by Bryan Mealer
As much as it clawed at his guts, Abe went to see the local agent in charge of the program, who arrived with an inspector and examined Abe’s herd. The inspector concluded they were too skinny for mass consumption, and some were diseased. Condemned cattle only warranted the minimum. The agent handed Abe a receipt worth six dollars for each cow, which would be paid in three weeks’ time. The healthy ones would be butchered, the meat returned to the family in a box of cans.
As for the sick cows, the government had hired the Grantham brothers to dig a deep trench up the road with their mules and fresno scraper. A few animals already lay tangled up at the bottom, their limbs tightening with rigor mortis. The hired guns were local men who leaned against a trailer and smoked, not saying a word, for it was work no man was proud to do. They waited for the cows to be guided within short range, then planted their feet, took aim, and dispatched them down into the hole. And while these were hard days for Abe Jones, his dark and awesome year was not yet over. On December 7, the Herald ran a small item at the bottom of Page 1:
“The home of Abe Jones was destroyed by fire Saturday night around 8 o’clock. How the fire started is unknown. The family was eating supper when the fire started in the front room. They did not save anything.”
* * *
In the face of despair, there were signs of better times. The programs generated by the New Deal and the rebounding markets helped spark a modest recovery across much of the nation. And as the country got back on its feet, it needed oil to keep moving.
In West Texas, new fields were explored, equipment began moving along the roads and rails, and best of all, companies were hiring. The timid economy wouldn’t allow for the roaring booms of the previous decade, and it would take more than new oil fields to replace what had been lost. In the short run, the drilling budgets remained tight and the wages terrible. Oftentimes oilmen paid their crews in groceries until a well came in, and a lot of men worked “bean jobs” during these years. But they were jobs all the same.
At the first sign of an uptick in 1934, my grandfather Bob began haunting the drilling company offices looking for work as a roustabout, which was the entry-level job on any rig. Roustabouts were the working cowboys of the oil fields, performing the dumb and dirty tasks for the pumpers and drillers. They had little stake in the outcome but enjoyed all the freedom a boom could offer.
I can imagine my grandfather—nineteen years old, single, and without commitments—living like his brother Bud had in the beaverboard shacks that sprang up near the rig sites, taking meals in flophouse cafés and hitting beer joints at the day’s end. By now he’d grown into a strapping young man, his body as taut as a spool of baling wire. He had dark eyes and dark skin like his father and a standing gaze that was both cold and distrustful until a smile softened its edge. He loved cars and trucks, particularly Fords, and liked to get his hands dirty tinkering beneath their hoods, a hobby he’d picked up from Bud. A photo of Bob from this period shows him in a pair of dirty overalls, cowboy hat cocked confidently to one side, posing beside a Ford coupe, his boots caked in white mud. Already he’d roamed the country on freight trains and had a temper so remarkable as to associate him with murder. He was also motherless, volatile, and came with baggage—tailor-made for the Texas oil fields.
5
The dusters continue … oil returns to the Permian … Bud’s fate is sealed … Bob comes alive …
That same year, 1934, Bud found a job driving a truck for Shell Pipeline Company. The position was in Forsan, a town twenty miles south of Big Spring, which took its name from the four oil-rich sand formations found beneath it, although a fifth was later discovered. By the time Bud and his family arrived, the shacks and bootleg dens of its boom days were gone and a real town had emerged, one with schools, cafés, and an active Main Street.
At first, the family lived in an oil camp out by the highway. Bud drove twelve-hour shifts hauling steel pipe and heavy equipment, and he knew his job well. He could pull apart an engine and reassemble it blindfolded and guide a loaded rig through a sand drift without putting it in the ditch. Because of this, he never lacked for work. After a year of saving money, he and Bertha bought a small lot on the edge of downtown, just walking distance from the elementary school. The vagabond years were finally over.
John Lewis and Bob drove down from Big Spring and helped Bud build a house. Although it was all wood and contained only two rooms, it had running water, as well as lights, a real stove in the kitchen, and an Electrolux refrigerator—all powered by natural gas piped from the fields. Their backyard was a pasture, where Bud built a small smokehouse, a garage, and a pen for their two milk cows.
The new home and Bud’s steady schedule introduced routine and a semblance of normalcy. Frances and Flossie enrolled in school, where most of the children were gypsy oil patch kids like themselves. Mornings began as they gathered outside to send their father off to work, waving good-bye as his Ford pulled out of the drive.
When he returned home in the evenings, his coveralls were caked in grease and smelled of tobacco, gasoline, and tire rubber. They waited by the door to greet him, yet there was no embrace. Frances noticed how her father horsed around with her brothers John and Leamon, mussing their hair or wrestling with them while Bertha prepared supper. But with the girls, he was oddly unaffectionate. Never once did he scoop his girls into his lap the way some fathers did, or bend down to kiss their foreheads. His standoffishness, Frances later guessed, was a reaction to Bertha’s abuse at the hands of her own father—as if the old man’s lechery had somehow poisoned the whole institution for Bud. Yet there was no doubt in her mind that her father loved them.
For Frances, her favorite times were Saturday mornings. While her brothers and sister went outside to play, she waited patiently for her father to get out of bed, then listened for the rattle of coins in his pants pockets. She would hear him say, “Murl Dean”—he called her by her middle names—“go up there to Wash’s store and get us a paper, and bring me back some Prince Albert.”
Frances raced out the door with a handful of nickels, then turned up the street to C. V. Wash’s general store. Inside, she slapped the coins onto the wooden counter and waited for Mrs. Wash, who wore her hair in a giant beehive, to pull the can of tobacco off the shelf and ring her order. Back home, her father rolled a cigarette, spread out the Herald on the kitchen table, and together they read the funnies.
Sunday evenings at eight o’clock, the two of them sat like statues in front of the radio, waiting for the shrill pipe-organ intro of the Lum and Abner show, then spent the entire hour laughing. After it ended, Bud turned the dial until he found station XERF out of Acuña, Mexico, which played country and western music. The train songs of Jimmie Rodgers seemed to plunge him into a trance, perhaps recalling his own days on the rails. He looked out the front window and twisted his hair around his finger, the way he did whenever deep in thought. Then, looking up at Frances, he flashed her a big grin, revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth.
Frances liked knowing that of all the kids, only her eyes were brown like her father’s whereas Flossie and the boys had Bertha’s blue eyes. As Frances got older, she also developed a faint beauty mark on the left side of her nose, just like Bud. Whenever strangers said she looked just like her daddy, she beamed with pride.
She turned ten years old in March 1935. In the weeks before her birthday, the dust arrived in curtains. Cold northern winds from the beleaguered High Plains brought ten major dust storms to Big Spring in February and March, causing residents to joke how they missed the sand they’d so often cursed. A typical West Texas sandstorm blew in at sunrise and was gone by dusk, leaving the atmosphere clean. But these storms were different, coating everything in a stubborn, silty film. Out on the ranches, it suffocated the vegetation and the cattle refused to eat.
A storm in late February had lasted four days. It arrived from the Dakotas in front of seventy-mile-an-hour winds, blocking the sun. On the third day, it mixed with a blizzard in a f
reak circus of nature that few residents had ever seen. On March 22, the dust was so blinding that cowboys on the Guitar Ranch lost six hundred head of cattle they were driving through the shinnery.
The following week brought the worst duster on record. Around dawn, a red curtain reaching twelve thousand feet rode in on a brisk north wind. At the same time the storm was rolling in, the aviatrix Amelia Earhart was attempting to fly from Dallas to the West Coast when her plane was nearly forced down at Big Spring. She managed to make it to El Paso, where she told reporters, “I was forced to fly blind nearly the whole way. Dust and clouds mingled in a thick yellow haze.”
By April, officials estimated that over three and a half million pounds of new soil from the Texas Panhandle and High Plains had landed in Big Spring. “We’re breathing payback from 1917,” a farmer told the Herald, joking that he actually recognized some of the dirt he’d lost in that previous drought.
* * *
Out in the oil fields, the drillers and roughnecks slung goggles over their eyes and wet bandannas over their faces, cleaned the dusty sludge from their engines, and defied the weather. By the spring of 1935, production was thrumming at near pre-Depression levels. In the Permian, companies were drilling their holes deeper than ever—over twelve thousand feet—while dispatching geologists and seismic teams to find new underground horizons. The same was happening down along the Gulf in towns like Angleton, Anahuac, and Refugio, where little booms erupted like illumination rounds against the darkness of the Depression.
As more jobs became available, Big Spring filled with workers and families and the merchants eager for their money. On weekends, everyone shucked off their greasers, donned their finest clothes, and walked the downtown streets, past the shops and hotels that the previous boom had built.
Bud and his oldest son, John Jr., put on silk neckties and suspenders and squeezed their feet into stiff three-dollar shoes. The girls wore dresses, made not from flour sacks but with cloth and sewing patterns ordered from the Sears catalog.
As soon as they reached downtown, Frances asked to walk to the Montgomery Ward. They turned up West Third Street and stopped in front of the tall glass windows. There, between the Sky King bicycles and Radio Flyer wagons, were the Shirley Temple dolls that she’d come to see. They stood in a row smiling winsomely, with perfect curly hair, anchor-print dresses, and those true-to-life moving eyes. How badly Frances wanted one. A sign on the window read: ASK ABOUT OUR LAYAWAY PURCHASE PLAN.
But even in these better times, that kind of luxury was out of reach. The previous Christmas, Frances and Flossie had to settle for a cardboard Shirley Temple doll instead, the kind you cut from a workbook and dressed in little paper clothes. But a stiff paper doll could not be held, not like the real thing that stared back now.
For lunch, the family walked toward the T&P depot, where a Mexican man sold hot tamales from a steam cart. Bud ordered a dozen and the man wrapped them in a bundle of newspaper, then they walked under the viaduct that stretched across the railroad tracks and ate them in the shade.
In the afternoons, while Bud and Bertha visited friends and family in Big Spring, the kids went to the picture show. They’d seen their first movie shortly after Bud started his new job. Their father had marched them down to the front row of the Queen Theater on Main Street, and after taking their seats, issued a gentle warning, saying, “You might think them horses are gonna run right over you, but they ain’t.” The picture was Unknown Valley, starring Buck Jones, and ever since, Frances had not been the same.
Buck Jones, atop his faithful steed, Silver, and wearing his white hat, was a moral force on the lawless frontier. During the heat of the afternoon, the kids planted themselves in the front row to watch Buck Jones battle cattle thieves and gold robbers in such adventures as The Fighting Ranger, The Thrill Hunter, and Outlawed Guns. And Buck always wound up with the prettiest girl, often some fragile dove he wrangled from the claws of predators. Back home in Forsan, the kids fought over who got to play Buck Jones. No one, especially Frances, wanted to be the girl.
* * *
On Sundays, John Lewis and Bob drove over from Big Spring and helped Bud around the house, or just sat in the yard smoking. One Sunday they butchered a hog behind the garage, salted down most of the meat, then delivered the rest to Bud’s sisters.
They often worried about the girls, whose taste in men was poor and oftentimes calamitous. Velva’s husband, Willie Bob Henson, was a cowboy and a rounder, so much that John Lewis had warned his daughter against marrying him. “If you’re gonna make your bed hard,” he told her, “then you’re gonna stay in it.”
Fannie’s husband, Abe, had his own troubles with whiskey and women, even before their house burned down, and the previous year, Ahta’s husband, Elijah—Bertha’s brother—skipped out on the family, leaving her with three kids and no money. At the time, Ahta revealed that Elijah had beat her when he was drunk.
Months had passed without a word from their other sister, Allie. The previous year, she’d moved to a town called Beeville in South Texas with her husband, Lee Pruitt. But now, in a letter she sent to Bud, she informed her brother that she’d filed for divorce. Lee’s drinking had gotten worse, she wrote, and he’d also taken to beating her in front of the kids. With nowhere to go, Allie had moved in with Lee’s friend Emil Holubec, whom she was planning to marry.
The news had stricken Bud, and now his heart ached for his closest sister.
“You don’t know how bad I want to see you,” he replied in a letter. “It’s like it’s been twenty years since I heard your dear old voice.”
He asked her to come back to Big Spring to be with the family, then ended the letter by reminding her how pretty she was.
“Allie,” he wrote, “I just want you to tell me what makes you look so young.”
* * *
The spring of 1936 arrived as dry and dusty as the previous one, though the storms no longer came as a surprise. The Herald gave each one no more than a few lines.
On a Sunday afternoon in late March, a storm moved in from the Panhandle. It was the color of rust and didn’t make a noise, didn’t even blow—just drifted in softly like dark magic until it diffused the daylight. Bud and the kids were in the yard when Bertha saw the windows cloud over. She called the children inside and yelled for Bud, who was beneath his Ford changing the oil. He waved her off and finished the job, and by evening, he was coughing.
He sat up in bed, unable to stop. What he hacked up was red and black, the dirt from half a dozen states now caked around his lungs. Some came from that storm, the rest from all the others he’d been breathing while out on the road.
He shook with fever all the next day, wrapped in a blanket on the bed and jerking in and out of sleep. By evening, his breathing was short and labored and Bertha said she was calling for help. She took the younger kids and went out the door, leaving Frances, who was now eleven, behind to tend to her father.
Frances pulled a chair next to the bed and sat there watching him sleep. His hair was mussed and matted down over his face, and the room smelled like stale sweat. At one point Bud came to and must have seen the fear in his daughter’s eyes.
“Murl Dean?” he said.
“Yes, Daddy.”
His hand came out from the blanket and he looked at his watch. “Go over there and turn on that Lum and Abner, wouldya?” he said. “I’d like to hear it right now.”
She walked quickly to the radio, delighted, and turned its big knob. The house filled with the show’s dirgy pipe organ introduction. Up in Pine Ridge, poor Lum was still besieged by the stockholders of the silver mine. The two of them sat there laughing until Bertha returned home with some men, who lifted her father out of bed and took him away in a car.
For a week Bud lay in Big Spring Hospital, fighting to breathe. Doctors said he had double-dust pneumonia, meaning both lungs were full and infection had set in.
Bertha kept constant vigil by his bedside. She slept in his room at night and returned
home in the mornings only to freshen up and check on the kids. A neighbor lady from down the road brought them meals, and besides her, no one came at all. During the day, the children managed to find distraction by playing with a nest of baby chicks that had hatched in the chicken coop. At night, they lay in bed and said prayers for their daddy while the wind blew its lonesome song through the slats.
Then one morning, someone else was there, shaking them awake. It was Bertha’s brother Grady, coming to inform them that their father was dead.
* * *
A succession of blurred, horrific days followed. Someone drove the kids to Aunt Ahta’s house in Big Spring, where John Lewis sat at the table saying nothing. When Allie and the others arrived, their wailing could be heard a block away.
The kids busied themselves in the yard, playing with their cousins Ruby and Fudge, anything to stay outside. The adults hadn’t said anything about their father, how he’d died or where they’d taken his body. Hadn’t talked to them, period.
Later, someone drove the children to the funeral home and led them into a small, airless room. Their father lay in a casket, surrounded by flowers, more flowers than Frances had ever seen. The kids gathered round the open box and looked down at their daddy, who did not look like the man they knew. His hair was freshly oiled and he wore a suit and silk tie. But his soul was gone, that was plain. He might as well have been made from wood.
“Look there,” Flossie said. “They took the beauty mark off his nose, the one like yours, Murl Dean.” And it was true. Frances felt the wind go out of her. She reached out and touched her daddy’s face, then instantly regretted it. Bud was thirty-one years old.