had a whole lot of personality.

  When Doug Field came to the town as a young investment adviser in the local Edward Jones branch in the early 1980s, my grandmother, a retired schoolteacher, owned $300,000 worth of shares purchased with money she earned selling cookies and investing her profits.

  She was proud of her success in the market, but would not allow her money to change her ways. People in the town had no idea about the fortune she was quietly accumulating out of her kitchen after she retired from school.

  She wouldn’t really talk about people, he says. But she would say this: All these people think I’m just a crazy ol’ woman over here, cookin’, fixin’, sellin’ these cookies. Little do they know what I’ve done.

  I tell Doug Field of my own surprise the time I drove with her down to Preston’s old bank on the square. She parked the car at the staff entrance around the back, the way she clearly was used to, and took the elevator up to the bank director with a box full of lemon cookies. She hadn’t made an appointment, and yet he received her with open arms as if she were his own mother, a permanent guest of honor. Immediately we were ushered into his office and sat down in plush armchairs. He had all the time in the world. Only when he started showing me pictures of his unmarried sons did I realize more fully that my grandmother’s finances might be healthier than I had imagined.

  Doug Field laughs. They used to hold their meetings in my grandmother’s house; money matters were dealt with in the dining parlor, and afterward they would go out into the kitchen for coffee and cookies. I loved her, he says. And we were buddies.

  The secretary, who has been standing beside us listening, goes out and comes back in with the package from my dad.

  You had yourself summa that barbecue yet? Doug Field nods in the direction of the redbrick building across the street.

  I’ve become a vegetarian since I was here last, I tell him. With that, everything goes silent. There I stand, a rattling rail in the reception area, European, city dweller, vegetable eater. I could just as well have said I was a Satantist. I’m not just un-American, I’m decidedly anti-Texas. What I am goes against everything Lockhart stands for.

  After some long moments, the secretary accommodates me and says she is sure you can get coleslaw over there. Coleslaw and crackers. But I think that’s about it. She turns to Doug Field and says: You would die if you didn’t get your meat.

  That’s for sure, he says, his face shining. I would just die.

  there can be all sorts of reasons not to eat meat, reasons concerning animal welfare, health, regard for the environment, and so on, but ever since I was a child, I’ve simply not cared for the sensation of chewing meat, invariably it felt like I was chewing muscle, and I found it hard to swallow. As time progressed, meat-eating became a habit in much the same way as paying your bills or wearing a knit cap when the wind blows, things that in themselves are no particular joy, but which have to be done. It was not until I reached my late twenties that I realized I did not have to eat meat. Nobody was forcing me. So I stopped.

  It was not that I was unable to eat it, but I’ve been a vegetarian for so long now that putting my teeth into a piece of meat would be unthinkable. The thought of doing so makes me feel sick. But I said nothing of this to Doug Field and his secretary. Being a nonbeliever is no reason to piss on somebody else’s god.

  Lunchtime is approaching, and the gravel parking area outside the former Kreuz’s is filling up. I unbox the gps and affix it to the windscreen with the suction cup. Turn left, it tells me in a female voice that sounds like Stephen Hawking. A pickup pulls in next to me; a guy in a cowboy hat jumps out and strides toward the building with the smoking chimney. His checkered back disappears through the swinging doors.

  The smoke coils up into the air and mingles with the smoke from all the other barbecue places: Black’s, the new Kreuz’s under the overpass on the access road, the Chisholm Trail bbq next to my motel. It hangs over downtown Lockhart, a smell of campfire and grilled meat. As with anyone else, it goes straight into my limbic system, not just because it awakens the primordial human in me, but because it reminds me of my grandmother.

  My family has always eaten at Kreuz Market, “the place with the knives,” founded by Mr. Kreuz in 1900. Two years before that, my great-grandfather had set up his saddle shop in the corresponding location on the next street. If you place a ruler between the buildings on a map, you can see they are only one hundred feet apart at the most. Poppa and Mr. Kreuz were good friends. I like to think they had a lot in common, both sons of German immigrants, both Freemasons, and maybe, like my great-grandfather, Mr. Kreuz was a volunteer fireman too. At any rate, they bought houses and settled down with their families right next to each other. Since then, generations of Walters have preferred the meat from Kreuz’s.

  I would pronounce the name Kreuz the way it’s pronounced in German, but my father and my grandmother have always called it Krites.

  Barbecued meat was an expansion of the normal meat market repertoire, Mr. Kreuz’s way of prolonging the life of the best cuts left unsold during the day, but it soon outstripped the shop’s raw meat in popularity. The customers could simply not wait until they got home, but pulled out their pocket knives right there in the shop and devoured the cooked meat, straight from the paper. Forks were unnecessary, knives and fingers were more than sufficient.

  I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what kind of clientele frequented the place when it first opened, whether it was a mixture of men and women, whites and Mexicans, or whether Black people were also among its customers. I assume those who ate there were all white, and perhaps mostly men. In the century that has passed since Kreuz opened his doors, the place has undoubtedly changed as much as society itself, and it strikes me that an important story could be told about American history if it were set in just such a barbeque joint in the southern states.

  White people of my grandmother’s generation would no longer dream of eating in the shop, but took the food home with them instead, respectably wrapped up. They fried their ring sausage on their own stoves, ate their brisket in their own kitchens. In my father’s generation, eating at Kreuz’s became more acceptable to the white middle class. My dad took my mother there in 1967; she was wearing her yellow summer dress and was the only woman in the place. The customers were nearly all Mexicans on their lunch breaks from the repair shops behind the square. My mother will never forget how they sat facing the brickwork in their oil-smeared overalls, eating the greasy hot cuts straight out of the paper with knives that were chained to the walls.

  When I visited my grandmother in 1998, there were still a few knives hanging from the wall, but mostly their chains had rusted away. I have no knowledge of when Black people began to eat there too. By then, eating took place in a bright, high-ceilinged room connected to the old meat market by a glass door, and diners, Black, white, and Mexican, now sat democratically side by side at long bench tables. The knives were plastic, and the salt and pepper were mixed together in small cardboard trays on the tables.

  The year after I visited my grandmother, the owner died, and Kreuz Market came to the whole nation’s attention when the two sons and the daughter were unable to agree on how the inheritance was to be managed. It was a disagreement that turned into what Texas Monthly would call “the most famous family feud in Texas barbecue.”

  The
ir father had left the business, and thereby the right to use the name Kreuz Market, to the two brothers, whereas the sister inherited the premises. The sons wanted to carry out certain modernizations to the building, which the sister believed would ruin what made the place special. They clashed as to how Kreuz Market should be continued, and the conflict came to a head when the brothers discontinued the lease on their sister’s premises.

  Instead, they put up a new, modern building next to the highway overpass into the town, and with a sense for mythology that seems to me to be typical of Texas, they took down the old enamel sign from the building where Kreuz Market had existed for ninety-nine years, gathered the embers from “the original fire,” and took them with them, for although the building by the bridge was new, “the fire,” as they said, had to be the same one “as had burned for a hundred years.” It was a great public spectacle: the brothers, carrying the glowing coals, leading a procession of the regular customers who had sided with them to the new site by the bridge where they duly hung up the old sign. On the former premises, their sister put up a new sign that said “Smitty’s Market” and let the fire burn in the same place in the corner as it had always burned, and that was that. Lockhart had one more barbecue place. That same year, on May 26, 1999, the legislative assembly in Austin declared Lockhart to be the “Barbecue Capital of Texas.” Just in case anyone should be in doubt as to how seriously they take their meat in Texas.

  Conflicts about inheritance are not without entertainment value, but the regular customers who, like my dad’s family, had felt a special attachment to Kreuz’s now argued fiercely about where to eat their barbecue. In the new building with the old sign? Or in the old building with the new sign? What was most important, the place or the name? Where did “the original fire” burn? Which place was the real Kreuz Market?