They were seated at a tile-inlaid table next to the wall of wine in the cool, comfortable restaurant. Both ordered ice cold Chablis. They were somber. “I was too dumbstruck to ask about the side effects of all of this medical care,” Iris admitted. “I just kept thinking about the last time I drove out to the ranch to feed the cattle with Dad in the back pasture.” Mary held Iris’ hand as she went on.
“It was only a few months ago. I had had a sixth sense all day at work that I needed to see Dad, so at five I changed into my jeans, t-shirt and tennis shoes…” Iris never wore boots. She claimed they were too hot.
Nestled in the Texas hill country outside of Austin, defined by its deep Barton Creek spring fed stream, the 700-acre ranch of their childhood had a fortress of a house designed by esteemed architect O’Neil Ford with all the green certified accouterments long before solar panels were fashionably sustainable. It stood at the top of the hill from the entrance to the ranch.
“Dad was in the pick up beside the front cattle guard as I drove up.
“I was so glad to catch him before he started his rounds. I told him I thought he might need some company.”
“Yeah, he probably already knew you were coming,” Mary said. “He’s always had extrasensory perception—especially when we need him.” Mary began tearing up.
“Yes, he did. He said ‘perfect timing’ and he smiled sweetly and opened the door for me to jump in. I parked my car and got out and walked around to the truck and hopped in.
“He was playing his favorite cassette tape—‘Moon River’—as we rolled over the berms in the pasture.”
Iris was quiet, remembering the moments with her father.
It was near sundown when he stopped the burnt orange Ford truck with the “Silvercreek Ranch” logo on the driver’s door, and honked the horn as was his custom.
The horn is never enough for cattle ranchers. Most have unique ways to sing “come-and-get-it.” VF’s was “Sue….Sue….Sue…weeee…. Sue…Sue…Sue…weeee…” at the top of his lungs.
Together they watched the cattle jostle over, random clicks from the hooves striking the flat limestone rocks in the pasture.
VF and Iris simultaneously opened their doors and jumped from the truck.
Iris grabbed bags of large chunky pellets from the bed. She carefully pulled the strings just so, the way VF showed her when she was a child, and the bags opened cleanly.
She stood and inhaled. The smell of hay mixed with cow dung, the open bags of pellets with their rich aroma of corn, grains, molasses, phosphorous, the baying of the calves, the anxious heifers’ breath and saliva on her hand as she offered them more pellets—all of this was comforting. She breathlessly watched a giant ball of orange rest over the hills in the distance as the sky melted into multiple shades of grape, melon, and pumpkin. She felt like a kid again, a welcome breeze in the air and big plans ahead for her future. She would finally be going to New York City to work. Getting her PhD in paleontology together with all of her hard work at UT had paid off. Her dream job in an exciting city was waiting at the American Museum of Natural History.
Iris returned to telling her story to Mary.
“Something wasn’t right that afternoon. Dad usually joked with the cattle—you know, he was always naming them and talking to them. ‘OK, now Trigger, go easy on those new gals, ya hear?’ he would say to the bull. But that day, no jokes. He watched the cattle wistfully. He kept putting his hand to his head and rubbing it.
“I asked if he was OK.
“‘A headache. That’s all,’ he said.
“I thought it odd. He never had a headache. Not even a cold. He never was sick. Ever.”
“So true,” Mary said. “He is a rock.”
“Before we drove back to the ranch house, Dad detoured to Inspiration Point…”
Inspiration Point was VF’s favorite spot on the ranch. It was a high cliff overlooking the canyon where the creek burbled below, where they used to hunt fossils and arrowheads. In fact, it was in these creek beds that Iris found her passion. There lay the Buda limestone with its millions of years of Cretaceous era remnants.
“Did you know, Mary, that below Inspiration Point lay my inspiration for a career in paleontology?”
“No.”
“You were just a twinkle in Dad’s eye at that point. I was ten years old. It was a summer of drought and I was enthralled at finding traces of tetrapods on the dry creek bottom as I searched for fossils. I did this for hours and hours for days. On my knees. Climbing the cliffs. Pocket knife and pail in hand. I found all kinds of fossils and imagined the unusual creatures that had come before us. That was my first romance with paleontology….”
“But back to my last day feeding cattle with Dad… Dad stopped the engine and turned to me and said that he had had, and kept having this strange experience of seeing depositions from his law practice of forty years ago. Forty years ago. Can you imagine? He said he saw them word-for-word as if they were in front of him, while he was driving. And he actually complained about headaches. He said he was about to see a neurologist, finally.
“I didn’t know what to think. What in the world could it be? How would your brain start bringing up details that vivid from so long ago?
“Then he said he hit a car in the parking lot at his office complex. ‘No big deal, little scratch—but for the life of me I never saw that car’ he said. I told him that things like that just happened.
“I said, ‘Dad, one minute you think no one is in back of you and the next thing you’re backing into them. It’s happened to me before.’
“Then he said that the other day he couldn’t find his way home after the American Legion meeting. He said he drove down one unfamiliar looking street after another. He didn’t know how he finally got back. It took three hours! Mare, can you imagine? Driving what used to be familiar roads and then all of a sudden everything is strange—foreign.”
Mary nodded, “A nightmare. A living nightmare.”
“Truly, then he finally gets home and said Mom was livid. She accused him of having an affair. ‘Oh! She went on and on,’ he said. He just needed to lie down. It was after midnight!’
“His voice carried a whiff of vulnerability. It really frightened me.
“‘Whatever happens,’ he said, ‘you’ll keep this land together? You and the others. Land and family. That’s what matters in life.’”
“What did you say?” Mary asked.
“Well, of course, I promised.”
Iris always understood how important the land was to her dad. The land more so than almost anything else. It was his mistress. Many times her mother, Virginia, accused her father of affairs, but the only affair he had was with his land. It was in his DNA. His father and his father’s father were farmers. His grandfather gave up a life in Prague to farm a piece of hot, dry dirt in Texas. And he succeeded. Both his grandfather and his father, Czech through-and-through, imbued a sense of purpose and awe of the great American farmland in their sons. Land was to be owned, not sold. Good, arable land could always produce, no matter what your circumstances. With that kind of land, there was no poverty. That was their credo.
“I watched him grab that sweaty Stetson and pull his thick black hair back with one hand while placing his hat above it, then saw him wince in pain.
“On the way back to the fortress, he drove around the ranch as if to take it all in before it was all gone. Before he was gone. I didn’t realize it then, but I think he knew he was dancing with death.
“He pointed to the remains of that old stone cabin on the rocky plain by the creek. He said, ‘I’m told Indians killed everyone in there.’ I’ve heard this story many times and it just becomes more horrid by the telling. That evening’s story had the wife captured and enslaved by the Tejas Indians. In a previous story, the children were enslaved.”
Mary and Iris laughed. “Dad loves stor
ytelling, doesn’t he?”
“Yep. So we continued the journey in the pick up around hundreds of acres to the old silver mine. Dad inched the truck along the rim of the mine as he always does to scare the shit out of us. That enormous, bomb-sized crater always makes me cringe, thinking that the truck might fall in. I asked him if he ever found out if the mine produced any silver of any value.”
“And….”
“He said it made a small fortune for one character.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. But it’s full of rattlers now,” Mary said.
Iris’ tone grew breathless. “Mare, while we were sitting beside the mine, there was this magnificent sunset. Swathes of orange and crimson were painted in the wide-open sky. I felt the essence of the land. It was a fall on your knees experience.”
“I know what you mean, Iris. It’s priceless…being present at the ranch with nothing between you and the sky but acres and acres of land and critters and color. The air feels clean. It smells sweet.”
“Will you keep your land? I know I am not getting any of the ranch,” Iris said.
“It’s too early to talk about that,” Mary said with a whiff of denial. Deep down, though, Mary was her father’s daughter—his pet name for her was “Little Buck” because she learned how to hunt deer as a toddler—and she would never part with that which felt part of him.
* * *
VF’s next ride in a vehicle together with Iris was after the diagnosis, the surgery and the terminal prognosis. It was Iris’ turn taking him to radiation. The family, with their oldest (read “the Boss”) sister’s coaxing, had created a very specific chart of activities to drive VF back and forth to radiation, doctor’s appointments, meetings at the American Legion, meetings at his law office, etc. Iris’ task was radiation. He was very appreciative and felt as never before that he needed to communicate with his family—especially those he felt he had hurt.
“Want to hear about my dream last night?” VF asked.
“Sure,” Iris answered, eyes on the road while driving.
“I walked into the waiting room at the Radiation Center and all the people had their heads screwed on backwards.”
“Whew!” Iris laughed. “Getting ready for Halloween?”
“That’s not all. Suddenly, they see me. Their eyes pop out and their heads pop up and swirl around.”
Iris and VF chuckled together.
“Yeah,” she said, “it all seems so absurd, doesn’t it?”
VF then stopped the narration and turned serious.
“The big C. I don’t have that.”
He continued to deny his disease. The big C clearly brought dishonor to this immortal.
“Bad headaches, yes, but I’m a survivor. WE are survivors.”
Iris nodded.
“Fred called and asked if I had cancer. Can you believe that? Cancer?”
Fred was his best friend. Fred had been in the Great War with him, one of the members of the Greatest Generation. Fred had fought in the Pacific. VF had written a book about it—Cabanatuan Japanese Death Camp.
What was Iris to say? Should she have told him that yes, indeed, he had survived a childhood of poverty, a crappy marriage, the worst possible case of espionage behind the lines in the worst War in history, and crushing career disappointments only to die of one of the most horrible forms of cancer? She and other members of the family just hoped the doctors were wrong. Maybe he could beat this.
So she said, “Yes, we are survivors.”
“I need to tell you something, Iris. Remember when you wrote and asked me for $800 for your toddler’s surgery?”
They had just pulled into the Austin Radiology parking lot. Iris stopped the engine, unbuckled the seatbelt and turned to face him. That incident was decades ago, when she worked full time, went to college and had two small children and an alcoholic husband. That $800 was real money then. She thought of the desperation she had felt.
“Yes, I remember.”
“I’ve always felt bad about that. I should have given it to you.”
She gently touched his hand.
“Oh, Dad, that helped me grow up. I had to get a loan for the first time in my life.” Inside, though, she felt a great burden escape. Now we can put his anger over my shotgun marriage behind me…finally. VF had disowned her when she got pregnant as a teenager. He had expected great things of her, but her behavior felt like a betrayal to him. He decided that if she wanted to get married so badly then her worthless husband would have to provide for her and the family. He washed his hands of her, her education, and her little family during that time. Despite his lack of help, she got her college degree, a good job, raised her kids, divorced that husband, got her doctorate, and now had a good life with her second husband and third son.
She exhaled as she held back tears, escorted him into the facility and watched as the technician scolded him not to adjust his mask during the radiation.
“What?” VF said, incredulously, “it’s my Halloween costume. I’d never do that!”
After the radiation treatment and before VF dozed on the ride back to the ranch, he looked at Iris plaintively. “Iris, you think you could get everyone to the ranch next month? The last Sunday?”
“I can try, Dad. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking there’s something I want to do before I get too tired and addled to do it.”
* * *
Three months post op for VF and counting, the last Sunday dinner together with most of the family did not go as planned. It was fall, 1994. VF had invited everyone, as he did monthly, for a feast. Iris had written the invitations and mailed them promptly as she promised she would do.
He was finished with the radiation, and although some of his functions were beginning to fail, he still had the spirited, wry mind they all admired. He knew he couldn’t keep up these family dinners much longer, and Virginia would never get the family together.
“These big family gatherings are too haphazard,” she confided in Bits. “I’m glad Daddy puts them together because it makes him happy, but they exhaust me. They’re really for him. He likes to be the center of attention.”
This fall, though, felt like a much more symbolic fall than just a season. It felt as if everything was falling apart—the Democratic Party, his family, his health, and his land, which he could not maintain under these circumstances. Most of the family was there.
Bits lived in Toronto, but made the trip because Virginia begged her to be there to be with her.
Vicki and her two daughters, Jessica and Jennifer, aged twenty and twenty-seven, had driven over from Colorado.
Iris and her ten-year-old son, Thad, were making a last supper appearance before moving to New York to her new job and to join her husband, Miles, who was already there. Iris’ oldest son, Will, was away serving in the Navy and her middle son, Jason, was away at college.
Mary, who was noticeably pregnant with her second child, was there with her dentist husband, Todd, and her four-year-old son Luke.
Joseph arrived wearing his collar since he raced from helping say Mass in downtown Austin.
Hap and his wife Karen brought special dishes to devour.
Even Richard came, looking anxious because of his status as a persona non-gratis in his dad’s eyes.
And of course there was an empty place setting for Jillian. There would always be an empty place setting for little Jillian.
Everyone saw this as his or her last chance to be together. VF was determined to make this a final grand performance.
The stage was set with Virginia’s family’s heirloom china and silver in the wide swath of the high-ceiling, sunlit dining room, its twelve-foot maple expandable table covered with Bits’ French La Mer blue table linens and napkins.
“I brought these just for you, Mom,” Bits said as she pecked her mother’s cheek a
nd handed her the package of goods from Canada, tied with a cornflower blue grosgrain ribbon.
“Merci!” Virginia said with a flourish.
Bits was always ingratiating herself to Virginia, and cleverly keeping things from her all at the same time. Their relationship was equally narcissistic.
Maple captains’ chairs attended each place setting. The granite floor absorbed the giggles of the two grandchildren jostling for places at the kids’ table. Ice melted in tall glasses filled with tea.
Everyone had brought a favorite dish. The table was laden with sausage, venison, turnip greens, tossed salad, cornbread, chili, rice, and raisin pie on the sideboard. VF walked unsteadily down the stairs into the open dining room, carrying his usual “top 10” poster with nine topics. His “I’m Having a No Hair Day” baseball cap covered his bald head.
“Here’s Dad’s teaching opportunity,” Hap said to no one in particular. He whispered to Vicki, “doan cha think he could at least finish the topics and make it a real top 10?”
“That’s his little joke,” Vicki shot back as she nudged Hap, “you know that!”
VF sat the poster against a tall chair, looking pleased. The poster read in big red letters:
Governor Ann Richards’ hair
W Bush
Molly Ivins
Should electric chairs be banned?
Silver Spoons
Fireside Chats
Karl Rove
What’s the matter with the Cowboys?
Clinton’s stupid Health Care
“Something to chew on.” He smiled, thinking how much he loved absurd, crazy Texas and DC politics.
“First thing, kids….everyone….” VF’s voice grew strong.
Everyone stopped talking.
“Can I please have you all in the living room now before dinner?”
Sons, daughters, son-in-law and daughter-in-law were joined by the grandchildren and Virginia, and sat on the leather couches and chairs.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” VF began as he removed his hat, “for a long time now. I know it’s not the Easter holy days. But I don’t know how much longer I will be able to do what I feel I must.”
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