Mary Lou found another doctor. Together they spent the night nursing the boy, too sick to be moved to the hospital. Richard was better by morning, but the episode resonated in his imagination. Decades later in Montana, he told Tom McGuane an amplified tale of lying alone in darkness for a year with his head blown to the size of a watermelon. “I guess his mind became his only toy during that time,” McGuane said, recalling this story.
At his construction site in Sitka, on the morning of August 11, 1942, Edward Dixon stepped onto a platform load of lumber, hitching a ride aloft to the third floor of an unfinished building. The crane operator didn’t see him. When the load jerked, Edward tumbled off, falling sixteen feet and landing on his head. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage when he was twenty-six years old.
It took almost two weeks to ship Edward’s body south through the war zone on the Southland boat to Seattle. The Dixon family mortician drove up from Tacoma to bring him home and came upon a macabre sight in the baggage storeroom. The coffin had splintered into pieces. Edward’s corpse, his head crushed sideways, lay in a corner. Mrs. Forkenbrock had her assistants pick up the splinters and place them in the wagon along with Edward’s body. They nailed the crude transport coffin back together in the mortuary, but provided a more elaborate casket for the burial.
At the funeral parlor on a rainy night in Tacoma, Richard Brautigan, age seven, stared into the open coffin containing his uncle Edward’s grotesquely painted remains, the thick makeup intended to recapture a final illusion of life. The gathered relatives urged the little boy “to kiss the lipstick on his dead mouth.” Richard refused and ran screaming up the aisle, past the gathered mourners, out into the comforting rain. In 1949, the family opened the mausoleum and placed Bessie Dixon’s ashes inside the casket with Edward’s body.
Many years later, when he was twenty-six, the same age as his uncle when he died, Brautigan wrote a three-stanza lyric poem in memory of Edward Dixon. After it was first published in The Octopus Frontier, Richard identified “1942” as one of his “favorites.”
Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
take his heart
for a lover
and take his death
for a bed,
and send him homeward bound
on a ship from Sitka
to bury him
where I was born.
five: dick porterfield
IN 1943, MARY Lou Brautigan worked as a cashier at Laughlin’s Café on Pacific Avenue in in Tacoma. The restaurant hired Robert Geoffry Porterfield, a fry cook who could also handle dinner specials, in May. Known to his friends as “Tex” (actually born in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1896), Porterfield was a broad-shouldered man standing about five nine, with a small mustache and a crew cut going gray at the temples. “He was not good-looking, but he thought he was,” Mary Lou observed. Tex came from a wealthy oil family but ran away from home at sixteen and joined the navy.
“He was an alcoholic.” Mary Lou remembered her ex-husband with considerable distaste. “He was crazy in the head. He had to sustain so much alcohol every day to walk around,” she recalled. “[Tex] had a big mouth, a dirty mouth, a filthy mouth. All he could think and talk about was filth. People he didn’t even know. It’s a wonder he didn’t get punched out.”
After working together for several months, Mary Lou agreed to go out on a date with Tex Porterfield. “He took me to a tavern, and I didn’t drink. Wasn’t that a joke?” The place had a small band. Tex Porterfield was a good dancer, one of his redeeming features. He was also something of a barroom conjurer, performing simple legerdemain and small sleights. Mary Lou remembered his act. “He did tricks, like taking a glass of beer and turning it upside down and putting it back on the bar without spilling a drop. All sorts of junk like that. Magician.”
Lulu Mary Kehoe Brautigan “Titland” married Robert Geoffry “Tex” Porterfield in Tacoma on September 20, 1943. Pastor Burton W. Smith tied the knot in a Lutheran ceremony. “You don’t know what I did or what I give up to marry you,” Tex told her. Mary Lou frowned at the unpleasant memory. “That’s a nice thing to tell your old lady,” she said. “I had to work all the time to support myself.” Both Richard and his sister used their stepfather’s surname, becoming known as Barbara and Dick Porterfield.
By early 1944, Tex and Mary Lou split up. He headed east to Great Falls, Montana, where he secured a job as a fry cook. Letter-writing was one of Porterfield’s accomplishments. When he took a mind, he adroitly turned his thoughts to words of love. After several torrid missives from her estranged husband, Mary Lou bundled up the two kids and boarded the Great Northern “Empire Builder,” traveling overnight to Great Falls for a Valentine’s Day rendezvous. She brought along the pet canary her mother had given her, but it froze to death in the baggage car.
Mary Lou wasn’t impressed with the little city on the Missouri River. “That Great Falls is nothing but old miners and stuff. Cold people. Dirty people. Drunks that go around shaking silver dollars in their pockets. They see a woman, they start shaking their money in their pockets.” Any hope of rekindling a hot Valentine romance went up in a blue barroom blur of cigarette smoke. Mary Lou soon tired of watching Tex perform his beer mug sleight of hand.
“He would sit in the tavern with some women that he never even saw. Would tell them the filthiest stories. These were just acquaintances passing through the night.” Mary Lou was only another stranger ricocheting in and out of Porterfield’s life. Two weeks later, after traveling nearly a thousand miles to be in his arms, she headed back to Tacoma on a train, leaving the kids behind in Montana, alone in a rooming house with filthy Tex.
Looking back through the wonder-struck eyes of a four-year-old, Barbara remembered the winter spent in Great Falls as a magical time. She recalled going down to the railroad depot with Dick day after day to watch the passenger trains come and go. All the energy and commotion provided an intense excitement for the little girl. The big steam locomotives with their exotic smell of grease and hot metal lured them back again and again. “We’d always say, ‘Let’s go to that smell,’” Barbara reminisced. They stood on the platform, two little raggedy kids waving at the black porters and cooks who threw them pieces of gum and candy.
Other days, Dick and Barbara went skating. Too poor to afford real skates, they slid across the ice on their street shoes. It was extremely cold, and Barbara remembered “just freezing all the time.” Having fun made her ignore the subzero weather. There was a pond in a local park where people skated, and Dick took Barbara there, the protective big brother holding her hand, sliding with her across the gleaming frozen surface on the leather soles of their cheap shoes.
In the early spring of 1944, Porterfield brought Dick and Barbara back to Tacoma. His reunion with Mary Lou went better this time, and it wasn’t very long before she was pregnant again. Even this didn’t hold the couple together. By summer, Mary Lou moved to Salem, Oregon, without Tex. During the fourteen months she lived in the state capital, Mary Lou changed her address three or four times. As her pregnancy progressed, she found the kids were more than she could handle and boarded Richard and Barbara out with another family.
Mary Lou arranged to spend occasional weekends with her children. In March of 1945, they all stayed at the Grand Hotel, a clean, quiet place, sleeping together in a great big bed. One afternoon, the family went to the movies: To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Halfway through the picture, before Betty asked Bogie if he knew how to whistle, Mary Lou went into labor. “We’ve got to go,” she whispered. Dick, a lifelong film fanatic, didn’t want to leave. “You’ve got to go,” his mother insisted, “you can come back later and see the show.”
They hurried out of the theater, and Mary Lou checked into the Salem General Hospital. Sandra Jean Porterfield was born on April 1, 1945. Mary Lou spent nearly two weeks in the hospital with her new baby. Children were not permitted to visit, so Dick boarded c
lose to Salem General and came every evening and stood outside the window, waving at his mother. Each time, he left a fresh flower on the front steps. The nurses went out after he’d gone and brought the gift blossom in to Mary Lou. “He was very grown-up when he was ten,” she said.
The Salem General Hospital played a recurring role in their lives. Less than two months after Sandra’s birth, a tough kid at school jumped on Dick’s stomach. The next day, he complained of not feeling well and lay around reading comic books. “He’d read and reread them.” By evening, he insisted he was not sick and “ate a great big supper.” On Sunday morning, Dick slept in late. When Mary Lou checked on him, he was burning with fever, his stomach distended.
The Porterfields had no phone at the time. Mary Lou ran to the office of the motel where they lived. She didn’t know anyone in town, and the owners called Dr. Terence King. “Don’t touch him or move him,” he told Mary Lou. Dr. King got to the motel in no time. The diagnosis was acute appendicitis. Mary Lou loaded Dick into the backseat of the physician’s car and noticed that Dr. King had only a thumb and one forefinger on his right hand, something of a handicap for a surgeon. She sat with her son during the slow ride to the hospital, his head hanging down and his feet across her lap as he writhed in pain.
Many years later, when Brautigan told Keith Abbott of this incident, he added fabrications, elevating the story into myth. He said his mother had put him to bed with a fever and left him there until a concerned neighbor telephoned for help five days later. “Richard recalled the doctor driving to the hospital at ten miles an hour,” Abbott wrote, describing his friend’s version of events, “holding Richard on his lap for fear the swollen appendix would burst. The memory remained of the doctor’s tears falling on him, as he wept out of rage and pity for Richard’s condition.”
During the long operation, Mary Lou paced back and forth along a path between the hospital buildings, chain-smoking cigarettes. A group of men and women sitting outside on benches stared at her with peculiar expressions. The next day, she found out the state mental hospital was part of the medical complex. “It was a nuthouse. And they were out there for air. My god!”
The operation was over by early afternoon. Eleven inches of Dick’s lower colon had been removed, along with a quart of poisonous fluid. Mary Lou looked in on him. Filled with Sulfathiazole to fight the infection and hooked up to an IV, Dick had a drain in his side for peritonitis. Dr. King came by in his hospital whites and suggested Mrs. Porterfield go home and get some rest. It wasn’t until the next day that he told her Dick was going to live: “I know he’s going to make it now.” Ten days later, Dick Porterfield ran around the neighborhood climbing cherry trees.
News of the Japanese surrender came on August 14. Young Dick was at the movies, watching a Dennis Morgan film. He later wrote, “I think it was a singing foreign legion desert picture but I cannot be certain.” In the middle of the action, a yellowed strip of paper was projected onto the screen with a typewritten message announcing Japan’s unconditional capitulation. The audience began laughing and yelling. Dick remembered the ecstatic sound. They all rushed out of the matinee into the heat of a summertime afternoon. Car horns blared. Complete strangers embraced. “Everything was in Pandemonium.”
Caught up in the general euphoria, Mary Lou had another abortive reunion with Tex. She rented a house at 2235 Hazel Avenue and he took a night job cooking in a café. Things went badly almost from the start. Dick didn’t move fast enough carrying in wood for the heating stove, and Porterfield beat the boy unmercifully. When Tex went to work one evening, Mary Lou gathered together as much as she could pack, roused the kids from bed, and fled into the night. She first went to her mother in St. Helens. Later, she flipped a quarter on a street corner in Portland. Heads, she would move to Eugene. Tails, she’d go the other way. The coin came up heads.
Home of the University of Oregon, the city of Eugene stands at the head of the Willamette Valley near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers. Founded in 1846 by Eugene Skinner, an Illinois county sheriff who came west by wagon train, the place was known for years as “Skinner’s Mudhole.” When Mrs. Porterfield arrived with three young children in tow in the fall of 1945, Eugene was the second largest city in Oregon yet, even with the university, it remained a rural backwater. Mary Lou rented a small white house on the corner of Twenty-third and Agate streets, close by the U of O campus. Tex Porterfield followed and lived there a short while before taking off forever. She never saw him again.
By December, the Porterfield family moved when the owner of the little white house returned from Alaska and needed the place for himself. Mary Lou put all her belongings in storage and found a motel room across the river in Glenwood, a strip town adjoining neighboring Springfield. A week or so after they moved in, torrential rains swept the area. “It was just a davenport rain that never stopped,” she remembered. The rain continued for days, and the water began to rise.
On the twenty-ninth of December, Mary Lou stood by the kitchen window bathing Sandra in the sink and saw a bed float down the turbid rain-swollen Willamette River. Dick and his sister, now nicknamed B.J., played outside in the storm with some other children. “Mommy, mommy,” they shouted, bursting into the room, “everybody in the court is out there. Even the sheriff.” Mary Lou saw them all milling about in the downpour. The sheriff told her it was time to evacuate.
Mary Lou picked up the baby, wrapping her in a blanket. Hearing someone next door, she called out for help. The woman came over, and Mary Lou handed Sandra to her. “Take my baby over to Eugene and tell the police where you have her.” Mary Lou rolled up the mattresses and stacked her things on the furniture, setting her little Christmas tree on the bed in the corner. Dick and Barbara kept running up and down outside, yelling in the pouring rain. They were soaking wet, having too much fun to care. Mary Lou and her kids were the last to leave, watching the highway fold up behind them “like scrambled eggs.”
Dick and Barbara each went to stay with a different family. Baby Sandra was taken in by another. Several days later, when the floodwaters receded, they reunited, and Mary Lou made one last trip over to Glenwood to retrieve her possessions. She would never return. Barbara remembered wandering the riverbank with her brother. They found jars of salmon eggs washed out of the stores and full bottles of pop. It was like a treasure hunt.
After the flood, Mary Lou rented a place at Seal’s Motel at 1600 Sixth Avenue West in Eugene, two rooms with a kitchenette and a shower for $149.50 a month. In So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, Brautigan wrote of when he lived “in a cabin at an auto court, but we didn’t have an automobile.” He claimed he and his family “were guests of the Welfare Department.” The fatherless Porterfield family was extremely poor. Mary Lou had worked as a waitress, never a lucrative job, even in the best of times. Now unemployed, with three kids at home, she often had to rely on public assistance over the next few years.
Dick Porterfield became a lifelong fisherman during his stay in Seal’s Motel. At a time when Chambers Street more or less defined the western boundary of Eugene, the little motor court was practically out in the country. A half-dozen sawmills were located in the area, bordering logging ponds alive with bluegills, crappies, perch, and catfish. A steam railroad servicing the mills ran north and south, and the local highway rose on an arching overpass above the tracks. Beyond lay open fields and abandoned fruit orchards. Apples, pears, cherries, and plums grew wild on the edge of town. All waited within an easy walk for an eleven-year-old boy with adventure on his mind.
An old hermit lived in a shack built from packing crates at the edge of one pool. A family of fat people in bib overalls came at night to fish, unloading a roomful of furniture off a pickup, making themselves at home along the bank, fishing poles in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. An air of the fantastic permeates later literary descriptions of this bizarre logging pond world, but Barbara remembered it all to be true. She was afraid of the old bearded man in the shack, but the
large couple with their sagging sofa became a treasured memory from her nocturnal angling expeditions with Dick.
Barbara was entrusted to her brother’s care when she was a toddler. The two Porterfield children went everywhere together. “The first memories I have, I have of [Dick] and not my mother or a stepdad,” Barbara recalled. “I never talked about anything with my mom, but if I had any problems or wanted to know anything, I’d always discuss it with [Dick]. I’d never go to my mother for advice or anything.” In his sister’s opinion, Dick was given so much responsibility at such an early age, he “grew up very fast. Very fast.”
Barbara trusted her big brother completely. Walking to the logging ponds, they never followed Highway 99 because of the heavy traffic. There was only one way in and out of Eugene in those days, and the road was always very busy. The kids cut across abandoned fields and orchards instead, stopping to eat whatever fruit they came upon. During the day, they fished for bluegill, bass, and perch. Neither had proper equipment. Dick cut willow stems for poles, rigging them with string and safety-pin hooks. On a slow day or if they caught so many it grew boring, they jumped on the big logs floating in the ponds. Neither knew how to swim. The water stood over twenty feet deep, but they gave no thought to the danger involved. It was too much fun jumping from log to log, pretending to be lumberjacks.
At night, they returned to the ponds, angling for catfish. They built a big fire on the bank for warmth and because the light attracted fish. They stayed out quite late, past ten or eleven o’clock. If Mary Lou had concerns about her children’s whereabouts, she made no mention of it. Dick had the responsibility of caring for his younger sister, and that was that.
Dick Porterfield proudly brought his nocturnal catch back to Seal’s Motel. “He would supply nearly everybody with his darn catfish.” The little family on welfare ate a lot of fried catfish. Dick and Barbara heard people calling frog legs a gourmet delight and learned how to “jig” for them, dangling a treble hook baited with bits of red flannel in front of squatting bullfrogs.
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