I started working in a welding shop in Oceanside, and we found out Adrianne was pregnant in April or May. She was supposed to have it in November, and I told her I wanted to name it Benny or Belle. We packed what we had and moved to Victory in June. The Dawsons had never been to the Panhandle, and Adrianne couldn’t believe there were no lakes or creeks. The first thing she said when we got off the train was, “It’s so barren.”
The first place we lived was a little white house in the middle of town close to the Methodist Church. I worked all day, came home and worked on the house. It was an old house no one had lived in for a long time, and we scraped, sanded and painted the whole thing. I redid the cabinets and varnished them. I wouldn’t let her do much, but she brought me things and helped paint the baseboards. I re-roofed the back porch. We painted the inside white and the woodwork a light brown and painted the baby’s room blue because we felt sure it would be a boy. The last thing I did was prepare the outside of the house all one week, take the weekend off and paint it eggshell. It was like reading “The Grapes of Wrath” which we did together in Oceanside after we married. It got ahold of you so you hated to get done with it. I worked till nine or ten every night, Adrianne brought me beer, and we sat in the back yard and loved up or talked.
We went to a movie one night at the little theater in Victory, the same one I went to cowboy movies at as a kid, walking because it was a nice night and the doctor told Adrianne to get more exercise. When we came out and I started home, she told me I was going the wrong way! I laughed a little and said, “I know the way home. I grew up here.”
“I can’t help it,” she said. “I know it’s the other way.”
“This is a little town, Adrianne,” I told her. “It ain’t even got a thousand people. I know how to get home. You’re just turned around.”
“I don’t think I am,” she said. She realized it was the other way and was being stubborn.
“Well, come on,” I said. “I’ll show you.” We walked home, and she never tried to give me directions in Victory again.
Benny was born that November in Victory Hospital. I took Adrianne in at six o’clock in the evening. Benny was born about two in the morning. He weighed seven pounds and some ounces and had dark hair like me. We named him Noah Benjamin Byrd after Adrianne’s daddy and Benny Cole. With his name, he might have been a preacher, but I’m glad he wasn’t turned that way. The only people that are as big a pain in the butt as a preacher are cops and politicians, and I’d rather he was a cop or politician than a preacher.
After all my people had looked at him and he and Adrianne were strong enough to travel, we had to go visit her folks in Union Track, near San Angelo. We had been real busy, and it was the first time they’d seen me since I went up there when we were going together. It was a big family, five girls and three boys, and all the girls except Adrianne, who was the oldest and named after her uncle Adrian, had flower names, Rose, Lily, Daisy and Camellia. The boys were named after counties because, Mrs. Dawson said, men were interested in territory. They were Haskell, Stonewall and Taylor. They were all married and would drive you crazy when they got together. Old man Dawson was bunged up from falling off a horse but was the best one of the bunch. Mrs. Dawson was a good old lady, too. Some years later, when Adrianne was complaining about me being hard on the kids, Mrs. Dawson only said, “They mind.”
Her kids were all right separately, but they were eight horny toads in a pocket in Union Track, which was named after the railroad it was built around. Benny howled and howled, and the old man and I went fishing.
I had a pint in my coat, and when we got away from the house in his pickup, I said, “Mr. Dawson, do you ever take a drink?”
He was hard of hearing, so I held it under his nose and asked him again.
“Yeah,” he said and broke into a grin.
His wife and kids didn’t like him to, but he was an old man. What did it hurt? We didn’t catch many fish, but we had a good time getting away from the house. We fished from the dock at Lake Jester all afternoon and passed the bottle back and forth.
When we were getting ready to come in, he looked at me and said, “You’re my favorite son-in-law.”
He didn’t say that just because I gave him a drink of whiskey. He knew if I wanted to do something, I went ahead and did it. He was a sharecropper till he got crippled up and old. He always had coonhounds, and he told me the thing he hated most was not being able to go coon hunting any more.
He died a couple of years later. We got down there, but he had had a heart attack and was in too bad a shape to talk much or get much out of everybody being there. Camellia and her husband were Baptists, and there was a Baptist preacher in the house. They told him Mr. Dawson had never been baptized, so the preacher was hounding him on his death bed. He couldn’t even talk, and the preacher was saying, “If you won’t deny God, Mr. Dawson, He won’t deny you. Ask his forgiveness, he’ll forgive you.”
I told him to leave the old man alone, and he said he was just trying to save a man’s soul. “Get out and leave him alone,” I told him, and I took him by the shoulders and pushed him out.
He turned around in my face at the door and said, “You’ll be responsible for a man going to hell!”
I shoved him down and said, “You’re going to be there with him if you don’t look out.”
Some of the sisters put up a squall, but the brothers waited in the room where they had been. I don’t think they minded. The old man watched me when I came back in the room. Though he didn’t say anything, I could tell by the look on his face that he was grateful. He died the next day.
Papa got diabetes about the time Mr. Dawson died. That was 1948. He lost a bunch of his weight and was down to two hundred pounds or so. To my surprise, he stuck to the diet the doctor gave him and got along fine. He made Benny a big red tricycle for his birthday and played Santa Claus and gave him an electric train for Christmas.
I worked in the shop and got better at my trade. It takes ten years to make a blacksmith-welder and twenty years to make a good one. Papa could take a wagon apart and put it back together, and he could shoe any horse, mule or ox and make corrective shoes. Before we got an electric welder, he taught me to forge weld. He always said, “There is nothing manmade that can’t be fixed by man. It’s only a question of whether or not it’s worth fixing from a money standpoint.”
Adrianne and I lived quietly and got along on fifty dollars a week, which is the only way you can live on that much.
I dreamed about the war for a long time. Usually I just rolled around and sweated or talked in my sleep. But one time I sat up and yelled, “Ha!” and stuck my fist through the wall.
Adrianne didn’t want any more kids. She told me I wouldn’t either if I was the one who had to have them. I finally talked her into having another one, and we had a girl in 1951 and named her Lenora Belle after Adrianne’s mother and my sister.
I was coming home one night and saw a deputy from Crosstie, Arnold McGovern, beating an Army veteran I knew named Dennis Jensen. It was on Main Street on the sidewalk outside Cleve Lawler’s cafe, and McGovern, who was known for being mean, had beaten Jensen bloody with his blackjack. Jensen was drunk and probably had given him trouble, but I thought he was overdoing it and might end up killing the poor guy. I got out and told McGovern to stop.
“Don’t interfere with the law or I’ll arrest you, too,” he said.
“I’m not interfering,” I said. “I just think we ought to take him to the hospital.”
McGovern agreed to take him to Victory Hospital, two blocks away, but he handcuffed me to the cigarette machine and said he would come back and let me go. He threw Jensen in his back seat and took off, but I was determined to see what was going on. I picked up the cigarette machine and started walking. I had to set it down and rest every now and then, but I reached the hospital and carried it in through the double doors into the lobby. A nurse said they were going to keep Jensen overnight, and McGovern came out and said he should
arrest me.
“You can arrest me if you want to,” I said, “but you better not try to use that blackjack.”
He unlocked my cuffs and left, and I pushed the cigarette machine against the wall and went home.
The next year, a guy I knew from the Marine Corps called with a job offer in San Angelo making horse trailers for a hundred dollars a week. I wasn’t making enough in Victory to turn it down. Papa hated for us to go, but he said I should stay in it for a year or two if it would get me ahead. He was down to a hundred and seventy or eighty pounds, but the doctor said it was good for him to lose weight. The guy’s name was Stewart. I never much liked him when we worked together in the shop at Oceanside. But I figured he would be all right to work with because it would only benefit us to get along. We moved to Angelo and found a big white house in a fairly good neighborhood. We moved in May and settled in, and I started to work with Stewart. It was supposed to be a partnership with his trailer plans and shop and me running the work and showing him how to help. He wasn’t much of a welder. He did have some sales lined up, though, and we started building trailers. We hired two men and were making a trailer a week.
It was a hot summer. The lady who lived next door was always watering her flowers, and I suppose I said something about not knowing why because they were going to die anyway. Benny toddled over there and said, “Hey, you old bitch, what are you watering those flowers for? They’re going to die anyway.”
That was about the only funny thing that happened. My partner turned out to be a double dealer. He began by being a day or two late with the checks for the men. Then he started being coy with me about who was placing orders and how they were paying. I don’t know if he was crooked or just stupid, but after five months, I caught him in the office after quitting time and told him I was through.
“Why?” he asked.
“You know why,” I said.
“Look, Preacher,” he said. “I’ve been low on money. It could happen to you someday.”
“It may,” I said, “but I’ll just own up to it and play square. You should have known better than to pull this on me, Stewart. Do I really look that stupid?”
“I just thought we’d work our way out,” he said.
“I come all the way down here and get the screws,” I said. “I ought to whip your ass.”
“I know how much I owe you,” he said. “I kept track. It’s eight hundred and eighty-nine dollars. I’ll have it for you tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’m not coming to work tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be here at four o’clock. You better have it.”
I stomped out and went home, and I waited till the next afternoon to go to the shop. On the way there, I noticed Stewart’s pickup on a side street near a cafe we had gone to once or twice. I parked in front and waited for him to come out. When he finally did about forty minutes later, he ran to his pickup, locked the doors and rolled up the windows. I went over, and he cracked his window and said, “You better leave me alone. I got a gun.” I saw it on the seat, a little twenty-five automatic. “I don’t have but a hundred dollars, Preach. It’s all I could get ahold of.”
“Give it here,” I said, and he stuck five twenties through the window. “I want the rest of it.”
“I don’t know much it is. I just made up the eight hundred and eighty-nine.”
“Well, I don’t want any more to do with you,” I said. “I’m going to the shop and take it out in equipment. I better not see you anymore.”
I went there and told the men to go home, and I loaded my stuff and took a big tool box and a set of torches. Then I hooked onto a trailer we had just finished and took it. I figured that would about square things. When he drove by once to see what I was doing, I got in the car and chased him. I couldn’t catch him because of the trailer, so he finally lost me and I had to go home. I knew where he lived but decided not to bother him because of his family. I never saw him after that.
It reminds me of the Marine Corps when a sergeant and a captain worked a frame-up on an old master sergeant who had thirty years in and was about to retire. I forget what it was over. But they worked some kind of a deal and got him busted. They were very stupid. They didn’t realize there are some people you can’t do that way. The old sergeant was busted to private and was on the parade ground with his Springfield ought-six early one morning. They came out of a building together. He took a step forward, kneeled, leveled on them and killed the sergeant on the steps and the captain as he tried to run. The old man went to federal prison. They ended his life, so he ended theirs. People would be more careful if they understood everything you do has a consequence.
After my job fizzled out, I got work at a filling station. I had done that in Victory some and was ready for a change. I worked from six in the morning till six at night. I was putting off going back to Victory because I couldn’t face my old man and tell him I had been had. I had my filling station job for about a month and was making enough to get along. We were doing all right with my wages and the hundred dollars and what I got for the tools and trailer. I kept the torches. I figured Stewart might call the cops, but I imagine he had reasons for not wanting much truck with the law. Adrianne and the kids were doing fine, and we went over to Union Track every other weekend or so to see her mother. We’d been in Angelo for six months when Adrianne called me one day at work.
“You better come home, Preacher,” she said. I made her call me by my nickname even though she didn’t like it.
“I can’t. I’m here by myself.”
“You still have to come home.”
“What’s it about? Are the cops there about the stuff I took from Stewart?”
“No.”
“What is it then? Did something happen to Papa?”
“You can find out when you get here. Now lock it up or whatever you have to do and come on.”
I had kind of expected the cops, but she said it wasn’t them. It looked like I’d got by with that. The most reasonable thing was that something happened to Papa. But I couldn’t really believe that. I came running in, and she said there was bad news. I stood there and waited. “I was going to have you call,” she said, “but I don’t guess that would be any better. You might as well know now. Your daddy died this morning.”
I asked what of. “They think it was a heart attack. He was in the back yard.”
“Mama called?”
“I took it that she was with him.” I felt lightheaded, so I squatted. “I loved him, too. He was so nice to me.”
I looked at her, and tears were going down her cheeks and neck without her making a sound or changing her proud expression. “I know how you feel, honey. I lost mine.”
I got up and looked at the ceiling. I don’t know what I thought I’d see there. I have always been very emotional, so it didn’t surprise me to feel tears on my face. What surprised me was that they were hot. I felt like I was being scalded.
That whole day is blurry. I called the station owner and told him what happened, and we loaded our black Buick and took off. I don’t know why I didn’t call. I guess I wanted to get it firsthand. I was careful not to drive too fast because I remembered stories about people who got killed on their way to funerals. It was already over anyhow, I thought.
Papa was a hard man. He never wanted anything from anybody but a dollar’s pay for a dollar’s work or vice versa. He never lied or cheated. He was honest. He was big and stout before he got sick, a hoss. He whipped those cowboys from the Bull Wagon for mouthing off when he shod their horses. They came in the next day, four of them, and he said, “My name is Raymond Byrd. I weigh three hundred pounds, and I cover every inch of ground I walk on.” They got on their horses and left because they hadn’t realized they might actually get killed. I saw him kill a horse. It was a worthless bastard that kicked and hurt him two or three times. He got up and hit it behind the ear with his fist doubled up like a hammer and knocked it down. I heard the bone pop. The horse was knocked out, and then it died. He let me out of the corn
er that time I was leaving to play football, testing me. He liked me more than Hilbert and Gilbert because I was more of a fighter, but he never let me know. He was hard just like he had tempered himself with all that steel.
We were halfway to Victory before the sun went down. It was nearly three hundred miles. We went through Snyder just after dark and saw an oil rig outside the city limits. The sky was moonless and clear, and the rig lights were as bright as could be. They outlined the rig all up and down. I was looking at it because it was close to the road. The lights blinded me or something, and I ran off the road and nearly hit a culvert. Adrianne asked if I wanted her to drive, but I was all right and kept on. Those lights just blinded me for a second.
I wondered who was at the house. My brothers were, I knew, because they worked at a power company in Lubbock. Rayno and Noona would be there. They lived in Victory. Judy and her husband, a model airplane-flying outfit named Rupert Doyle, were in Terkel, where he worked for the city water department. Johnette and her husband had probably not made it in from Albuquerque. The only other ones not there would be Papa, Melody and Annabelle. They were gone for good. No matter how many deaths you are exposed to, each one affects you differently because you have different feelings about whoever it is.
I was afraid of Papa when I was a kid and some afraid of him, I suppose, after I was grown. I used to tell myself I hated him. What I really wanted was to match up to him and be accepted, and I was afraid I would never be. I don’t know if he accepted me or not. I think he did. He sure loved Benny. Red was his favorite color, and he was as proud of that red tricycle up there drying in the sunlight on the bed of that cotton trailer as Benny was. He called Benny “my little brain surgeon.” He wanted him to be a doctor and not be busting his butt like us. I imagine the only thing he disliked about me was the way I was like him at the same age. The last thing he built, I found out later, was a high stand for a gasoline tank, which I noticed the outline of behind the shop as we came into town and went down the highway past there.
The Byrds of Victory Page 4