Basically, everything that’s fun is forbidden.
But the rest is vanilla ice cream, serviceable and harmless enough, but nothing to get excited about. Certainly not the way you can get excited about science and ideas.
we sit in my room, me at the desk, my dad on the screen of my laptop with a glass of Scotch in his hand. The door out onto the walkway is ajar and I can watch the sky as increasingly it takes on the color of an exotic bird.
Before I came here, we’d only ever Skyped once, the time it came out that he is no longer allowed to visit me. Now we meet up nearly every evening over the motel’s unstable internet. He talks about the time when America became America. He tells me an ancestor of ours, Samuel Clark, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, fought in the Revolution and took part in 1781 in the famous Siege of Yorktown in Virginia, a decisive battle that led to the British Crown finally giving up the colony. What made Samuel Clark’s part in that battle all the more interesting was that he had already been badly wounded three months earlier in another battle on a plantation in Green Spring, where the British had set up an ambush. The revolutionaries had no idea what lay in wait for them, they were simply on their way from a to b through a soggy area of swamp. Out of nowhere they were besieged by British cavalry. A horseman cracked Samuel’s head open with a saber, a serious injury that left his brain exposed. They managed to get him to the infirmary and patch him up. He was seventeen years old.
What they did, says my dad, is they put a plate there, a silver plate. My dad laughs out loud, a silver plate right in his skull! Being young and strong he survived!
And he lived to be ninety-two! He laughs even louder.
He’s warming up now. He has told me the story before, but this is the first time I’ve really listened. My receptiveness makes him all the more eager. Naturally, he never met Samuel Clark, and never met anyone who did either. On my mother’s side, the collective memory stops at a wealthy merchant from Northern Jutland, my grandmother’s father, who it seems was something of a tyrant. Three generations would appear to be the normal scope of a family’s living memory. By comparison, Samuel Clark was the grandfather of the man my dad refers to as the Ur-Clark, whose grave I visited on that scorching hot day without fathoming who he was, and whom no one I knew ever knew either. Grandfather to the unfathomable. The unfathomable bounced on the knee of Samuel Clark. Deep is the well of human past.
Did you know that George Washington used him as a courier?
He did?
Yes!
Incredible.
It is incredible, yes.
A courier for Washington, my dad’s hero, how marvelous a coincidence is that? According to my dad, Samuel was even a favorite of Washington’s. Courier was an unsung, though crucial, entrustment, and, according to what has been passed on by other relatives, not without peril. Once, he was pursued by Indians when carrying one of Washington’s messages. Only a ravine separated them, Samuel Clark and the Indians, he on one side, the Indians on the other. He never forgot their spine-chilling battle cries.
Did he leave anything behind in writing?
Yes, he did.
My dad has seen a firsthand account, though written many years after the event. He applied for a war pension, you know, when he was old and wanted some support.
Do we have that?
Cora had some of it.
It vexes him that he didn’t get a copy of it from Cora when he had the chance. Cora Clark was the genealogist in our family, and I’ve heard her name spoken a thousand times. Every time I ever asked my dad or my grandmother something about the family, the answer was: Oh, Cora would know that. Or: It’s in Cora’s book.
To me, Cora was always Cora Double-Clark. Her maiden name was Clark, and then she married Preston’s brother, Hugh Clark. Sharing the same surname prompted them to research their roots together, and eventually they discovered that they were indeed related, albeit only distantly. Cora collected their findings in a book, Our Clark Family, 1740–1998. I’ve never been able to get my hands on a copy. When my dad’s uncle died, Cora lived on in the house farther down the street from my grandmother’s. One would have thought they could have found some joy in each other, the widows of those two brothers, but at some point my grandmother and Cora fell out.
If I ask my dad what it was about, all he says is: Strong women. He declined to take sides, but continued to visit both Cora and Gussie when he was in town. In all his years, he has been surrounded by women with strong views about life, and occasionally about each other, and there has never been a lot he could do about it. The general opinion in the family was that one day they would make up and be friends again. Until they did, it was: Oh, Cora would know that. But they never did. Cora is dead, and who knows where Samuel Clark’s account might be now.
The sky has become red as blood, the crack in the door a long, oozing scratch. The ice cubes in my dad’s Scotch have melted, my tea is cold. Sometimes the connection breaks down and the image on my screen freezes. The only part of my dad that I can see is his right shoulder, a stem of his glasses, the dresser behind him. After a minute or two the connection returns, the picture catches up, and in the meantime he’s been talking without noticing I was gone.
He is absorbed in the object in his little petri dish, a minuscule human being with his head bandaged up, in the midst of a great historical battle. Genealogy is a magnifying glass, Samuel Clark a tiny figure in a much, much bigger story, right there in our family.
He says only three months passed between Samuel’s encounter with a British saber at Green Spring and the Siege of Yorktown. His wounds could barely have healed. My dad says there are some old paintings of George Washington, huge panoramic pictures depicting Washington the military commander at the Siege of Yorktown. We picture him, the cocked hat, the powdered wig, the red coat, commanding his many men. And some of those men are wounded, says my dad excitedly, and there’s this drummer boy, this drummer boy, and his head is bandaged.
You know, this white bandage on his head, he says, and puts his hands to his own head. I like to think that that’s our ancestor.
My dad and I are together in the same project. Loading his stories onto me. The next time we say goodbye at an airport, he will leave lightened of his burden, and I will travel home heavy.
Was Samuel Clark scared? What kind of things did he dream about? Who was he in love with? This tiny person in our petri dish is an enigma of loose ends. And yet not: Samuel Clark married his captain’s daughter, a Handley. He received his war pension. He lived until he was ninety-two.
Consider the scene for a moment. Here we sit, many generations on, me in a motel room in my father’s hometown, heaving a sigh of relief on a Skype connection.
Samuel Clark had a silver plate put in his head.
He survived.
He lived until he was ninety-two.
The past turns out to be full of hope.
by now i know the way to Celia’s house. It looks like something out of a movie, the long road snaking its way through the landscape, across Onion Creek, past the local school that bears Celia’s father’s name in recognition of the acres he donated to it. And then, at a bend in the road, the house appearing, half-hidden behind tall trees at the top of a hill, a perfectly proportioned wooden house built by a wealthy physician in 1900, and at the foot of the hill a neat, shining pond that mirrors it all.
The gates are always open. I turn in and continue up the driveway, pulling up behind Celia’s bmw. She emerges smiling in a crisply ironed light blue shirt and khaki pants, her eyes full of plans. Just inside the door, above a dark wooden dresser, a hat rack branches across the wall like antlers. The hats look like they are worn often, Celia’s faded caps, Mel’s dusty cowboy hats, and a broad-brimmed canvas variety, all soft from use.
Mel shows me around the house, which is tastefully and simply done out with antique furniture and hand-sewn quilts. Apart from the occasional woven rug, the original wooden flooring has been left bare, dark and
shiny. Mel uses a pen laser pointer to point with, its red dot darting about over the old rafters with their original joints, the stone fireplaces, the antique wood-clad walls. On the north porch the wind is still, the side facing east is littered with withered leaves that have blown in onto the wooden planks.
The Stars and Stripes hangs down from a pole angling out at forty-five degrees from one of the wooden porch columns, and on the wall behind us is a star of rusted iron. I’ve seen them everywhere, on the outside of houses, on fences, iron gates, wheel hubs: the symbol of Texas, the Lone Star State. Four identical rocking chairs stand in a row, all painted a light shade of gray. Celia serves chilled white wine for me and herself, bottled beer for Mel. We sit down and rock with our drinks. Far out on the horizon, a string of blinking lights slithers through the landscape.
That’s I-35, says Mel.
In our family we like to look at the highway, says Celia.
Her grandfather built it, says Mel.
Every time we say goodbye, we arrange to meet again. Celia and Mel are hospitable folks. Celia organizes things in the background so my stay can be as fruitful as possible. The next time I visit them, Mel has been mowing the lawns, a job that takes him several afternoons after work, seated astride a tractor mower so noisy he has to wear hearing protection. As I arrive, he hands it over to Salvador, the handyman, standing for a moment halfway down the slope in a way that seems so very Texan to me, legs firmly apart, rooting him to the ground like a pair of guy ropes.
Salvador came with the house. He was living for free in a trailer on the property in exchange for helping the previous owner out with odd jobs on the weekends, chopping down a tree, mowing the lawns, fixing fences. The Mexican in the trailer was part of the deal when Celia and Mel took over the place, a condition of sale. So they got a house, and they got Salvador and his trailer too.
That was thirty years ago. Since then Salvador has gotten married and had four children, all of them living and growing up in the same trailer. A few weeks ago, Mel bought a new and bigger trailer they’ve now put down behind a row of trees at the northern end of the property. Celia points toward it. The old one is still chocked up at the bottom of the hill to the west, it too behind a row of trees.
Mel has gone down there to talk to the guy who has come to collect it, a lumberman who helps them cut down trees in exchange for the wood and who has promised to remove the trailer if he can have it for free. Texas seems to run on deals like that.
I go with Celia to look at Salvador’s old home. It stands on the grass with its door wide open, like a slough that’s been cast off and left behind. We stand in the doorway and look inside at the 120, maybe 130 square feet of living space. It’s quickly seen. At the back is a tiny bathroom, at the front an even tinier kitchen with drab brown fixtures, cupboards, flooring, and chipboard cladding all frayed, the air close and clammy. How the place must have looked with furniture inside, beds for six people and presumably a table at which to eat, is impossible to imagine. Celia is amazed too. She stands halfway up the steps gazing in, totally hypnotized by the alien life that has been lived here on her property, less than two hundred feet away from the house.
The lumberman has a gleam in his eye. I can’t work him out; he looks like something out of a myth, a fairy-tale figure with a dark Santa Claus kind of face, a long white beard and a black ponytail. A trickster. He gives me an odd look and says: I betcha she won’t go all the way in.
Celia leans inside, into the unknown, her hand gripping the door frame for security. Her daring is just what the lumberman was waiting for. He points at a hole that looks like it’s been gnawed in the baseboard. Look, he shouts, a rat!
Celia jumps back out onto the grass.
The lumberman beams strangely.
He then offers to plant some pear trees down by the pond.
Oh, I love pear trees, Celia says.
She takes me down to the pond to show me how easy it is to find fossils in the clay. They lie at the water’s edge, round and white as pebbles. She bends down, picks up a handful and gives them to me, fossilized snail shells that have been there for some hundreds of millions of years before being transferred into my pocket.
once upon a time, Stephen F. Austin, the man who would one day be called the Father of Texas, stood gazing across the wilderness. Between the eastern forests and the blue-toned mountains to the west lay the enormous plains, an unbroken stretch of prairie and steppes, swaying grass as far as the eye could see, all the way to Canada. North of the city that would one day take his name, a limestone plateau had risen in a grand curve shaped like a fingernail through Central Texas, a grass-covered high plain, and south of the city, erosion from the rivers had left a rough-toothed hill country with even more grass- covered meadows. Inscrutable shifts of clouds, rain, and drought. Once in a while a tornado whipped across the plains like a black funnel.
But most of all just grass and more grass swaying hypnotically in the wind, disorienting and terrible, like a desert or an ocean with nothing to stop the eye: no boundaries, no roads, no houses, or fields …
That he stood here at all was on account of his father, Moses Austin. His father was the type of person who always leaned forward, a businessman, enterprising, persuasive, industrious, always heading toward money and opportunity.
Moses had been a bank manager in St. Louis, but the bank had, like much of the American economy, collapsed. Something to do with how the banks had systemically loaned money to speculators who sold land to poor immigrants, who were later unable to pay. It was the premiere of a play that would become as American as apple pie, a bubble followed by a giant pop. The first American depression.
But Moses didn’t let a little resistance get in his way. He left the bank and immediately eyed new opportunities to the south. The area that would one day be called Texas, which at the time belonged to the Spanish crown, was largely uninhabited by whites. Because of the warlike Native tribes living on the plains, no Spanish or Mexican citizens had any desire to settle there. Moses rode down to San Antonio de Béxar and convinced the Spanish authorities to convey some of the land to three hundred law-abiding and enterprising American families on the condition that they renounce their citizenship and begin to cultivate land in the hazardous belt north of San Antonio. The trade-off was that the white Anglo families would receive the land on the cheap if they, in turn, would put life and limb on the line by serving as a buffer between the Spanish Mexican residents and the belligerent prairie tribes.
On his return journey to St. Louis with the decree from the Spanish crown, Moses contracted a horrible lung infection. He managed to make it home in time to hand the document to his son and convince him to complete the assignment before he breathed his last. The young Austin had actually had other plans. He’d had no interest in his dad’s project. But he acquiesced, the document changed hands, and he rode southward. En route, the area in question also changed hands. Mexico had broken free of the Spanish colonial power and become an independent republic. Texas went from being Spanish to Mexican, and Austin arrived with an invalid document.
He could have simply returned home and continued his life with a good conscience, telling himself that at least he’d tried. But now he stood here with his invalid document regarding the vast wilderness before him.
The year was 1821, but it was as if he gazed directly into primordial times. If it was up to the landscape, if you could even call a wilderness a landscape, humanity might not exist at all. It was the oldest landmass on the North American continent, and the view stretched endlessly toward the flickering horizon. The wind whistled. His belly rumbled. He was overwhelmed by an irrepressible hunger. It wasn’t about money, not first and foremost. It was about the wilderness. Taming it, gobbling it up, transforming it from wilderness and delivering it to civilization.
Just as his father succeeded in convincing the Spaniards, the son convinced the Mexicans. The buffer project exceeded all expectations. The American immigrants immediately began to fell t
rees, build log houses and fences, then to cultivate the good, rich, black prairie topsoil in perfect, straight rows. They didn’t understand the landscape, but they weren’t really interested in understanding it anyway. All that interested them was what they could extract from the land, cotton, sugar, corn, potatoes, pears, peaches, melons, pumpkins, squash, and cucumbers. The immigrant always walked around with a nail between his tight lips, had dirt under his nails, a rifle strung over his shoulder, hemmed, hammered, plowed, fired shots. He would rather take care of himself, be his own farmer, his own soldier, priest, doctor, lawman. And if anything got in his way—Natives or trees or whatever else—he cut them down and burned the stump, suppressing the undesirable and eradicating it like a bothersome insect.
As if that weren’t enough, the white man multiplied faster than rabbits. Before the Mexicans knew it, there were many more white Anglo families. They called themselves Texans. They made the Mexicans nervous, so nervous that they put Austin, whom they were otherwise on good terms with, in jail for a period of time without any charges. The Mexicans’ unrest made the immigrant colony uncomfortable, which made the Mexicans even more tense. The result was a confrontation. The Mexican army, led by Santa Anna, attacked a humble mission station in San Antonio, Alamo it was called, and annihilated the approximately two hundred Texans residing there in a bloody massacre, including the folk heroes William Travis, James Bowie, and Davy Crockett. The white man responded. Austin’s Old Three Hundred—who in the meantime had become thirty thousand—captured Texas and made their own independent republic.
Almost ten years later, when the republic was close to bankruptcy, Texas became part of the United States.
Now there’s talk about building a wall.
The white man’s colonizing skills must have exceeded the Mexicans’ imagination.
Lone Star Page 23