“Lord,” I said on the way home, “Can you imagine doing this every day of your life?”
“I guess that’s what they all do. Marvin told me …”
“Marvin? I thought he was Melvin.”
“Marvin. He told me that usually they were all out here—even the girls and Aunt Ada,” Junior’s eyes bugged. “Boy, this sure isn’t what I’d call women’s work. They’re taking today off because we’re here and they didn’t want Mom to know.”
“But we saw those really little kids get on the truck. Were they picking, too?”
“I guess so. That head man gave everybody a sack. Marvin calls it nigger work. He even said their house was a nigger shack.”
“Did he say ‘nigger’?” Mom said that only ignorant people used that word.
“Yeah. He says he hates them. They make the nig … the colored people work in different fields. That’s why we didn’t see any. They’re doing the same work, but they have to be segregated.”
“Like we were in Springfield?”
“Yeah. Only here it’s the whites who put up the fences. Marvin says black oil and water don’t mix.”
“Marvin, Melvin or whatever, is about to grow up into an asshole.”
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Junior said. “He made me really laugh. Once. When we were on that old truck going to the cotton fields and could hardly see each other for the dust, he muttered under his breath, ‘Dryer’n a popcorn fart’. I never heard that expression before.”
“He’ll replace Will Rogers on the stage some day.”
It was on that first stop that I instigated the practice of Junior and me sleeping in the car. It was an inspired idea. Inspired by several things—mostly the cracks between the floorboards in the house. They were far enough apart in places to allow almost anything to crawl up in the night and join us in bed. Since I’d seen a vicious little fox terrier kill a snake at the barn where we’d picked cotton I assumed that under the rickety floors would be an ideal snake sanctuary. Marvin and his grown-up brother had given their bed to Mom and Dad. And if there was ever a cousin I didn’t want to sleep with, Marvin was it. It was a toss-up between him and the snakes.
Arranging myself in the front seat for the night, I discovered if I left the gear-shift in second, it was less likely to poke me. That first night I also discovered not to sleep with my head under the steering wheel. Strange night noises woke me and sitting up suddenly had left some knots on my head. Junior was getting so tall that he had to curl up in the back seat to make room for his legs. We both decided that it was much more comfortable than the floor. Particularly Uncle Ralph’s floor.
“It’s not very clean, either, is it?” That was the sort of observation that Junior didn’t make often—he noticed people more than things.
“Marvin may hate colored people but not even in Springfield did I see anybody live in places like this.”
“Well, this is Oklahoma.”
“What’s that got to do with it? Mom says people are people the world over.”
“I know, but it’s the times, too, don’t forget. They’re just poor, Tots. I mean really poor. I’ve never seen anything like it either. Not even the backwoods farms back home. They’re stuck here and don’t know how to get out. I guess it’s like being in prison. Maybe Marvin hates the colored folks because he’s doing the same work as they are. Their lives are exactly the same. He just hates his own life, I guess.”
“I can understand that.” I plumped the pillow and rolled down the window a bit more. “You sleepy?”
“My body’s died and gone to heaven. But my mind’s …”
“What’d you think? Wasn’t it kind of funny when Uncle Ralph said they didn’t need a calendar? Remember? He said he could just peel back the newspapers on the wall and figure out how many years they’d been here. The first one was 1932 he said—‘Roosevelt Inauguration.’ They used the Kansas City Star that first year then the Oklahoma City newspapers after that. He claims it’s the best insulation in the world. Newspapers! ‘Not a breath of wind comes in through them cracks.’ he said, ‘and wind here can blow the hide off a mule. No siree, not a breath of wind blows through them cracks in the walls. Now it just comes whistlin’ up through the floorboards.’” I laughed but heard no sound from the back seat. “We all had a good laugh when he said that they’d had to sew rocks to the girls’ skirts to keep them from blowing up around their necks. Those were good jokes, I thought.”
“Yeah. But did you see Mom’s face? All the time he was counting out the years and listing disasters. I don’t mean world disasters, either. He was trying to be funny but Mom was doing anything but laughing. I don’t think Mom had any idea that they were living like this.”
“You remember when we were catching crawdads in Springfield? Down under that little bridge? You remember, when those little colored girls called us white trash?”
“Un-huh.”
“Well. What do you think they meant by that? It always kind of bothered me.”
“I don’t know. Probably didn’t mean anything. Just kids being nasty to other kids. They all do it.”
I felt I shouldn’t say what I was thinking, but I said it anyway. “I think they meant something like this. White trash would live like this.”
There was a long silence. “I suppose they could have meant something like this.”
Later in Arizona and California when I was called an Okie, the memory of this pathetic existence gave the insult an extra sting.
Our second stop was Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a second brother of Mom’s would be our host along with his new wife, Doreen, whom we’d not met. From Ada—and we all wanted to be away from Ada—Albuquerque was over six-hundred miles as the crow flies. But since we weren’t going by crow—our co-pilot’s little joke—we decided to go flat out and try to break Dad’s long-distance driving record.
The Model-A purred sweetly along the endless straight roads through the rest of Oklahoma and into Texas where the landscape was as relentlessly boring as it had been in Oklahoma. Cotton fields stretched as far as the eye could reach relieved only by the occasional patch of dried out corn stalks which looked like strange elongated skeletons of beasts who’d been picked clean by crows. Little towns popped up unannounced, treeless, all but empty of inhabitants in spite of population listings on the signs— Childress: 457, Silverton: 1,045, Tulia: 79, Dimmit: 574, Floydada: no listing (had they all gone west?)—and then would disappear as quickly as they’d appeared, swallowed up again in lakes of cotton.
We’d had the roads pretty much to ourselves until we were nearing the New Mexico border where we became aware of more traffic. It seemed to be filtering down from Amarillo—to the north—down to the more southern highways in order to avoid the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains. Cars and trucks and buses of all sorts started appearing along the way—some pulled over to the side of the highway, some gathered with others in clearings, camping just off the roads. Like covered wagons forming circles to protect themselves from the Indians, Junior said. We stopped only to fill up our gas tank and the canvas water-bag (and the eye-opener) and use the toilets. The latter more often than not a mistake when bushes beside the road offered at least clean virgin territory to squat down in. Even Mom was soon disappearing discreetly when we stopped to let the motor cool down enough for Junior to fill the radiator.
I’d taken a side trip into the cotton field and come back to the steaming car and said to Dad, using one of his favorite expressions. “If you want to know where I’ve been, well,” I glanced around to make sure Mom wasn’t in sight, “I’ve been shittin’ in tall cotton.”
Junior roared with laughter and spilled some water from the canvas bag causing him to mutter “shit” under his breath.
“Weeelll, now,” Dad said, drawling it out as as he cupped his hands around a match to light a Spud. “Ain’t we gettin’ to be the big boys?”
Junior blushed, “Sorry, Dad. It just slipped out.”
“Aw hell, son, if you a
in’t old enough now to say shit—when it’s the right time and place, you won’t ever be.” He let out a long cloud of smoke as he squinted following the direction Mom had taken. “As for you shittin’ in tall cotton, boy, well there’s more to that old expression than just that.”
“You mean like ‘keep your gallouses clean’ has more meanings?”
“ ’Xactly. It means—well, like you’re tryin’ to hide something. You know what you’re doing. You’re shittin’. But nobody can see you. In other words, you’re doing something you don’t want anybody to know about. Anything you do that you might be ashamed of, that you know is wrong, well, that’s shittin’ in tall cotton.” He flicked the ash off his cigarette with his middle finger. “It can also mean just the opposite. Like cheatin’ on your husband.” He grinned sheepishly. “Or wife. You might think nobody knows what you’re doin’, but you’re only kiddin’ yourself. The whole town probably knows and you think you’re foolin’ everybody, but you’re only foolin’ yourself. That’s also shittin’ in tall cotton.” He took a last deep drag and flicked the butt out into the middle of the road. He looked up and pointed. “Here comes your mom.” He opened his door and we clambered into the back seat as Mom waved and hurried to the car.
That monologue sent chills all through me. I was going through my mind the amount of shitting in tall cotton I’d already done. There was Bonnie Lou and Mary Ann and—but I wasn’t even able to think about Ronnie yet. That was shitting in the tallest possible cotton. Or so I thought at the time. It’s amazing how tall cotton can grow.
Albuquerque was as satisfying as Ada had been disappointing. Uncle Ernest and Aunt Doreen were living with her parents while they prepared for a California expedition of their own. Uncle Ernest was waiting delivery on a house-trailer—the latest model with all modern conveniences, he said proudly. We stayed with them for two days, soaking in hot baths and luxuriating in real beds— even Junior and I had one to ourselves, nobody was forced onto a pallet.
The haul to the next stop was one to try men’s souls, as Mom said later. Almost from the moment we left Albuquerque things started going wrong. We never thought of car trouble. We all had perfect faith in the Model-A and in Dad’s ability to fix anything short of a broken axle. We’d decided on the southern route down to Silver City and across the Arizona border at a small town called Paradise. It turned out to be anything else but.
Our first flat tire wasn’t so catastrophic, it was the second and third that had our nerves twanging. We were a fairly expert team at changing wheels and tires, and fixing patches on inner-tubes, but two blowouts happening almost on top of each other can have a pretty destructive effect on your morale. Not to mention your pocketbook. Having to buy two new tires and tubes caused Dad to have a blowout of his own that sent the rest of us fleeing into the desert. He was his father’s own son as far as temper went. Remembering how Grandpa had killed his prize cow, I feared for the Model-A’s life until his rage had subsided.
After that things went more or less smoothly all the way to Silver City. It was just after Silver City that we shot the rod. Somewhere between Paradise and Silver City—purgatory, Junior said. It took Dad about four hours to fix, flat on his back under the car with Junior under there with him half the time. At least they were in the only available shade. Junior explained to me in detail what a rod was, where it connected whatever and why it was so difficult to repair and what a genius Dad was since he was working with the minimum of tools and what looked like a great deal of bailing wire. I didn’t understand a word of the mechanics of the thing and let his words drip off me along with the sweat.
“Paradise, my ass,” Dad said after he’d been up and down both sides of the main street of this little border town finding nothing open. It was Sunday and there wasn’t even a diner or a cafe where we could eat. That was problem enough, but Dad’s bottle was as dry as mules’ balls. With the hope that we’d find a road-side diner we headed out of Paradise into the Arizona desert.
If we thought we’d seen desert before we were sadly mistaken. Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico were the Black Forest compared to this. The road was straight as a die, cutting through rolling mounds of sandy red earth, with only a mesquite bush or tumbleweed hanging to the barren surface.
“A place here on the map looks like it might be big enough to have at least a Woody’s Cafe,” Junior said. “It’s called C-o-c-h-i-s-e. However you pronounce it. We ought to be there soon.”
“Isn’t that an Indian tribe?” Mom asked.
“Wasn’t it something to do with Custer’s Last Stand?” I risked.
“This is my last stand,” Dad said. “If I don’t get something cold to drink pretty soon—a beer is frothin’ in my mind—I’m going to stop and get out and drink that mirage.” The road was so hot that the water effect created by the mirage was so convincing that it gave the illusion that we were driving through water. Once Dad mentioned it, I couldn’t take my eyes off it and in some reverse order it made me feel cooler.
We ate in Cochise at a diner-filling station. Dad washed down his food with two cold Budweisers and was out having the car at tended to while we finished. He seemed in a particularly good mood when we piled back into the car. Back on the road, he reached under his seat and pulled out his full bottle. “Whooeee, looky here what I got.” He shook the bottle of a particularly dark liquid. “That ole boy back there claims this is the best moonshine in Arizona. Looks like molasses. I think it’s made out of used sump oil and kerosene. Figured if I can’t drink it, I’ll just use it like smelling-salts. One whiff and it’ll curl your hair.”
Junior and I studied the map—anything was more interesting than looking out the windows at the bleak moonscape—checking and rechecking the mileage to Tucson where we’d decided to spend the night. We’d finally be in a motor court and have a good night’s rest and clean up for the last hundred and twenty miles to Phoenix and Aunt Dell. We couldn’t arrive on her doorsteps looking like grubby hicks.
We stopped for gas and a cold drink in the mid-afternoon at a place that advertised modestly on a hand-painted sign: Reptile Farm. Adm. 5-cents. I was dying to go in, but didn’t dare ask for the money. The man pumping the gas saw us looking at the sign and called out, “Go on in. Hell, it ain’t much. Ain’t worth a nickel. Just a couple of rattlers and an old Gila Monster.”
We followed the painted arrows to the back of the shed to a fence which enclosed a hole or pit in the ground. We were both cautious about getting close to the fence, but we sidled up and looked over. The man was right, there were two rattlesnakes, diamondbacks, looking more dead than alive coiled lazily around each other and at the other end of the pit was a yellow and black mottled lizard about two feet long that really did look dead.
“I guess he could be pretty scary if he was moving and coming at you,” I said.
“He doesn’t look like he’d ever move again.” Junior shuddered.
“Rabbit run across your grave?”
“Sort of. I was thinking of Grandma. That hole. That big hole they dug for her. These poor things look pretty lost down there in their grave.”
“Don’t say a word about them snakes,” Dad demanded when we were back on the road. He had a fear of snakes so violent that even stories about them would turn him pale. “Or that Geela Monster.”
“The man pronounced it Heela, Dad. Did you hear him, Mom? It must be the Mexican pronunciation.” He unfolded the map again. “Hey, Tots, here it is. I thought I d seen it. It’s all over down here—Gila Bend, the Gila River. And here, this whole area is the Gila Desert.”
“Are we in it? This is sure a desert.”
“No, we’re still over this way—a bit to the east of it.” He burst out laughing. “Here’s Tombstone!”
“Tombstone?” I said. “I thought that was just a name they used in the movies.”
“No. Look right here.” He pointed it out for me. “Tombstone. And over here the Gila Desert.” I thought he shuddered again as he folded the map up quickly and
muttered under his breath, “What a place to be buried.”
We were as fresh and clean as we could be when we arrived in Phoenix. We’d found clean cabins outside Tucson with big shower rooms and we all soaked, shampooed, slept and were shining with excitement about seeing Aunt Dell and Sister.
Just after a sign reading City Limits, we went over a long low bridge above a dry river bed where I noticed a lot of people were camping out.
“Now, go slowly, Dad.” Junior had a letter of directions in his hand. “Aunt Dell says right after the bridge there’s a stop sign. Then we go two more blocks and turn left. That’ll be her street. Tam … Tamar … I don’t know quite how to say it. Tamarisk, I guess. Tamarisk Avenue.”
It couldn’t have been easier to find and there we were being hugged and kissed with tears being rubbed from cheek to cheek in front of a neat little wooden house with a long screened porch across the front, very much like Grandpa’s. The box with the lump of excelsior and chicken wire air-conditioners were hanging on two of the windows, stamping the known with something foreign. Houses, I was learning are like some plants—one is always surprised to find them cropping up, looking so familiar, in places thousands of miles from where you first knew them. We were home. Off the road. We all sighed and laughed. Home. At least Aunt Dell made us feel at home. For the time being.
It took no time for us to be brought up to date: Sister was working in a night club as a waitress, making eye-bugging amounts of money. Mavis had got a job in a lawyer’s office as a file clerk. (“Have you had any experience in filing, Miss Slokum?” she’d been asked.)
(“Only my nails, Mr. Griggs. And horses’ hooves when they’ve just been shod. And sharpening a hoe. But I can read and the alphabet is no mystery to me.”)
“That lawyer!” Aunt Dell roared, “is still in her lap.” She nudged Dad in the ribs. “And she swears not in her pants.”
In Tall Cotton Page 12