by James Still
Throughout my editing of this manuscript it seemed very clear to me that Mr. Still wanted, more than anything, to tell the truth in this book while also leaving some mystery behind. The truth, of course, is nothing less than the human condition, and conveying it is a tall order for any writer. That's exactly what the haunting ending does. I believe the last chapter of this book is right up there with the five or six best endings of all time, dripping with perfection.
While editing this remarkable book, I was moved and changed. Mr. Still's writing is so beautiful and rhythmic and precise that it made me more excited about being a writer myself. This book affected me to the core, for it is more than a record of three months in Texas during the narrator's childhood. It is a history of his entire life's thought process. It is a record of a place and time gone with the hot and ever-present Texas winds. It is a collection of stories about people who mattered, who are gone except in the memories of those who loved them and in these pages. Mr. Still has given them all to us in this wonderful last gift he left behind. He has given us his narrator (and, by extension, himself), along with Anson, Lurie, his parents, Ernest, the Knuckleheads—all of them—and once met, they will change and move you, too.
I am so thankful to Teresa Reynolds for trusting me to work on this project, and I deeply respect the fierce loyalty she has to Mr. Still and his legacy. I also appreciate the faith in me that Mr. Still's literary advisers, Bill Marshall, Lee Smith, and Bill Weinberg, exhibited when they asked me to edit this book. I cannot begin to thank Lee Smith, in particular, for all the ways she has helped to make me a better writer, teacher, parent, and person. This book would also not exist without the determination and intelligence of Laura Sutton, who understands what an important text this is for Appalachian literature. Everyone at the University Press of Kentucky also deserves praise for ushering this book into the world and for making sure it was presented in the most beautiful way possible. I dedicate my work on this project to Mike Mullins, the director of the Hindman Settlement School, who loved Mr. Still and who is loved by many himself.
This was a place where half the world was sky, a place I had never imagined, much less expected to be. We had passed through Waco the day before, heading west, looking for work. The cotton fields we had passed thus far had only begun to whiten, and until now there had been no market for our services.
We numbered four. Our leader was Ernest, a widower in his late thirties who had been here before, under similar circumstances. There were two young men, Cadillac and Rance, both in their twenties, called “the Knuckleheads” by Ernest, and for good reason. And I was thirteen, barefoot, in simple garments: a shirt my mother had made for me and a pair of bib overalls.
We stood on a dusty corner near the courthouse in the beating sun. Several men wandered out to us, looking us over. One spat and said, “You're a week too early. My crop's not quite ready. A week from now I can use you. In fact, I'll need you.” He stayed, looking at us, speculating, I suppose, that enough cotton in his field was ready for a first picking. And it could be that was why he stayed on and was joined by a couple of other men. One of them approached and stood watching us, too. He was not a farmer, as could readily be seen by his way of dressing. He was sharply dressed in cowboy boots and the kind of hat that I would later learn was generally worn by cattlemen.
I stood there in the dust with the edges of my straw hat pulled down to further shade my face. My straw had a hole in it, and I suppose a tuft of hair was sticking out. My heels were rusty, for I had gone barefoot all summer, and every summer, and I suppose my elbows were likewise. There were ten of us children at home, and though my mother took a wet rag to the ground-in dirt on my neck every day and insisted my feet be washed before bedtime, there was no such thing as whitening my sunburned feet. I glanced down, noticing that I had a toenail hanging. I had stubbed my toe a week before, and the new nail had not quite supplanted the old one.
From the moment we had arrived in the town, the name of which has escaped me forever, I was aware of the many horses. Saddle horses were hitched to a row of posts before and behind the courthouse, and there was a post or two before every store. As I have always been aware of birds, I recollect the sparrows washing themselves in the dust, pecking at the horse apples strewn along the square.
The man in the boots came closer, walked up to me, and said: “Howdy, Little Man.” I glanced at him and managed to say “Hey,” which was so small a sound it barely escaped my lips. As the man stared at me, I moved closer to Ernest. My father had entrusted me to Ernest, and he had kept an eye to my comfort all the way from Alabama. Keeping an eye on me consisted of seeing mainly that the mischievous Knuckleheads did not play tricks on me as they did on each other. He made sure that I had all I wanted to eat, that the trip was halted when I was thirsty. He took care that the bed of a quilt and hard pillow I had brought along was well placed in the churchyards and on the lumber piles we had slept upon on the way out. My bed was always at least within six feet of his, a bar against fear in the dark and homesickness.
I had turned thirteen in the middle of the month before. And more independent of others than a child of my age might have been expected to be. A brother had “kicked me out of the cradle” almost within the year of my own birth, and I suppose I had been denied the nurturing most Southern children received. From the moment I could walk, I was treated as an adult.
I did not lack for love, but it was undemonstrative. My mother loved me fiercely, but I remember her kissing me only once, and I recall my embarrassment. To my recollection I never sat on my father's knee. But he took me with him everywhere he went. And he listened to me. Papa was a veterinarian—or rather a “horse doctor,” which is a veterinarian without formal training.
I ought to mention here my size. Although I was thirteen, I was taken for something like six. I was the only child in the first grade who had had to stand on a pencil box to reach the blackboard. The same was true of my baby brother, Alfred, yet in time we both took off physically, in our later teens.
Still, the booted man stood before us. I realized that he did not seem wilted by the heat like everyone else. He seemed as fresh as morning, neat in figure, in dress. His belt bore a buckle with a bull's head in silver. His khaki pants bore a crease. His shirt was white, in contrast to those of his fellows, and where a tie might have been he kept a handkerchief. Any practiced eye might have ascertained that here was a man who had a wife behind him who cared about his appearance, and there was a certain affluence to support it. Yet he was in working clothes. He wore two wedding bands, one gold and one platinum, on his ring finger.
What he was doing in this town on that day I do not know. As I later learned, he certainly did not need cotton pickers. His farm was in the next county, and he had Mexican families living on the place who took care of the livestock and also assisted in the house, yard, and barn.
This man stood apart. He was Anson Winters. One of the farmers asked, “Anson, what are you doing here?”
His reply bore an element of both facetiousness and directness: “The same as you. Attending to my own business.”
The inquirer laughed with some amount of embarrassment. He knew this man, for he had a certain fame in the region, enjoyed a certain admiration from all who knew him. They knew his ordeal, which had not entirely passed.
Later, I asked him how he happened to be in that town on that day, a town in another county, a town where he had no business connections, and he said, “This is going to be hard to believe. But bear with me, it is a fact. I was looking for you. I was looking for a boy to fit into the place of my son. Yet it's not too strange when you know I've been looking for several years for you. I believed you were somewhere. I had to believe it to keep my head steady. I had to look. Looking made it possible to bear the ache.”
His first wife had died in childbirth, in the first year of their marriage. The infant, a boy, had not been expected to live. But he did. The only explanation ever given to me, and not by the father, was tha
t he was “afflicted.” A bright, beautiful child, they said, with a “breathing problem.” The child had asthma attacks that would have been fatal had not he had his father to work with his chest, breathe into his mouth, and bring life back to him. The child lived for six years and never learned to walk without support.
For six years Anson entrusted the child to no one, not even to Anson's own mother, who often pleaded with him to let her rear her grandson. Anson was in literal physical contact day and night for six years, at night with a forefinger hooked into the child's navel, the palm of his hand spread across the small chest to monitor his breathing. He carried the child with him everywhere. He was never out of hearing, or as I was told, more than three minutes away from it.
Folk remembered seeing him galloping on his bay mare, babe in arms.
And then the child died. Anson had to be restrained in bed for three days.
Of course I didn't know any of that then, standing in the sun in that courthouse square. But something about his face spoke these things to me, even if I didn't realize it at the time.
Anson's gray-blue eyes never wandered from mine as he asked Ernest what he could do for us. Yes, he said, he had cotton to be picked, and it was only beginning to open. He'd even house us and charge us with no board.
He glanced down at my feet and inquired about my sore toe. “I stubbed it,” I said. Being my father's first son, I was not shy. “It don't hurt.”
At last his eyes lit on Ernest, who accepted readily. Always on the lookout for me, he said, “This boy needs a drink of water.”
“Come on, I'll buy you soda waters,” said Anson. “Soda water won't do it,” Ernest replied. “Just water.”
The drinking water we had encountered for the last few days had been alkaline, next to undrinkable, and did little to quench thirst.
Anson led us inside the courthouse to a fountain stoked with ice, which made the water more palatable. Even had I been as tall for my age as I should have been, I couldn't have stretched up to drink. Anson lifted me, and as I put my mouth to the squirt of water, he began to tremble. He set me down quickly. “Not too much cold water at one time,” he said. He lifted me again. He again trembled, but he held me until I had my fill.
“You fellows need something to eat?” Anson asked Ernest.
“We're making out,” Ernest said. He was not one for charity or pity, but he did know how to do business. “What about some cotton sacks?”
“We've got all sizes at the house,” Anson replied. “Except maybe for this boy.”
He went into the store and bought a yard of duck fabric, and on returning he asked me if I had ever picked before.
Later in life I would joke that I was born in a cotton patch, but sometimes I felt as if I had been, for my first memories are of running along the rows of cotton, picking a boll here and there. By the time I could walk, my mother had sewn up a muslin sack for me, one that hung by a strap around my neck and reached just below the knee. My father always promised I could go to the gin with him when enough was harvested to make a bale, so I picked as fast as I could. I recollect that my sisters would never hoe or chop cotton within sight of the road. For a girl to be seen laboring in the fields was against the mores of the times. Yet they all did it, out of sight, my sisters and female cousins. Even mama, on top of her chores of cooking, laundry, scrubbing, and bed making, used to come to the fields in late afternoon and help until sunset. Mama was not afraid of acquiring a freckle on her nose or a tan on her cheeks and wore no protective clothing. My sisters worked swathed in straw hats, their arms deep in cotton stockings, collars standing on end to shield necks, their faces bathed in a screening of cow's cream.
To Anson's inquiry as to whether I had experienced picking cotton, I was too awed to make a verbal reply. I nodded yes.
And when he emerged from a store with the duck for a sack, he brought with him a cone of ice cream, which had always been a rarity in my life, chiefly for the lack of ice to freeze it. To be handed a cone on that day, with the thermometer in the upper nineties, went far toward breaking down my natural resistance to any overture by a stranger.
The Knuckleheads looked so hungrily at the ice cream that Anson went back into the store and returned with three cones. Ernest refused his, so I ended up eating two. Ernest had a certain distrust of the obviously affluent. During the whole of this chance encounter, the Knuckleheads kept hunting the shady spots beneath the elms. The only jobs they had ever held were in a cotton mill at Shawmut, delivering bobbins in the spinning room. Any strong sunlight, in either Alabama or Texas, was an abomination to them.
“Need any branch water in your car?” Anson asked, and Ernest indicated we might need a gill. Our car's tank was directly filled to the brim.
I had expected this cowboy to be riding a horse, but it turned out he was driving an Overland. It was his wife's machine. I'd never heard of a woman owning a car. The car was as spotless as the driver. No mud on the fenders, windshields clean. This was in marked contrast to our Model T Ford, which was crusted with the mud of the four states we had crossed.
“The boy can ride with me,” Anson suggested.
“He'll stay with us,” Ernest replied, true to his mandate from Papa to keep me under his eye.
We had hardly started off, keeping our distance from the Overland to avoid the raised dust, when Rance leaned in close and said, “Boy, have you got it made! That big shot was eating you up with his eyes.”
“You can put rocks in your cotton sack when you weigh in, and he'll let you by with it,” Cadillac added.
“We'll just work for this man,” Ernest said, soberly, “and have nothing else to do with him.”
“Tell you what,” Cad said, “let's pick enough white stuff to buy gas and then get the hell back to Alabama.”
“What I say,” agreed Rance. “I don't want to stay where the water tastes like horse piss.”
Both were beginning to have the feeling of being lost, which always precedes genuine homesickness.
“You'll harden up,” Ernest said. “We intend to be here awhile.” Ernest had in mind trying out Texas with a view to settling down. It was already in his head, I was later to learn, to take the three of us back home should any permanent job turn up. Not cotton picking, which was seasonal. Ernest had several talents. Back home in Alabama, he had been living with a daughter and her husband, since his wife had been dead some ten years. Of his unworthy son-in-law, he had remarked to my father, “When he comes in the front door, I go out the back.”
How Ernest happened to take me along was that my father had loaned him some money for expenses in exchange for my experiencing Texas. Papa had once lived in Texas, and it had never gotten out of his blood. He wanted me to know what it was like, and it wouldn't hurt that I would be making some money along the way.
Why Ernest allowed the Knuckleheads to accompany us was a mystery even to himself and often exclaimed about along the way. They too probably furnished a few dollars and offered some companionship in a strange territory. Ernest and Cadillac and Rance hadn't been anywhere much. I'd barely been out of Chambers County, Alabama. And here we were on a real adventure in this world made up of half sky.
We had long left the swamps and lush landscape of East Texas, and as we followed the Overland there was nothing the eye could hit up against. It was a land without features, flat as a pancake, cotton fields stretching to the earth's edge. Dust rose in a red cloud behind us. How far we traveled I can't say. It took fully an hour, and in those days thirty-five miles an hour was rated as a fast clip. Whereas the main road went straight as a pencil, we were soon off it and on a narrower new road that meandered from farm to farm.
We had left all signs of habitation when a low, rambling homestead appeared ahead. A lane some couple hundred yards in length began where stood a mailbox bearing the legend A. W. Winters. I noted the mailbox. It was to be my link to home.
Back home, in August our Alabama yard was half-filled with petunias, brown-eyed Susans, and gailla
rdias. I was used to a place that possessed a cape jasmine by the step, which needed only a bucket of cold water thrown on it to sweeten the air. But here there were hitching posts, horse apples scattered about, two great live oaks shading a corner of the house, and a clump of chinaberry trees—which gave the farm its name, Chinaberry—sheltering a wooden contraption of a swing, and a single pomegranate tree hanging with fruit, surrounded by a protecting fence. This was horse country. Farmers owning vehicles other than wagons were few. But there were two trucks parked in a side yard, one a cattle truck with high siding bespeaking the prosperity of the farm. The Winters cotton farm was the size of any three properties thereabouts.
Anson drew up at the front steps, and Ernest pulled alongside. There on the porch stood Lucretia Winters, known as Lurie. She was somewhat surprised by her husband's return at midday, by now this being about one o'clock in the afternoon. As you could hear a car coming a mile away, she had been warned and had put on a fresh gingham dress and white shoes, and her corn-silk hair was loose about her shoulders. If flowers were missing in the yard, there was a human blossom on the porch.
Lurie: she was as beautiful as my mother.
Ernest gasped, the Knuckleheads stared, and from that moment, all of Ernest's defenses were down. He made no objection when Anson reached into the car beside him, lifted me out, and carried me to the porch.
“Sandspurs are rough on the feet,” he explained. I was suddenly aware of my rusty ankles and elbows, my smudged face, which hadn't been properly washed in a week, and my dirty ears, within which my mother would have said birds had been roosting.