The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  We turned a corner and suddenly we were alone in white Montgomery. Three white men were following us, shouting. They followed us for blocks. Then three young black men standing at a street comer saw us and heard them and understood what was happening. “Would you like us to walk with you where you’re going?” one of them asked.

  “Yes, we would,” I said.

  Soon the white men faded away and we were safely inside the station. Two hours later, our bus departed. Nearly all the passengers had been in the march. One of them had a radio. Not long after we left Montgomery, he said, “Oh, God. There’s been a murder.”

  It was Viola Liuzzo, 39 years old, mother of five, from Detroit. She lived in the Green Street Baptist Church, where we lived. She had been one of the hardest workers among us. While she was driving from Selma to Montgomery, still working after the march, some unidentified men in a car had forced her car off the road and shot her in the head.

  I sat alone on the front seat of the bus, opposite the driver. I was hungry and exhausted. My fever was high and climbing. I didn’t know it, but my cold had become bronchial pneumonia.

  During the night, my brain became a whirl of nightmarish images and sounds. Whenever the driver would hit the brake or steer around a curve I would jerk awake, and in the highway ahead, in the beam of the headlights, I would see hooded Klansmen standing.

  Maybe I talked or made a noise. One of the other passengers came forward and sat by me. He was a burly, white-bearded man, about 55 or 60 years old. He spoke with an Irish brogue. His name was Tim Murphy, he said. In his youth, he was in the Irish Republican Army, and had fled to America in 1923, a fugitive from the British. He was a labor organizer for the Longshoremen’s Union on the New York waterfront.

  “Some young man should have climbed to the top of the capitol and raised the Stars and Stripes,” he said. “That wouldn’t have been very nonviolent, though.” He talked all night of Ireland and ancient kings named Brian.

  At midnight on March 27, we arrived in New York. Roy and Bob and I were supposed to board another bus immediately and continue on to Boston. “Don’t go,” Tim Murphy said. “Come have a drink with me. There’s another bus in two hours.” Roy, a teetotaler, declined and boarded the bus for Boston, but Bob and I accepted. Mr. Murphy took us to an Irish bar near the waterfront. “Now you’re ill,” he said to me. “You must do as I tell you.” He ordered us corned beef sandwiches and shots of Irish whiskey and beer chasers. He paid for it all and proposed a toast: “To freedom.”

  He proposed the toast many times. Neither Bob nor I would remember how we got on the 2 a.m. bus to Boston. We slept all the way home.

  March 1990

  GOING WITH THE DAWGS

  There are no fans so rabid as the followers of six-man football, partly because it’s an exciting game to watch, and partly because it’s played in towns where absolutely nothing else is going on. People have time to think long on it, and fine-tune their emotions. I know this because I played six-man football in the early 1950s for the Fort Davis Indians.

  THE TALL BLUE LETTERS ON THE WATER TOWER ARE BEGINNING TO fade but still can be read, even from the interstate:

  STATE CHAMPS 1979-’80

  At the foot of the tower, the fry cook at the County Line Cafe has just served up the day’s last Ellis County Collider Burger and is cleaning his grill. The cafe occupies one end of the Milford One Stop, which also is a grocery store and a garage. The grocery store is empty of people, but the loud thumps and clangs echoing from the garage out back say that someone is trying to separate a flat tire from its rim.

  Across the street at the Country Corner, a boy wearing a cowboy hat is pumping Fina unleaded into his Ford Ranger. He’s the only soul in sight. The Ellis County State Bank and the Milford Cash Grocery have been locked up for the night.

  They, along with the One Stop and the Country Corner, account for nearly all the commerce in Milford, so the parking spots along the sidewalks are empty. So is the street.

  At six o’clock on the first evening of September, the sun is still high and brutal and the school year hasn’t started yet. But 200 of Milford’s citizens (a sign on the edge of town says “About 700 Friendly People Plus 3 or 4 Old Grouches” live here) have come to Horton Field, “Home of the Mighty Bulldogs,” to watch the beginning of their autumn.

  They’re sitting in lawn chairs and on parked cars along the sidelines, and in the bleachers along the north side of the field. Behind them, beyond the rows of parked cars, on the lawn of Milford School, little children have started a football game of their own.

  On the west end of the field the Gordon Longhorns are warming up, and on the east end, the Milford Bulldogs. They’ve been warming up a long time. Coach Kevin Ray and his assistant, Brad Lane, glance nervously at their watches. “The officials are late,” Coach Ray says. “If they don’t get here soon, the coaches will have to referee.”

  The people leaning on the cars and sitting in the bleachers cast appraising eyes on the hometown boys, and on Coach Ray and Coach Lane, hoping for omens of greatness. “Get ‘em, Dawgs!” they cry.

  It isn’t to be a real game, only a scrimmage. The first real game is still two weeks and 200 miles away, against Moran. But the Milford cheerleaders—Shelia, Robin, Kellie, Renee, Taree, Rachel, Beth and Jennifer—are dolled up in dress uniform and already in full cry.

  “Oh,” says Ron Scott, Milford’s sixth-grade teacher and most vocal fan, “you come out here on an October night when it’s just cool enough to wear a little light jacket, and the old moon is so bright, and every fan knows every player, and every daddy’s rooting and every mama’s rooting and every girlfriend’s rooting, and the boys are playing their hearts out… Well, it doesn’t get any better than that. No time. Nowhere.”

  A red station wagon turns off the highway. The officials have arrived. The Bulldogs and the Longhorns take the field. The trill of the referee’s whistle pierces the air.

  Last year or thereabout

  It turned into a rout,

  With a score of zero to fifty.

  Since we won the game,

  We are proud to proclaim

  That beating Moran was nifty!

  In Milford, winning is a strong tradition. Back in 1978, the Bulldogs lost only one game. That was to the Cherokee Indians—the eventual state champions—in the quarterfinals. Then they played two undefeated seasons and won back-to-back state championships in 1979 and 1980. They’ve made the state playoffs four of the past five years. Last year, May beat them, 54-20, in the quarterfinals. Then Zephyr beat May, 54-36, in the semifinals. Then Fort Hancock clobbered Zephyr, 76-30, for the state title.

  Indeed, Zephyr got 45-pointed, a numbing humiliation in a championship game.

  Maybe you haven’t heard of Zephyr or May or Fort Hancock. Maybe Milford is just a sign on I-35E between Waxahachie and Hillsboro and a water tower in the distance. And you never read in the sports pages of Jamie Aguilar of Fort Hancock, Matt Mann of Higgins, Darrell Paul of New Home, Lewis Knapp of Trent, Bryan Keith of Zephyr or Bud Venable of Bovina, even though they made the All-State Team last year. None of them will make the pros. It’s almost certain that none will play on a college team. It’s unlikely that they even will be recruited.

  And if you don’t know about getting 45-pointed, well, you don’t know about six-man football.

  Coach Ray didn’t know, until he graduated from college about five years ago and needed a job. “I’d never seen or heard of six-man ball,” he says, “but I was offered the coaching job at Blum, and I took it sight unseen. I fell in love with the game. It’s better fit for smaller, quicker kids than 11-man is. And you have to be in better condition to play it. There’s a lot more running, and most of the players stay on the field longer than in 11-man.

  “A big, strong, slow guy who might be a star 11-man lineman…well, in six-man he’d just be slow. The other team would run around him like he was a rock.”

  The game was invented in 1934 by Stephen E. Epler, the coac
h at Chester High School in Nebraska, who was trying to figure a way for tiny schools with not many boys to play football. The schools in Coach Epler’s neck of the prairie must have been really tiny. When the world’s first six-man game was played on Sept. 26, 1934, four schools had to contribute players to put two teams on the field. Chester and Hardy Highs battled Alexandria and Belvidere Highs to a 19-19 tie.

  The team that Coach Epler devised consists of a center, two ends and three backs. Most of the game rules are the same as for 11-man football, but with some important differences.

  A six-man football field is 80 years long and 40 wide, not 100 long and 50 wide. The goal posts’ uprights are 25 feet apart, not 23, and their crossbars are nine feet high, not 10. Each quarter of play is 10 minutes, not 12. The ball must be moved 15 yards for a first down, not 10. A field goal counts four points, not three, and the scoring for extra points is reversed—a kick is worth two points, and a run or pass is worth one.

  Also, the quarterback—or whoever takes the ball from the center—can’t run across the line of scrimmage with the ball unless he hands off to another player and then receives it back. Also, any member of the team is eligible to receive a pass.

  These rules, plus the sparcity of bodies on the field, make for fast, wide-open, razzle-dazzle play, full of options, end-arounds, reverses and faked punts and field goals. It isn’t unusual for the center to catch a touchdown pass. It isn’t unheard-of for the center to throw one—to the quarterback. High-scoring games are usual, replete with 60-yard runs and 70-yard passes, lacking the piles of bodies at the line of scrimmage that characterize 11-man football.

  “I tell my friends in Dallas, if you want to see some real football, come down to Milford on a Friday night,” says Max Kimrey, who lives in Milford and commutes to work in Mesquite. “Compared to six-man, regular football is plain boring.”

  Trent beat Panther Creek, 89-69, last year. Lazbuddie beat Wilson, 64-44. Strawn beat Newcastle, 52-47.

  “The only time six-man is boring is when it’s a real tight defensive game,” says Joseph Calderon, a 1989 Milford graduate who has driven 75 miles from Tarleton State University in Stephenville to watch his old teammates scrimmage Gordon. “In the game for the district championship last year, we beat Covington, 22 to 20. That was pretty boring.”

  But scoring can get monotonous sometimes, too. Hence the 45-point rule: If a team has its opponents down by 45 points or more after the first half, the game is over.

  “We played Moran last year,” says Mr. Calderon, “and we had them 50 to nothing at halftime. They drove 200 miles down here and then had to leave after only 20 minutes on the field. Their coach told our coach, ‘You’ve got to come to Moran next year. You’d better be there.’ It was kind of a dare. He was pretty upset.”

  It will happen again,

  ’Cause it’s part of our plan.

  With our coaches, our players and staff,

  We will win in the end,

  But we’ll still be friends,

  Even though we’ll retire them at the half.

  According to the rules of the University Interscholastic League, which governs public school sports in Texas, only high schools with fewer than 100 students may compete in six-man football. A decade ago, 58 teams played it. This year there are 86 six-man teams, and their number is growing. “As the small towns of Texas get smaller, so do their schools,” says Bob Young of the UIL.

  Nearly all the six-man schools are west of I-35, in the barely populated vastness of the West Texas cattle and oil empire. Milford and the other schools in its district—Covington, Blum, Buckholts, Aquilla, Abbott, Bynum and Boles Home of Quinlan—are the eastern end of six-man country.

  In the 1940s, Milford had seven churches, two cotton gins and 30 businesses. Most of them are gone now. The town’s population hasn’t shrunk as small as many of Texas’ old farm communities, but it hasn’t grown, either. About 800 people lived there at the end of World War II. Its official city limit sign says 664 live there now. One hundred ninety-three children attend Milford School. Forty-nine are in high school.

  Seven of Milford’s 10 football players graduated last spring, so Coach Ray and Coach Lane are constructing a new team around the remaining lettermen and a transfer from Waxahachie. “We don’t have much experience,” Coach Ray says, “but we have speed.”

  At 12:50 p.m. on the season’s first game day, every Milford School student, from innocent kindergartener to worldly senior, gathers in the cafeteria to pump school spirit into the Bulldogs. The cheerleaders bounce and jump. The boys in the audience bark like bulldogs. The coaches and the two seniors on the team, James Claiborne and Carl Essary, deliver speeches promising great effort and victory. Ron Scott, whose custom-made poems have become a pre-game tradition at Milford School, reads his new work, “The Battle at Moran.” The room quivers with cheers and laughter. The kindergarteners, seated on the floor at the front of the room, stare wide-eyed at the glory of it.

  About 2 p.m., the players start loading the school bus for the drive to Moran, the longest trek the Bulldogs will take this season. “Oh, I love these trips to West Texas,” Mr. Scott says. “You go so far out there you think you’re going deer hunting, and you find the little bitty town—some of them don’t even have a water tower—and you play the game, and then you get a couple of 99-cent hamburgers and a big Coke, and you get on the bus and come back home. That’s what it’s all about. It’s fantastic! It’s a thrill!”

  “This is going to be a mad house,” Coach Ray says. “Look at all this stuff. It’s like we’re going to camp.” When the football equipment and cheerleaders’ megaphones, coolers, duffel bags, makeup boxes and radios, eight cheerleaders, 11 football players, coaches, managers and sponsors are piled in, Coach Ray issues an official admonition—“I don’t want you acting up and making a lot of noise. There’s no call for that”—and at 2:30 the bus departs with Mr. Scott at the wheel.

  Highway 22 to Hillsboro, then to Fort Worth via I-35W, then to Cisco via I-20, then to Moran via Highway 6. It’s a long, long road, and hot. All the windows are wide open, but the breeze generated by the bus’s movement is hot, too. The passengers settle down with books, magazines and Walkmans, and sweat.

  At 3:30, Coach Ray hands out sandwiches and soft drinks. At 4:15, as if obeying some silent signal from nature, the eight cheerleaders simultaneously open their kits and launch a fluster of lipstick application, brushing and spraying of hair and painting of nails, beclouding the bus in cosmetic chemicals. At 5:15, Mr. Scott stops in Ranger for gas. Coach Ray declares the rest of the way to Moran a “quiet time,” to “get our minds set.”

  The time and temperature sign at the Ranger bank says its 98. At 6:20, the bus pulls into Moran, population 335, and heads for the school at the foot of the town water tower. The players catch sight of the football field and gasp.

  “God! Look at that! That’s no field, it’s a cow pasture!”

  “They must have plowed that field, boy!”

  “I’ll bet they have rodeos on it!”

  “Don’t worry about the conditions,” Coach Ray says. “Just think what you’re doing. We’re here to play football.”

  The field is a brown adobe brick of a place, strewn with rocks and a few sprigs of long-deceased grass, not of the kind usually grown on football fields, but the kind that the buffalo and longhorns used to eat. In both end zones and on the north sideline, where the visitors’ cheerleaders will stand, are huge beds of red ants large enough to wrestle small puppies to the ground. A tangle of mesquite and prickly pear is threatening to swallow the visitors’ bleachers, and there’s no sideline bench for the visiting team.

  A Moran school official explains to John Lilley, the Milford principal, that things are as they are because of a dearth of water and the electric company’s unwillingness to erect a pole for a line to a pump that would bring water from a distant tank to the field. “We put up a new scoreboard and built a new fence and a new pressbox this year,” he says. “We were
hoping that’s what you would notice. We plan to have a new field next year.”

  In the Milford dressing room, Coach Ray says, “I tell you what, guys. That out there is enough to make me want to go home at halftime.”

  At 7:30, when the announcer calls for the national anthem, Milford’s eight cheerleaders and eight fans and the whole populace of Moran lift their voices, but they fade to a dry whisper under the sun, still a vicious disk high above the scoreboard. There’s no flag on the pole the singers are facing, but after the anthem and the school songs are finished, someone goes into the school and gets one and raises it.

  Milford kicks off, but after only a few plays Moran fumbles. Milford’s Scooter Lynch recovers, and John Morgan later runs it in for a Milford touchdown.

  But Moran is tougher this year. Clouds of dust rise from the field with each tackle. At the end of the first quarter, Milford leads only 6-2, and by the end of the half the score is only Milford 19, Moran 2.

  Mercifully, darkness has fallen. The moon is high in the southwest. While the coaches pep-talk their teams at opposite ends of the field during halftime, the crowd watches two sparrow hawks chase bugs in the glare of the field lights.

  Then John Morgan, standing near his own goal line, receives the opening kickoff of the second half and runs it all the way back for a touchdown. Moran, badly rattled, fumbles on its next possession, and Milford scores again. And again. And again.

  “Atta boy, Dawgs!” Ron Scott cries. “You’re looking mighty good from here!”

  “Get with it, Dawgs!” somebody screams at the Moran team, which also is Bulldogs. “They’re laughing at you!”

  With 6:21 left in the third quarter, Milford leads, 40-2, and is only a touchdown away from 45-pointing Moran again. In the nick of time, though, Moran scores, and the third quarter ends with Milford leading only 40-8. Mr. Scott shakes his head. “We haven’t won this yet,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot happen in a 10-minute quarter.”