Texas

by James A. Michener

  When they inspected their land next morning, Nancy Nell and the children gasped, for it was flatter by far than any seen on the previous day and it contained not one tree or shrub of noticeable size. The horizon was so endless that Nancy Nell asked: ‘How many other farms can we see from here?’ and her husband quipped: ‘Sixteen in Montana and seven in Canada.’

  He showed the children where the house would stand and assured them that it was going to be first class: ‘With the money we get for the old place, we can build a little paradise here.’

  ‘Will you plant a windbreak to the northwest?’ Nancy Nell asked, and he said: ‘That goes in tomorrow.’ But like his ancestors when they occupied their new lands in Texas, the first thing he erected was a cotton gin, because like them he expected to be the leading cotton grower in his region.

  Even before the house was started he entered into a contract with the Erickson brothers, the deep-well people, and they took pleasure in teaching him about the water situation: ‘Two hundred feet below us as we stand, a thick, impermeable rock formation, the Red Bed. The Ogallala rests on it. Water level rises to within thirty feet of the surface, but to play it safe, so that not even the severest drought can affect you, we’re going to drill your wells down to one hundred feet.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘We calculate that to work the good center areas of your land, you’ll need six wells.’

  ‘I thought five would handle the job,’ Cobb said, and they agreed: ‘Sure, you can do it with five, but you might be puttin’ a mite of strain on them. Take our advice, go with six.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘We give you the best well ever drilled, thirty-five hundred dollars a well, and that includes a converted Chevy 1952 engine set in a concrete box three feet down to protect it from rain and dust.’

  ‘What’s it run on?’

  ‘We provide a butane tank, two hundred gallons, they fill it for you from town.’

  The Ericksons also showed him how to rent a tractor before he bought his own, throw a fourteen-inch ridge around his entire cotton area, and box it in: ‘That way, you trap every drop of water that falls on your land.’

  ‘We get sixteen inches a year,’ the second man said, ‘steady as God’s patience with a sinful man, and you ought to be here the afternoon it falls.’

  After Cobb had consulted with the experts at Texas Tech in Lubbock to learn which strains of cotton were appropriate for his new land, and when his first fields were planted by tractor, broad and open and requiring no stoop work by imported Mexicans, he heard from the college expert the best news of all: ‘This year Lubbock cotton is bringing top dollar.’

  ‘Sounds like we’re home safe,’ Cobb said as he studied his fields with the banked-up ridges hemming them in.

  ‘There’s one small cloud on the horizon,’ the expert warned. ‘Each year, from South Dakota to Lubbock, the Ogallala seems to drop an inch or two.’

  ‘You mean the level could go down, permanently?’

  ‘Unless we use it properly,’ the man said.

  Maggie Morrison’s life in Houston was made more pleasant when she located a drugstore that received an airplane shipment of the New York Times each Sunday afternoon at two. Since her husband was usually down at the quail camp with his three buddies—grown men playing at games—she put on her bathrobe and slippers, made herself comfortable in a big chair, and wrestled with the crossword puzzle, her chief intellectual enticement of the week.

  As in Michigan, she had found several other wives who enjoyed the puzzle, men apparently not having adequate intellect for this teaser, and when she had completed filling in her little white squares, she delighted in calling these other women to compare notes and gloat if she had found all the answers and they had not. She recalled with keen pleasure one Sunday evening when she had unraveled one of the more tantalizing puzzles. At the start, the clues for the five long lines were of little help:

  17 across. Precious metal things.

  33 across. Cheap metal things.

  54 across. Alloy metal things.

  79 across. Soft metal things.

  89 across. Valuable metal things.

  Not until she had solved many of the difficult down words could she assemble enough letters to provide clues, but even when she had a goodly selection she could not fathom the secret of the word fragments thus revealed. Finally, on the ‘Alloy metal things’ line she had the letters kn and this encouraged her to decipher the word knuckles, and like the sudden flashing of a light in a darkened room, she perceived that the alloy had to be brass, and the precious metal, gold:

  Precious metal. B U G D U S T F O I L L E A F A N D S T A N D A R D

  Cheap metal. E A R G O D T Y P E P A N H A T H O R N A N D C A N

  Alloy metal. B A N D K N U C K L E S A N D C A N D L E S T I C K

  Soft metal. P E N C I L P I P E S H O T A N D P O I S O N I N G

  Valuable metal. C H L O R I D E F I S H F O X W A R E A N D S T A R

  When she made her nightly calls that Sunday she found that only one of her team had solved the five lines, and the two congratulated themselves on having superior intellects, but some weeks later both were rebuffed by what all the players agreed was one of the most ingenious of the puzzles.

  As before, the four across lines gave only bewildering clues; they were not intelligible at first, nor even after some serious speculation, and she surrendered: ‘I’m ignorant about the military. I give up.’ She failed to solve it, but that night one of her friends gloated: ‘Maggie! I got it quicker than usual,’ and Maggie said: ‘Yes, but your husband was an officer. You know about battles and stuff.’ And then her friend cried: ‘Maggie! It’s not about war. It’s about automobiles.’ And with that simple clue Maggie was able to fill in the squares, chuckling at her stupidity in not having discovered that the lines referred to a car at a stoplight:

  19 across. March! B A C K B E R E T S W A R D G A G E H O U S E H O R N

  41 across. Halt! H A N D E D L E T T E R I N K S H I R T H E R R I N G

  63 across. Mark time! G R I S J A C K I F E R O U S B E A D S F O R E V E R

  89 across. Retreat! B E N C H E R G A M M O N L A S H S L I D E W A T E R

  With her husband prospering in his business, her children adjusting to their schools, and her small circle of friends sharing crossword-puzzle results on Sunday evenings, Maggie, without being aware of the change in her life, was becoming a Texan. She revealed this in a letter to a friend in Detroit:

  Tonight I feel joy about being in Texas. It’s so big, so alive, so filled with a sense of the future. In fact, I’m so kindly disposed that I even want to apologize for the unkind things I said about our Texas cockroaches. I told you they were as big as sparrows. Well, I had one this morning as big as a robin. But an oilman who bought some land from me told me that roaches may be the oldest continuing form of life on earth, and he showed me a fossil his geologists dredged up from the Pennsylvanian Level. That’s 330,000,000 million years ago, he said, and anything that can survive this Texas heat for that long has earned my respect.

  She was congratulating herself on defending the cultural life in Houston—‘We’re candles blowing in the wind,’ she had once said to one of her friends —when she received a stupefying counterblow which stunned. Daughter Beth, a willowy fifteen now, came shyly into the room where her mother was tangled in her big chair, and said: ‘Mummy, I’m going to be a cheerleader.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘All the girls, it’s the very best thing you can be, they vote for you.’ ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That I’m reporting for cheerleader practice tomorrow. I have to be at school an hour early.’

  ‘Beth, are you out of your mind?’

  ‘No, Mummy. It’s what I want most.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have it. A cheerleader! Beth, cheerleaders are pretty little fluffs who can’t do anything else. You can do math. You can write poetry. You can do anything you put your mind to, but not cheerlead
ing, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘But all the girls …’

  ‘Sit down, Beth. You must understand one thing and keep it always in mind. You are not “all the girls.” You have an extraordinary mind, inherited it from your grandmother, I think. God knows it skipped me. Beth, you’re special. You could win top honors at Michigan. You’re not a cheerleader …’

  ‘I don’t want to go to Michigan.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Texas, where all the good kids go. Or A&M, it’s real neat.’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop saying “real neat.” A&M is not real neat and neither is cheerleading.’

  Beth was so persistent in her desire to have what every Texas high school girl was supposed to want that Maggie finally said: ‘We’ll talk to your father about this when he gets back from Falfurrias,’ and when Roy Bub Hooker pulled the hunting wagon up to the Morrison residence at eleven-thirty that night, Maggie called upstairs: ‘Beth, come down and let’s talk about this.’

  To her joy, her father sided with her: ‘I don’t see anything wrong with a little cheerleading, if that’s what her school features.’

  ‘But, Todd, it’s a step backward. It surrenders all the gains women are beginning to make. Next you’ll be entering her in a beauty contest, bathing suits yet.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with bathing suits, properly filled out.’

  Beth allowed her parents to fight the thing out and was gratified when her father won, but next morning she found that it had only appeared that way, because her mother blocked the door at seven-thirty when Beth prepared to run out and join the kids in the car for first-day practice of the cheerleading squad. ‘Hey, Killer!’ they called. ‘Time’s wastin’.’

  ‘Beth cannot join you,’ Mrs. Morrison informed them. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Inside the door, Beth stood white and trembling. ‘Mom!’ she cried, dropping the customary Mummy. ‘If I can’t be a cheerleader, I’ll die.’

  ‘If you can’t be a contributor, a brain at whatever level you’re capable of, you’ll really die. Now eat your cereal and be off to school like a proper scholar, which you are.’

  For three unhappy days the sparring continued—Mr. Morrison siding with his daughter, and Mrs. Morrison standing like Horatius at the bridge table, as he said, refusing to allow her daughter to take what she called ‘this first step down to mediocrity.’ It then looked as if Beth was going to solve the problem by refusing to eat until she starved; poetry, math, her designs for a new fabric, all were forgotten in her determination to be one of the gang and to gain the plaudits of her fellow students.

  The impasse was resolved in a manner which Maggie Morrison, trained in Michigan and with Michigan values, could never have anticipated, but on the Friday of that first awful week she was summoned from her real estate desk to the office of Mr. Sanderson, principal of Deaf Smith High in north Houston: ‘Mrs. Morrison, I’m sure you know you have a most superior daughter.’

  ‘I want to keep her that way.’

  ‘But you cannot do it by opposing her natural desire to be one of our cheerleaders.’

  ‘I doubt that cheerleading is natural.’

  ‘At any serious Texas high school it is.’

  ‘It oughtn’t to be.’ She was startled by her willingness to fight but was convinced that she was fighting for the preservation of her daughter’s integrity and intelligence.

  ‘Mrs. Morrison, I think we’d better have a serious talk. Please sit down.’ When she was seated, her legs fiercely crossed, her jaw forward, he charmed’ her by saying: ‘I wish we had more mothers concerned about the welfare of their daughters. Feel free to come here and visit with me about these things at any time.’

  ‘I’m visiting now, and I don’t like what you’re doing to Beth.’

  ‘Mrs. Morrison, she is no longer in Michigan. She’s in Texas, and there’s a world of difference. No girl in Houston can achieve a higher accolade than to be chosen for our cheerleading team, unless maybe it’s to be the baton twirler. To have the approval of the whole student body. To stand before her peers, the prettiest, the most popular. Mrs. Morrison, that is something.’

  ‘Is it true, Mr. Sanderson, that your high school has eleven football coaches?’

  ‘We need them. In this state, competition is tough.’

  ‘And is it true that four out of five of Beth’s teachers this year are not prepared in their academic subjects, because their first responsibility is coaching?’

  ‘Our coaches are the finest young men the state of Texas produces. Your daughter is lucky to share them in the classroom.’

  ‘But can a coach of tight ends teach a girl poetry?’

  ‘At Deaf Smith we don’t hit poetry very heavy.’

  ‘What do you hit?’

  ‘Mrs. Morrison, I run one of the best high schools in Texas, everybody says so. Beth will tell you the same. These aren’t easy years, drugs and all that, new social pressures, Negroes and Hispanics knocking at the door. Holding a big school like this together is a full-time job, and one of the strongest binders we have is football. I want every child in this school to be involved in our team, one way or another.’

  ‘Even the girls?’

  ‘Especially the girls. Football at Deaf Smith is not a boy’s empire.’ He pointed to the stunning photographs that decorated his office: ‘The girls’ marching squad, best in the state. The cheerleaders, runners-up last year. The rifle-drill squad, have you ever seen a nattier bunch of kids? And look at the number of girl musicians we have in our band, and their spiffy uniforms.’

  There were also girl baton twirlers, three of them, the pompon squad and the marshals. Maggie was startled by the overflowing abundance of girls, smiling, stepping, preening, twirling their wooden rifles, tossing their batons in the air.

  ‘And I’ve saved the good news till last, Mrs. Morrison. Here’s a report I received from Mrs. Crane the week before you startled us by your refusal to let Beth take her logical place in the system,’ and he handed her a typed report from the woman who directed the girls’ activities and who taught world history on the side:

  I have been watching Beth Morrison closely, and she gives every indication of having the hands, the necessary skills and the innate sense of balance which are required to make a great baton twirler.

  Let’s keep her on the cheerleading squad for the time being, but let’s also watch her very closely, because I think she has the ability to become a twirler of university class.

  Mr. Sanderson rocked back and forth on his heels as Maggie read the heartwarming report, and he reflected on how many mothers in his district would be overjoyed to learn that their daughter might one day be chief twirler at a major college. He waited till she had digested the report, then smiled and lifted his hands, as if to indicate that this had resolved all problems.

  ‘Mrs. Morrison, your daughter has a chance to achieve what every girl dreams of.’

  Maggie felt beaten, but she still wanted to protect her daughter: ‘I don’t think Beth would find much happiness being a baton twirler,’ to which Mr. Sanderson said, with some asperity: ‘If she’s going to make her life in Texas, she will.’ Quickly he modified that harsh statement: ‘You and your husband are happy here, aren’t you? I’ve heard he’s doing famously. Syndications and all.’

  ‘We’re increasingly happy.’

  ‘Then look to the future, Mrs. Morrison, that’s all I’m asking of you.’

  So Beth Morrison appeared one day with pompons and what she called ‘a really cool uniform,’ and apparently Mrs. Crane liked what she saw of Beth’s coordination because two weeks later Beth came home with a silver baton and the exciting news that ‘Mrs. Holliday, who’s trained all the real cool kids, is willing to give me special lessons, Saturday and Sunday. Fifty dollars for the first course.’

  She did not immediately drop her interest in words and colorful images, for she had become addicted to a silly game called ‘The White House.’ It consisted of asking a partner:
‘What do you call the White House?’ and when the other person said: ‘I don’t know. What do you call the White House?’ you said: ‘The President’s residence.’

  For several weeks she pestered her parents and her brother with her questions, and one night she crushed them with what she called ‘a four-alarm sizzler’: ‘What do you call a Canadian Mountie who works undercover?’ and the answer was: ‘A super-duper trooper-snooper.’

  About this time Maggie came upon that remarkable study of child genius and music in which it was pointed out that from a society much like America’s between 1750–1830, Europe produced hundreds of gifted musicians because that was the thrust of the society; that was what counted in Germany and Austria and Italy. ‘Today in America,’ reasoned the study, ‘we have the same amount of innate talent, we must have because the genetic pool assures that, but we concentrate on games, not music or the arts. So we produce a plethora of great athletes and no musicians, because parents and schools do not want Mozarts or Haydns. They want Babe Ruths and Red Granges, and so that’s what they get.’

  She was about to discuss this with Beth when her daughter appeared one evening after school dressed in one of the sauciest, sexiest costumes the older Morrisons had ever seen—certainly they had not expected to see their daughter in anything like it—the uniform of a baton twirler, with padded bosom, padded rump and tightly drawn waist. She was totally fetching as she pirouetted before her family: ‘What would you call me tonight?’ When each had guessed wrong, she said: ‘A sassy lassie with a classy chassis.’

  Beth Morrison, once headed for English honors at the University of Michigan, had changed her plans.