by Bryan Mealer
They told Frances that their brother John had also visited. Much like that day, they’d sat in the hayloft and talked for hours. When it came time for John to leave, both Flossie and Leamon were devastated. It was like losing him all over again. But comfort arrived the following day when they discovered something John had left behind. On the floor of the barn was a single footprint, which they quickly covered with an old soup pot. Now whenever they missed their brother, all they had to do was return to that place.
“It’s always here,” Leamon said, lifting the pot to reveal the faint impression. “Just like a picture.”
* * *
Within six months of Frances’s moving in with the Dodds, she and Howard were dating in a more serious way. Howard was dependable, solid, and funny. When Howard asked Frances to marry him, it felt like the right thing to do. His mother arranged the license and booked the preacher down at the Church of God. In mid-September of 1941, at age sixteen, Frances stood at the altar in a blue dress and bobby socks and became Mrs. Howard Dodd.
* * *
That December, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war. With California under constant threat of attack, the enemy poised to swarm the beach at any moment, Frances began to fear for her mother, despite everything that had happened.
So early the next year, Frances and Howard hitchhiked to San Francisco. They thumbed rides through New Mexico and Arizona, traveling mostly at night. Sitting in the backseats of strangers’ cars, Howard held Frances’s hand and tapped her finger three times, which was their code for “I love you.” One night out in the desert, one of their rides blew a tire and overturned into a ditch. The two of them, along with the driver, emerged unscathed, then laughed at their fortune as they hitched another ride west.
In San Francisco, they found Bertha working at a bar on the Embarcadero called This Is It. She was lonesome and distressed by the air-raid drills and blackouts, and in this vulnerable state she was happy to see her daughter. Frances and Howard took a tiny room in a nearby hotel and Howard found a job at the National Biscuit Company. The following year, he enlisted in the navy and went to sea.
Frances took Howard’s job stacking ice-cream cones and crackers, then ran a big oven that made vanilla wafers. Howard’s mother and sister also moved to the city, only a few blocks away. But Frances couldn’t help feeling alone. She missed Howard, but for some reason she missed her father more than ever. Most days she could sense his presence. One night while asleep, she felt him sitting on the foot of the bed. “Don’t be afraid,” she heard her daddy say, then he stood up and disappeared.
After that, Howard began to drift further and further from her heart. Frances didn’t know what was happening, why she seemed to be slowly turning him off. Was it the new city? Why was she behaving like a spoiled little girl? When Howard returned home on furlough, Frances could hardly look him in the eye.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” he demanded, hurt and confused, and Frances couldn’t answer. Finally, she took an apartment on Pine Street and they separated.
Frances found girlfriends at work and began going to movies and concerts. At the Golden Gate Theater on Taylor Street, she saw the big orchestras that toured the West Coast—Artie Shaw, Harry James, and Glenn Miller, before Miller’s plane disappeared over the English Channel. But Frances was most drawn to a band from back home called Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Wills had everything that Glenn Miller and Harry James did: a large horn and string section, drums, plus a piano and vocalists. But he’d taken their same influences—Dixieland jazz, barrelhouse blues, and New Orleans stomp—and blended it with steel guitars and fiddles. The result was a new kind of music called western swing, and it was borne of the East Texas cotton fields and lonesome Panhandle plains where Wills grew up.
The band’s slick cowboy attire reminded Frances of Big Spring. The fiddles and guitars took her back to those warm nights in Ruby and Joe’s tent. Songs like “Dusty Skies” and “New San Antonio Rose” hit her like waves of memory. And Wills himself was an oddity to behold. He pranced around stage on tippy-toes, twirling his fiddle bow above his head and crying out “Ah-HA!” in a high falsetto that was both unsettling and magnetic. Whereas most people danced to the swing orchestras, fans at Wills’s shows tended to cluster against the stage and watch in silence, mesmerized by the tight synchronization of parts.
Wills had recently moved the band from Tulsa to California, where they played nightly up and down the coast, his audiences packed with Texans and Oklahomans who’d come west during the Depression and to find jobs in the war industries. That success had also carried over into Hollywood, where Wills starred in western films.
Frances saw the Texas Playboys at the Oakland Auditorium, then again at the Golden Gate, each time emerging after the four-hour show feeling exhausted and alive. Already she had a thing for steel guitars, the way they seemed to moan and cry like the wind off the Caprock. She even bought herself an Epiphone Electar and practiced in her apartment after work. For a time, she and her girlfriends were planning an all-gal country band.
Around this time, Howard asked for a divorce and Frances didn’t fight him. She signed the papers and for a while slunk into a stupor. One night she read in the paper that Wills and His Texas Playboys were playing in Oakland again, so she went. Wills had a new steel player named Les Anderson, known as Carrot Top, on account of his red hair. He had a smooth and effortless playing style and that night, whenever he looked up from his instrument, his eyes seemed to lock on Frances like big blue magnets. When he sang lead on the Irving Berlin tune “Always,” with lyrics about “loving you always,” she knew it was silly, but she swore he was singing right to her. After the show, Frances was standing on the dance floor, waiting for one of her girlfriends, when Anderson appeared behind her. They ended up talking for an hour and he asked her out. Those blue eyes were beckoning her—to romance, to new adventure on the road, to a chance to live inside that music.
Frances told him yes, then let herself go.
PART 2
1
Bob and Opal go to Wink … Clem and the Salvation Army Band … an unbearable tragedy … New London explodes.…
After my grandfather Bob and Opal’s wedding, Bob found work as a roustabout in the newly discovered Keystone field. The town was called Wink, a hundred miles west of Big Spring, where the sand blew wild across the flats. Civilization had ventured there for one reason, and that was oil.
Nearly every waking hour found Bob on a rotary rig assembling pipe, cleaning boilers, elbow deep in wet concrete and drilling fluid. Back at home, he found comfort in his bride.
Times were lean, nothing that Bob wasn’t used to, but with Opal it wasn’t so bad. The couple moved into a poor-boy camp on the outskirts of town, where the shotgun houses sat close together in a row. Since paint wouldn’t last long in that wind, tin sheets protected the houses from the blast coming off the Rockies. The sand and dust were so thick that mothers covered their children’s faces with diapers when they went outside to play. Oil field wives learned to conserve water, which was scarce, and to burn trash in pits fired by flare-off gas.
The oil patch families were close and looked out for one another. During the worst of the Depression, a gunman held up the grocery store in Wink and took only milk and bread, saying, “Sorry to do this, but my family’s hungry, and I’m going to take what they need.” After the man left, the other customers asked the grocer what he intended to do, to which he replied, “If I knew where he was, I’d hunt him up and give him some more groceries.”
During their first three years in Wink, Bob and Opal had two daughters, whom they named Zelda and Norma Lou. And when Bertha began to lose her mind out in Big Spring, before she left for California, they took in John whenever Fannie couldn’t afford to feed him. Living out in Wink, far removed from the family, it’s hard to tell if Bob and Opal knew about Frances and the others. Perhaps they did and figured there was little they could do, what wi
th three kids already and hunger planted on their doorstep. A roustabout’s salary didn’t go very far. Most meals consisted of side meat and cornbread, maybe some eggs and dried beans. The blowing sand and dust chewed a garden to the nubs and made laundry next to impossible. Whenever Opal hung the diapers to dry, she often returned to find them coated in a red crust.
And yet she was full of joy. She sang as she hunched over the washtub and hung the clothes again. She sang in the little Assembly of God church, where the pastor put her in charge of the choir, her voice part of the great message of hope that delivered a tired and worn-out people from one Sunday to the next.
* * *
Opal hadn’t come to faith on her own, nor was it instilled through Sunday school or Bible stories, the way many children encounter God. Rather, Opal’s father Clem had embraced salvation from one of man’s lowest stations—as a drunk in the gutter. And his radical transformation lifted the family from poverty and shame.
Clem Wilkerson hailed from southern Tennessee, near the town of Winchester, where he’d worked as a logger around Sewanee Mountain. He suffered from asthma, and sometimes the air in the forests was so heavy and wet that he slumped against the crosscut saw, choking and turning gray.
“What you need is the desert,” a doctor advised. So after marrying Cora McCann and having a baby girl, who they named Agnes, they’d packed the wagon in 1914 and made their slow way toward Arizona. They got as far as Mississippi before another child was born, then settled on a tenant farm in Willow, Arkansas. Another baby was born there and stopped breathing five days later. Pneumonia, they were told. With Little Pauline’s grave still fresh, a nearby creek rose up during a storm and carried off everything they owned.
They stopped next in Paris, Texas, where Clem found work as a driver. Five more kids were born in a span of six years, including my grandmother Opal and a set of twin boys, Ed and Fred. After oil was discovered in West Texas, Clem loaded the family into a Model T Ford and headed for Big Spring.
At first he sold fruit in Jones Valley, then found work driving a truck. Prohibition was on, but the boomtown was too wild for a harness. Honky-tonks and pool halls sat on every corner, selling beer, whiskey, and local jake. The jobs Clem held never lasted long, and neither did his pay, but he was fortunate in that the openings always outnumbered the available men.
It didn’t take long for him to gain a reputation as the town drunk. People called him “Sleepy,” for the way his eyes half closed whenever he was on a stink. Even in later years, when he was sober and upstanding, the name lingered.
By 1932, two of Clem and Cora’s children had grown and married. Agnes fled to the East Texas oil patch with a roughneck from Lamesa. Herman, the oldest boy, married the daughter of Arkansas boomers who were living in tents in Jones Valley, where the tarpaper shacks flapped in the wind. Herman’s new wife was also named Opal, just like his sister. But she was a bit shorter and rail skinny, so folks called her Little Opal to avoid confusion.
Little Opal was headstrong and zealous and bent on reforming her drunken father-in-law. She even followed him into the beer joints to shame him into going home.
“I won’t stand to see you hurt this family any longer,” she wailed.
Clem never needed a daughter-in-law or anyone else to provide him shame; regret and self-loathing came all on its own. But occasionally, he managed to elude her. And one sweltering night in that droughty summer of 1932, he claimed such a victory and spent his last dollar celebrating.
Midnight found him downtown on Third Street, sitting on the curb. The night’s revelry had left him feeling ill and dizzy, and as he sat wheezing from the dust he heard what sounded like horns. Sure enough, from down the block he saw them come into view—the Salvation Army band. The ragged brass section marched two steps behind a tall preacher who was dressed in shirtsleeves and carried a thick, black Bible. The procession stopped directly in front of Clem and paused their music.
For fishers of men working the night beat, the bites were few, especially from drunks. But Clem must have revealed something only the preacher could detect, some radiant spiritual hunger. The preacher introduced himself as a sinner and a man of flesh and blood. He explained how we are all children of God, and even the most wicked of men can be redeemed through his grace. All it took was a confession of faith, from the same mouth that had drawn so much wine, for a man to be saved from himself. He asked Clem something like “Are you willing to surrender the old burdens of flesh and be set free?”
With the preacher’s knobby hand clutched around his forehead, Clem repeated the simple prayer of salvation. Right away, he felt something tear free from his body, like wind blowing through every pore. He saw in his mind his old spirit, grooved from the Devil’s dark touch. In its place now were only lightness and an almost nauseating sensation of love. All was forgiven, all was made clean. Not a trace of booze remained, for he’d drunk of what Jesus called “the living water” and would never be thirsty again. He left the preacher’s side and ran all the way home, blubbering like a newborn babe.
* * *
The change was instant and dramatic, and never did Clem Wilkerson drink another drop. He joined a small Assembly of God church in Big Spring and brought Cora and the kids. And there in the dark bowels of the Depression, he and his family discovered something that John Lewis had failed to find for his own—a community.
They found people who looked like them, who’d traveled from the same Georgia hollows and Tennessee forests chasing the same broken dreams, people who’d been busted and bankrupt, who buried children and other loved ones in places long ago abandoned, and who’d carried that trauma knotted up inside them. They’d arrived with little education and few possessions, harboring past crimes and shameful, hidden desires. But like Clem, they learned how to surrender these troubles to the Lord and regain what Jesus promised in the Gospels: wholeness, humanity, and self-respect. They also learned how to pray, as a way to both communicate with God and give voice to their own worries and regrets, and by doing so come clean with themselves and begin to change, to heal.
The church became their refuge and lighthouse. It provided a safety net for those who needed it. The church nurtured them when they were sick, fed them when they were hungry. When a loved one died, their fellow church members wept with them and gave them comfort and encouraged them to live. And the church provided strength when they were feeling susceptible to the world’s destructive ways.
Clem became fired up for Jesus, and soon, so did his children—especially Opal, who at twelve years old discovered her gift of song. Whenever the church doors were open the family was inside, either for worship, choir practice, or to feed a funeral party. After the preacher finished his sermons, Clem stood before the congregation and reminded them of the man he used to be and how the Lord had molded him, like a lump of clay, into the man he was today. He always ended this testimony by quoting his favorite psalm: “Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!”
Clem became a deacon in the church and a leader among the congregation. He was not a learned man, but after his transformation, his desire to know Scripture pressed him to improve. Each night after supper, he charged his two daughters still living at home with teaching him how to read, using the Bible as his primer. He became a devoted student of Scripture and opened his home each week for Bible study and prayer. Those meetings often built to a peak, with people receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues, just like they’d done on the day of Pentecost.
But all the racket embarrassed Herman’s wife, Little Opal, who was raised hard-shell Baptist and didn’t tolerate such antics. “You can hear them from down the block,” she complained to Herman. “They sound like a bunch of fanatics. Folks are gonna run them outta town.”
But even Little Opal couldn’t resist. Soon she was kneeling at the altar of that little church and receiving salvation, her voice joining the jubilee.
* * *
; Around that time, Little Opal and Herman had a girl named Mary Lou, who they raised in that tiny church. By the time Mary Lou turned five she was a missionary for Jesus just like her grandpa, reciting scriptures she learned in Sunday school or asking friends to come to church. And Mary Lou was a regular prayer warrior, whether it involved laying hands on her sick baby dolls or blessing the family supper.
But in November 1937, a terrible accident occurred. Herman and Mary Lou were driving along the highway to meet Little Opal at a family gathering when Mary Lou somehow opened the car door and tumbled to her death.
They buried her at Mount Olive Cemetery, just a few rows down from Bob’s brother Bud. Brother Sheats led the service. Afterward, Little Opal stood over her daughter’s grave and asked those gathered round, “If I’m a Christian, then how can I lose my child?” And no one could give her an answer that took away the pain.
After the funeral, she fell into a panicked state of grieving. For an entire year, she still made a plate for Mary Lou at supper. Each morning she walked two miles down Highway 80 to the cemetery, where she lingered much of the day. After a year, she looked up and realized Mary Lou’s name was misspelled on her tombstone, having gone unnoticed all that time, and this sudden stroke of cognition seemed to snap her from her spell. She called the monument company to correct the mistake, then returned to the living world with a new kind of faith, one fired and tempered like iron.
Not long after, tragedy tested the family again—this time with Agnes, the oldest of Clem and Cora’s kids. Agnes and her husband, Arthur Hahn, were raising four children in the boomtown of New London, in the heart of the East Texas field. The previous year, on March 18, 1937, their oldest boy, Granville, had awoken with mumps, so Agnes kept him home. Granville attended first grade at the nearby New London School, which the town had built for a million dollars as a totem to its oil boom, a colossal middle finger extended toward the Great Depression.