The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  While the school boasted the first football stadium in Texas with electric lights, the administration chose to skimp on its heating system. Instead of using fuel oil, they piped raw natural gas straight from the field. On that day in March, the pipe sprang a leak and slowly filled a crawl space beneath the school. When it finally exploded, shortly after 3 p.m., the blast lifted the steel-framed building into the air. Nearly three hundred students and teachers perished, most of them crushed and burned when the roof came crashing down on them.

  Over a mile away, still in bed, Granville felt his own house buckle, then heard the caterwaul of anguished cries as the town registered the carnage. The New London explosion still stands as the worst school disaster in American history.

  But at home, the real tragedy was Granville’s daddy. Arthur Hahn was a mean and calloused man, with glaring blue eyes that dared anyone to try him. Whiskey made him into a monster, and he took out his wrath on the two oldest boys, Granville and Wendell. During supper, Arthur would spring across the table and cuff one of them for the slightest transgression, knocking him to the floor. Once, when Wendell tried to escape a beating by crawling under the house, Arthur spotted him easily under the floorboards, trembling like a rabbit. Without saying a word, he boiled a kettle of water on the stove, then stood atop the child and emptied it over his body.

  Naturally, Agnes lived in terror of her husband, who’d once fantasized to her about setting the house on fire while their children slept. So he probably did them all a favor the day Agnes gave birth to their fifth child.

  It was a girl, whom Arthur insisted they name Betty Kansas.

  When Agnes asked, “Why Kansas?” her husband replied, “Because that’s where I’m going to get rich,” then walked out the door and never came back.

  For six months after Arthur left, no one heard from Agnes or the kids. Back in Big Spring, her father, Clem, became so worried that he sent her sister Dorothy on a bus to New London to check on them. When Dorothy walked in the house she found Agnes and the children practically starved. Agnes was nearing a nervous breakdown, trying to nurse Betty Kansas and care for the others. The older kids were eating wild blackberries and poke salad they foraged in the woods. Most days, a neighbor’s milk cow provided their only nourishment.

  Dorothy called their father, who dispatched Herman to East Texas to get them. Herman had started a cattle-hauling business and owned a truck with a forty-foot trailer. Two days later he arrived in New London, placed Agnes and the baby in the cab, then drove four hundred miles back to Big Spring with kids and luggage loaded in the carriage.

  As for Arthur, he was gone. A few years later, his parents and brother came looking for him, with the sole purpose of telling him that he was a millionaire. It turned out some land that he’d bought years before in the Permian Basin was full of oil, and companies were clamoring to drill. But Arthur never appeared, not even to claim his fortune (his brother, through some crafty legalese, stole the land and squeezed Agnes out of the royalties).

  In the months after Arthur disappeared, some recalled reading about a big explosion on a Kansas oil rig that killed many men. And since nothing ever surfaced about his whereabouts—no census or death records, no mention of him in newspapers or city directories—that’s where I’ll choose to leave Arthur Hahn: in Kansas, consumed in a tower of flames.

  2

  Bob and Opal return home … Clem becomes a prayer warrior and cousins heed the call … Gloria Jean, terrified of worms …

  Out in Wink, Opal’s heart ached for her family. At least once a month, when the homesickness became unbearable, she and the girls caught a bus to Big Spring and stayed with her parents, attended church and fussed over new babies. In 1939, two years after Mary Lou’s death, Herman and Little Opal had welcomed a second child, a boy called Homer, in honor of their pastor Homer Sheats. And just eighteen months later, a third child arrived, whom they named Evelyn.

  After a few days with family, it crushed Opal to have to leave. Each time the bus left Big Spring and crossed the empty flatlands it felt like dismounting the earth altogether. There was nothing there to see. Nothing out the window but dead grass and mesquite and pump jacks that seesawed in the fields like alien mules. Occasionally, a working rig appeared close to the road and she glimpsed human life, but mostly they were just roughnecks of some kind, their khakis and coveralls slicked with oil. Men like her husband. The heat waves off the blacktop made their hard hats appear as white bobbers on a rust-colored sea. She hummed softly to Zelda and Norma Lou, both asleep in her lap, and knew when she was close to Wink by the grit in her teeth.

  She was terribly lonely, but what good would it do to complain, especially to Bob? In these years, a man was blessed to have a job and a home he could afford to keep. So she resolved to wait it out, through the long nights when Bob worked turnovers, and through the dirt that greeted her each morning on her clean kitchen floor in that tin-covered shack that whistled like a cheap horn.

  Then, in December 1941, the war solved all her problems.

  The government began hoarding steel pipe and other raw materials needed to fight Hitler and the Japanese, which cut exploration by nearly half. Rigs were shut down, men enlisted en masse, and the land emptied as if by magic. The same was happening around Big Spring, and due to the shortage of help, Bob easily found a job there. That summer, the family loaded their belongings into Herman’s cattle trailer and finally headed home.

  The war overseas brought the extended family closer together, but the price they paid was their young men. Three of Clem’s boys went off to serve, including the twins Ed and Fred, and on Bob’s side, there was his sister Allie’s son, Orville Pruitt. Ed and Fred fought across Czechoslovakia in the Sixteenth Armored Division and came home decorated soldiers, while Orville died in Lorraine, France, in November 1944, his body never recovered. Allie, who still grieved the sudden loss of her brother Bud, became so distraught when told about Orville that she drove her car onto the T&P tracks and waited for the afternoon train. Luckily, someone found her and brought her home, but that evening she came down with a headache that never went away. With no corpse to bury, she erected a shrine to her only son in his quiet sunlit bedroom, one that she maintained for the next forty years.

  * * *

  Bob and Opal found a cheap duplex on the west side of Big Spring, and while Bob disappeared on the rigs, Opal spent her days at her parents’ house. Clem and Cora lived just across the train tracks on the north side of town, alongside the city’s black and Hispanic residents, who in those days seldom crossed the T&P line.

  Her parents’ house was big for the neighborhood, three bedrooms on two stories, but every inch of space was accounted for. Three of Opal’s sisters lived there, Veda and Dorothy, plus Agnes and her five children. And to make extra money, Clem and Cora took in boarders. A man named Smith, who’d been shot in the back during the war, rented a small bedroom, while a Mrs. White, whose husband was still overseas, occupied a second room with her daughter, Gloria Jean. One of Herman’s drivers, an alcoholic named Jug, rented a bed on the back porch.

  The family’s nerve center was the white-stucco Assembly of God church at the corner of Fourth and Lancaster, which Clem had helped build after being saved. Opal joined a singing trio that included the pastor’s wife, Velma Sheats. They performed on the radio station KBST as part of a Sunday afternoon gospel hour. And later that day, the three of them rode around in Brother Sheats’s open-air Willys car, which was equipped with a bullhorn speaker, the women singing harmony while the pastor pitched the evening meeting.

  A typical service kicked off with two hours of singing, which laid the red carpet for the Holy Spirit to work its wonders. As a denomination, the Pentecostal church prided itself as a bottom-feeder, its message of salvation tailored toward last-chancers. The moment these people accepted Christ, they tended to believe passionately what the scriptures promised about how “old things are passed away … and all things are become new,” for in their own hearts and min
ds they were transformed. This they could feel.

  And if God could deliver them from hopelessness, they believed, there must be no limit to his works. Their faith was absolute, like a child’s, and so they didn’t hesitate to ask for wonders otherwise unthinkable, and to believe in their outcome. When faith was this concentrated and aligned, it set the stage for miracles.

  Opal liked to tell the story of Frank Mack, a traveling preacher who’d married her friend Inez while they were living in Wink. As a boy, Mack was stricken with polio and for two years lay paralyzed in bed, hardly able to eat. His mother prayed constantly, begging for a miracle. With the little money she had she ordered a prayer cloth anointed by a faith healer she’d heard on the radio. The day it arrived, she laid it across Frank’s body. “Lord, he’s just an invalid,” she prayed. “But he belongs to you, and we’re trusting you to heal him.”

  “As I slept, God touched me,” the preacher later wrote, “and the next morning I felt new strength. When my parents came to set me in the chair, pain shot up my legs like piercing needles. Glorious pain where there had been no feeling at all!”

  Mack became a preacher at seventeen, advertising himself as “Once a paralytic and now a flaming evangelist!” One night in a motel room in California, he felt as if he were suddenly “covered in liquid fire.” It was God calling him to lay hands on the sick, which he began doing in crusades across America.

  My family told stories about witnessing their own miracles, about people receiving the Holy Spirit and performing extraordinary feats—like the man who ran to the piano, on which he’d never laid hands, and started playing as if he’d done it his entire life. About deaf people who could hear, about cancer and diabetes vanishing under prayer. “With his stripes we are healed,” Scripture says, and this my family believed.

  After his transformation, Clem became a prayer warrior who laid hands on everything. He prayed over scraped knees and stomach aches, a wart that wouldn’t go away. At his county job, where he worked as a foreman on road crews, he prayed each morning over the men and their trucks, and the men were always grateful. He even prayed for the hoboes who came off the trains and knocked at his door for a meal, handing each one a prayer tract with every plate of beans. He prayed because there was no shortage of God’s grace. It was inexhaustible, and often it came when you needed it most.

  When Clem was helping build the new church in 1938, the congregation ran short of money and couldn’t finish the roof, so he climbed up and prayed over it. While sitting there, a stranger rolled up in a rickety pickup.

  He shouted, “Hey! Somethin’s tellin’ me y’all could use some help.”

  “Boy, we sure could,” Clem said.

  The man reached into his shirt and pulled out a check for five thousand dollars. No one ever saw him again.

  But the greatest miracle Clem ever helped facilitate happened right under his own roof. Mr. Smith, the wounded war vet who rented a room, was confined to a wheelchair when he first arrived at Clem and Cora’s house, and right away Clem saw him as a challenge.

  One Sunday before church he laid his hands over the jagged scar across Smith’s back and began to pray, then loaded his chair into the cattle truck and took him to the evening service. With Brother Sheats and the deacons gathered round, they prayed long and loud, with the congregation backing them up with fire. And sure enough, Smith stood to his feet and pushed away his chair. The crowd parted and he began to walk—with a slight limp, but upright all the same. That night when they got home, Smith refused to go to bed but limped through the house until dawn, stepping over sleeping children and mumbling a stream of hallelujahs.

  Just as the disciples had spread the news of Jesus’s wondrous works, this burden also fell upon the church. So following the singing portion of the service, members of the congregation stood and shared the ways—both large and small—that the Lord had moved in their own lives.

  A woman they called Sister Taylor, who was quite large, gave thanks one morning after being struck by a car. “Bounced up on the hood and hit the windshield,” she proclaimed. “Tore that car to pieces and it didn’t even hurt me. Praise Jesus!”

  For Zelda, Homer, and the rest of the cousins, testimony time was rich theater. They sat together and tried not to giggle, but each child knew their time was coming. The signal was usually a tap on the shoulder from someone sitting behind them: “Don’t you have anything to say about the Lord’s wonders?” they asked, and the children had to be ready.

  One such morning, Zelda stood and said, “I love the Lord this morning because He first loved me and saved me from the miry clay.” The congregation nodded with approval.

  This was not her own testimony, of course, but one of the many she and her cousins had memorized. Each time they heard a new testimony they liked, they wrote it down in a notebook and gave it a number for easy recall.

  “I love the Lord because He picked me up when I was worthless and set me upon the rock,” said Iris Hahn, quoting number 4, which naturally followed number 3 since it derived from the same scripture.

  “Praise Jesus!” someone shouted.

  Next came Norma Lou, who rolled out number 7: “I love the Lord because He gave me victory. I was down and out in the mullygrubs and He lifted me with His love. Now I’ve been smiling all week.”

  “Amen!”

  Then Homer stood and started on number 1. “I’m so happy because God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son…”

  It was that old ace in the hole from the Book of John. But halfway through, Homer seemed to lose his train of thought, and to his cousins’ horror, began barreling through the whole system, snatching pieces of numbers 2, 5, 8, and 10 and jumbling them into one baffling ramble.

  “And what shall a man give in exchange for his soul … uhh … Jesus the same yesterday, today, and forever … uhh … Verily, verily I say unto you. Amen.”

  Stranded and out of options, Doris was forced to tell about a half-bottle of perfume she’d found in the alley, which was actually true and wonderful but didn’t fetch any hallelujahs.

  As usual, Brother Sheats preached on the wages of sin, how heaven was good and hell was hot, and how there was no in-between.

  “Don’t be on the fence,” he warned. “God doesn’t take fence walkers in His Kingdom. You’re either in or you’re out! Don’t come in here and talk about being in when you’ve been out all week long, fighting with your husband, letting your kids run wild, harboring wickedness. God will root out a liar.”

  He paced the floor. “If I’m talking about you, then you need to hit the altar. Grab hold of the horns of the altar and get right with Jesus.”

  The Baptists down the road believed that once a person accepted Christ and was cleansed by his blood, their ticket to heaven was guaranteed. But not the members of the Assemblies of God, who in those days believed that even the slightest blemish of sin carried the whole weight of damnation. Each tiny transgression had to be reckoned with and expunged.

  The cousins all agreed that it was Homer who usually led them into sin. After all, it was Homer who’d thrown the neighbor’s cat down the outhouse hole, forcing the fire department to come and save its life. And just the previous week, he’d sent Betty Kansas next door to the neighbors under the auspices of cleaning their house and forced her to steal cigarettes. But there were other sins, too, sins that were all their own.

  They told lies, of course—whoppers. Lately, they’d been walking to the Hotel Settles to ride the big brass elevators, telling everyone they were from New York City.

  “Is that so?” the bellhop asked. “Tell me then, what’s it like in New York City?”

  “Oh, you know,” said Homer. “Tall buildings. Lots of people. Fancy people, mister.” Iris even wore a hairnet to look extra convincing.

  Aside from telling bald-faced lies, there was envy, the silent destroyer. Envy that swelled up like fever whenever friends from school talked about seeing picture shows or going roller-skating, both of which were f
orbidden. There was resentment, too—toward the visiting evangelists whom Clem invited over for supper, fat men with hearty appetites who filled their plates with fried chicken and potatoes, beans and biscuits, and left the kids to fight over the crumbs. Resentment for their boarder Jug, who did the same thing, even after the kids had seen him in Shine’s Drug Store eating hamburgers and french fries. Jug even had his own bed, while they slept on the floor.

  Each child sat filthy before the Lord. So when Brother Sheats ended with the altar call for people to get salvation, they marched down the aisle and received their weekly dose.

  While there, they prayed for the souls of others—whoever in the family happened to be drifting away from God, according to Grandma Cora. That list usually included my grandfather Bob, who never took to church the way Opal and her family did. And the children prayed for their uncles Ed and Fred, Opal’s twin brothers, who were off fighting in the war. They asked the Lord to watch over them in battle, but also prayed for their souls lest they be killed and face judgment. Or worse, the great Rapture took place and left them in a foreign land as fodder for the Beast. For it was well known that Ed had been drifting into deep water. In the months before shipping out, Grandma Cora discovered he was going down to the Settles to jitterbug with the lonely wives of servicemen. He’d even won a contest, which shamed her deeper.

  “Pray for Eddie,” she would say, her face stricken. “He’s down there a-dancin’ again.”

  In addition to the two Sunday services, Brother Sheats preached the midweek sermon on Wednesday night. An evening service on Friday provided distraction from weekend temptations such as football games and honky-tonks. Saturdays were reserved for a revival or camp meeting, which occurred monthly and kept the spirit sharp.

  “Got to stay on the firing line,” the pastor reminded his flock.