Writing On The Wind: An Anthology Of West Texas Women Writers

Writing on the Wind

Writing on theWind AN ANTHOLOGY OF

WEST TEXAS

WO M E N W R I T E R S

Edited by

Lou Halsell Rodenberger,

Laura Payne Butler, and

Jacqueline Kolosov

Texas Tech University Press

Copyright © 2005 Texas Tech University Press All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher except for brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes. This book is typeset in Minion.The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997). “Indignities, a Memoir,” by Sandra Scofield is an adaptation of pages 184–199, Occasions of Sin by Sandra Scofield. Copyright © 2004 by Sandra Scofield. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Interior photo courtesy of Susan Tomlinson. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Writing on the wind : an anthology of West Texas women writers / edited by Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Laura Payne Butler, and Jacqueline Kolosov. p. cm. ISBN 0-89672-540-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-89672-548-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.American literature—Texas,West. 2.American literature—Women authors. 3.Women— Texas,West—Literary collections. 4.Texas,West—Literary collections. I. Rodenberger, Lou Halsell. II. Butler, Laura Payne. III. Kolosov, Jacqueline A. PS558.T4W75 2005 810.8'09287'097649—dc22 2004022461 ISBN-13 978-0-89672-540-9 (cloth) ISBN-13 978-0-89672-548-5 (paper) 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America Texas Tech University Press Box 41037 Lubbock,Texas 79409–1037 USA 800.832.4042 [email protected] www.ttup.ttu.edu

To our mothers, Annie Mabel Falls Halsell, Becky Olive Payne, and Helene Schroif Kolosov

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The slow work of wind. Silences longer than lifetimes, pauses. . . . I trace a lizard’s tracks and think of the people who first came here, built fires at night, and drew the next step of their journey in the sand. From “Prayer” by Leslie Ullman

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xiii Preface

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J A C Q U E L I N E K O L O S OV

Introduction

3

L O U H A L S E L L RO D E N B E R G E R

Poetry and Post,Texas

10

BETSY COLQUITT

Writing Llano

12

S H E L L E Y A R M I TA G E

Be All Right

23

LISA SANDLIN

The Scent of Water

31

BARNEY NELSON

Making Place

42

SUSAN TOMLINSON

Place and Grace S H E R RY C R AV E N

49

Contents

Almost Like Rain

55

TONI JENSEN

The Chronicles of Toad—West Texas

61

J OY C E G I B S O N RO A C H

Indignities, A Memoir

81

SANDRA SCOFIELD

It’s Three O’clock in the Morning

95

L AU R A PAY N E B U T L E R

The Summer My Engine Died

103

M O N I C A T E R E S A O RT I Z

Fast Women and Naked Legs

109

S H A RO N D. M I L L E R

West Texas Journal

113

C A RO L C O F F E E R E P O S A

Elizabeth Boyle (Aunt Hank) Smith: The Scottish Lassie Who Became a West Texas Legend 118 J A N E T N E U G E B AU E R

The Art of Dipping Candles

129

J U DY A LT E R

Waiting for Gideon Prince

136

PAT C A R R

Cash and Doll’s Golden Anniversary D O N N A WA L K E R - N I X O N

To Reap,To Thresh JAN EPTON SEALE

x

155

143

Contents

Box Canyon

161

JEWEL MOGAN

How I Got into Big Trouble and the Mistakes I Made In Increasing Order of Importance

174

C A R M E N TA F O L L A

Gold Stars and Silver Wings

179

B E T T Y W I E S E PA P E

Welcome to Magdalena

190

S H I R L E Y S U L L I VA N

Nell Peterson’s Right Hand Man

210

K E L LY T E A G U E S M I T H

Lisa and Her Brothers

224

L AU R I E C H A M P I O N

Road Signs

232

J I L L PAT T E R S O N

Only Connect

247

J A C Q U E L I N E K O L O S OV

Reading West Texas:A Selected Bibliography

261

L O U H A L S E L L RO D E N B E R G E R

Citations

273

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

O U R T H A N K S to Betsy Colquitt for her interest and poetic expression of what it means to be a young writer in West Texas; to Leslie Ullman for sharing her poetic vision; to the English Department at Texas Tech University for invaluable administrative support during the formative stages; to Margaret Lutherer for all that words cannot express; to our fine editor, Judith Keeling, for shepherding this collection through many stages; and to all of the gifted women writers who share their understanding of life in West Texas in this collection. Grateful acknowledgement is made for permissions from the authors to publish their works here. Additionally, co-editors express appreciation to Sandra Scofield and her publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, for permission to publish an excerpt from her memoir, Occasions of Sin (2004), and to the University of Iowa Press for permission to publish an excerpt from Slow Work Through Sand by Leslie Ullman.

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P R E FAC E

Writing on the Wind is a collection whose time has come. Gathered here are twenty-five diverse contemporary women writing about the relationship to place in a sequence that brings together essays, memoir, and fiction. A few well-chosen words from regional archivist Janet Neugebauer ground this collection of women writers from West Texas and its borderlands. Despite the fact that Neugebauer describes the region as historically both lonesome and inhospitable to settlers, she’s paradoxically convinced that: “More often than not, pioneer women did more than survive, they thrived. Their spirit grew to fill the wide-open spaces, their determination became as strong as the wind, and they developed ingenious ways of coping with hardships.” Such a statement points to the peculiar strength of female character West Texas cultivated—and continues to cultivate. So too, it illustrates the ways in which West Texas women are shaped by—and shape—the country we inhabit. Yet despite our presence here, women’s stories are not traditionally associated with the westernness of this part of Texas, with the mythology traditionally or officially told about this place. To quote Shelley Armitage: “There have been histories, narratives—the Indians, the cattle kingdom, coming of railroad towns, the farmers. Mostly, these are a march of dates, a sequential seeing of how a country was finally ‘tamed,’ developed.” The aim of Writing on the Wind is to break that sequence and simultaneously break ground for re-imagining and re-writing the history, experience, and dailyness of a land with its own memories, cycles, and peculiar beauties and

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Preface hardships. West Texas is a land of dust devils, tumbleweed, and mesquite; a land of wind-blown, wide-open spaces and fantastic red-blue sunsets. And it is a land populated with large and small towns with names like Amarillo, Muleshoe, Sweetwater, Idalou, Needmore, Lubbock, Fort Worth, Alpine, Breckenridge—names that suggest lives and stories: habitation. Our ultimate hope is that this anthology will be a cornerstone for many future collections. So too, we hope it will spur many storytellers, male and female, whose voices have not been heard, to bring their stories into the region’s collective consciousness.

How does one define West Texas? In geographical terms, West Texas is the part of the state west of Fort Worth.What this definition doesn’t say—what it cannot allow—is why this particular and paradoxical geography seems to loose the creative spirit, bringing out the writer in so many of us. Most of the writers included here speak of the enabling impact, howsoever lonely, of West Texas’s wide openness. Jewel Mogan believes the “endless space invites the spirit to expand in meditation, while the sharp air and the vigor of the people invite action. . . .” According to Sandra Scofield: “On the plains, there is nothing to obscure your view of the sky, nothing to help you kid yourself that you will not die. That starkness is beautiful and awful, and completely irresistible.” What both of these women seem to be saying is that the emptiness here—the fact that a person can hear herself think and find the place where land meets sky—frees the imagination and simultaneously compels one to respond to the hard truths of this place: prejudice and inequality alongside opportunity and freedom; possibility for growth (why Sharon Miller wept and prayed when she got here) as well as the inevitability of death. Ultimately, the West Texas landscape compels mindfulness. The hightabled landscape, the long stretches of road between towns, and the omnipresent sky can prevent one from becoming distracted from important questions—and the facts of history. To quote Carmen Tafolla: “[There’s] too much space here in which to hear what’s been said these last five hundred years.” Yet if West Texas is a country of extreme weather, vast space, and resounding echoes, it is simultaneously a place of great subtlety. “Why is there no poet of the plains?” Shelley Armitage asks, returning to a

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Preface question initially posed by May Sarton. Having hurled the question into the air (is it a windy day?), she goes on to poetically paint the colors of her landscape. In winter, it is “a brown-scape tinged in ochre, dried buffalo and grama grasses, the touch of green wintered over yucca and bear grass.” West Texas is not a landscape of tall trees, mountains, or big bodies of water. There is water here, but as Barney Nelson points out, the waters of West Texas “have never been as impressive as the Big Blackfoot [of Montana].” Indeed, here water is often hard to come by.Yet Nelson also says: “It seems that the plants who have survived the worst droughts have the most faith in water.” Sherry Craven echoes Nelson when she says: “This place has given me the unfettered vision of flat and dry land that dares me to plough deeper for the underground water of hidden strength. . . .” Newcomer Toni Jensen’s lyrical “Almost Like Rain” enacts just such a search as the writer struggles to build her life on the lip of Blanco Canyon. For everyone, the region seems to compel one to clarify what she believes. To return to Scofield: “On the plains, there is nothing to obscure your view of the sky. . . . That starkness is beautiful and awful. . . .” Such starkness—what Shelley Armitage finds persistent, Jill Patterson harsh and abrupt, Sharon Miller adventurous and praiseworthy, Carmen Tafolla deceivingly empty and emphatically full, Jewel Mogan lonely and meditative, and Lisa Sandlin, “a wide-open, best behavior kind of place”— inevitably compels response and engagement. It’s why West Texas is the source of inspiration, even if that inspiration is fraught and furious, or at the very least, difficult, as it can be for so many of these writers. In this collection, women explore the inextricably linked influences of place and community. Armitage’s “Writing Llano” is a meditation on the land’s memories and cycles as well as a retelling of the author’s own family history—the human bridges that anchor her to an arid land dominated by sky and inhabited by hardy denizens like the porcupine and the prairie tortoise. So too, Barney Nelson’s “The Scent of Water” is an essay that could only grow out of life in a place where if one wants water, she needs “to dig for it.” Jan Epton Seale’s “To Reap,To Thresh” focuses on the Panhandle farmers who depend upon the land for their survival: “West Texas people always seemed to know their mind . . .” she writes. “[Here] isolation demands living the authentic life.” Many of the writers gathered here directly anchor their writings in

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Preface the natural landscape and in weather. Miller, who moved to West Texas from Virginia, finds liberation in the tumultuous unpredictability of the climate here, finding it a release from “the monotony of the seasons” back east. Carol Coffee Reposa embarked upon a long road trip through West Texas, only to return to the lushness of her native San Antonio with an eye suspicious of such greenness. Whereas land and climate are key topos, other writers take the human community as their primary focus, implicitly aware of the ways in which geography, weather, and the peculiar circumstances of an individual town shape character, lifestyle, and habit. Kelly Teague Smith’s “Nell Peterson’s Right Hand Man” is in large part an exploration of the way the perceptions of a small town impact a marriage. Shirley Sullivan’s “Welcome to Magdalena” begins when a wealthy woman is propelled onto a strange road trip after peering out her bedroom window at an underprivileged family of “gawkers.” Jill Patterson’s “Road Signs” enacts an extremist religious group’s forsaking of a gentle, recent follower.These three stories find a good deal of destructive or crushing narrowness in characters that were, ironically enough, formed in wide-open geographic settings. Simultaneously, these stories still manage to hold onto characters who refuse to relinquish their vision. Meanwhile, the work of other writers occupies a more temperate middle ground, mining recurrent themes of family, marriage, and religion within West Texas, finding much that is amiss but much that is praiseworthy also. In Laurie Champion’s “Lisa and Her Brothers,” a road trip set in the no-one’s land between the hill country and West Texas becomes an exploration of marriage and family dynamics. In Donna Walker-Nixon’s “Cash and Doll’s Golden Anniversary,” a fiftieth wedding anniversary creates a space for meditation on changing gender roles.The aging protagonist says straight out: “Women were taught to ‘dance with the one who brung them,’ and I’ve been dancing his dance for fifty years now.” The upshot: “You don’t leave a good provider.” A piece like Walker-Nixon’s dialogues nicely with Carmen Tafolla’s hilarious “How I Got Into Big Trouble and the Mistakes I Made,” as well as with the work of several of the younger writers including Laura Payne Butler and Kelly Teague Smith, who also focus on women’s roles both in and out of marriage, with crucially different perceptions.

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Preface On the other end of the spectrum is a piece like Sherry Craven’s “Place and Grace,” an effusive celebration of this treeless land where “hand-holding is a deep and enduring art,” a land where people live “in sanctuary—together.” The nurturing solidarity and sense of community that a writer like Craven finds in West Texas resonates through many of the pieces in the collection, including Susan Tomlinson’s graceful meditation “Making Place,” an essay which subtly returns to the pervasive question: “How do we become comfortable in a landscape?” Tomlinson finds peace canoeing. She even builds canoe paddles.Yet she lives in a place void of big rivers, taking comfort and finding a sense of rootedness in community and in the knowledge that she is connected to those who came before her. “The light striking the prairie is the same light people saw a hundred years ago,” she writes, “and the color of the grasses is the same amber and maize.” How close Tomlinson’s voice and her vision come to Janet Neugebauer’s pioneering Elizabeth Boyle, a nineteenth-century woman who cared for her family as well as “nearby cowboys, and anyone else, who got sick,” during the era that saw the establishment of the big cattle companies in the West. Despite its renown as a place of migration (it’s a fantastic place to watch the birds) and its endless stretches of open road suggesting that this is a part of the country to pass through on the way to someplace else, West Texas remains a place that calls to and compels a good number of people to stay.Whether it invites newcomers like Toni Jensen and Sharon Miller to build their lives here, or calls those who have strayed to return home, the habit of this land exerts a powerful pull, a pull first seen in pioneer writings and in the artifacts and surviving lore of the Indians whose culture western settlers ultimately displaced (why Carmen Tafolla hears the voices of ghosts). Several writers build the pioneer history directly into their work.Yet the legacy of the pioneers is a vital influence in almost every piece. Susan Tomlinson envisions community in the continuity of the homesteaders’ self-reliance and simultaneous need of each other. In West Texas, every denizen learns to be independent and resourceful. But we also learn to depend upon each other. In an arid land, we establish communities with deep roots. In this way, we seem like the plants who have survived the most droughts, the plants Nelson believes “have the most faith in water.” And

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Preface simultaneously, like the pioneers who came before us, West Texans are adventurous or restless—why so many build driving and migration into our work. Visions of community and migration return us to the anthology’s enduring theme: identity and its connection to place and the people who live there. For most of the writers gathered here, family identity—especially identity among the women in one’s family—is a recurrent focus. Sandlin’s “Be All Right” centers on the author’s West Texas grandmother, Canna, a woman who made lye soap, cough medicine, and duck feather pillows when she wasn’t picking cotton, gentling horses, and caring for her family. Such writing is ultimately about the continuity and the differences between women in a family across generations. Although the land may not bear traces of those who came before, descendants carry their forebears within themselves. In “Writing Llano,” Armitage puts it beautifully when she recounts her return to her family house in Vega where she found quilts made by her great-grandmother who continued to sew until her death at 101. “What did it mean to sleep under those quilts again . . . ?” Armitage asks. What does it mean to be a woman who simultaneously belongs to a tradition of pioneer settlers and their descendants in a region known for its harshness of weather? And alternately, what does it mean to come to West Texas from elsewhere? As one might expect, each writer’s experience is different and becomes a dialogue with the others. This brief sampling of the conversation created among the pieces assembled here proves a point that Lou Rodenberger makes clear in the introduction: “West Texas is a land of contrasts.” And again, West Texas is a state of mind. Our hope is that the diversity of viewpoints represented here both call into fruitful question and create a dialogue about the relationship of the individual to her place. To close, perhaps Barney Nelson provides the best clue toward understanding why West Texas inspires so many writers.“Because it seldom rains and our water is hidden underground,” Nelson writes, “nothing is as symbolic of the West Texas landscape as a windmill spinning in our desert winds. . . . A windmill represents deep hope, maybe even more than hope.” Nelson’s windmill is a perfect symbol for this dry, often windswept place. The windmill is also a perfect symbol for what each of the collection’s

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Preface writers has created. Whether her subject is historical or contemporary, personal or pure fiction, she has to go deep to find it. Her characters may at times falter in their vision, but the writer herself must see clearly. In a wide, open land where the sky is everywhere present, one does learn to see. We invite you to share the visions of the fine group of writers that Writing on the Wind brings together, and to judge the clarity of our visions for yourself. J A C Q U E L I N E K O L O S OV

Lubbock,Texas, 2005

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Writing on theWind

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INTRODUCTION

A Place That Speaks Truth Lou Halsell Rodenberger This place speaks truth— little changes, and here is loss, gain B E T S Y C O L Q U I T T ,“Big Bend 2”

in watercolor hanging in my home records one of the dramatic farewells that the West Texas sun frequently orchestrates as it disappears on the distant horizon. Bright in the distance, coral overhead where last light plays across cloud streaks, the overwhelming sky is all the viewer sees at first. Below that brilliant sky, however, stretches miles of grassland, almost invisible in the approaching dusk. Then, far on the horizon, a small figure, resembling at first glance a distant tree, inspires closer examination. This interruption on the flat horizon, one discovers, is a lone cowboy on a blaze-face horse driving before him two Hereford cows and a calf across acres of prairie. No houses, no other people, no trees, and no home corral mar the spacious landscape. I ponder what the artist seems to be saying in this stark painting: Does the lone rider represent totally unfettered freedom for those willing to venture out into the endless landscape? Or is it desolation and loneliness the cowboy is experiencing as he crosses the limitless space? A LANDSCAPE

3

Introduction Whatever his poetic intentions, the artist clearly knows the prevalent icons that remind West Texans of the history of this region. After the buffalo herds were decimated by hide hunters, the cattlemen soon followed. Cowboys and cattle and great, level stretches of grassland recall the heritage these first comers established. Only the ever-present windmill is absent in the painting.These images often dominate in the outsider’s mind when he thinks of the West, but the poets, essayists, and short-story writers who respond to West Texas landscape in this collection remind readers of other icons that symbolize for many of them what both the history of this region and contemporary life in these spaces mean to individual lives. Homesteaders soon followed the cattle men, often to the consternation of the acquisitive ranchers, and brought with them the unbending determination to establish farms and families on the flat lands of West Texas. Their presence added tall grain elevators, vast acres of cotton and wheat, tumbleweeds, and mesquites to representative imagery. Bringing salvation, particularly during dry years, the discovery of oil under the rain-starved prairies added oil rigs and well pump jacks to those icons signifying meaning in this unforgiving landscape. The watercolor creator acknowledges only the beauty of sunsets and the great open spaces occupied by a lone cowboy in his version of West Texas, but he speaks the truth of this place nevertheless. As the artist and many of the writers in this collection have discerned, West Texas is a land of contrasts, which suggests that the poet Betsy Colquitt is on the mark when she observes that West Texas is a land where “little changes” bring both “loss and gain.” Dwellers in the West Texas plains from the Panhandle to the Big Bend region can expect to cope with both the negative and the positive in a landscape where bright sunsets often are hidden by dusty haze and spring days bring more wind than flowers. Nevertheless, what contributors to this anthology have discovered is astutely summed up by Page Lambert, a Wyoming resident aware of the contrasting elements in life in the West. She concludes her memoir, In Search of Kinship, with this optimistic observation: “New stories landscape the edges of the path, built upon layers of stories that have been silent for generations, perhaps centuries.”1 What the creators of this collection accomplish is the telling of new stories, which in turn not only capture oral history and folk life never recorded but reveal what is good as well as not so good about contemporary life in this region. 4

Introduction For native West Texans, long-time residents, and newcomers who have found the openness of life on the plains a positive experience, the unlimited space offers freedom to live boldly. Such spaciousness in experience and daily living frees cramped imaginations. West Texas latitude inspires its occupants to make new beginnings, to explore spiritual response to the beauty of sunrises and sunsets, and to achieve understanding of the people coming and going in their daily lives. Jane Gilmore Rushing, the late Lubbock novelist who lived only two years of her life away from her beloved native region, explains the value of this understanding to writers in her essay “People and Place.” She writes: You have to see landscape the way it is, and you have to see people; for as a regional writer you see them both together because you know that people are not just posed against a background made up of landscape, climate, and quaint customs.You see that what another writer might call “setting” is much more than that because it is never completely separable from the people in it. People are affected by place. Sometimes they are products of it and are content or rebellious or unaware. Sometimes they are hunting their place, and sometimes they have found it. Place is made up of landscape, climate, manners and morals, of culture and customs; and characters are largely made up of their responses to all of these.2

For Rushing, as she reveals here, her imagination thrived on her broad knowledge and understanding of West Texas landscape and people. As many writers in the past have pointed out, however, life on these plains can also be difficult and uninviting. Rushing was born in 1925, and that year Dorothy Scarborough published a novel far less positive in response to life on the West Texas Rolling Plains than Rushing’s interpretation of her experience in the same region. In her novel The Wind, now a classic, Scarborough introduces Letty, fresh from Virginia, who cannot cope with incessant wind and her lonely life as a cowboy’s wife during the 1880s drought on the Rolling Plains. Finally, the wind and sand drive her to violent action and insanity. In Sylvia Ann Grider’s introduction to the 1979 reprint of this novel, she points out that “The Wind is one of the first novels to deal realistically with the negative aspects of the great myth of the West.”3 Sweetwater natives, however, were indignant that Scarborough, who had lived in their region only as a young child, would picture life 5

Introduction there as so harsh. Even in the Panhandle, where the novelist and teacher Loula Grace Erdman spent hours in the 1940s interviewing the early women settlers in that region, one of her subjects made clear that she and her friends were not the kind of women “who ran screaming out into the wind, completely daffy.”4 But however well these hardy pioneers adjusted to plains weather, West Texas wind is rarely praised as a natural element worthy of acceptance in much of the creative writing about the region. Coping with wind almost daily means also learning to deal with another given in West Texas landscape. Blowing sand presents more than an occasional trial on the West Texas plains. Seigniora (Nonie) Russell was a fifteen-year-old adolescent when with her reluctant mother and two sisters and a brother she joined her father in Collingsworth County in the Texas Panhandle in 1890. Significantly, Sand in My Eyes is the title of her memoir, published when she was eighty-one years old. In her description of her first crossing of the vacant prairies, she cheerfully shares her early impressions of a region that was almost completely unoccupied territory at the time. As the family rides from the train station down a barely marked sandy trail in a creaking wagon, she observes, “The wide empty land lay in an unbroken circle like a huge table-top. All around, the edge of the circle was tucked in and held neatly in place by the great hoop of blue sky.There was no road, just a trail cut through the sand. There were no trees. There was nothing to see except hundreds of grazing cattle marked with the Diamondtail brand.”5 Space and “the great hoop of blue sky” inspired awe in young Nonie, but what was soon to follow demanded creative coping. She describes the family’s challenge: All year, the house complained whiningly of the wind, the sand sifted and swirled through the doors and windows and into our eyes and hair and between our teeth. Sand rippled across the floors and ground beneath the carpets. During a sandstorm—and a sandstorm differs from the regular blowing as a tornado differs from the ordinary wind—it poured in until the floors resembled an ocean beach. . . . We learned to follow the example of our neighbors and turn the plates, glasses, and cups upside down when setting the table for meals.We learned almost all that we ever did know about practical living from our friends on the high prairies of Texas.6

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Introduction Nonie Russell Laune soon started her own cattle herd, rode across the prairie when she was only seventeen to teach ranch children in a oneroom schoolhouse, and finally became a partner of her lawyer husband, Sidney Benton Laune, in the establishment of Woodward, Oklahoma, just across the Texas-Oklahoma border. Pioneers like Nonie Laune accepted the challenge of plains living and overcame water shortage, temperamental weather, loneliness, and isolation with optimism and little complaint. For those who could not adjust, isolation led to desolation, prejudice, and often violent behavior. Not all of those hardy women who first came to West Texas accepted the landscape as a habitat with flaws to be accepted or ignored, however. When Adah Hadlock arrived in El Paso as a nineteen-year-old in 1902, she was immediately intrigued by the far West Texas landscape. Trained as an artist, she admits in her memoir, My Life in the Southwest, that El Paso’s Franklin Mountain seemed “dismally drab.” Then quickly she adds, “But after seeing one of the sunsets which turned from a light amethyst to a lavender, then to shades of purple, and the sun going down in a blaze of deep red—nowhere was there such brilliant sunsets—I fell in love with El Paso.”7 Unlike Adah Hadlock and Nonie Laune, Mary Lasswell was a Texas native, born in Brownsville at the turn of the century. She returned to Texas in the 1950s determined to travel her native state from border to border.West Texas scenery impressed her particularly. In her account of her travels in I’ll Take Texas, she describes Palo Duro Canyon with the same enthusiasm that Adah Hadlock demonstrates when she wrote of El Paso sunsets. She writes: The colors are like those of the Grand Canyon. . . . Quite incredible, really, like one of those super technicolor movies where the color film runs amuck. I looked down from the rim of the mighty chasm and marveled at the fantastic formations of rainbow hues: purple, brown, yellow, blue, and red, all blended into beauty by a soft purple haze. . . . Another look at the striations of the rocks showed me that they spread out in seemingly ruffled layers. Spanish skirts! I thought.That’s what they are like.The ruffled, flounced skirts of a Flamenco dancer. . . . Why doesn’t somebody write a symphonic tone poem about them?8

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Introduction For such women as Adah Hadlock, an artist, and Mary Lasswell, a writer, their optimistic affirmation of their experience in this capricious landscape fostered emphasis on the positives in life there; for others, West Texas with its endless spaces and limitless skies led only to desire for escape. As with these earlier autobiographical accounts,West Texas landscape often influences the works of contemporary writing dramatically, but with the goal of portraying life in frontier West Texas realistically, their authors have also discovered copious material in the colorful history of West Texas. For historians, West Texas has provided almost endless material for essays and books that discuss responses to both the beauty of the landscape and the violence associated with buffalo slaughter, Indian confrontations, wideopen towns, and the inevitable military presence that soon arrived.The letters and journals of those just passing through provide the first valuable impressions of landscape. After independent historian Frances Mayhugh Holden read Sally Reynolds Matthew’s classic Interwoven and visited the Matthews family ranch at Lambshead, her curiosity inspired research into the area history. Her diligence in recapturing the early history of the region led to the publication of Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle 1848–1878, which provides background to Matthew’s often reprinted story of her life as a pioneer on the Clear Fork of the Brazos. One of the verities of pioneer settlement in any frontier region is that travelers came first to describe the landscape positively when their goal was to attract future settlers. Holden’s description of this region of West Texas before the settlers arrived depends for its authenticity on the writings of Captain Randolph B. Marcy, who rode through this valley straddling the Shackelford and Throckmorton County line in 1849, as he returned from guiding a wagon train to Santa Fe. Holden creates from Marcy’s account and her own observations a vivid word picture of this virgin landscape as it looked in mid-nineteenth century: The valley of the Clear Fork of the Brazos River at this point was onequarter to two miles wide. Lushly carpeted in thick grasses and verdant plants, in contrast to the rude, barren Salt Fork to the east, it reminded Marcy of “all that is most picturesque and charming in a highly cultivated country.” Its clear, pure stream was twenty-five yards wide and flowed

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Introduction rapidly over dazzling white limestone and gravel.The precipitous banks were lined with giant trees, pecan, hackberry, black walnut, and others, which were reflected in the clear waters. Layers of limestone cropped out in the surrounding hills, shaped by natural causes into convenient shapes and smooth surfaces “already dressed for the hands of the mason.”There was plenty of timber for building or fuel.The best varieties of grama and mesquite grasses were everywhere, providing ample winter forage; in fact, animals did better here in timbered districts to the east. Marcy concluded there was “no place in the universe better suited to stock raising.”9

Holden describes how she imagines Marcy saw the Clear Fork valley as he looked down from a river cliff on this “magnificent” land. Early travelers like Marcy had the luxury of enjoying landscape unmarked by human occupation, but the stories of families who believed these travelers’ glowing reports and came to the West Texas frontier to establish homes is the subject that captures the imagination of several writers in this collection. For these writers, weather, wind, the sky, and space are prevalent elements for establishing a sense of place as they explore the lives of those early settlers in this lonely landscape. For other contributors to this work, traveling through this landscape today inspires contrasts between the old and the new, the east and the west, and the elderly and the young. Some of the writers in this volume are newcomers to the region; others feel most at home on the High Plains or Panhandle or in the Big Bend region. Perhaps most surprising is how often religion becomes the overriding theme of several short stories. The creative, writing women who share their versions of life in West Texas in this anthology demonstrate that they understand that experience in the West can be both exhilarating and devastating.They explore the history of the region and validate the effects weather and landscape can have on both daily life and personal feelings. They discuss connections between the old and the young; document, often with great good humor, the influence of religion on West Texas life; and examine the intensity of emotions inspired by travel from east to west. Finally, the theme of escape—from the tedium of life, from one’s self, from responsibility—focuses several essays and stories in the collection.

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Introduction What these authors accomplish, Betsy Colquitt sums up succinctly and gracefully in her poem “Big Bend 2”: Dawns, dusks, I watch summits, the peregrines, golden eagles soaring to float on updrafts dive like birds in a long-ago place where I first learned nature, my nature.

Clearly the overriding theme in these creative responses to West Texas landscape is the writers’ discovery of who they are in this land of contrasts.

poetry and post, texas BETSY COLQUITT

out of a high school writing contest what miracle is wrought except a poet whose land is jackrabbits big as coyotes, mesquites with china roots, and dust bowling over dust though sun lanterns and stars lacquer the wide sky. he’s never seen a daffodil nor does Pecos flow like Avon, yet this marvelous boy manned of language visions his landscape whole. jackrabbits graced as unicorns roam these lines where mesquites laurel their prickly legend,

10

Introduction and dust, sun, stars metaphor his universe full of bad typing, worse spelling, and overcome by poetry sick of paltry passions, I find these lifting craft to heaven’s gate and ringing by his sight. it’s not enough to judge he’s won: he’s by God a poet, and Post and all West Texas will never be proclaimed again the same.

retired from Texas Christian University in 1995 as an emeritus professor of English after a long career there. In 1982, she received the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and for almost thirty years, she was editor of the literary journal Descant. One of her best-known poems, “poetry and post, texas,” was first collected in Honor Card (1980). Her most recent collection, Eve—from the Autobiography and Other Poems, was published by TCU Press in 1997. Recognized nationally for her work, the poet is honored by Descant with the annual presentation of the Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry. Betsy lives in Fort Worth, where she continues to write and publish her poetry. BETSY COLQUITT

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Writing Llano Shelley Armitage . . . that is what the buffalo grass has wrought: an enormous elevated tableland divided invisibly north and south by the TexasNew Mexico border and bounded by the Canadian, the Pecos, and the eastern escarpments of Texas.This unique plateau covers 20,000 square miles (about half the area of Ohio) and would be bigger still if geologists counted in the Edwards Plateau, with which it merges imperceptibly far south in Texas.Although a part of the Southern High Plains, it has been given its own name, Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains. . . . Although the Llano slopes gently toward the southeast, it looks dead flat. . . . Rain falling on those aching, treeless miles of sameness does not run anywhere. It is either evaporated by winds whose average velocity is the highest in the United States—in winter they produce devastating blizzards—or it percolates directly into the ground except where soil compaction prevents. DAV I D L AV E N D E R , The Southwest

. . . Why is there no poet of the plains? M AY S A RT O N ,“The Leopard Land”

WA L K I N G T H E S E P L A I N S , here on the family farm three miles northwest of Vega, Texas, in the Panhandle, I lean into a north wind. It is winter, a brown-scape tinged in ochre, dried buffalo and grama grasses, the touch of green wintered-over yucca and bear grass. It’s early morning, the sky a pale blue, except for the horizon-line, deeper key to the

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continual changes in the weather. Here is where you can see “northers” building. Fronts and snows roll in from the north/northwest. I’ve ridden this road with my dad since I was a girl, later jogging it myself, giving the gloved wave back to his one-finger greeting as we passed when he went south toward town. Lately, the resident Swainson’s hawk, territorial on his cedar post in winter, eyes my walk. Running days over, I am slowed to a pace fit for my desire to write the llano, for, pointed north and by myself, I understand the act of walking to be writing, the act of writing, listening, inside and out. What does the land speak to us, I have wondered for years? Now my father is gone, heart attack, instantly dead at home, after a day at the farm where he was shoring up old, broken pieces of concrete and rocks to slow the erosion in one of the draws farther north. He was one of those always building up the country, but from native sources it seems to me. I remember in a year when the mosaic insects threatened to take the milo crop, he waited patiently, saying their natural enemies, the ladybugs, might come. He wouldn’t have to use chemical, aerial sprays. For a while after his death I felt his presence here, but that’s been years and now the two sections of farm, but mainly native grassland, is leased to a young, chemically savvy farmer from Adrian, Texas, west of here. Still I mark the sites of our exchanges, my dad and I: this draw where he taught me to drive the 1949 International pickup by putting it in gear and me, at nine years of age, behind the wheel, pointed downhill while he threw cattle cake off the back to a crowding herd; the wheat field where I day-dreamed while plowing, leaving a deep ridge he had to level later, taking me with him for that solid day in the hot summer sun. True, there has been no poet of these plains. Plains history is a history of migration, movement, change—conditions that make people look ahead, look past, but not reside long enough to write other than reports, letters, maybe diaries, journals. But there is a poetry of the plains.This part of the Llano, both rolling plains and flatlands, exists as a shape of time, requiring the rhythm of a habit of landscape, of the repetition of experience. On our place, the two sections of it, I walk up and down two large draws, yawning breaks in the apparent high, level ground. These rudimentary wind and watercourses head, one in the far southwestern corner, the other, the northwestern fringe of our land, becoming the Middle Alamocitas Creek, and emptying into the Canadian River. In the distance, the 13

Writing on the Wind faded winter tan and green, the whitened blue of sky, tell of slopes and dips; a slip of silver to the north suggests a playa lake. The Llano is not flat after all. There have been histories, narratives—the Indians, the cattle kingdom, coming of the railroad towns, the farmers. Mostly, these are a march of dates, a sequential seeing of how a country was finally “tamed,” developed. I think: if we could think of the land as poem, we might more closely sense what it is saying about natural, human cycles—that sometimes uneasy relationship. All the old settlers in this part of the country are gone now, like my dad, who came here with his family in 1926, after a flood along the White and Mississippi rivers washed the Armitages from their delta farm. Memories are gone with this group, both early pioneers and storytellers. But lyric, often fragment, reshapes itself in what is left and goes on. In the residual sites, the material survivals are the promptings of this other way of telling: the llano. My dad’s memories, told to me in stories, was a human bridge spanning the experiences of the earliest Llano settler, Ysabel Gurule, after the Civil War period, to my father’s, in the mid-1920s, and my generation, born in the 1940s. It is hard to imagine that this section of the United States is so lately “settled,” the first Mexican plazas established in the 1870s along the Canadian River and tributaries and the first towns shortly after the turn of the century. My father, Bob Armitage, was twenty-one years old when he came with his parents to Vega in 1926, getting a job after high school graduation as a teller (and janitor) at the First State Bank. He had a dream of buying a piece of the large ranch lands, this southern tip of the short-grass prairie, when he met Ysabel, then an old man, who had come at age sixteen to the valley along with the first sheepherding families from Anton Chico, New Mexico.Ysabel had stayed on, living in a dugout on the north bank of the Canadian. One of the cycle of sheepherders, who summered their sheep on the tall, sweet mixed grasses, building stone pens and a few plazas but returning to Anton Chico in the fall, Ysabel became a respected cowhand working on the Fulton ranch, a cow camp on that ranch is still named for him. I don’t remember my dad’s stories of Ysabel, and he died when I was just a girl.What I do remember is the impression of my dad’s stories about him—full of respect and shared, good humor—and the photograph I still have of Ysabel as a young man in front of his half-dugout, the rear of the 14

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dwelling backing into the river embankment. Dad had a mental image, which generated his memory and stories; I have only the photographic image. I see in it a curiosity. The dugout is flanked in front by flying buttresses near the adobe front wall, survivors of the Spanish style architecture of New Mexico Catholic churches—and part of the architecture of the Catholic church in Anton Chico.Though this dwelling, like most Panhandle dugouts, is gone, the faint external image of the picture—the mud, adobe, the man, and his cultural adornments—survives in lyrical equipoise. And what of the stories, the lives, of those Hispanic women settlers, more often than not, absent from historic photographs? Ysabel’s mother returned to Anton Chico after the death of her husband, but the boys stayed and married. Without the evidence of passed family stories or surviving photographic images to prompt new ones, what residuals of these former lives does the land suggest? My uncle, whose mother had spent her early adulthood as a pioneer wife, living in a dugout on the plains, had told him of those sparse days, scarceness of water, the lack of utensils.When she was an old woman, mute, her mind gone, my uncle, visiting her in a nursing home, noticed she continually moved her hands in circles, sculpting the air. He finally surmised that the repeated motion was the unforgettable gesture of her harsh youth: the repeated movement of washing and drying the two glass mason jars the family had used for drinking. No name given to a surviving wood and adobe cow camp, no persisting stone pens tucked away in arroyos, women’s lives in this land sometimes live in a gesture, an image of air. The imagist poets, some of whom spent considerable time in Santa Fe and Taos in the 1920s and 1930s, taking that land and people as subjects, theorized that an image resonates beyond its descriptive surfaces.The poets Alice Corbin Henderson and Harriet Monroe connected the concrete object and environment to an emotion arising from them. They applied the ideas of Ezra Pound on “imagist poetry”—that an image can supply an instant intuition, catching a motion, itself generating an intellectual and emotional complex. Later writers, such as Peggy Pond Church, attempted to write poetry whose imagistic aspects became what she called “a tongue for the wilderness.” “It’s the land that wants to be said,” Peggy once remarked, adding that one must possess a “noticing eye” in order to thus speak. No wonder that later native writers to this Llano place, for example Rudolfo A. Anaya and Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca, would find full and 15

Writing on the Wind cacophonous what early travelers described as a silent, empty place. The land’s own memories, its cycles, droughts, human homes, surface only for the observant, who may hear and articulate something of the image and its instant intuition. Here on our place, up on the high ground on either side of the south to north arroyos, I find an occasional pottery shard, refugee of some slope of previous dwelling. At one point Peggy Church remarked in her private journals upon a similar discovery: an Anasazi pottery shard still bearing the fingerprint of its maker. Marveling at the beauty that emerged from such a hard life, Church’s find prompted a feeling of connection.“I remembered how cold such a cave can be in winter,” she said. The shards I find so far have borne no surviving fingerprint, nor did they accomplish the decorative slips and designs of their pueblo neighbors. Yet the mica-flecked remnants are corrugated, suggesting a desire for adornment in a world of utility, necessity. Alice Walker has written about the value of material objects as the passed language of women’s domestic creativity, a form that, when noticed, has a special legacy and meaning. Women’s gardens, the activities of quiltmaking, the ways in which objects of homemaking carried the wisdom of such creative acts from generation to generation—these are the kinds of records Walker finds unique as women’s material lyrics. In the Panhandle, few records of women’s life and work survive except in the awareness of the land’s own records. West of our place about fifteen miles, but in one of the creek beds which served as connecting trails east and west across the Llano, is a curving sandstone escarpment banking a mostly dry creek bed. Underneath it are numerous petroglyphs, purportedly etched at different times, perhaps as early as the 1500s, but also historically connected to the comanchero trading period when such camps united Mexican and plains Indian traders. Just south of this site, we kids played archaeologists on a ranch where the sandstone flatlands bordering the creek area indicated Indian settlement. Near circular holes made to catch water and what appears to be sites of buffalo wallows, we took pickaxes and mallets to the earth, trying to chip out of it a burial ground or shards or something “Indian” to fuel our imaginations. But down along the creek bed, I discovered later the real riches. A petroglyph of what looks to be a Hopi girl, her hair in the sworls over her ears indicating marriageable age, appears alongside early images of water serpents but also later drawings

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of horses, Indians, soldiers, and even a Catholic church. The only image of a woman, her presence indicates perhaps a fascination with the Arizona pueblo and suggests the far-ranging travels of trading peoples. Farther north, in the Canadian River valley, other land sites are all that remain of the human and natural relationship and life cycles. Like the image of the young Hopi woman, there remains only the broad crook of a large cottonwood tree that once shaded the last occupied adobe of the earliest Panhandle town. Tascosa, flourishing during the open range years of the 1880s, the first county seat of Oldham County, attracted cowboys, settlers, and business people. Mickey and “Frenchy” McCormick were among the citizens. He ran a livery stable and a gambling operation where she served drinks. An early wedding photograph of Frenchy shows her posed in the manner of late-nineteenth-century studio photographs, leaning on a picket fence (a prop), with a painted background of lush trees and a garden behind. Her dress bustle trails behind her gracefully, while outside in the “real” world, in what was called “Hogtown” in Tascosa because of its boggy river bottom location (and its shady reputation due to the saloon life), a tangle of brush and Canadian red silt persists. This apparently is the same dress Frenchy kept in a trunk in what became a tumble-down adobe, long after the death of her husband and the death of Tascosa. Deaf and alone, she had refused to leave the house near the bough of the towering cottonwood, a place she and Mickey had chosen for their home. Neighbors checking on her one day found that she had been frightened by some tourists coming off the highway in search of “Boot Hill,” the cemetery where several cowboys were buried after Tascosa’s one notorious gun battle. She was smoothing her remaining treasure, the wedding dress, for comfort. As a girl, I reveled in stories of Frenchy, whose New Orleans past was a mystery, poured over the photograph in hopes of unearthing some secret, talked to the rancher whom she had babysat when he was a boy. She had given him the wedding photo to keep in an album. The twisted cottonwood remains, a chosen harbor, yet unnoticed by passersby from any of the other stand of trees near the river. Mostly this area is known as cowboy country. As I cross the second of the deep draws on our place, I see the evidence of this very short yet continually popularized history of the llano. Our west fence has a stretch Dad and I decided to keep. It was part of the original XIT Ranch line fence,

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Writing on the Wind which stretched some twenty miles north to the Canadian River, at one time enclosing a single pasture in those 1880s ranch days. This completely male story of the cowboy period continues to be reformulated as the land’s only memory, today revivified in the lyrics of cowboy poets, even the worship services of cowboy churches.There were “cowgirls,” so-called, if few. I remember the Binford ranch women, Katherine, the mother, and the two daughters, Nan and Barbara. Katherine had come with her husband to this area in the 1920s, when the couple got off the train where the tracks ended near present-day Wildorado, Texas, making their way by wagon to their homestead. Adding to the land through the years, the Binfords became a prominent ranching family, with Nan returning from college to help her mother run the ranch after her father’s death. The ranch became home to some of the original cowgirls and ranch women who competed in the All-Girl rodeos. Nan built part of her reputation as a prize-winning cutting-horse performer, following in her mother’s footsteps. She once recounted a story to me of her mother’s first competition in Madison Square Garden among an allmale field of participants, the first woman to compete with men before the circuits were split. But what I remember of the Binford women were as working ranch women. Nan and her partner of the time, Lonnie, would pull into town with their horse trailer, driving through the drive-in window of the bank where my dad still worked. I tried to imagine the lives these women in spurs and chaps led out on the llano, the same free life I romanticized where you could live outdoors—animals, dawns, and dusks your companions. The cowgirls I played with as a child have long since married well and moved off downstate.Their daughters now are getting married to even more promising and prosperous urban men. But as girls we played in the barns in the area ranches and in the “backyards” of ranch houses, prairie, and breaks themselves.Tomboys, we rode horses, climbed haystacks, ate cattle cake in the barn, befriended the occasional antelope twins made pets after their mother had died.We caught horny toads, non-poisonous snakes, and ground squirrels for pets, poor things! When the girlfriends were sent off to a prestigious boarding school in Dallas, I missed them, but I kept riding, finally giving up horses for good when a rank colt I’d been given

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reminded me in my early college teaching years that my bones could be broken. Besides, he made a fool of me, quickly circling and lying down in a soft field in town, almost crushing my leg before I could jump off. I should have recognized my own melodrama from a long ways off, since I came by it so naturally not only struggling to be a cowgirl, but steeped in the cowboy films of my childhood. One of my earliest memories is of the dark interior of Vega’s downtown movie theater, a long, narrow room in a stone building, where there were hard wooden benches and popcorn in brown bags brought from home and the flickering black and white film. How impressed I was with the later Hollywood films in color, but when I saw Crazy Horse, I questioned the fake blood and fake Indians used to tell the real stories of the late-nineteenth-century West. I wanted Dale Evans to be different too, was compelled to identify with Roy Rogers instead, asking for a birthday costume complete with red boots and sixshooters. There was Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger. I had the sheet music and some recordings of Gene Autry, but I listened to “The Lone Ranger” on the radio, sprawled out on the floor in front of the upright white radio at my grandparents’ house. But I identified with the sidekick, Tonto, and wished him to get full credit for his wisdom and talk in his native language. I suppose I still am only a stucco house away from the caves, dugouts, adobe dwellings, migratory settlements, remnants of the early plains people. In 1983, I moved from Albuquerque back to Vega, where I had inherited a farmhouse on the edge of town from my great aunt and uncle. I moved in, with plans for a garden and orchard, with time to help my father with the family farm/ranch operation. My own return to land included fifty acres fronting a 1920 prairie-style bungalow, with a three-acre native pasture around it, and a large, New England-style barn I later discovered had been ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and assembled in 1926. When I moved in, I surveyed the old implements, unopened Burpee seed packets left over from my uncle’s gardening, the beds of iris, wild roses, still-sprouting asparagus beds, a fifty-year-old peach tree—all hidden by weeds, but once lovingly tended by my aunt Alice. Across town, my grandparents’ house, bought by a young couple who had recently divorced, fell into disrepair. Broken windows marred my granddad’s workshop back of the house where he made furniture when I was a girl, the roof pocked and

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Writing on the Wind blighted after seasonal hailstorms; my grandmother’s gardens lay forgotten under the kitchen window. I clung more tenaciously to my house, which daily revealed forgotten treasures. In a rusted trunk in the root cellar, I discovered three quilts made by my great-grandmother, who at 101 was still sewing.What did it mean to sleep under those quilts again, to take in hand rakes, hoes, scythes whose wood had lost its grain, smoothed by a generation of use? My great uncle had come from Chicago where he worked for a printing company. Long-standing area farmers often smirked at his farming practices, but he had made a living, leaving behind this house and a small farm. Like the man who built the house—Jess Giles—many of the early generation of farmers to break out the plains in the Panhandle had come from Illinois when word of flat, potentially bountiful wheat country (and cheap land) reached them through the promotional literature of the developing railroad companies. Jess Giles came with his family, but moved out at age sixteen, building his own dugout south of town.When he earned enough money working on the threshing crews, he bought a small acreage and built this house. Like so many men of his background and generation, he was, by necessity, a jack-of-all-trades. The house and barn were full of his wood-working projects: the five-inch baseboards, the cold frame for plants on the south side of the house, the windows situated for ventilation, the simple beveled glass in the front door—all suggest ingenuity, taste. When the first telephone wires were strung in Oldham County on the existing cedar fence posts, Jess Giles tried out the first connection in Vega by playing his fiddle into the wall phone. My uncle Vern bought the house and barn lot; he added more land and outbuildings according to his own sensibilities. I think of these things when I hear the drone of trucks on nearby I-40, only a pasture away. For if the town had grown up around the railroad in 1903, and Route 66 intersected the town in the 1930s, Interstate 40 later skirted south, the highway department paying my uncle a mere one thousand dollars in 1966 for the right-of-way that went through the middle of his farm. On many east/west trips myself, I’ve driven this major highway, which shadows the celebrated Route 66, but also the original Indian trails and later wagon trails in this area. It seems quite natural that modern highways should pass through farmsteads. After all, the first trails originated for reasons of safety, accessible water, relative ease. The juxtaposition of 20

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dwelling places and migratory trails seems appropriate, a nexus in a land said by the early Anglo military and expeditionary men to be “empty,” “uninhabitable,” a daunting “sea of grass.” “The Great American Desert,” nineteenth-century maps indicated. Cruising through this country today, maybe aimed toward the more populous West Coast, or even Albuquerque or Phoenix, a traveler may only experience the impression of color, atmosphere, the dominance of sky, until, west of Adrian, you drop dramatically off what the early Spanish explorers called “the ceja,” an eyebrow of the Llano escarpment. Measured in only human terms, for many the land still is monotonously open, arid, unworthy of love. As I end my morning’s winter walk, five miles north of I-40 at the turn-off to our place where I started, I like to think of the migrations of prairie tortoises, from bar ditch to bar ditch across this country road I’ve observed, of tarantulas in early spring—egg-laying season, mating season. The persistently digging badgers in winter course the hard pan caliche on the roadside, leaving deep potholes, sometimes undermining the softer fence rows. I think of the old bull we had who jumped fences, leaving hide behind. I’ve come upon avocets seining the water spill from the section windmill; sandhill cranes feeding in the milo stubble in fall. An old resident porcupine used to amble down this same roadway, not a tree for this barkeater in sight, his arthritis shifting his gait to a lopsided wobble. I once spotted him in the last dead cottonwood tree, rooted in an arid dam site; he was napping in a rotting bough. Antelope take the wheat fields in winter, disappearing over the horizon into the breaks when someone like me appears. This is another drought season, but even without rain, flint fragments surface among the small road rocks, distinguishable by their pink, white, and gray striations. A huge flint quarry was east of here. Native American artisans traded the Alibates flint so that it has been found as far north as Minnesota. There is a persistence in this habit of landscape, this Llano that is lyric, if in catching the motion, we can hear the song.

Genesis Having walked or jogged sections of the Llano Estacado for over thirty years, inspired by regular visits to the family farm/ranch, I wanted for as many years to write about this place, this habit of landscape, and the 21

Writing on the Wind connection between migrations and dwelling. Once, when a friend of mine and I heard cranes in the night sky over a neon-lit café in Vega,Texas, he told me cranes navigated by night yearly, by those green and purple lights. Mostly, the expectations of academe have reinforced categories of research and publication, requiring professors to analyze the work of others—the manning of other city lights—but not our own. But after my most recent project on the Southwest nature writer and poet, Peggy Church, I realized anew a shared perspective, the connection of our “two plateaus,” as propelling me again to “writing llano.” I’ve chosen the rather strange title, without its expected article (“the” llano), to indicate this an open work, a process. It is also a work about the meaning of ecology of art, how, as we standardly define “ecology,” the creative process is an ongoing relationship to place.

S H E L L E Y A R M I TA G E is a professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at El Paso and affiliate Professor of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Author of eight books and numerous scholarly and nonfiction articles in the fields of photography, visual and material culture, literary and cultural theory, ethnic and regional materials, her most recent book, Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church, is a nature memoir. She has been Distinguished Fulbright chair at University of Warsaw, Poland, a Rockefeller and NEH grant recipient. She lives on the family farm and ranch near Vega, Texas, in the summers.

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Be All Right Lisa Sandlin W H E R E W E L I V E D in East Texas the sky was walled up by pines, which suited us fine. We were a dark family and combustible. Sometimes, kicking back with a rare bottle of wine and an even rarer Pall Mall, my mother would blurt a family story, say, that they were so hungry during the Great Depression that when her sister fell out of their old Ford while they were scrapping over an apple, my mother flung herself out too. She didn’t intend to rescue her sister—she was after that bouncing apple. Or how their father gambled away the Ford, leaving their mother to grit her teeth and bargain it back. Their mother folded soft dollars from her seamstress cigar box, borrowed a neighbor lady’s veiled cloche to camouflage the steel-blue pinpoints of her eyes, and set out for the winner’s house. We listened, grinning. Our mother made mean stories funny. Dad couldn’t stand it. He’d snatch away the small pleasure of the cigarette and rant about her bad example. His family lived in West Texas up toward the Panhandle. To us it was a wide-open, best-behavior kind of place. Going there, we packed our good clothes and had our faces spit-scrubbed a lot. We didn’t know these relatives well, since West Texas was far. Six hundred miles of backseat punching and pinching and quick stops and threats from the front seat. Our only relief was the edge of the hill country, where Dad would slam on the brakes and order us to roll down a hill.We liked that. It ironed out our evil kinks for a while. My mother rode tensed and dreading, her hair molded from the beauty shop, girding herself to be intimidated by the

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Writing on the Wind aunts who had only good and unfunny things to say about their husbands, children, and lives. Invariably she embarrassed herself up there. Discord and divorce, they knew those things.They even had secrets—a cousin’s husband got shot once—but they didn’t blurt them out to us. Secrets were not company conversation. We’d wind through the two-lane Big Thicket, tall pines whipping by. My pastime—before the slugging started—was to slice through their wall with a giant blade.They’d sheer off halfway, toppling rapidly behind the car as we passed. Out in West Texas where Canna lived, where we became quieter people, trees grew so singly in yards that a kid might name them, or by water, in a neat, thirsty row. Cotton fields would tick by or range; nothing needed mowing down to reveal a huge, light blue sky.

I’ve been remembering all this as I sew because out in West Texas my grandmother Canna is trying to die. I’m thinking of her, watching my two-year-old son push a backhoe, scraping at a knot of thread on a vintage button, not paying any more attention than the man in the moon. The scissors slip off the slick button and bite my thumb wide open. The phone rings just as I’ve stanched the bleeding with a kitchen rag. My thumb is throbbing and there are sparkles around my head. I had been sewing, of all things, a black dress. The enemy scissors lie on the couch beside me where they dropped, where my two-year-old hovers. He wrinkles his forehead in concern. He looks like his dad looks when they play Hospital with the blue toy stethoscope and red thermometer. He lets me know how I sounded when I rocked him after the operations as he wailed, bewildered by the pain. He pats the bloody rag over my thumb.“Be all right,” he singsongs, “be all right.” He mimics my tone precisely, and I hear how unsure he is, how he wants to believe. My father is calling from Lubbock. “She’s bad,” he says, “I think it’s pretty close.” He speaks with a clipped, public calm that doesn’t mean he’s calm. In private, he’s an emotional man. Time and melancholy have added a sheen to his eyes, a tremor to his lips. He adores his mother Canna, ninety-four and blind. She’s been sick off and on for the last few years. Lonely since her husband died, bound by a wistful spell no one could permanently disperse. She’s stopped resisting the recurring pneumonia. The

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last time I talked to her on the phone, she as much as said she was determined to die.Then she quit talking. She shocked me. Harsh forthrightness belonged to my mother’s side of the family. It wasn’t like Canna, and neither was the frustration and anger that crackled over the line. Couple of days ago, my father says huskily, a Methodist minister visited her to pray for recovery. She told him that wasn’t what she was asking the Lord for and would he leave her room. She hasn’t said much since. He wants to know am I going anywhere in case he needs to call again. “Staying here.” “Good,” he says, “how’s that boy?” “Like gold.” I unwrap the rag around my thumb.The cut wells over, and I wrap it up again. My son watches anxiously when I pick up the black dress. I bite off some thread, double it, knot it, and hem. Lucky the hem and the buttons can be sewn without scissors. My son has nudged them under the couch. Craft and honesty shine from his face. After the last surgery, the anesthesiologist poked his blue-capped head in the waiting room. “He wouldn’t have made it ten years ago,” he said. “We can do a lot more now. He’s a fighter.” I like this doctor. He wears arm puppets for the kids, beginning at his hands stuffed in lamb or monkey faces and ending at his elbows like evening gloves. We’d thought we couldn’t be any more grateful that our son had stayed with us than we already were. But we found we could. Grandmother, bless her heart, she’s just as set on leaving.

Bless your heart, that’s what she always said. To neighbors who’d lost their crop, to kids who fell out of bed. Our side of the family would have informed these individuals just where they went wrong, but to Canna, bless your heart covered it. I listened curiously to the kindness in that commonplace’s tone and substance—and decided it was nice, not just because it was nice, which meant acceptable and good, but because it saved a lot of time and wrath. Sometimes she said it to me. Canna’s voice is sincere and wobbly, the way people used to sing back when too-sweet songs were popular. She sounds like Glinda, the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.” Only humbler. Though her grown

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Writing on the Wind kids wanted to treat her at restaurants, she persisted in ordering from the bottom of the menu: tomato soup with crackers. She never needed Christmas gifts; in fact would make us sorry we spent our hard-earned money on her instead of our own more important needs. She refused to move in with one of her children when she couldn’t live alone any longer—No, she’d go to a home, she wouldn’t burden. My mother flailed against this sort of selflessness. She wanted things for herself, just as she’d wanted the apple, and one of them was to say her piece with no sugar on it. After she did, she felt small in the silence of her sisters-in-law. Selflessness didn’t necessarily serve Canna, either. But that’s what she learned and she stuck to it. She never believed in asking for anything for herself. Until now. Now she’s asking. At ninety, she told her life to her daughters, who wrote it down. She began by apologizing.When you children needed me most, she said,“I was unwell and unhappy and thought too much about it instead of doing something about it.” She and the aunts labored over her memories, writing, organizing, typing them up, and that work did make her happy. She recalled her childhood in astonishing detail: the exact dates the family up and moved from farm to farm, birth dates, death dates, dates of snakebites, illness, floods, and storms.The rest is a record of doing. She made lye soap, peach-leaf bleach, cough medicine, persimmon beer, duck feather pillows, she picked cotton and gentled horses. She explained how to do it all. To feed baby birds: chirp at the nest until they open their beaks then drop in a berry. To ride cows: sit on their heads and hold onto the horns. To stay awake a second night when nursing the sick: set a lit lantern in your lap.To teach troublesome children, the ones who’ve dropped live bullets in the stove: assign them an important task, have a compliment ready, for “a kind word means more to them than to one who knows only kindness.” Her father built neighbors’ coffins at night, after a long day in the fields. He planed the rough lumber by hand. Canna held the lantern so he could see to do his carpentry. In the “wee early hours” she passed the lantern and finished the job. Small hands suited this task. She sewed the lace around the casket, white on the inside to match the white sateen lining, black around the outside. To Canna this work was blissful. They did it for the Lord, and they did it for free.

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It was blissful for one other reason: it made her feel important. She lets herself say so. This little self-praise she permitted since it came from doing for others. Her self-effacement rubbed off on her children, but we grandchildren were born too late to embrace it. We asked, all right. We ordered chicken-fried steak from the menus. We made up plays and acted them out to forcefully captured audiences.We sang Johnny Cash and bowed for applause. My grandparents’ next-to-last home was a Gatesville farm. Out here one summer, the summer all the girl cousins tromped around in plastic high heels, I asked God to show himself to me. I went about my plan in secret, East-Texas fashion. I slipped away from the cousins who were playing beauty parlor with cigarette papers and pink foam rollers. I swiped pencil and pad and wrote him a letter. I wouldn’t have thought of mailing it back in Beaumont where forty-four trees, taller than telephone poles, crowded our front yard. But out here, there was room. Out here the letter wouldn’t knock into a branch or get snared in pine needles. It could be taken directly up. God could reach out for it. I didn’t ask to see a face or an arm or a star or a dazzling light. Just for the letter to go up. I tottered to the barn, locust shells crunching under my plastic soles. Reluctantly I kicked off the high heels and climbed the ladder left-handed. My right hand clutched the sweaty letter. I balanced in the broad window of the hayloft to survey my range. It was limitless. I was above scrubby yard dirt and horny toads, garden and the stubby mesquite whose roots twisted into the ground. Above fences and cows and sheds and chicken pens. Above every grown person. Above everything but wind and sky. Limitless, like the ocean where, if you splashed out through the waves to the farthest place you could see, you would be at another beginning. I took the deepest breath and threw out the letter. I so wanted it to soar up and disappear into the sun’s spokes. At seven or eight, I knew better—baseballs fell down, glasses of Kool-Aid fell off tables, leaves might fly around but they would fall down, too. Nevertheless, I clenched my fists and asked that it go up. Please let me see it go up. The letter floated on the wind and then drifted down, down, down. I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t have to watch it land in the dirt. Hurt, thwarted, I gripped the hayloft’s splintery side. I wouldn’t have told, if the letter had flown up. No, probably I would. Sooner or later we

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Writing on the Wind always told. I felt drearily older. Now I would have to believe only what people said was true—not what might be true, what might be lovelier or more just or much more thrilling.That sorrow lasted until I got tired of it and grudgingly opened my eyes. The world was still framed in the hayloft window. What a broad summer day.The pale blue sky was a circle that met itself. Sunbeams fit my head like a crown. Locusts sang fast, a choir of wire springs stretching and coiling.They drew in the day and swelled it out again. Clouds sat on top of the day. It did not occur to me until years later that God was revealed in the whole blue spectacle.What did occur was that I was a speck of it, a kid in a hayloft. I was not part of it because I was good. I was part of it because I just was. I sat down to puzzle over this idea but soon forgot it in the pure satisfaction of dangling my bare legs in the sun. What a day, so round and loud.

My father calls again in the morning just as my son has woken up from a nap. With him bouncing on my hip, we jog into the kitchen to get the phone. “She passed away about twenty minutes ago,” my father says. “Aw, she worked at it.” I tell him we should be glad for her and he agrees, but his husky voice is breaking. So we plan flights and who’s picking up whom from the airport, all the time feeling the mysterious displacement. She’s gone. Now she’s somewhere over our heads. They’ve got the funeral arranged, the plot in Slaton. In three days, we’ll bury her there. A sharp West Texas wind will scythe through our winter coats.We’ll squint against the brilliant sunlight. My father and aunts and uncles will blot their eyes at the grave. My mother, armored in costume jewelry and mannerly intentions, will sob because death takes her that way. Afterward we’ll congregate in the church hall and hug and catch up and laugh, not too boisterously except for our cousin the salesman. We’ll eat the neighbors’ baked hams and Jell-O molds and let the greatgrandchildren trip over the folding chairs. My boy and I go look out the window. For a second, I imagine seeing Canna in the sky from the hayloft. A good place for her, light, open, the locusts’ song steady, the wind constant, so much room to move. But that fades as we stand a while, watching the street with its parked cars, the

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spiky black trees, the brown leaves washed flat in the gutters. A January cold breathes in through the glass. I could tell my son stories about his family that he wouldn’t understand or remember. I don’t. Instead I say what I thought after the phone rang and my father told me. I say it over and over because it feels good, it just feels better and better, and the better it feels, the more my son hears it in my voice and the brighter his eyes grow. The tone, the repetition, make him break into a smile. This boy knows a celebration, even a little one, even a quiet one, when he hears it. He catches on to some words, says them with me, and we smile with our mouths open. We keep smiling and saying. He loves it. I love that he loves it, that he is here to love it, and I love Canna for lantern-holding and sewing white satin deep in the night, for evicting a preacher praying the wrong prayer, for every kind word she gave me, for asking at last. We say: Canna, you made it.You made it today. Bless your heart, Grandmother. Bless your sweet heart.Welcome home, welcome home. Canna, you made it. You made it today.

Genesis “Be All Right” comes from the collision of two events: my son’s recovery from several operations and my grandmother’s death. Wished-for events. By the time my son was two, it seemed he’d beaten his medical problems, and we could let up on the wondering if we had him for sure. We could relax. He had a clear airway like other toddlers, and he was clamoring to get outside to watch a backhoe tear up San Francisco Street. At the same time, my grandmother had come to the end of her long life and wasn’t interested in hanging on longer. She was ready to go. Her last homes were in Slaton and Lubbock, where I’d spent time as a child. West Texas was very different from East Texas where we lived on the edge of the Big Thicket. The ground was moist around our house. Ditches held standing water. We sometimes motored through bayous in a little boat with an outboard, getting lost in the watery channels and cypress sloughs. The bayous with their dripping trees were beautiful and quiet. Enclosed. Still. In the Big Thicket itself, tall trees sealed up the sky. It became a strip, a series of chinks. The contrast of West Texas was stark: the huge open space, the unobstructed light, a sky that stretched far down to fit to the land. I felt not in 29

Writing on the Wind it, but on it. As a child out on that flat land, I used to hold out my arms and turn round and round. When I fell down, it wasn’t from dizziness. It was because the earth was, secretly from us, spinning all the time. Out there I had the sense I could feel the earth spin.

Lisa Sandlin, a native of Beaumont, Texas, is the author of The Famous Thing About Death and Message to the Nurse of Dreams, two short-story collections published by Cinco Puntos Press of El Paso. The latter book won the Austin Writers League’s Violet Crown Award and the Jesse H. Jones Award from The Texas Institute of Letters for Best Book of Fiction, 1997. She teaches at Wayne State College in Nebraska. Her son Evan, 23, graduated last May from Bard College.

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The Scent of Water Barney Nelson For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground;Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. — J O B 14:7–9

A S N O R M A N M A C L E A N W R I T E S in the first line of A River Runs Through It, “I am haunted by waters.” But my waters have never been as impressive as the Big Blackfoot. If I wanted water, I needed to find it, remember it, sometimes dig for it, and take damn good care of it. For over fifty years, while living in the desert Southwest, I have been learning to find water. I sometimes don’t remember how to return to the homes of friends I have visited, nor the names of roads I travel regularly, but I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten a spring or a tinaja or a windmill. Creeks in my country are the least dependable sources of water. They can run big and destructive when it rains, but soon begin to disappear or run underground as the rains stop, finally drying up completely, leaving moss baked gray on rocks like flaking paint. Periodically, I try to fool myself into believing a dry arroyo is a real creek since it will sometimes run for several months. It can look like a real creek with green moss and watercress and flowers and water bugs and all the birds who like to hang out around water. After it has been running a while, the water clears because of the

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Writing on the Wind plants filtering it, and it looks clean enough that I pick watercress to make salads. But it’s not real. Knowing that seems to make it easier to watch it dry up. I know it is only a temporary creek. I’m sure the moss and watercress probably know it too. But Mother Desert is a very patient lady. Her plants can wait. They look like they are dying, and these adults probably are. But in a year or two or ten, when the rains come again, the roots or seeds will sprout. Even though the water will come as a torrent and wash rocks and dirt and trees away, somehow the little roots and seeds hang on until the water calms. I’ve never lived near a mountain stream, but it seems that plants who have such an easy life might not be as prepared. They might put too much faith in their creek and forget to protect themselves. Sometimes in March, I wonder if my world will actually die. I hate March. The bare branches of the trees creak in the constant wind, which sometimes gusts to hurricane force. A thin layer of dust coats the grass, the rocks, the world. Everything is dead, brown, dried up and depressing. I suppose to people less skeptical than desert dwellers, there are signs of spring everywhere. In my yard an apricot tree blooms beautifully every March, but in twelve years I have never picked a single apricot. A late freeze always nips it. That tree symbolizes my skepticism. The buzzards come back in March, but I’ve seen them snowed on. They make no promises either. In the Chihuahuan desert even the mesquites and pecans sometimes get fooled. Perhaps there are places where spring comes every March or April. But sometimes in West Texas it doesn’t come at all. Sometimes nothing turns green until the next year or the next. March never ends—it just gets hot, then cold, then March again. So during March, in years when the creek is still trickling from late fall rains, I will go for a walk there. Even if the creek has been dry, powder dry, for several years, the waterweeds come back when the water comes back. It always amazes me. The water birds find it too. The creek can’t be seen from the sky since it meanders under clumps of sacaton and willow trees, but ducks and snipe and killdeer find it almost immediately and claim it. Outside of this thin green line, though, the desert is locked in winter. I don’t believe in spring. I believe in water. And I’ve never known a desert water plant that couldn’t wait. I wonder if water plants would wait for a

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mountain torrent like the Big Blackfoot the way desert plants wait for theirs? It seems that the plants who have survived the worst droughts have the most faith in water. So, I don’t believe in spring, but I believe in springs. I’ve never known a spring that didn’t come back too. Here in Far West Texas, most springs are high up a rocky bluff, under a rim rock. But after the strenuous climb, sometimes the spring has been fouled into a seepy, muddy hillside by javelinas, or gone dry. It seems that quite often in desert country a spring and a tinaja will be located quite close to one another, almost as backup systems. A tinaja is a deep bowl that has been carved into rock by water falling from above. Both usually occur along rim rocks where walls of rock have been thrust up by some invisible force: water for the tinaja pouring off the top, water for the spring percolating down through the rocks, but both appearing at the base of an upthrust cliff. After a rain, a tinaja will have caught water, but it sometimes takes years for the same rain to percolate through the rocks and pop out somewhere in a spring, so a spring will sometimes be dry during a rainy year—but not always. Some springs are only three weeks behind the rains. Springs, ironically, seem more dependable than tinajas during droughts. One of the most haunting photographs I ever saw was of a drowned mountain lion floating in a deep, sheer-sided tinaja. As the water gradually evaporated away, I can imagine the lion stretching further and further for a precious sip, perhaps falling in and scrambling out a few times, until finally the rain came a day late and the climb out was just one inch too far. There is an old Australian aboriginal greeting: “From what water do you come?” Most people today don’t know where their water comes from. Often I’ve known painfully too well, and it was often one of my jobs to make sure the water came, not only for me, but for anything else that needed a drink for a several mile radius. Except for a few unimportant years, most of the water I come from has been very deep and so cold I drink it without ice. Here in West Texas we call our water sources “aquifers” but there is no underground lake or river.What we usually have is a bolson, Spanish for purse, and as messy as one. Rock wasn’t laid down here in neat limestone layers pocketed with huge water-holding caverns. What we have is more like a stack of multi-colored rock pancakes slung around like a food fight

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Writing on the Wind between two mad volcanic cocineros. After the pancakes hardened, earthquakes, uplifts, and dropping fault blocks cracked them, toppled them, shifted them, heaved them up, dropped them down, and in general just created a geologist’s dream or nightmare, depending on the geologist’s tolerance for puzzles. The few geologic maps of this area look like modernistic Monet paintings with overlapping, irregular dots of color. In places where the pancakes grated against one another, maybe crumbs formed a porous layer or filled a crack that can hold a little water, sometimes at 50 feet, sometimes at 1500 feet, sometimes one on top of the other, or maybe not. When water is sucked out of a mess like this, no one seems able to measure or even find water tables. Underground water sources don’t show their bathtub ring to the world like a lake or reservoir. No one is sure where the bottom is. Pressing questions among desert dwellers sharing an underground water source are how much population can it support, how many trees, how many golf courses and lawns, how many cars can it wash per week, how many loads of laundry, how many swimming pools or fountains or flush toilets? Nobody seems to know. So we worry. Well drillers like to keep collections of glass bottles filled with rock samples taken at drilling intervals, band after band of colored rock dust— pink, green, white, gray, black—rainbows. Pretty curiosities. Crystal balls. Lined up next to one another the bottles tell stories, sometimes fiction. Finding little pockets of water in this maze of broken pancakes has proven almost impossible through gambling, science, or prayer. So, most of the wells in West Texas have been witched. Lots of jokes are told about Law West of the Pecos, insinuating that we have none. And when it comes to water, that may very well be true.When you need water, you need water— no matter whose laws get broken or what happens to your soul. So although most of the water witches and their customers have been good, God-fearing people, they are more afraid of running out of water than of God. If God remembers where he hid the water, he isn’t telling. So witches walk the rocky ground with two pieces of wire or a forked stick or brass rods until twitching or swaying or some kind of movement indicates water. After years of sinking successful wells and filling bottles with colored dust, the witches have given the geologists clues about the colors of rocks and where the water might be hiding. So today geologists are doing better. Recharge is another desert water mystery. Rain in the desert does

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not run away to the sea. Instead it collects in low places or playas, evaporates, or trickles and percolates down between cracks, disappearing into the ground to replenish bolsons. Although some are, most desert aquifers are not really pools of ancient water that once mined are gone forever, but rather act more like underground cisterns, catching and holding the rains that fall on their desert roof. Sometimes, though, it never rains and maybe some don’t recharge, or at least not fast enough. So we worry. What about pollution? Underground water can be contaminated from human error: leaking gasoline storage tanks, septic tanks, city dumps, or run-off containing chemicals used on golf courses, yards, gardens, and fields. Deep wells are harder to pollute, but not impossible. Sometimes pollution is nature caused, not human. Some wells produce water too salty to drink, often within a few yards of sweet water wells. Some have naturallyoccurring elements like mercury or arsenic. Sometimes the surrounding rock contains uranium and the water becomes radioactive. Most true desert playas, places without drainage where water collects on the surface and evaporates, are salty—like the country around Dell City. The flat desert country around the Pecos River was also salty long before the first farmer arrived. Big rains have always washed salt into the river. Old timers claim to “remember” tall grass along the Pecos and it running with sweet water, but the earliest explorer’s diaries complain of the scant, salt-stunted weeds and water too salty to drink. Then, again, not all bolsons produce salt—so the water mysteries deepen. Windmills are the most dependable places to find water, but someone has to mother them. Someone has to climb the windmill tower at least once every two years and risk life and limb to change the oil in the gear box or tighten bolts. Someone has to check tubs and pipelines daily to make sure a float hasn’t jarred loose, a riser become air locked, or a leak started somewhere. Eventually, I learned to tell by a drop in my kitchen water pressure when a leak had appeared on the long, hidden pipelines that threaded for miles through the pasture connecting windmill storage tanks to water tubs for livestock. A two-day leak can drain a storage tank that a windmill might not catch enough wind to replace during the hot, still months of summer. Even for humans, on the hottest, driest days, the water level in the storage tank is often too low to reach with a cup and no breeze stirs to push the big metal fan enough to bring up a trickle. I learned to

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Writing on the Wind push the moss and slimy pea-green scum away from a spot in a water tub and drink around the bugs, but in order for the tubs to contain water, the reservoir must have water. I’ve learned to fix some leaks or quickly call for help when several hundred head of cattle, not to mention deer, antelope, coyotes, mountain lions, birds, wasps, and no telling what or who else were depending on me. Someone once asked author and Buddhist Gary Snyder what we should do for animals since they have been so good to us. Snyder recommended that we sing, pray, and dance for them. I suggest that we never let them run out of water. Consequently, much of my life has been spent maintaining, checking on, and worrying about water. In the fall, windmills are wrapped from the “T” to the spider and dogs with paper sacks and baling wire to help keep the well stand-pipe from freezing where it goes into the casing. On cold, still nights, wooden brake handles are pulled down and fastened to collapse the windmill tail against the fan, so it will not catch a breeze and turn if the pipe does freeze. If water freezes inside the stand-pipe, the wooden red-rod between the fan and the rub-rod is designed to break in order to save the gears, but replacing a red-rod is expensive business. I’ve helped to pull shallow wells by hand, lifting a heavy string of plastic pipe full of water until the submerged parts came to the surface for repair. But when a real working windmill with 1500 feet of sucker-rod cased with metal pipe must be fixed, it takes a good windmiller and tons of rolling equipment. Windmilling is an art with a language all its own.Watching a couple of windmillers sling elevators around a coupling on a joint of sucker-rod is pure poetry. Joint after joint is pulled to the top of the tower, uncoupled with 20" rod wrenches that I probably couldn’t lift and walked out to waiting metal burros. A windmill tower has a big window on one side just tall enough to tail out rods and pipes if they are long and flexible enough to sag just a little. Once leathers are replaced in the stuffing box and the top check checked, the sucker-rod is recoupled, joint by joint, and lowered back down into the hole to fish for the bottom check. Hidden 1500 feet in the ground under several feet of water rests a heavy brass cylinder with a 3" fitting that the bottom pipe must carefully touch and thread into. A windmiller fishes by listening to the hole. Once fished, joint by joint the sucker-rod is again uncoupled, tailed back out to the burros, and the bottom check brought to the top. Once its leathers, too, have been replaced or

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any other needed repairs made, the bottom check is simply dropped back into the well and again the windmiller listens. Even I can hear the sound like fragile glass shattering when the brass bottom check breaks the surface of the well water, but I can’t hear what they hear when it hits the bottom. Meanwhile, the rod threads have been daubed with soft black grease and once again, joint by joint, beginning with the rod that holds the top check, the sucker-rods are recoupled and fed back into the well. Windmillers say that old rub-rods made of ash are the best, but that today all the ash trees are located on some kind of protected ground.The new rub-rods are pink, and my friend the windmiller doesn’t think it is real wood. He says it makes the water taste funny—which I think is a joke, but one never knows with a windmiller. One day several years ago, my dog “Perro” and I went for a little walk up a dried up creek. We found what was probably the last puddle of chocolate water with a scum of green algae on the top. The scum should have been a warning to me since I’d seen it before, but I didn’t listen. I sat on a rock to meditate, and Perro decided to take a bath to cool off. He’s not very particular about his bath water, and I suspect he pees in it anyway. We’d been there just long enough for both of us to drift off into another world when we suddenly realized we had company. This was a favorite afternoon-lay-around-in-the-warm-bathwater spot for a band of javelinas. They bristled at the sight of us. Quickly, Perro and I both gave the javelina bathtub back to its original owners, on the run. After our initial burst of adrenalin wore off, I stopped to pick up a couple of rocks, just in case the javelinas decided to follow us. My good West Texas dog, deciding I was now ready to fight for the water, as he thought we should, headed back to the pool to start a fight. While the American thirst for creature comforts has increased by leaps and bounds, I was always content if I just had water, and it didn’t have to be fancy. I’m really not much more particular than my dog. The old ranch camp houses where I have chosen to live are famous for their unique and conversation stimulating bathrooms. I once lived on the 7-W Camp of the Nail Ranch near Albany in North Texas.The old house has since been plowed off the face of the earth because nobody but me ever seemed to like to live there. It had a tin roof that turned rain and hail into music and sat on a hill overlooking a creek that seldom went dry.

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Writing on the Wind The house water came several miles from the Clear Fork of the Brazos, which wasn’t clear to start with. By the time it had been agitated and mixed with mud and pumped up the riverbank to a holding tank that had never been cleaned, then sloshed through old, used oil-field pipe for several miles, it came out of my faucet black. So in the bathroom the pot always looked like someone eating prunes had used it but hadn’t flushed it. It was also very temperamental to flush. If things didn’t go just right, it would overflow and flood the closet with black water. To keep guests from being embarrassed or wondering about my housekeeping, I wrote a little poem about why it looked like it did and how to flush it and tacked it over the toilet paper holder.Then, instead of sheepish red faces, guests emerged successful and grinning. I joked that the water left a ring on me after a bath. There were other endearing features about the 7-W bathroom. The tin roof and the house perched on a hill both attracted lightning, which can be fierce in that part of “Tornado Alley.” On several occasions, lightning blew the drain out of the bathtub or exploded the fuse box for the old crank telephone that hung on the wall about head-high next to the pot. I always hurried through bathroom rituals when there were black clouds on the horizon. The tin roof caught our drinking water and funneled it into a big tin cistern where I drew it by the pitcherful. Another interesting bathroom was at the old house on the Tippit Ranch below Mitre Peak in Jeff Davis County. It had been abandoned for over thirty years before I moved in and stands abandoned now. The house water system was spring fed, so a little frog had taken up residency in the pot. I’d flush him away and in a few seconds, he’d pop back up. It was always fun to listen to guests shriek when they went in the bathroom and then holler, “Hey, there’s a frog in the pot?!” I’d holler back, “Yeah, I know. It’s ok. He lives there.” I tried not to think about what he ate. Still another interesting bathroom was at the Willow Springs Camp on the 06 Ranch in Brewster County where I lived for thirteen years. It was rather boring by comparison to the other two, but it had its moments. We killed a rattlesnake in there once. She had evidently crawled in under the porch screen door, crawled down the hall to the bathroom, and hidden under a pile of dirty towels. When I picked up the towels to wash them, there she was. That bathroom was especially fun when I’d have a house full of com38

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The Scent of Water

pany for a party. The pot sits in the middle of a 16' x 16' room and gave new meaning to the word throne. Three doors lead into it. One of the doors had the aggravating habit of coming unlatched and drifting open when someone sat on the throne because the floor wasn’t quite stable. I suppose most women prefer tiled, chromed, and carpeted normal bathrooms, but I wonder what they write about? That bathroom also housed the world’s most wonderful indoor bathtub. Most folks today seem to prefer showers. I like baths. When I was a little kid, I had to take baths with my brother because water had to be heated in a kettle and poured into the tub—not that I’m that old, but we were just that poor and rural. My mother was very accommodating, but I can’t even imagine her standing over us pouring water into a can with nail holes punched in the bottom. So, I suppose my love of baths started there. Later, when my family packed our few belongings into a motorized covered wagon and headed west, I had to take showers for a while in community shower houses. When we finally had our own bathroom again, I had gotten too old to bathe with my brother, so I probably started associating baths with delicious privacy (although I did go through a short phase at about twenty when I enjoyed having a friend join me). The world’s best indoor bathtub used to sit next to a window in the thick adobe walls of the old Willow Springs house. It was one of those old footed kind with the long, comfortable backrest. I never curtain country windows, so in early spring, I used to try to schedule my bath when the sun was at the right angle to strike the bath water and me. The water would sparkle. In winter, I’d snuggle down in a hot bubble bath and watch the snow fall outside until the window fogged. I spent many wonderful idle hours looking out that window. I once watched a rattlesnake bite and kill a kitten. I once saw bees swarm.Within touching distance bloomed an apricot tree, covered with pink blossoms in the spring. Deer, wild turkey, and javelina occasionally wandered by, and I’ve identified many rare birds while soaking in that tub, from vermilion flycatchers to summer tanagers to painted buntings. Ground squirrels and my silly dog would windowpeep. Twice a year when the cattle round-up was camped at my house, I would bathe in the dark, ducked down so nobody could see me and listen to the cowboys jingle the remuda of horses past my window. I feel sorry 39

Writing on the Wind for people who have never lain naked in a tub of warm water up to their neck, with their eyes closed, and listened to a hundred shod horses trot through the rocks less than ten feet away.The still water trembled. I have had baths in some wonderful outdoor places too. I grew up in Arizona and sometimes took a towel to one of the “hot boxes” where hot water bubbled from underground springs into the irrigation canals close to my home. People paid dearly for those hot mineral water baths in Arizona bath houses, but I got mine free. I’ve taken outdoor baths in many rivers and creeks, the coldest in Yellowstone’s Slough Creek, not long after snow melt—always careful not to get soap in the water. Showers would be hard to imagine in those places, although some of those little black bags that backpackers hang in trees look like fun. I also know of a shower without a door next to an old cowboy round-up camp that might be fun. The outhouse there has no door either. I guess that way we always know when it’s occupied. My all-time favorite bathtubs were clean cement stock troughs out in the pasture somewhere. I’d grab a towel, hike out, run the cows off for a few minutes, and take an open-air bath late on summer evenings. Nothing is quite as soothing as soaking naked in sun-warmed water with a windmill clanking nearby. Nothing feels quite as sensual as a sundown breeze on wet skin with a poor-will calling in the distance. Nobody’s shelf of $30 candles and Vivaldi cranked on a stereo can compare. Depending on where a person is raised, I suppose, water sounds different. To Norman MacLean, I guess the Big Blackfoot babbles and speaks the words of God. Sometimes water roars, or crashes, or tinkles, or slaps.To me water sounds like a windmill—ca-a-a-reee thunk, ca-reeee thunk, careeee thunk, careeee, careeee, careeeeee.

Genesis Several years ago, after Texas Senate Bill #1 was passed, I tried to get myself appointed to the Far West Texas Water Planning Group as the environmental representative, but I was not selected. I went to many of their meetings anyway, since water use is a very important political issue in this area. Rural communities fear water “development” both by their own neighbors and by the large cities.We know our underground water sources

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The Scent of Water

are limited, and we know that water often “flows uphill toward money.” I also teach one of my university research classes on water issues. Numerous geologists, well drillers, and lawyers have been guest speakers in my class. So I have gradually accumulated a little knowledge on the subject. I have also spent most of my life living on desert ranches, often taking on the responsibility to “keep up the waterings” when both livestock and wildlife were depending on me. One of my best friends for almost thirty-five years is a windmill man, Don Coleman of Coleman Well Service. So I have been thinking about water for a long time. As I look back through the years, I have often written about water. Recently, I have been collecting some of these personal essays into chapters for a possible book on the subject. This essay, “The Scent of Water,” represents one of those chapters. Material for the essay was patched together from a weekly column, “Switching Flies,” that I wrote for several years for the Davis Mountain Dispatch, from a journal I keep sporadically, from old letters written to friends, from films, readings, and conversations. To me water in West Texas is heavily symbolic and very worthy of literary treatment.Water images range from the sensual and personal to representations of the public power structures.Water is a trickster, a shape-shifter, and quite often worshipped or at least prayed for more often than any other subject. Because it seldom rains and our water is hidden underground, nothing is as symbolic of the West Texas landscape as a windmill spinning in our desert winds. My title comes from a passage about hope in the Book of Job, so this essay is about hope and faith. A windmill represents deep hope, maybe even more than hope. If a good windmiller has just been there, I have faith that it guarantees water.

B A R B A R A “ B A R N E Y ” N E L S O N has published six books, the most recent is God’s Country or Devil’s Playground: The Best Nature Writing from the Big Bend of Texas, an anthology of nature writing from the University of Texas Press, 2002. In addition, her scholarly essays appear in three recent collections about Henry David Thoreau, Mary Austin, and Edward Abbey. She has also published numerous popular press essays, photographs, and poetry. She is an associate professor of English at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. She currently lives alone and looks after a little water on a ranch northeast of Marfa,Texas.

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Making Place Susan Tomlinson I H AV E S T E P P E D O U T S I D E my woodshop to watch the helicopter pass overhead. It is a brilliant spring day and above me there is what I believe pilots and baseball players call a “high sky,” a term I have always found appealing. There is poetry in the notion of a high sky, and I look into this abstraction for the helicopter—one I have only heard and not yet seen. As I scan the sky, I am not anxious or touched by dread. I simply wait for it to break out of this endless blue somewhere so I can mark the passing and go back inside. I hear the helicopters all the time now. Early, before it is light and while I still lie in bed, the chop of the blades breaks the morning. I hear them during the day as I walk to work or cook a meal, and in the evenings as I read or grade papers.They fly low, like geese—so low that the antique chandelier in our dining room shimmies in percussion. We live close to both hospitals, so it isn’t a surprise that they are up there so often. It’s just strange that I never noticed them before. While I wait, I am thinking about monarch butterflies. In particular, I am thinking about an autumn migration I once witnessed. I was in the desert with a paleobotanist, Elisabeth, who was on the trail of Cretaceous hardwoods. I was searching for ancient turtle bones. The simple beauty of the desert is normally sufficient unto the day, but on this morning we were in a plain landscape without much to recommend it. Plant life was restricted to scrubby, bare brush that speckled the dry washes, and water, always temperamental in the desert, seemed especially hidden in this spot. It was not the sort of place to look for wonders.

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I don’t know who looked up first from the searching to notice, but at some point there they were all around us: butterflies, flying low to the ground, about waist-high. They were spaced only a few feet apart in all directions and I couldn’t see the end of them.There must have been thousands.They flew in the same direction, south toward the Chisos Mountains far in the distance. I turned to the north, from where they came, but there was nothing to see but sere flatland for miles. There was no place to light, nor water for replenishment, so they flew without pause from somewhere I couldn’t see, to somewhere I couldn’t see, silent and relentless. All through that day and the next, and the next, there was a steady current of butterflies—a soft, wide river of infinite wing beats, flowing on a pilgrim’s progress toward South America.The air around me palpitated like a heartbeat with the contrast between the delicacy of the creature and the dangers of the journey they faced. For the next few days, Elisabeth and I would often pause in our respective tasks to stand upright and watch this river of butterflies flow past. For some reason I cannot adequately articulate, I felt compelled to pay homage to the urgent and terrible journey they were traveling. It seemed important to me that the courage of the butterflies should not pass unnoticed. Lately, I have taken to watching the helicopters in the same way and for the same reason I watched the butterflies: to mark the delicacy of the creatures on the gurneys inside and the difficulties of the journey ahead. And to wish them courage. This one appears suddenly through the branches of the big pecan tree through which I peer and rockets into the blue sky, beating the air in its path. It is heading south, away from the hospital, toward desperation. I watch it until it disappears from sight, then turn back to the cool light of my woodshop.

I did not intend to stay in this graceless flatland. I had always meant to settle someplace with a view—someplace like Oregon, or California, or Saskatchewan—but I got sidetracked somehow. I came here for school, met someone and married, got a job, bought a house. It’s an old story. Still, there is a moment that comes in the Texas spring, when the big thunderstorms arrive. The clouds hang like a blanket of blue-gray foam 43

Writing on the Wind above the land, encircling the sky, but not reaching down to the horizon. The time is late afternoon and the sun has started to set. Light pours in from beneath the clouds and strikes a field of restored prairie grasses, bathing them in a color that I cannot name but is somewhere between amber and maize. The grasses seem suddenly to glow with a mysterious internal light, and for a brief instant, I am filled with a brilliant, fathomless ache. The rest of the time the plains are pretty ugly, even to someone like me, open to the possibility of beauty everywhere. Instead of glowing prairie grasses—like little bluestem, or side oats grama, or buffalo grass— the land is hidden by cotton, and the purpose of cotton is not beauty, but economy. It is not the sort of place to look for wonders. In fact, I do not know a single person who came here for beauty. Their reasons for coming here to live, though varied, are nonetheless similar to mine. Like cotton, our purpose for being in this place is economy. Most of us have regarded these withered flatlands as nothing more than a temporary stay enforced on us while we make a living. It is a pause in our journey to that other place, the one with the view.

Earlier in the day I visited with a woman who’d come from the green swamplands of Louisiana to these plains.Though she’d lived here for many years, she’d never become accustomed to the dryness. “I used to take long showers and swim every day, just to immerse myself in water,” she said. “I’ve gotten past that, but I still can’t seem to get comfortable here.” We ask so much of a place. It must support us by providing for our basic needs, like nourishment and shelter—economy, again. But it must also, it seems, offer us succor of a sort that is harder to define. Annie Dillard writes about a frog she saw once. While she watched, the frog’s very insides—the organs, the bone, the blood, all of it—were dissolved and sucked out through a puncture wound put there by a deadly giant water bug. All that was left was this outer pouch of skin, which crumpled in on itself like a “kicked tent.” The woman that I talked to had read about Dillard’s frog. I know because once we’d exhausted the topic of dryness, we moved on to favorite

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pieces of writing and she brought up the unfortunate beast in the essay. It didn’t occur to me until later that she could have been describing her unhappiness with this place and her slow collapsing inward as the moisture was relentlessly sucked from her.Were we talking about water and frogs, or something else?

It is cool in my woodshop. I have the carriage doors open wide to coax the breeze from the windows. I sit at the shaving horse, which is situated to catch light from a window cut into the ceiling. From this spot I can look straight up through the branches of the pecan tree to the sky outside. I am carving a canoe paddle from cherry and ash for a friend, and the leavings of my work lay curled on the floor around me like a hostess offering of pirouette cookies and spun sugar. Since—except in times of thunderstorms—there are no naturally flowing streams on the southern high plains, even the wood I work is destined for another landscape. I built this shop largely by my own hand.The shell of the structure— a detached, single-car garage—was here when my husband, Walt, and I purchased the house many years ago. I have installed windows and insulation, tacked and mudded sheetrock, painted. I needed help on two things—electrical work, and the tricky removal of the heavy overhead door, which I sliced in half and turned into these big carriage doors through which the cool breeze now flows. Otherwise, the work has been all mine. I am ridiculously obsessed with this; it is, perhaps, some atavistic condition, like baldness, or twinning. I am not my mother or father, nor my grandparents, who did not grow up under the tyranny of convenience and so, by virtue of everyday living, knew where they were and that they were made of grit and mettle. So when I cut a window into the ceiling to let in the abiding light, and it comes out right—sans leakage—something primitive and cellular stirs to life as if suddenly doused with water and tells me these things about myself. In some measure, it used to be easier to know these things. When people lived far removed from cities and towns, far from each other, whether the voice of the wind across the plains was demon or companion depended entirely on the heft of the sand in your belly. Here, in this twenty-first century place, the wind is just another busy commuter, and

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Writing on the Wind our relationship with grit is more about closing our mouths in a dust storm than it is about mettle. Here, instead of sand, our bellies are more likely to be full of tapioca, or banana Jell-O. Still, the light striking the prairie is the same light people saw a hundred years ago, and the color of the grasses is the same amber and maize. And it is homesteading of a sort that we do even now, proving a claim on a place by the simple act of being here. Our claim on this place extends beyond this woodshop to our home and to our neighborhood. Our homestead, purchased with the sweat of care, travels outward from this spot, right down the middle of 22nd Street and gathers in the people we know.We’ve all of us come from elsewhere to this place for purposes of economy; we claim it as home because of each other.We claim it because of Julie and the way she pushes Chloe and Dylan up and down the street in their strollers, and Tita and Michael’s alternative garden style, and John on his scooter early in the morning, headed off for work.We claim it for Nancy’s chocolates at Christmas, and Randy’s excellent cherry pies, and Sheila’s soup, and the many hot dogs—vegetarian and otherwise—at the annual neighborhood block party we hold on our front lawn. We claim it because of Tom for his help with wiring some lights when, as the result of an accident that almost killed Walt and me, I recently took it in my head to finish all unfinished business as soon as I was able, starting with this woodshop. And for the same reason: Randy for letting our families, come frantically from out of town, into our house in the dead of night while we were in intensive care, and Ron for buying the Sunday Times for Walt when we couldn’t drive, and Eileen and Judy for arranging two months of neighbor-made meals for us when we couldn’t cook, and Aaron for coming over one day and opening the windows when we were too feeble to do so ourselves so that the autumn breezes would not pass unnoticed. It is a river of care so wide I cannot name them all.We are not alone.We claim this place for that reason.

I don’t know how we become comfortable in a landscape. This is what I do know: We don’t find our landscapes—we make them. We cut holes in walls and ceilings and find out where we are and what we are made of by the quality of the light that flows in. Sometimes that light is the color of amber and maize. 46

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Making Place

I am locked into this place from this point forward, for all time, no matter where I go. It is the unexpected view—the one I wasn’t looking for—that allows me to see this. I look up at the helicopters and try to imagine the person inside, lying on a gurney, and sometimes when I do this I am suddenly in the helicopter, looking downward. One day last autumn I was outside visiting with Julie as one flew overhead, and as I glanced up at it I realized that on the day of the accident, around four in the afternoon, a helicopter carrying Walt’s body flew directly over our house and this woodshop, and then, forty minutes or so later, another flew over with my body. When I watch the helicopters, I sometimes try, from this bird’s eye view, to imagine my neighborhood that Sunday afternoon.Tita was probably writing and Michael was riding his bike. Julie was taking her kids for a walk while Randy was working out with his weights. Our dogs were sleeping in the backyard, waiting for Randy to come over and feed them. Maybe Sheila was throwing pots in her studio. Maybe Danny was bringing Gabriel home from a soccer game. Maybe these were things that were happening, I don’t know. But I do know that if my neighbors were like I was before the accident, they never even noticed the helicopters. I am confident that not a single one of them looked above to where our desperate bodies were flying so low, so close. No one marked the passing. The helicopters flew above our houses and then there was quiet.

It is later in the day. A thunderstorm is moving in, and I know this from the wax and wane of light in the shop as the clouds move overhead. The wind freshens. As suddenly as a finger snap, the sharp smell of ozone fills the air. I turn the radio on to listen for tornado warnings. The birds have gone quiet and their noises are replaced by the sound of this soothing voice drifting into the shop on the changing light. First there is rain, then the hard pelting of hail, which litters the ground like buckets of buttons. I keep working at the shaving horse through all of this drama, calmed by the sight of cherry curling up through the mouth of my spoke shave. I look up through the skylight to see the rain and see instead a vine that is wrapped around a heavy limb of the pecan, its leaves folded like the green wings of butterflies.

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Genesis It seems sometimes as if I’ve spent most of my life trying to leave the plains. In my fantasies of the perfect life, I’ve always pictured myself living near an ocean, or maybe just a stream big enough and fast enough to float a lazy canoe. In these fantasies, it is also always cool, but not so cold that I actually have to put on long pants, and there is an enticing view of some sort—maybe something with lots of green trees (like, say, a forest), or a blue mountain on the horizon. Any other details about the dream-places are hazy and mostly unimportant—only the water, the cool temperature, and the attractive view are vital. I thought for a long time that these were what I needed to find before I settled down and made a home. With the plains being what they are—waterless, hot, sans green trees—I always figured that I was just biding my time here until I got to my fantasy place. Then my husband and I were in a horrible accident, and when my neighbors rallied together to care for us, I began to see that these things were not important to making a home at all.This essay explores that transition.

S U S A N T O M L I N S O N was born and raised in West Texas and New Mexico, an upbringing that has left her with an unquenchable obsession with water. She currently teaches at Texas Tech University, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Honors College. She also directs the Honors College’s Natural History and Humanities degree program, an interdisciplinary study in natural science, philosophy, and the creative arts.

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Place and Grace Sherry Craven W H E N I H E A R people talking about “sense of place,” I wish I were a cowboy, a farmer, or a city founding father-mother, someone who can talk about place, land, grasses, and trees. Someone who is an expert on the terra itself. A dirt specialist, so to speak. Instead, I am a woman who is not a farmer, a rancher, or Daughter of Texas, but I have come to believe we may all have a different “sense of place,” each belief authentic. Texas, in itself, evokes place if nothing more than with its size; you have to go so far to leave it. And there’s more—Texas instills itself into your head, your beliefs, becomes your viewpoint. Place, I have discovered, has delivered me to today through day-to-day, hour-by-minute experience. A sense of place runs through my veins, conveying sensations of daily wanderings directly to my mind and heart. A woman, whether she likes it or not, or even admits it, wants to belong.We crave to nestle in; if we spend the whole day in an office or on a commuter train, out of our nesting place, we still gather sticks and twigs, spend hours arranging them to form a cocoon for ourselves and those we care about. We can’t help it. The heart overrules the intellect. Something deep and primordial tells us that to be safe we must create a space where the world makes sense and that offers help when we need it, love when we seek it, and courage when we require it. So we build ourselves into a place, pulling the world around us as we would a down comforter on a chilling winter night. I know this not so much by having my God-given, directed, and ordained place, but by having left my place and discovering from the

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Writing on the Wind remaining void what a large and wonderful thing place is. The loss is like going to the dentist and having a tooth extracted, a tooth you have gotten used to over the years. It fits right into place and fills your mouth just so, and now it is gone, and it feels as if your whole life could fall into the gaping hole remaining.That is what happens when a woman loses her sense of place.

I lived in a far West Texas corner of the universe for twenty-six years. I bitched and moaned and whined because there were few trees or flowers, no lakes or mountains. I wanted more soulfulness. I craved East Texas azaleas, Big Bend Mountains, Dallas shopping, Houston galleries, a good haircut, Central Market. I was sure I deserved it. I was living my life and living it in Midland, Texas. My sons were growing taller, stronger, and braver in West Texas without mountains and lakes.Yellow brushy land and twangy nasal accents were home. I was able to know what someone meant by the cock of a head or the raise of an eyebrow; it was all local, family, familiar. I was growing older, wiser, more compassionate in a town without azaleas. I sat in the same pew in church every Sunday (well, almost) and peered over the red binding of my prayer book at life traveling by. Babies were christened; eighteen years later the same babies gave the sermon on high school Seniors’ Day. Then, a few years later, I went to the weddings of these same babies, and I sat in my pre-ordained pew as we buried their grandparents. I saw the notches on their belts, those moments that marked their lives, and in the marking, made words on my own heart. In this place I held friends’ hands as they divorced, lost jobs, buried loved ones, started lives over, and they held mine. Hand-holding is a deep and enduring art, and I learned it in this town with few trees, framed by parched prairies as flat as a table top, air so raspy and dry that the only thing that can grow is oil. Cattle gave up in the drought years. Sheep were not this far north and west. I was in the oil patch when the Middle East sheiks flooded the international market with oil from across the globe. I watched friends go bankrupt. Houses streamed into the real estate market, “for sale” signs emerged in car windows.The women held their heads high above this emotional flood into the glaring sun of West Texas as they

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moved across town to “cozy” cottages and put their furniture in the classifieds. I saw the men-in-charge weep in fear, and blue-collar workers, roustabouts, and roughnecks drink too much in the Stardust Dancehall on West Highway 80. Place is place after all, I began to decide.To belong to a hunk of land, a bit of soil as if attached like a leg or an arm, that is a gift. I have discovered that it is only in the belonging that we can learn to reach beyond ourselves, and it is only in others that we discover ourselves. The gift is smack in the middle of the giving.

So I went to meetings in Midland. I chaperoned ninth grade parties planned to keep kids off streets and drugs. I designed posters for church, made vats of tea to raise monies for Hospice, served soup on Thanksgiving “across the tracks” for the homeless, drove Meals-on-Wheels for the housebound. I put on my best sparkling bought-on-sale dress and went to symphony deb dances to see friends’ daughters be beautiful and learn to be women. I sat through more than my deserved share of sandy grit-in-themouth softball games to see if my sons would get a hit while dinner burned at home. I waved school flags at Friday night football, never sure of the difference between “offense” and “defense.” People entered and exited my days like a revolving door. Many stayed permanently. I entered the workforce. I taught Spanish at the Episcopal day school, English at the local community college, sold couture clothes, cut pies and fancy cheeses at a friend’s catering business. I shared secrets with the woman who worked at the cleaners and wept genuine tears when she died. I hired yardboys who needed money for college.The pharmacist and I were best friends. My closest friends included a fireman, the mayor, a Congressman, a Hispanic Chamber officer, and Trish, who cleaned houses. I saw friends through mid-life depression and picked up their migraine medicine at Walgreen’s, sat by their beds as they recovered from hysterectomies, face lifts, and broken hearts.We held hands and said grace together over life. We watched in wonder and fear as the town grew north and subdivisions sprouted on the yellow ochre prairies. We drew together over pimento cheese and salad about how things change.We held one another’s

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Writing on the Wind egos in our hearts as our parents grew old and we had to make decisions about nursing homes and assisted-living. In other words, in this West Texas place with no trees we lived in sanctuary—together. It is as if God said to me, “This is the place where I have placed you, and these are the people I have given you.You may love them or not, but they are your lot, here to see you through; you are going to do this thing together.Weep, laugh, dance, drink, eat, strut, regret, but do it together.” Okay God.Who am I to argue? I couldn’t have done it alone.

So now that I am gone from the place that I had a relationship with much like my first love, I wonder will someone (some place) better come along? But I know that I do not have to find a particular personal place again. I can take it with me. Cowboy or not, I know it was in the grass, the soil, the pharmacy, a song lyric, a familiar intersection, the high school gym. I don’t have to find place in having been a founding father. I have a sense of place in knowing that it is not about location, though its accents and food and landscape help shape or unshape us. No, place is about an intangible within our hearts.The place is inside us and goes with us wherever we are and is spawned and fed and thrives in us because of what we experience together, the taking in and letting out of breath, the espiritus, the essential life we inhale and exhale. That is place, and it comes to us through shared daily doings. My place just happens to be a town named Midland, a prairie oil town always needing a rain. It is where I left almost thirty years of me and a place that, in turn, sustained me those same almost-thirty years. West Texas is the place where I intuitively understood being a woman, a being who learned to make a nest made of sand, oil, pimento cheese sandwiches, tears, and church pews. I would have loved my place to have been a Scottish moor or Spanish plain, but it wasn’t. Just West Texas. When I awake in the middle of the night and feel the tears of amputation for having left my place, I realize again, and each time for the first time, that those many years in West Texas are my place on earth still, and that shared experience is sacred. There is no need to grieve because my place goes with me. My place created me, raised my sons, and whispered hope on soft, summer-dark nights.We cannot lose place because we and it

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become the same and are indivisible, joined at the heart’s hip. We are wrapped into one another, tied by shared experience. Come go with me place, and I will always set a place for you at my table.

Genesis When I think of writing, I think of who I am and how I fit into this marvelously crazy universe. What is my place here? How can I do better? Serve the world more generously? Feed myself from the richness the world has to offer and not starve in the face of all this proffered abundance? Then, I realize why I write—to seek answers to these questions. Notice, I say seek and not necessarily find any answers. I am not sure there are any answers, or that I would want to find them if there were.What would I do with myself if I had answers? No, it is the busyness of looking around me and observing and then deciding a few things that creates my momentum, and all this rolling, heaving energy comes from the world around me—the faces, voices, breezes, songs, fragrances, tastes. The colors of the voices, the tenor of the sunset, the hands that touch and guide and hold—these are the things that enter my writing and tell me where to go next, and these are the very gifts that I get from place. I am nothing without that which is around me, my cloak of place. Lucky for me it is Texas. This bigger-than-life land has become so mixed up within me and with me that I can scarcely tell us apart. Don’t even think of having my funeral in another state. My father graduated from West Point in 1940 and marched straight into the European theatre to become the attaché for General Sean Hackett of Britain, the commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. From that time on, my father never stopped traveling from pillar to post. One warm spring evening several years ago, I stood in a phone booth in Los Angeles bemoaning to my travel-weary father that I was homesick for Texas. What was I doing, I queried, living in L.A.? People were unfriendly, pushy, and in a hurry, and furthermore, they talked funny. I still remember the longing in my father’s voice when he said he envied me such a sense of belonging—place. He had never had a piece of

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Writing on the Wind the earth that felt like home to him in all his global wanderings. I was blessed, he said, don’t lose it, that sense that earth is a party you were invited to attend, and I haven’t. I plan to stay until they turn the lights out.

S H E R RY C R AV E N lives in Canyon, Texas, and teaches English at West Texas A&M University. She has published poetry in both English and Spanish and flash fiction in journals such as Suddenly, AmarilloBay, RiverSedge, New Texas, The Witness, El Locofoco, The Maverick Press, The Texas Review, Descant, and Muse2. She has also read poetry for National Public Radio. Currently she is poetry editor for the online literary journal AmarilloBay and is at work on two collections, one a collection of poetry centered on women in relationships and the other a collection of nonfiction essays which take a soft satirical look at contemporary women’s experience.

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Almost Like Rain Toni Jensen W H AT E V E R WA S L I V I N G in the rose bushes outside my bedroom window is now dead. It had been scratching out there for a few weeks, bending and turning the thorny branches, rustling around in the once-green leaves, nesting, as summer gave itself over to fall. I’d fallen into the habit of knocking good night on the window that separated us, and, in return,Whatever It Was would quiet into sleep. But it’s fall now, after a long, dry summer, and the drought has everyone and everything on edge. It’s killed the grass and wildflowers in the canyon and seared even the tips of some mesquites, and the wildlife—rabbits, both jack and cottontail, armadillos, skunks, porcupines, raccoons, deer, and coyotes—have been fleeing Blanco Canyon for my yard at the canyon’s rim. I’ve left water running at the base of the cottonwoods. I’ve left okra and tomatoes in the garden. I would share, but my dogs won’t.They’ve been waiting for the other animals to cross into the yard with all the zeal of city dogs turned loose on a 500-acre cotton farm. They’re cold-weather creatures—a husky and a Newfoundland mix—northerners, like me, embracing fall after our first summer of West Texas heat.They’ve been waiting on the wildlife; I’ve been waiting on the rain, and though it’s good sleeping weather, no one’s sleeping.

* * *

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Writing on the Wind It was 2:24 A.M. on a Wednesday when the dogs made their first big kill. They had started small-time killing when the rains stopped in the late spring, reducing cottontails to odd bits of fluff and bent feet that did not, somehow, seem lucky. By summer’s end, the dogs were bringing down jackrabbits and littering the yard with their bones, white rib cages beached on dry grass. Still, I was surprised by the level of this noise—screeching and hissing, barking and tearing. I ran outside in my underwear, brandishing a mop and flashlight, thinking maybe this time they were the prey, adding my No, stop to the cacophony. By the time I found them, just across the barbed wire fence about twenty yards from the canyon’s edge, Lucy was shaking the raccoon by the throat, and Jack was working on its back end. The raccoon was at least twenty pounds and looked healthy. It reached out for the dogs with its clawed hands but missed. Lucy shook it harder, and though it still spit at her, the hissing stopped and its tongue hung out in defeat. I stopped my yelling, felt my heart slow in my chest, and clicked off the flashlight with hands still shaky from adrenaline. The moon shone down, half-full, amid stars thick as cream. I stood there for a while, on the edge between thinking and sleep, listening to the West Texas wind whip and swirl up off the canyon. It was almost three A.M. when I got back to bed, and nothing rustled in the bushes outside my window. I knocked, but, still, no noise. I lay there, thinking of how I’d tell my parents this story. How, with my hardworking, anti-outdoors mother, I’d focus on my lack of sleep. How she’d say, “Jesus, I’ll bet you’re tired,” and “That is the middle of nowhere.” How, with my métis father, an old trapper, I’d emphasize the size and health of the raccoon. How he’d say, “How big was he?” and “Poor wittle waccoon.” We’d talk about the weather, then, how it’s too dry in Iowa, as well. How the grasshoppers were the only things thriving. We’d think about how everything’s drying up, maimed, or dying, but we wouldn’t say it.We’d stick to the dogs, the garden, the things for which we have a language. I would want to say there would be an absence, that I’ll miss the rustling in the leaves, that the raccoon’s hands by moonlight looked surprisingly human. But I won’t, of course. Instead, I’ll say, “I wish it would rain.” * * *

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My mother’s best friend was diagnosed with cancer this spring, and another friend died, suddenly, during a routine surgery, a few weeks after my father’s good friend in Alaska died of an aneurysm. “Like flies,” my father said. “Like goddamn middle-aged flies.” When my mother’s friend first was diagnosed, my mom called me. We talked for almost an hour about the dogs’ inability to learn the porcupine lesson, about how to grow a better tomato before Mom said it: “She has cancer, and I don’t know what to do.” My mother wanted to know what to say to her friend; she wanted my help. I had spent the last four years in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals trying to learn why my left leg twitched and shook sometimes without cause, why my calf muscle was always tight—even after hours of stretching.The problem had started in the fall. By winter, I had gone from running six miles a day to dragging myself up and down stairs, grateful for the handrail. By spring, the numbness, pain, and tingling had spread to both legs and the occasional arm. The doctors had gone through a list of likely diagnoses: lupus, multiple sclerosis, Lyme’s disease, some rare, unnamed muscle disease, and/or fibromyalgia. When none proved conclusive, I started over with a new batch of doctors and white waiting rooms, getting roughly the same inconclusive list in roughly the same order. “Tell her that,” I said. “Tell her what?” Mom said. “That you don’t know what to say.” I was sick off and on for almost two years before I told my family, though at the time, I lived in Minnesota in the same house as my brother, only a five-hour drive from our parents. When I told my brother, he took another swig of beer and said, “Well, you look fine.” My mother didn’t return my phone call for a week, and my sister called my mother every day, asking if I was better yet, if my mother thought I was going to die. My father made cutesy names of all the possible diseases and left messages on my answering machine inquiring after each and every one, as in “How’s the Limey disease?” and “You don’t ever answer your phone. Must be too loopy from the loopy-us.” A week before I moved to West Texas, I found a doctor, a neurosurgeon with a diagnosis and a sense of humor not unlike my father’s. There was a problem at the base of my skull where it met my spine—the top of

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Writing on the Wind the spine jutted upward, into the skull, causing compression, causing the symptoms—and there wasn’t anything to be done about it. “I like you,” the doctor said, “so I don’t recommend the surgery.” The surgery to correct a basilar impression involves the surgeon making an incision down the middle of the tongue, splitting it open to access the base of the skull through the inside. It sometimes also involves breaking the jaw. The recuperation time often is at least nine months. “I don’t recommend it,” the doctor said, “unless you get worse.”

Inexplicably, my symptoms did not get worse but improved a little. Stairs were easy again, and I ran a mile, then two, then three. My mother’s friend, however, grew sicker. Her cancer spread from behind her eye to the rest of her body too quickly, and within just a few months of her diagnosis, she died. My mother was there when her friend died, having made that first phone call, having driven her friend to numerous doctor visits, having helped her children plan their mother’s funeral. She called me one night after leaving her friend’s house. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said. Her voice held the strain of a long day that would become a late night, which would become another early morning without much sleep. I looked out across the yard to the garden and the canyon beyond. That morning the dogs had killed a coyote. It had come up from the canyon to the pool of water I’d let collect under the smallest cottonwoods. I was drinking my morning coffee when Jack started barking, and by the time I put down my cup and found my shoes, the yelping and screeching had stopped. At first, I thought it was a pup, but, drawing closer and pushing back the lowest tree branch, I could see it was an adult, weak from malnutrition, its hair ragged, its skin mottled, its ribs almost poking out through flesh. “How’s your okra doing?” my mom asked. She’s never grown okra and has been wanting to know if I have any secrets. The deer have eaten almost all of it, leaving only the thin, green stalks, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I asked after her tomatoes, told her how mine were puny, how I’d over-watered to compensate for the poor West

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Texas soil, how I’d probably caused root rot. I could see her on the other end of the line—chain smoking and drinking down coffee fast—working on this problem, one I knew she could solve. “Wire cages,” she said, exhaling. “Wire cages for the vines, and coffee grounds for the soil problem.” “Really?” I said. “And if necessary, egg shells.” “But not the eggs?” “No, no,” she said. “Good God, you’re not making a meal here.” We talked past dark, and I took the phone outside to the picnic table. The stars and the moon came out, splashing light across a cloudless sky, over the cotton fields and into the canyon. “Anything new?” my mom asked. “No,” I said. I thought of the coyote, but I kept it in, looking up at the sky, where to the west there might have been something resembling a cloud, something that might hold rain.

Genesis Before moving to West Texas, I never would have believed there was beauty to be found in the spare landscape, but after experiencing it first hand, I now better appreciate how landscape shapes a people and a culture. West Texas seems to straddle the line between South and West, both geographically and culturally. Living in West Texas has made me more aware of my own in-between status—a northerner who’s living in the South, who now calls it home. My writing, then, has become more focused on landscape and its influence on people and culture, how they intertwine and intersect, how this interweaving is subtle but pervasive. “Almost Like Rain” explores the ways weather and landscape can become vehicles through which more difficult topics can be discussed. Conversations about okra and raccoons, about the wind over the canyon, become conversations about illness and death.The essay examines how the spaces in a family’s dialogue can be filled in by weather and landscape— how both can help bridge the gap of distance.

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T O N I J E N S E N is a métis who grew up in Iowa and has lived in South Dakota, Arizona, and Minnesota before moving to West Texas. She is a PhD student in creative writing at Texas Tech University and lives on a cotton farm at the rim of Blanco Canyon outside Crosbyton,Texas.

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The Chronicles of Toad—West Texas Joyce Gibson Roach I A M F O N D O F S AY I N G that “I am from Jacksboro and never have gotten over it, nor am I trying.” The remark brings laughter, and that’s why I say it, but it’s an inside joke. If you aren’t from West Texas or haven’t spent some time there, you don’t get it. Many of those who do, understand that Jacksboro represents every small West Texas town from the Brazos to the Rio Grande with a population round about 3,000—give or take 1500 or 2500. In that one sentence, everybody understands that time and place have made all the difference in me, caused me to be what I am and am not; have inspired, confused, helped, hindered, given me great confidence and terrible insecurity and pushed me ahead and held me back from all sorts of notions. But, if you’re going to write about what will always be home to you, then you’d better not go around calling the place by its real name. Why? Because others don’t remember it the same way you do—some better, some worse. Jacksboro is Everytown encompassing the universal small town in a rural setting. I substitute Horned Toad, Texas, the county seat of Caballo County. Horned Toad, Toad for short, ranks right up there with Muleshoe, Goatneck, Plainview, and Levelland—no-nonsense names, yet appropriate to tough, dry, thorny, windy, enduring locations and those who inhabit them—Everyman and Everywoman. The time is somewhere between “I’ll tell you of my troubles on the old Chisholm Trail” and the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius”—free love

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Writing on the Wind and hippies. Time marches on, but not necessarily the folks or the landscape of West Texas. The place? In addition to the variegated descriptions you have read in this volume, it is a place marked by aberrant weather, hard-nosed religion, peculiar politics, curious customs, clubs and rituals, some of them having to do with games on horseback, distinct speech patterns, and odd manners.There is more, but these characteristics will do for starters. It is ranch country, dry-land farming country, oil country, King James Bible country. West Texans compare their place favorably with the Wilderness of Zen, rocky hills of Bethlehem, or Golgotha. Yet, West Texas, too encompasses the land of milk and honey—and, oh yes, eggs. Heifers, hives, and hens bring in a little extra money for the sugar bowl kept on the shelf in the kitchen. The characters, male and female, have their crosses to bear and gospels to proclaim, are various mixtures of saints and sons-of-bitches.They take God’s name in vain, swear expertly, quote scripture, Longfellow, Edgar A. Guest, and Shakespeare in the same breath, pray mighty prayers, and sing gospel tunes at the drop of a stained Stetson. The litany of brown places is always supplication for rain and their colloquy of praise is ever for it. Horned Toad,Texas, then, is Holy Ground. Like Narnia that was sung into being by the Great Lion Aslan—a beastie of another dry and mystical place—Toad has its Chronicles, and the song of its birth was, no doubt, a hymn—or a cougar’s scream.

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof. . . .” Meteorology was a science nobody recognized in the past in West Texas. Weather, well, it just happened when you saw it happening. “Look, it’s raining.” “Look, the wind just ripped the clothes off the clothesline.” “Take cover, it’s hailing.” Tornadoes were common—still are—and sometimes you found out about one because someone either came to tell you or you left to tell someone else. I was in town at Aunt Myrtle Morris’s house one summer helping can green beans and black-eyed peas, pickle beets, and make chow-chow

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and such. There were other ladies helping, too. It was something we did together each summer. The sky was that awful green color and we noticed a wall cloud in the west. And we could see a car tearing up the road kicking up whatever dust the wind had missed. It was Morley Mayfield, the mail carrier. “Tornado! It’s comin’, it’s comin’,’” he screamed. “It’ll be here any minute.” “I believe you’re right, Morley,” observed Aunt Myrtle. “It’s right behind you.” We had been watching the clouds for some time and had everything in readiness. The storm cellar door was open. Blankets, candles, water, and the like were in readiness. When Morley turned around and saw what was coming, he did not wait to pass go or collect two hundred dollars but performed a swan dive directly into the cellar. We were right behind him pushing and shoving to get in. Just before pulling the door shut, we discovered that Edna Fay Clay was not among us. “Late to her own funeral,” came to mind. Waiting as long as we could with the wind literally tearing the door from our hands and hail the size of golf balls pelting us, we slammed the door amid screams and crying. Nelda Montgomery took her harmonica from her apron pocket and immediately began to play “Turkey in the Straw.” “Music helps,” she said. “No, it doesn’t” said Aunt Myrtle. “Harmonica music in a cellar with a tornado blowing my place away and not knowing what happened to Edna Fay doesn’t do me a bit of good.” We all mumbled similar sentiments. Nelda got her feelings hurt. Then we all hushed and listened to the wind blow various and sundry parts of Myrtle’s house and chicken yard away and the hail break the windows and destroy the roof. The roar subsided a little, although not the wind. Everything got quiet.Too quiet.“Now, Nelda, play us a little tune—quiet, slow, and sweet.” This from Morley who knew Nelda needed her ego restored. She started, but broke off and began to cry. “Where in the world do you suppose Edna Fay is?” she sniffed. That was all it took to get us all to crying. When a piece of some-

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Writing on the Wind thing whizzed overhead and hit the ground somewhere near the cellar by the sound of it, the crying turned to sobbing. “I swear, she nearly drove me crazy with her always being late for things, but she was a good cook,” said one. “And she never showed up with her part at the socials, but was quick to help clean up.Well, she wasn’t quick but she did help.” “I remember she always told jokes—bad jokes because she told the punch line first. Or, she’d walk in late in the middle of one of my jokes and blurt out the punch line before I could say it.” We sat there in the pitch dark sobbing our hearts out for our lost friend. “Yes, and she gave us those ugly crocheted doilies and made runny jam, but she could sing alto the best I ever heard, even if she was always late to choir practice.” Then someone started to sing,“I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses.” By the time we got to “And the voice I hear falling on my ear,” a beautiful, deep alto voice from the back of the cellar joined the harmony. Morley, who was singing bass, stopped long enough to light a candle and yes, you guessed it, there was Edna Fay’s face lighted in the flame. “I’m not always late,” she said smiling, “if my life depends on it.”

The Tower of Babel Outsiders sometimes come to Toad. Outsiders used to be referred to as Yankees, even if they were from California. Outsiders were mostly those who didn’t talk like us—well, they didn’t act like us either. They thought we talked “funny,” which equated with “ignorant.” Effie Grace (nee Sidebottom) Simpson, who tried hard to graciously explain “us” to “them,” always responded sweetly, “We are just one of the rooms in the Tower of Babel way out here.” “Fixin’ to” as in “I’m fixin’ to take a cold” or “We were just fixin’ to come over to your house” caused a commotion with outsiders. (Incidentally, a commotion is like getting folks stirred up, but short of a hue and cry.) How do you fix to do something? Maybe getting ready is better. But then how do you get ready to take a cold? Words and phrases are rich and flavorful, dripping with imagery and 64

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completely undecipherable, unless you were born and raised here. If you were “quite a card,” you were funny. If you “took a fancy to something,” it meant you liked it and wanted it, even if it was a person— “He sure took a fancy to her” but she “took a fancy to the yard goods in the mercantile.” To keep something “about your person” was to have whatever it was, maybe your purse, pocketbook, or pistol, with you at all times. To keep something “under your hat” was to keep it secret. To “commence” was to start or begin, as in “she commenced to runnin’ down the road.” Maybe she ran “a-piece or a-ways,” which was not very far. If she ran a good piece or a good ways, then she ran farther. Satisfied, as in “I am satisfied that such and so is right,” translates to “I am convinced about it.” “Keepin’ company” with someone or “courting” meant that a boy was seeing a lot of one girl and had serious intentions. “Sparkin’” was kissing her. “Carryin’ on” had two uses. If a boy or a girl were seen “carryin’ on with one another,” then likely they were being too friendly in public. If some person, usually a woman, was all the time “carryin’ on” about this or that, then she talked about a thing too much and brought it up too often. Then there was just the word “carry,” as in the boy carried his horse to water, his parents to town, or his girl to a party. Carry is in a class by itself, like “fixin’ to.” “Tendin’ to” or “mindin’” was paying attention to what needed to be done—tendin’ to business or mindin’ the store. “Aimin’ to” was intending to do something, as in “I was aimin’ to go to town.” “Headin’ that way,” meant going toward something. “Tearin’ around” was moving fast, as in “He was tearin’ around town.” “Liable to” inferred that you just might do something—good or bad. “If he comes around here again, I’m liable to run him off.” Or, when asked if she might come to Prayer Meeting on Wednesday evenin’, Effie Grace might respond, “I’m liable to if I take a notion to.” Effie Grace was noncommittal about a lot of things. By the way, to take a notion to is to decide about something; or notions can be ideas. “To reckon so” was to believe it to be true. Or it meant to reason or think a thing through— “I reckon it’s about time to go.” My favorite, hardly used at all anymore, is the phrase “at himself ” or 65

Writing on the Wind herself, meaning that a person is or is not still in full control of mental faculties and personality.“I am ninety-two years old,” says Paul Patterson,“and still at myself.” Or, “she is just not at herself lately.” If you think we are speaking in a strange and foreign tongue, that’s your problem. I am an old fogey and do not run with a fast crowd. I am still at myself, though, and satisfied that my notions are right. I aim to carry Mama down to the store, which is a considerable piece from my house. And now, I’m fixin’ to quit.

“Against whom do ye sport yourselves?” Caballo County is football country—well, sports-of-any-kind country. But football and rodeo are the most important, naturally. Some years ago when sportscasters started calling rodeo a sport and the cowboys and cowgirls athletes, we were sure the national media would learn about Toad, and we might become a tourist mecca. As of this writing, it hasn’t happened. But football! We have the finest six-man football team you ever saw called the Toad Tornadoes. This year, we did not make the finals and will not be going to the state championship. I repeat: the team will not be going to state.This information is vital to those who are faithful fans of the Terrible Toad Tornadoes. Grover and Myrtle Monroe, whose son, Maurice, is the quarterback, called late last night to give me the news. I was unable to attend and hated it so bad that I couldn’t be there. In times past, my pick-up was counted on for lighting the field, along with other vehicles, of course. Now, every team has an electric-lighted field to play on. But, some time ago, I felt really needed, got hooked, and took a good citizen’s interest in the goings-on. But back to the game. Myrtle said they were just plumb worn out, as are all the other parents and fans having to drive all the way to the stadium in Thumb,Texas, for the game—eighty-three miles one way. She couldn’t give me all the particulars, but she was able to provide a few highlights of the game. The only touchdown made by the Tornadoes came just before the half. Maurice called for a fake around left end; then when the Thumb

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Thunderers moved to the left side, Maurice hauled off to throw the bomb pass he is famous for. One man on the other team, however, did not move but was on Maurice like a duck on a June bug. When Maurice reared back to pass, this boy, who was six-foot-eight, maybe taller, deflected the pass, which hit our center in the head, and bounced again. Maurice, quick as lightning, caught his own pass and ran seventy-five yards for the touchdown. Myrtle said the crowd just went wild! The cheerleaders played leapfrog all the way down the sidelines—their signature gymnastic move for touchdowns. By the time the band was getting ready for half-time and when Maurice, Jimmy Ward Lee, the center, and Bobby “Cotton” Flynn, tackle, got their helmets off and took up the drum, tuba, and trombone, respectively, to march with the group, why, she said the band gave the most spirited performance you ever saw or heard in your life. When the half was over and the game resumed, things turned ugly, however. The fans from Thumb started calling out insults and referring to our boys as the Toad Tomatoes instead of the Tornadoes. Some on our side responded by calling the Thumb Thunderers the Thumb Suckers. That ripped it and things went down hill from there. A fight between the coaches ensued. “It was just so demoralizing,” said Myrtle, “that the boys just couldn’t play anymore.” Anyway, Thumb won the game. And it was just as well that they didn’t get into overtime or anything like that because the team had to get back to Toad in time to practice for the first basketball game of the season the next day, and yes, you guessed it five of the football team are starters. There was a bright side to the sad episode, however. The Tornadoes whipped the basketball be-Jesus out of Thimble Tech. We may just be headed for the playoffs.

“Make a joyful noise” Various denominations in Toad were not strong on getting together for many occasions. Once we tried an all-church musical at Christmas— but only once. It was held at the Methodist church because they had an organ and

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Writing on the Wind anybody knows you can’t move the organ about from one place to the other. Of course, they had a piano, too, but anybody with any sophistication knows that you need an organ at Christmas. The Baptists headed it up, naturally, providing not only a piano player but most of the bass voices, too. The director was also a Baptist. None of the singers minded. We knew the Baptists were the best at directing and bass singing. The Presbyterians lent—in fact, were glad to get rid of—an accordion player who had trained with Lawrence Welk—an’na one, an’na two. The Pentecostals provided not only drums, but three harmonicas, a trumpet, and six tambourines.The Disciples had a cello player, but decided he might be unappreciated, not to mention unheard. We were going to have a band, if not an orchestra. The singers were no problem because they were all accustomed to blending harmoniously, except for high-toned high sopranos who got loose now and again. It was the instrumentalists who were used to playing solo and each and every one of them felt they had something to prove. The director begged, pleaded, prayed, but to no avail. Every rehearsal went astray, in fact, went straight to hell. The musicians were mad at the director, mad at the choir who tried valiantly to sing over the din, and mad at all the other musicians whose denominational persuasion differed from theirs. On the evening of the musical, after the director had prayed to God “to make each and every one of us an instrument of Thy love,” each and every instrument took it as a personal invitation to let her rip from the opening to the closing.The organist pulled out every stop, the pianist went double forté, the harmonicas ripped up and down the notes with force enough to have torn their lips, the trumpet player blew hard enough to have ruptured himself, the tambourines (the only females in the band) shook and pounded with what amounted to fierceness, and the accordion player pumped with a mighty will, producing sounds that combined a chain saw and the Scottish bagpipe. The director tried valiantly, but of course wherever the percussion led, the band was sure to follow. And what about the choir? They had figured out that nobody would ever hear them, and they were prepared. They pantomimed every piece. When a song mentioned angels, they flapped their arms. When a song

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mentioned cattle and sheep, they shouted “Moo” and “Baa, Baa.” At the mention of Mary’s name, they gestured pregnantly. For the kings, they made a crown. Edna Fay Clay said later she was never so glad to see anything end in her life. She also declared that she found a new interest in the Church of Christ who sang “bare” voiced without accompaniment of any kind, and in the Catholics who sang in a foreign tongue. She even admitted that a nip of communion wine would have been welcomed refreshment after the first and, she hoped, last all-church musicale.

“It came upon a midnight clear” There was one other occasion when the children of other denominations helped the Methodists, but it was never official. It was the worst Christmas pageant ever. At Christmas time attendance at the Methodist church increased temporarily because the Methodists invited members of other denominations to take parts in their Christmas pageant. The Methodists didn’t have enough children to put on a respectable manger scene so they bribed kids with candy, fruit, and presents. Those from other churches sent their children, pretending it was a kind of missionary trip to the heathen. One Christmas was such a mess that the Methodists gave up and got out of the pageant business forever. It happened this way: Little Ferris Goodman was considered a backward child who lived out on a ranch with only his mother, his daddy having passed on when Ferris was just a toddler. Mrs. Goodman ran the ranch alone as good as any man with only day working cowboys to help. She broke horses, worked cattle, bought and sold, kept the accounts, and swore expertly, as any good rancher must. Ferris worked hard, too. Nobody knew Ferris except his teachers at school because he rode the school bus and had no chance to mingle in community life at all. His third grade teacher was the cause of all the trouble. Since Ferris never got to participate in Christmas activities in town, Mrs. Evans told his mother that if she would let the child play Joseph in the Methodist Christmas pageant, she would come and get him for the rehearsals, which only took place on Sunday evenings,Thanksgiving-to-Christmas, anyway.

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Writing on the Wind The Methodist church, to which the teacher belonged, couldn’t get anybody to play Joseph—always a hard role to fill in country churches. At the Methodist church they sometimes had to dress up little girls to play the part, and this year every one had flatly refused. Even with all the extra membership coming in, there were no little boys who would touch Joseph with a ten-foot pole. Well, Mrs. Goodman was so pleased.What nobody knew was that she harbored secret plans for her little boy to get off the ranch someday and become a doctor, lawyer, or a preacher—not so different from other mothers’ dreams for their sons in that time and place. Mrs. Goodman knew she could not teach her son anything about lawyering or doctoring, except for livestock, but she had not neglected Ferris’s religious education, according to her own understanding of it, although she knew ranching best. She read, and re-read the chapter in Luke—“And a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed”—(dad-gum guv’ment!)— over and over again. At the same time she told Ferris over and over, just as she had told him for many years, just what a preacher did and said. And because Ferris was an obedient child, he listened over and over again just as he had listened through the years about cattle, horses, and grass. And, faithfully, he listened to the radio to hear what cattle were bringing and heard the Stamps Baxter Quartet sing “Turn your radio on and listen to the music of the air. Turn your radio on. . . .” Excuse me, I got carried away. Scriptures and cattle ranching were all tangled up in his theology. What was going through his mind could not be divined until the night of the pageant. Up until that time, nobody had done anything with Ferris except have him walk down the aisle, turn left at the altar while Mary turned right. They met in the middle. He took his place behind Mary, who sat in front of a bale of hay, provided by the Goodman ranch at no charge, incidentally. Then he stepped up when the shepherds entered, gestured welcome, and pointed to Mary and went back to his place behind her. On the night of the pageant everything went according to the script, if not holy writ, until the moment when Ferris stepped up to welcome the shepherds. At this point, Ferris took the floor and said something like this: “Howdy and welcome. We do not cotton to the idea of sheep men in our midst, but it is Christmas, and so I will welcome you like a brother.

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How is the pasture? Ours made the best crop of hay in ten years, so Mama says. What about water? Our tanks are dry this time of year. We sure need rain bad. But then we always need rain, don’t we? And what price are the sheep bringing? The cattle market is bad, real bad; so bad, in fact, that we will have little to put in the collection plate that will be passed at the end of the program when we sing, “Blest be the tithe that binds.” Now, I wonder if we could join in a prayer together and ask God for rain, not mercy drops, but for the showers we plead—gully washers and toad floaters. God seems quirky about rain, don’t He, seein’ as how we need it so bad. Great God a’mighty! It’s about the only thing we pray for at our place.” When Ferris took God’s name in vain, the congregation, who barely managed to hold their peace during the boy’s soliloquy, went into an uproar.The preacher fell to his knees. His wife fainted. But let not your hearts be troubled. The organist saved the day. She hit the keys full throttle, gave the cue to a high-toned soprano who leaped into the Hallelujah Chorus by herself, singing all the parts. The congregation, glad for something to do, leaped to its feet and joined her in the firstever Handel sing-along. Then Santa Claus took the cue and appeared just as the last Ha-lay-lu-ya rattled the windows, shouting “Merry Christmas.”

“But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee.” In rural West Texas, elections of the past were big business and grand social occasions. Local elections for sheriff got more heated than national elections for president. On election eve, everybody gathered on the square where an enormous black board was put up—you know, to tally the precincts as they were phoned in.Yes, I said phoned in. Between watching results, folks played dominoes or forty-two, listened to a country band, heard speeches and stories. One story never changed. It was the one about Tandy, the mule, and how the animal got mixed up in the sheriff ’s race. It went like this: Seems there was this widow-woman who lived out a piece from town a few miles from Toad. She had an awful sick mule, bloated and suffering terrible. She called the vet to come take a look.The vet said he was having his supper and couldn’t come, but to just give him a dose of mineral oil.

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Writing on the Wind “How do I do that?” she asked. The doc snorted. “Through a funnel, how else?” “I can’t do that. He might bite me.” “Give it through the other end!” And he hung up before she could ask him any more stupid questions. The old lady went to the barn. Old Tandy was groaning! He was bloated, suffering awful bad. She looked around for a funnel, but there just wasn’t one. Then she spied Uncle John’s hunting horn hanging on the wall. It was gold plated and had red tassels on it. She knew in an instant that she had found herself a funnel. The mule never flinched when she inserted the horn in the proper end. But she never took her eyes off him when she reached around on the shelf behind her to get mineral oil. There are lots of bottles on a barn shelf and she groped for one. It was, however, not mineral oil but turpentine she got hold of. She poured it into the funnel. When Tandy felt the sting of the turpentine, he made a mighty mule sound, kicked out the side of the barn, and flew down the road headed for the river. Every time his hooves hit the ground, Uncle John’s horn gave a giant blast. All the dogs at the Price’s place heard the sound and knew what it meant. Uncle John was going hunting.They took off after Tandy. Aunt Mallie, rocking on her front porch, saw the dogs and heard the mighty mule music and thought some scripture had surely come to pass. With the dogs in hot pursuit, Tandy approached the bridge in the dark. The bridge tender, who, incidentally, was running unopposed for sheriff, heard the sound of a horn and thought a boat was coming up the river. The candidate jumped straight up, ran to the gears and levers, and raised the bridge. Tandy ran up the span and fell into the river below and drowned. News gets around fast. By the time Election Day came around, everyone knew what had happened. The bridge tender got only fifteen votes, and those from his kinfolks.The rest voted for a write-in candidate. Political philosophers speculated that any man who didn’t know the difference between the sound of a boat coming up the river and a mule with a bugle in his butt wasn’t smart enough to be sheriff. 72

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Of course, it’s just a story. Everybody knows there wasn’t a river in West Texas that needed a bridge to let non-existent boats pass under.Yet, the story became “ours,” and we got mad when we heard someone else, somewhere else, tell it.

“A worthy woman is more valuable than rubies” 1997 Lyda Louise Nettles, perennial president of the Greater Toad Chamber of Commerce, asked Mabel Claire McGee, editor of the Toad Times, to give the program for January. It is not Mabel Claire’s style merely to give interesting and informative programs. She usually starts a movement, and, if not that, at least an uproar.This meeting was no exception. Mabel had seen a program on the TV about the ten most influential women in Dallas. She carried on and on—and on—about it. Why not get the same idea off the ground here? Said she’d put it on the front page and see that it was picked up on the AP wire and carried all over the state. The chamber, composed equally of business leaders and ranchers, jumped on the idea, immediately went into secret and solemn conclave to see what they could come up with, but knew they would have to settle on just one, not ten. They had no more settled in their seats than every last member had a candidate and demanded the floor. Vester Bulé, parliamentarian, reminded the distinguished group of Roberts Rules of Order and began with the pledging to the flag followed by the National Anthem, “Beautiful Texas,” and the Toad Alma Mater.That settled everybody down some. It’s always good to have a level head in the group to set the tone. I’ll spare you the proceedings, which took the better part of the day, and move right to the short list—the top three candidates for the Most Influential Woman in Horned Toad,Texas. Rosebud Johnson, a former high school history teacher, had a lot of support.We were all schooled by her.To her credit we learned a lot of local history that went on around the square and plenty of state history even if nothing of the “global community”—an idea unheard of anyway when we were in school. And she taught Lynn Redfern who went on to the Broadway stage and put Toad on the map. 73

Writing on the Wind But Ethel McBurnett, who’s been on the chamber board since year one, brought up that Miss Rosebud also taught Billy Bob Burns who went right to the top in state politics as an aide; then right from the governor’s mansion to the Big House. Before anybody could jump all over her for bringing in faulty cause-and-effect-logic, Ethel stated that Miss Rosebud was honored by both the PTA and the TSHA at the time of her retirement. Mittie Lois Longworth had a lot of support. She is the waitress and proprietress down at the Coffee Cup Café and Catering—or the Four C’s as it is known. Mittie knows every single one of us and offers her place for any group who wishes to meet there. While everyone to the last person agreed that the cuisine is excellent, the accommodations clean, and the menu varied, it was the part about her knowing everybody—more about some than others—that precluded her selection. Surely there was some national restaurant survey that would include Mittie eventually. All were reassured by that thought. Lyda got on with it and proposed Ophelia Rae Bumgarner, owner, manager, and beauty operator at the Curly-Q Beauty Parlor, located at 238 Pecan Street, on the square, south side of the courthouse. The vote was unanimous in her favor. Here’s why she was chosen: Ophelia Rae 1) turns out the nicest Do in the county. People from all over come to her; 2) stays on the cutting edge because she goes over to one of the bigger towns, like Midland, that have beauty schools, to learn the latest techniques. That’s why she says she goes, anyway; 3) knows how to back-comb, straighten, perm, and thicken the hair; 4) can coiffure you from a bob to a beehive with a blow-dryer to a curling iron, from a hair dryer to a heat lamp; 5) remains patient and calm when the Forsythe quintuplets come in with their mother; 6) provides free coffee, and soda water for only a quarter—but just for clients; 7) can make you or break you in social circles or at church. Nobody wants on the wrong side of Ophelia Rae. Vester said he was already having T-shirts made. Everybody wanted one. It says, “Ophelia Rae can really curl your hair.” Lyda had the chamber order the bumper stickers—“Honk if you love Jesus and Ophelia Rae.” There will be a surprise ceremony on Super Bowl Sunday—before the game, of course.The mayor will pick up Ophelia Rae in a Regimental

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Red 1967 GTO Convertible, give her a bouquet of roses, and ride her to the square where everyone will be waiting. Then, his honor will give a small testimonial and present her with an engraved plaque and token of the town’s esteem and a bus ticket to Fort Worth to visit the famous beauty parlors in the big city. In case you should wonder why not Dallas, well, that’s because Fort Worth is as far east as anybody with any sense is willing to go. It doesn’t get any better than Cowtown—where the West begins.

“Will the circle be unbroken?” I learned nearly everything I’ve ever needed to know in Horned Toad, Texas. My own home, school, church, and town taught me a lot— courtesy, manners, honesty, guilty conscience about everything. A lot of good deeds come out of feeling guilty about something, and as a Baptist, I was born guilty. I learned how to laugh and cry, but mostly laugh, how to sing and dance—okay, so I was a dancing Baptist. (Dancing Baptist—that’s an oxymoron.) I always told the truth, but much of what I said was so farfetched that it sounded like a lie, and folks said,“Joyce Ann, you could have told a lie and it would have been more believable.” There was more to learn. Some of us studied advanced philosophy, literature, and geometry.There was a special environment for these studies, undertaken only during the summer session. The classroom was a pallet spread on somebody’s lawn on Archer Street. Often there were three or four pallets since the class consisted of mothers, daddies, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and visitors. Watermelon or a freezer of ice cream sometimes preceded the coursework. The coursework started while we were at rest—yes, three or four hours of just lying down and resting until the night became cool enough to go inside so that we could sleep. There were no air conditioners or climate control measures. We grew calm beneath the Milky Way and Scorpio’s tail. We lay waiting for the Big Dipper to spill the truths of the universe to us. A full moon gave a general idea about how far up heaven was. The dark ground holding our bodies marked down as far as any of us thought about going. Outer boundaries changed with whatever mental images we conjured, brought on by ghost stories or songs with four part harmony,

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Writing on the Wind family tales, recounting of brave or tender lovers, knock-knock jokes, word games, how Ruth said, “Whither thou goest, I will go,” and little Samuel said, “Speak for your servant heareth.” I heard Longfellow and Shakespeare and thought they must have lived in Toad long before my time since their words were so familiar and true. The mouths that spoke the words from memory seemed to know the writers like old friends. I first heard the line, “I have seen the world in a blade of grass,” and understood the microcosm about which Walt Whitman spoke. I also knew the world contained on the perfect square of a family quilt—quilts made from the scraps of generations of lives lived before me illustrating the family saga in cottons, wools, and silks. These fabrics of the past allowed me to lie down on, take comfort in, absorb time and place from the Double Wedding Ring, Texas Star, Log Cabin, or squares of Patchwork. Other squares gave instruction—the courthouse square where lives were joined day to day by activities called living that took place around the sharp edges of its boundaries.The geometric truth of squares was symbolic and metaphoric. My house was also square; so was my church; and so was I; so were we all—square. On those summer evenings, I learned another definition of round— without sharp edges. Most of those in my circle of acquaintances were indeed round. The lessons of squares and circles were no more important than triangles: the Trinity—God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; paradigm—if, then, therefore; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; tripod, triumvirate, tricycle. I wouldn’t return to the good old days, but there are summer evenings when I long again to make a pallet in the grass, contemplate and grasp the universe in a sea of stars, ponder squares, circles, and triangles, feel the beat of my own heart in rhythm with the earth and all mankind.

A Psalm for Toad—West Texas (with apologies to King David and sundry parts of King James’s Bible) They shall dwell in the tents of dryness and drought but for a season. Rain will surely come;

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Not mercy drops, but showers of blessing, Gully washers. They worship in brush arbor sanctuary, dug-out chapel, greasewood grove; Under sky apse and nave, oil derrick steeples, Personal vestibules the only entrances. Every thing that has life or breath, Goes armed, ready to fight for life— plants with blades and thorns, fences, barbed, animals with horn, fang, claw and hoof. Likewise, men and women, even unto words, they go armed. Not the chosen ones, but more the choosers, play their roles in miracle, morality, mystery plain as the sunburned nose on a freckled face. They see Him ride upon the prairie storm, appear in the burning bush, or burned up crops, in prairie fire, in clouds of dust, tornado or mighty winds, in dry lightning that portends no rain. The places of their gathering are like the tents of Abraham, offering shade in a dry and thirsty land; Where having enough saliva to spit is holy water; Where surely the rain will come. They abide in straight and narrow rows, or dwell in the midst of barbed wire. Their doctrines are deep as chasms,

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Writing on the Wind pits for falling into, Open as cloudless sky burned clean by the searing sun; Jealous as Joseph’s brothers. They are holy writ. They are the words and the music. They are the song and the dry land pulses the rhythm that bids them dance or sing, beat their breasts or cry. Thirsty religion does not always suffer long, is not always kind, is sometimes envious, thinks, sometimes, evil, is easily provoked. The sinners and saints stand upon the walls of Jerusalem or Chillicothe, Jacksboro, Muleshoe, Hereford, Perryton,Albany, Post, Crane, Mentone. They sound the shofar or yell “yippi ti yi yo” and square-dance upon the walls. They praise God with timbrel and trumpet, banjo, guitar and fiddle. By the rivers of Babylon—or Pecos, Rio Grande, Brazos, Nueces and Red— they sit down and weep or laugh. Blessed are they who cry in the West Texas wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” or for round-up; or for sowing and reaping;

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or for drilling; or for canning and preserving. And those who say,“Make straight in the desert a highway for our God” or the plow, or a trail to market, or the diamond bit. Hear their cries, O Lord. Let the rains come again. Let them dwell in the house of the Lord forever If the rains come— when it rains.

Genesis All my begats have to do with West Texas. I, myself, was begat there; my friends were begat there; my ideas and beliefs and all that I stand for and hold dear were begat there, not that a lot of it isn’t without flaw. In the beginning was the land, of course, and without the land was not anything begat that was worth a hoot. I was nurtured in and got acquainted with the West Texas land both a’foot and a’horseback. The rhythm of the place and its variegated moods is always inside me. The people of rural, small-town West Texas are also inside me. Their stories are of the good, the bad, and the ugly, not to mention the peculiar, stubborn, mean, and perverse; but also the beautiful, decent, friendly, intelligent “good somebodies”—as my grandmother used to put it—who reside in the forty shades of brown of West Texas. Who could keep from writing about such a place and such people?

J OY C E A N N G I B S O N RO A C H is a three-time Spur Award winner from Western Writers of America for non-fiction book, The Cowgirls (Houston: Cordovan Press, 1978, reprinted and revised Denton: UNT Press, 1990); short non-fiction,“A High Toned Woman,” from Hoein’ the Short Rows (Dallas: SMU Press, 1987); short

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Writing on the Wind fiction, “Just As I Am,” from Women of the West (New York: Doubleday, 1990); and a finalist for short fiction, “In Broad Daylight” from Texas Short Stories (Dallas: Browder Springs Publishing, 1997). She was also a finalist for the Teddy Children’s Writing Award from Writers League of Texas for Horned Toad Canyon (Albany: Bright Sky Press, 2003). She received the Carr P. Collins prize for non-fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters for Eats: A Folk History of Texas Foods (Fort Worth:TCU Press, 1989) with co-author Ernestine Sewell Linck; and the William E. Jary memorial award from the Tarrant County Historical Commission for a book of local history, Wild Rose: A Folk History of a Cross Timbers Settlement (The Donning Company/UNT Press, 1996). She is a former president of the Texas Folklore Society (1976), a fellow of Texas State Historical Association and of Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Excerpts are from the forthcoming book The Chronicles of Toad. Some pieces are unpublished, some have been adapted from columns appearing in the Northeast Edition of the Fort Worth Star Telegram between 1997 and 2000 and some are adapted from pieces appearing under the title, “The News From Horned Toad, Texas,” on the Virtual Texan website.

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Indignities, A Memoir Sandra Scofield W E W E N T T O S E E Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue in A Summer Place. I didn’t even know who they were. In four years of boarding with the Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur in Wichita Falls and Fort Worth, I had seen four movies, all of them approved by the Catholic Legion of Decency. In the months since I had started public school in Odessa, I had seen only a couple of films. Larry had heard that the movie was romantic, serious, “just up your alley.” He had said that about Natalie Wood and Gene Kelley in Marjorie Morningstar, and he had been right. I didn’t really care. We turned bad films into opportunities to mock. Mocking was our favorite pastime. He headed for the middle section, where families parked and the light from the concession stand would fall on us. I craned my neck to see the line of cars along the back fence, where all the couples sank low in their seats, where they disappeared after intermission. My peers. I didn’t think of them that way.They knew things I did not. I put my hand on Larry’s arm. “We could park a little farther back. There’s always somebody blocking the picture.” He gave me a sly, sideways look. He moved three rows back, away from the concession stand. He fiddled with the microphone; pop music played until the feature started. He couldn’t lower the volume enough to suit him. I said, “You’re sitting right against the speaker. Come over here.The sound will be just right.” He slid away from the steering wheel to the center of the seat. I tugged at his elbow. He scooted closer and I climbed over him. I was wearing a hand-me-down cashmere sweater Aunt Mae had given me. I

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Writing on the Wind was wearing a gray light wool skirt, straight to my knees, with a kick pleat, and I had to pull it up some to get across him. As I slid over, he put his hands on my knees to steady me, and then on my thighs, higher, and just for an instant, I froze, like someone in a photograph; for the first time, I felt that sweet shock between my legs. For just a moment, I had only the one thought, more. Then I rearranged my skirt and pressed my knees together. Gently, as if I were a child going to bed, he pulled off my loafers, and I moved my legs up onto the seat, tucking them sideways carefully, fussing with my skirt. The places where he had touched me still held the delicate surprise of skin on skin, the ghost of the pressure of his thumbs. I stared straight ahead, waiting for the movie to start. He slipped his arm around me and I fell limply against him.The cartoon splashed onto the screen and he bent down and thrust his tongue between my teeth.

A Summer Place is a melodramatic romance, greatly helped along by its theme song, which was enormously popular for at least a year. It opens when Troy Donahue’s family (he is Johnny) approaches a Maine island on their yacht, and he spies Sandra Dee (Molly) on shore. By nightfall they are kissing in the boat shed. They get caught in a storm on an island and are out all night. Hell breaks loose; Molly’s mother hauls her to a doctor. (I cringed in embarrassment. Larry did not move a muscle or make a sound.) The young lovers are immediately separated and sent to boarding schools, where, of course, they have telephones. Together again clandestinely, their urgency escalates. “Is kissing me enough?” she asks him. There’s some back and forth about being good. “Have you been bad, Johnny? Have you been bad with other girls?” she asks him. Her face scrunches up with the anguish of her inner conflict. Should she, should she not, hardly a real question. I cringed. I was reading Erich Maria Remarque novels in my free time. The Citadel. All Quiet on the Western Front. I hated those big faces on the screen, the corny dialogue. It would have been embarrassing, except that Larry didn’t like it, either. We made little comments all the way through, mostly about how obvious all the hints were. He remarked that Troy Donahue had a fat chin and the bewildered gaze of an old dog, and I said that Sandra Dee was impossibly sweet. Every emotion was carried by

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the swelling theme song. The story was obvious. Sandra and Troy are united. In retrospect, I suppose it was an unusual movie because everyone who loved someone won out, even though they broke all the rules. For 1959, that was daring. I didn’t really notice the lack of punishment and redemption. Larry’s clowning had a physical aspect. Johnny would embrace Molly, and Larry would move his hand up and down my back. They would kiss, and he would kiss the back of my neck with smooching sound effects. I giggled and smooched back and tried to have a good time, but by the end of the movie I was tense and tired. The exaggerated mimicry had an edge of frenzy that sucked my energy and alarmed me. I thought this must be what it was like to get drunk. I knew I would lose my equilibrium if I did not stay sober, and I did not want to think where the falling would stop.

We drove out of town, into the same area where he had taught me to drive Mama’s Edsel, out where there was nothing to see but a few gas pumps and a lot of mesquite. I had had my first lesson on a straight dirt road that stank of fresh oil, sprinkled to keep the dust down. (Two years later, by a nearby stock pond, a boy would kill a girl with her father’s shotgun because she asked him to. Betty and Mack. He said she drove him crazy asking.) It was a cold clear winter night, and the moon was nearly full. The landscape had the eerie luminescence of a dream. Larry pulled off the road and parked the car, pointed toward a pump-jack that wasn’t operating. It looked like a giant prehistoric insect. Far off, a windmill rose beside an open water tank, the sort of place boys went on summer nights to douse themselves, naked buddies, no girls allowed. He didn’t touch me. He just looked. I couldn’t read his face, and I had no idea what he saw in mine.We sat like that for a minute or two—it seemed forever—and then he said, “Are you a good girl?” My face prickled with shock. What was the right answer? I said lightly,“Good as I know how,” and instantly I knew it was a stupid thing to say, rife with innuendo I did not intend or even fully understand. To my relief, he laughed softly, leaned back, and beckoned with his finger. Come here. I curled against him, snug under his arm. My chest was tight. I con-

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Writing on the Wind centrated on my breathing. He took his glasses off and set them on the dashboard and waited.When I repositioned myself so that we could kiss, he whispered, “You know you don’t have to be afraid of me, don’t you? You know I’m a good guy?” I could smell his after-shave splash. Without his glasses, he looked dreamy and distracted. Instead of replying, I took the initiative to kiss him. He did nothing, as if he were asleep, and I took this as a dare. I kissed him calculatedly, until he had to respond: a little teasing, a luxurious, long kiss, a nip; a still moment, and then my tongue, bold against his, and that shock of surprise at myself again, as I discovered that I knew just how to do it, and that it was lovely to reach him in this liquid way. I thought that I was losing the boundary of my lips, I was folding into him. Happiness surged in me like carbonation. It wasn’t sex, it was power: I sensed his surprise and nervous delight. He ran his hands down my sides, onto the slight curve of my hips. My hands were planted on his shoulders, palms against his chest. He said my name. I could push or pull. Say yes or no. But not knowing where the edge was—that was the thrill. His hands slid over me. It was a wonderful sensation. He pulled the sweater up from my waist and moved his hands beneath my breasts. One of his thumbs pressed upward. I stiffened. I was wearing another of my aunt’s gifts, a padded bra, and he had pushed into the cushioning foam. I twisted up and to the side, so that his hand slid off of the brassiere. He reached around to the back and unclasped the hooks. The brassiere sprang away from my flat chest, probably a lot less obviously than I felt it did, but I was mortified. I was fifteen, with the body of a tall ten-year-old. I pulled back, in effect giving him better access. He pressed both hands against me. I wrenched away. “Hey,” he said. I wanted to scream: Don’t you ever say anything but hey? I struggled to hook the bra, and when I couldn’t, I began to cry. He did it for me. He rubbed my back. “Hey,” he said again. I turned around and glared at him. Through my tears, he looked frightening and unfamiliar. He stuck his head forward and tried to kiss me as he moved his hands under my bunched up skirt onto my thighs. I shoved him away. Then I crushed myself against my door, trying to make myself small. I thought of my nipples against his palms and they tingled. “You think I care if you don’t have big headlights?” He was leaning against his door now.We were like broken bookends. 84

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“I want to go home.” I would never forgive his choice of words. He put his glasses on again and sighed. “This is crazy,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.You’re pretty as can be. I’m just rattled. I’m sorry. Jeez.You think any of this stuff matters?” A lot had gone by in a hurry, and all of it mattered a lot to me. He reached for me, and when I resisted, he scooted closer. His car was a turquoise ’57 Bel-Air.There was room on the front seat for a girl to lie beneath a boy. I pressed my back hard against the door, my body twisted, my feet not quite on the floor. He tried to put his arm around me, and when he couldn’t do that, he put both hands on the window-glass behind my head and leaned in and kissed me. There wasn’t any place to escape. The easiest thing was to yield, and I did, relieved to stop resisting. He pulled my legs up onto the seat and lay on top of me. I knew nothing about what we were doing, but I realized that there was nothing I had to know. I was weary and resigned, as if I had gone to sleep and wakened years later. I trembled and he clasped me tightly. He made no effort to undo my clothing, or his own, he simply held me fast. He trembled slightly. I was breathing shallowly in small gasps like those a child makes before bursting into tears. I felt his sex against me, his breath on my neck, but I knew he was a better boy than Johnny. He wouldn’t do this unless I said it was okay. Maybe not then. I didn’t know what fears his father, Reverend Predmore, had instilled in him. Everything my friend Rita had ever said raced through my mind. How boys went so far and then couldn’t stop. How it was up to the girls to put the brakes on before they got crazy, before they got blue balls. She hadn’t said anything about what this would be like for me; how I would want to see what it felt like to touch a man’s sex. How I wanted him to touch me, too. There would never be a moment in my life so big or so terrible (and there have been terrible moments) that I would not be able to imagine it even as it happened. There would never be a significant dialog without quotation marks in my head. I lead two lives, one ordinary and clumsy, the other an overlay of observation.When my feelings are flattened by my fear of them, I can always say what’s happening, as if I am committing my life to memory for a test. At every turn, I see alternative possibilities, multiple interpretations, and although I have sometimes resented the ambiguity, I have also relished my otherness. Every picture is a scrim over another. It 85

Writing on the Wind took me many years to discover the humor and wickedness in my peculiar sightedness, let alone to dare to think of it as a talent, but even early on, I cast it on everything and turned my life side to side as I lived it. Is that good or bad? Does it matter? I didn’t understand any of this at fifteen, of course. I didn’t understand it that night when I was caught up in a frenzy of conflicting emotions, riding them on a chute of physical sensation. Larry, he a Baptist minister’s son, was waiting for me, the Catholic girl, to stop us, to stop what we were doing; that was my part in our sexual exploration. I didn’t want the responsibility. What decisions had I ever made? Uniformed since the age of seven, I hadn’t even chosen my own school clothes until two months ago. “Larry, Larry,” I whimpered, holding my arms out. Make it okay. I must have looked like a child wanting to be picked up. I thought my vulnerability would disarm him, but I wore it clumsily. He wouldn’t look at me. “Smart girls.“ His disgust thudded like a heavy door slammed shut.There was no place for all my feelings to go, and so they turned outward again, barbed and resentful. “That movie,” I said,“was stupid. I hate Sandra Dee.” I made my voice high, insipid, like hers, “Johnny, have you been a bad boy? Have you been bad with girls? When that was exactly what she wanted him to be!” We needed to just go home and pretend this hadn’t happened. Like when we had argued about Catholics, and he swore that nuns went through a tunnel to the priests’ house and drank altar wine and caroused, and then he said I had no sense of humor and made every day a holy day. I went home that night sputtering with anger, but Mama made me feel better by saying that we had tested our sails and we were still afloat. Baptist and Catholic, we knew what we weren’t ready to do. But I was so angry now; I felt that he had tricked me, with all his joking around during the movie, his complicity in my scorn. He had tricked me into revealing myself before I knew who I was. Of course that’s how most of us stumble through adolescence, but nobody thinks that at the time. Everything matters so much.Then, as now, teenagers died of humiliation, thwarted desire, lack of vision. In and out, the sound of his breath, the sound of mine. He said, “That’s what you hated, wasn’t it? She did what she wanted to do. She

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wasn’t scared to death of sex. And she’s beautiful. She’s on the covers of hundreds of magazines. She’s rich and famous. She’s the same age as you, and she has that body. And you wish you were just like her.” Even now I can remember my indignation. His words play in my mind like a tape. Never mind that he was insulting my body. That he wanted to hurt my feelings. I did truly hate Sandra Dee. I hated that she was someone boys wanted. I hated the part she had been given to play— her character’s wealth, and the absolute certainty of her attraction to that big lunky boy, the humiliation of her mother’s assault on her dignity, the cliché of her pregnancy, and the stupid happy ending. I felt sorry for her. If Larry thought I was jealous of her, he had me all wrong. People were always misunderstanding me; how could I be close to him if he was no better? “I want to go home,” I said again. It took forever. I had to scrabble for my shoes. My sweater was twisted, my hair was a mess. I kept glancing at Larry, but I never caught him looking at me. At the curb in front of my house, I opened the door, but he grabbed my arm. “Wait, please, I’m sorry.” I wrenched my arm away and got out of the car. He jumped out and followed me to the door. He slammed his hand against the screen so that I couldn’t pull it open. I faced the door, so that he had to talk to the back of my head. He leaned in and his breath stirred my hair. “I don’t do that. I won’t. Heck, I’m a virgin, too.” Pause. “I’ll deny it if you tell.” I whirled around. “You think this is a joke? We’re sand hill yokels so you can insult me? I never want to see you again. How could you think I was jealous of Sandra Dee?” He stepped back and I pushed my way inside and slammed the door. The house was completely dark. I stood still and waited for my eyes to adjust. My only coherent thought was how glad I was that I had never told Larry that I dreamed of being an actress. Then I thought again of the way I had kissed him, and I shuddered with revulsion. He made me do it, I told myself, but I knew full well he had not. The hall light went on. Mama came around the corner. “Sweetie, it’s you?” It was cold in the house, but she was wearing a summery gown that rustled about her knees as she hurried toward me.

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Writing on the Wind I tried to speak, but instead of words, a squeak came out of me, the first syllable of my fury. “Oh darling,” she said, a little clumsy with her arms out. “Whatever happened? Whatever’s made you so upset? Come to me. Come to your mother.” She wrapped her arms around me and pressed her face into my hair. The luxury of her embrace flooded me with relief. A warmth spread out from my chest into my limbs and made me limp. My anger washed away, but I was left with my stiff resolve. Tomorrow, I thought, I would tell her how he had insulted me, I would tell her I hated him and would never see him again. I would not tell her how wrong he had been about me, how much I had wanted him to show me what could happen next. I knew she would have understood completely what I meant, but I knew, too, that she did not think I was ready to have such wants. She wanted me to be grown up enough but still be her little girl. I wanted to tell her that nobody can be two things at once. I wanted to ask her to help me choose one, for now, whichever would make her want to be my mother, want to stay alive. Whether she would be sad or angry or scared for me, I simply didn’t want to know.

Mother told me once that she counted herself among the blessed, that that was the gift of faith, and that it helped her get through bad days. She liked to say that the great saints had seduced her, not so much because they convinced her of anything as that she thought that if they could believe, so could she. I might have said the same of her, but my faith was lost in the rubble of her death. For all the days and nights of being a good Catholic child, none of it stuck once she was gone. I was all surface and roiling resentment; God would have had to speak up and blow a horn or two to keep my attention. Come to think of it, I was all surface and resentment as Mother moved toward death that spring. I was a teenager, worst luck, with thin skin and a thick skull, and if in sentimental movies loved ones get to cheep their sweet goodbyes, I didn’t know about that in March 1959. I had a chip on my shoulder that rolled off and landed between my mother and me. There wasn’t time left to go around.

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* * * I believe that, right up to the end, she was trying—trying to believe, trying to find meaning in her pain, trying not to be afraid, trying to broker heavenly attention to her children. She survived, day to day, defying that worst calamity, the terrible surety of her total absence, until it could no longer be resisted. Early on the morning she died, she received the Last Sacrament, administered by the pastor she did not like, who was barely able to disguise his disinterest in her death, but by then she was unconscious. She was beyond the reach of his condescension, as she was beyond the reach of our cries: Don’t go! My grandmother, mute with grief, wobbled and grasped the bedpost. She said, “Not here.” She couldn’t have meant the dying, and nobody would want to bury Mama in Odessa.

I couldn’t help seeing the cuts on her arms. She spent hours trimming her cuticles with a razor blade. I had tried to do the same thing, and I knew that it was hard not to slip or cut too deeply, especially since she was so often foggy with pain or medication or depression. But she sometimes sliced her wrists, too, at first lightly, crossways, and then along the length of her inside arm, from elbow to wrist. She didn’t cut deeply, it was more a thin red tracing that beaded, scabbed lightly, and left pale white threads of scars. I wanted to touch them, but I pretended not to notice. I wasn’t too alarmed by her cutting because apparently her doctor was not. She was deliberate, absorbed, rather than reckless. She had done the cutting before, but more seriously and decisively, and the wounds had required a trip to the emergency room. Now she merely dabbed at the threads of welling blood and picked, picked away. I thought it was idleness that provoked her, that she was seeking a surcease from boredom. It did not occur to me that she might have mutilated herself, not for distraction, but for the possibility of ecstasy.

My grandmother (“Mommy”) planned a weekend trip from Wichita Falls. That meant that I could go to a speech tournament in Austin. We were

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Writing on the Wind leaving at noon. Aunt Mae said she would come over to spend the night with Mother and my little sister, since Mommy wouldn’t arrive until midmorning on Saturday. Everyone was enthusiastic about me going. I couldn’t get to sleep, I was so excited at the prospect of the competition, and the trip, too; five girls were going to share one motel room. I took the car home at lunchtime; the speech teacher, Mrs. Everson, would pick me up soon after. I hoped Mother was awake to hug me and wish me luck. My head was stuffed with news and the opinions of columnists; I was excited about Extemporaneous Speaking, an event that attracted the most aggressive contestants. Larry’s car was parked in front of the house. I ran up the walk and burst into the living room. He and Mother were sitting at the table, empty bowls in front of them. She was wearing her chenille robe, and she hadn’t penciled on her eyebrows. It was the first time I had seen her up in days and days. She said, “There’s tomato soup on the stove.” “You cooked?” It was a sarcastic question and she didn’t bother to answer. But preparing a can of Campbell’s soup was more than she had done in a month. I turned my attention to Larry. “Don’t you go to school anymore?” I glared at him. I felt a headache strike me in my left eye. It hurt so much I brought my hand up to cover it. Mother said, “I bet you’re hungry.” “It’s lunchtime,” Larry said. “At my house? You came to lunch at my house?” I made myself take my hand off of my eye. I could feel my eyelid dancing. Larry shrugged. Mama said, “He brought me some magazines, isn’t that sweet?” “I wondered how you all are,” he said. I had waited to cool down, waited for him to come to his senses, and he hadn’t called. I didn’t even realize I had been waiting until I saw him sitting there with my mother. “I have to pack.” I fled to my room and slammed the door. My bag was ready, sitting by the door. I threw myself on my bed, the throbbing side of my head down in the pillow. I heard Larry leave, and in a few minutes Mother brought me an ice pack. She sat down on the bed. “You’ve got a migraine,” she said. She brushed my hair back off my face. “Are you up to this?” 90

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I sat up. “What was he doing here? I thought you were so sick.” She looked at me for a long moment. I don’t know how she kept from slapping me or just walking away, except that she lacked the energy, and she loved me, and she was a grown-up. Larry’s visit had tired her, and now I was using up strength she didn’t have to spare. “Honey, he was just here a few minutes. I think he misses you. He’s a nice boy. Really, he is.” “He didn’t know I would be here. He came to see you.” She sighed. “He just wanted to talk. He wanted to know if you would see him again. He didn’t believe an argument about a movie could be so serious.” “I guess he knows now.” I wanted so much to go back to the beginning with Larry and make it turn out another way. I missed him, and I hated him for it. I couldn’t see that I was doing the same thing now with Mother, the old mountain out of a molehill I’d heard about all my childhood. Overreacting. Tripping on my lower lip. Hurting my mother, and unable to stop. She said,“I know he would like to apologize.” So she had been sorry to see him go, too. Did she see what I could not, that I wasn’t going to have more Larrys come along? Not ever? “He said that? He wants to apologize?” “In so many words.” I fell back on my pillow again. “You go out with him, Mama,” I said coldly. “I don’t want to.” She winced, then exhaled wearily, but would not be provoked. She held the ice pack out to me. “Put this on your eye. I’ll get you some aspirin.” She bent to kiss me. Getting up, she moaned.

All the way to Austin, I slept, and though the headache had drained me, I was able to do the round of competition that evening, and by the time we were at the motel, I was fine. I enjoyed all the turn-taking and the talking in the dark. I shared a bed with Lynelle Wood. She had a sweet disposition, a fantastically high hairline, and huge breasts. I’d heard jokes that went like this: Lynelle Wood, Lynelle Wood, Lynelle would let you touch them. Lying beside her, I wondered if she had heard them, too. We had talked about 91

Writing on the Wind being partners for our senior year. She was smart and intense, like me. Saturday, I won first place, beating girls from Houston and Dallas schools, girls with extravagant gestures, who wore expensive suits and regarded us West Texas girls with disdain. One of our boys placed in persuasive oratory, and Lynelle and her partner reached quarterfinals. I heard that debate, and I thought that Lynelle and I would have won. Next year, we would. I was actually looking forward to something at school. The night was balmy. At the motel, there were other kids wandering around, some of them from the speech meet, and some boys in town for a wrestling tournament.The motel was built on a hilly plot. It was fun, walking up and down; I lived in a place where the land was extended flat and open to the horizon. I found a pop machine and ended up talking for a long time to a cute boy from Seymour. We took our drinks around the corner behind bushes, leaning against the side of one of the units. I took little sips from my bottle until they were warm and flat. Every time I lifted the bottle to my lips, I thought of the pose I made. I cocked my hip, as if my drink knocked me off balance. He rolled his tee shirt up like James Dean and gave me puffs of his cigarette. We inched our way closer and closer to one another until our hips bumped, and he laid his arm across my shoulders.We were in a place private enough for a game of sorts, but there wasn’t any place where we could go too far. Perfect boundaries. We didn’t know anything about one another; he didn’t care if I was smart or popular or virgin, he just liked the smell of my hair (he said so), and I liked his smooth skin over the ripple of his wrestler’s muscles. I started running my hand up and down his arm. A warm languor spread through me, as if I would melt, or float, away. I stole glances at his crotch; he moved so that I couldn’t see the way he strained against his tight jeans. He pretended to be interested in my speech event, though I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about. We exchanged names and telephone numbers on scraps of paper, but I knew that I would ever see him again. He kissed me goodbye. We pushed our bodies against one another but held our hands lightly on shoulders, like polite dancers.When I got back to the room, and Lynelle said they had started to worry, all I could do was grin. Behind her, one of the other girls giggled. “You bitch!” she said, affectionately, I thought. While I waited for my turn in the bathroom, I called home collect to tell my mother that I had won. Aunt Mae answered. “You’re still there!” I said. “Guess what? I won.” 92

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“That’s so good,” she said. She sounded weary. “Did Mommy get there okay? Will she have to leave before I get home? Tell her not to!” Aunt Mae said, “Don’t worry about Mommy, she’s going to stay.” My face stung as if I had been slapped. I knew very well what it meant that my grandmother was back in Odessa to stay.“Is Mama awake? I want to tell her—” “No, baby, she was so tired tonight.You can tell her about it tomorrow, okay?” “But I want her to know that I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s important. Please!” I was spinning into panic. I wanted to shout:This isn’t a good time for this! “Can’t you tell her that for me? I’m sorry? Tell her tonight? Tell her now?” “You sleep tight,” Mae said. “I’ve got to go.” I cried out, “No, wait!” but she hung up. I looked up and saw that my roommates were all looking at me. “Your turn,” Lynelle said softly, pointing toward the bathroom. I took a bath, lying back with my eyes shut until the water cooled. When I was done, the girls were all in bed and the lights were out. I got into bed and pulled my knees up to my chest. I dug at my feet furiously, scratching away flecks and bits of flesh, tearing long strips of skin from the pads of my heels until Lynelle, sweet and patient as she was, had had enough and huffed to let me know so. I closed my hands into fists and tucked them against my cheeks, and I tried to pray.

Genesis I left Texas in 1964, but when I dream, I find myself alone under a brilliant starry night, standing on an endless landscape of sand and mesquite. I never “belonged” and grew up estranged, yet in my maturity I turn again and again to the Texas past where I find the characters I understand best. On the plains, there is nothing to obscure your view of the sky, nothing to help you kid yourself that you will not die. That starkness is beautiful and awful, and completely irresistible.

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is the author of seven novels, including Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Chance to See Egypt, recipient of an award from the Texas Institute of Letters. “Indignities” is from her memoir, Occasions of Sin, published by Norton in 2003. She lives in southern Oregon and visits West Texas often to see family. SANDRA SCOFIELD

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It’s Three O’clock in the Morning Laura Payne Butler M A M A C I L E ’ S H O U S E stands across from the hospital, just up a slope from my grandfather’s medical office in Breckenridge. In the afternoons, she likes sitting in front of her programs, snapping beans in uniform sizes, or shaping dough for pecan sandies into half-moon wedges, then patting them lightly with powdered sugar. She talks back to her programs like they are companions, her afternoon visitors. “Oh, girl.You know he is a bad character.You’d be better off not getting started with him; he might not stay by your side,” she says in a highpitched, breathy tone to As the World Turns. In the days before I can remember these afternoons, she sits with her maid, Suzie, and they both discuss the happenings on the television, not with one another, rather, each talking to the characters in the programs directly. “Mmm mmm. Girl. You know he ain’t no good,” Suzie absently wipes with a dust cloth a side table next to the La-Z-Boy on the right side of the narrow room. “That girl is wrong-headed most of the time, anyhow. She might be one of those kinds of girls if she doesn’t settle down.This is her fifth marriage—scandalous. Do you know that, mister?” Mama Cile points her stainless steel nail file at the television from her own deeply-settled spot in the left-hand La-Z-Boy, the one cracked and torn, the one that bleeds stuffing. She decides to disagree with Suzie, to villainize the female protagonist rather than the male. She is against multiple marriages. Two are fine, maybe even three, but then it becomes tacky.

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Writing on the Wind * * * When I grow old enough to visit my grandmother in the afternoons, we also sit in front of the television set. By this time, she has mostly lost her hearing and has never overcome the buzzing clatter of hearing aids. “Sounds like I’ve got too many people in the room, all trying to talk at once,” she yells at me before turning back to her program. She does sometimes make a show of the hearing aids, wearing them to please my parents who drive her in her Buick the two and a half hours east to Dallas from Breckenridge to have them fitted, checked, and rechecked—she many years past lost her driver’s license to failing eyes. But I notice at church that she turns them off as soon as the priest begins the first prayer, leaving large and inert plastic earplugs in both ears. We sit together on many afternoons, then, each also watching programs and not really talking to one another, as I imagine she and Suzie had done in years past, back when she could still hear the dialogue and the ensuing commentary. I, however, sit in the right-hand La-Z-Boy eating frozen Fudgesicles, making no pretense of housekeeping. It is at these times that my grandmother attempts to instruct me in the ways of men, usually asking about boys at school and not hearing the answer. One evening when I am eighteen and have finally begun dating a particular boy for what must have seemed an alarmingly lengthy time, my grandmother turns from her program—this time a made-for-TV movie about a girl who gets pregnant in high school—and takes my hand in hers. She looks searchingly into my eyes, perhaps attempting to discover evidence of any sexual misdeed I may have committed by a sketchy slide of my eyes. I stare straight back at her, curious as to her intent with all this focused attention. “Men won’t always stand by your side,” she comments and then rocks back and forth until she is finally able to stand up and walk slowly to her bedroom. Later that night, when I also join her in her room to sleep in the twin bed next to hers, she again takes my hand. She is clearly disturbed by the chance that I may become “one of those girls” and has sat up for many hours waiting for me to finish the late-late movie and tire out. “Good girls don’t until marriage” is this moment’s jewel before sleep.

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* * * Mama Cile is the mother of four boys, football stars all. She hands them a book on sex education and says, “Go on down to your daddy’s office. He wants to have a talk with you.” Mama Cile lies down on the couch with a sick headache on those afternoons. No one but my father and his brothers know what was said at those talks, but Mama Cile certainly breaks new territory with me, her youngest grandchild, the one who looks like her, when she ventures into parental sex talks.

In 1926, when Mama Cile is eighteen and still known as Lucile, she is “fixed up” by her older sister, Agnes, who works in Memphis,Tennessee, as a nurse. Lucile’s hair is crimpy curly, and she wears it in a pageboy, sassy and pretty. Her smile shows small, even teeth, and she wears a drop-waisted, lacy dress on the day that my grandfather, then a young medical student who moonlights as a semi-pro football player and a funeral home ambulance driver, is invited by Agnes to visit. Agnes brings Lucile into their father’s parlor and stands her beside the piano. Their father is a riverboat captain; their home, quite affluent. But Agnes wants Lucile to make the right kind of marriage. Agnes will soon be divorced from the funeral home’s director. Lucile shyly sings songs for my grandfather who politely smiles back at her and encourages more. He sips whiskey straight and feels warm.

As a family, we drive to my cousin’s wedding in Sanderson,Texas, in 1976. The terrain has shifted from the stately mesquites of the Big Country to those struggling to lift themselves out of the ground. Even these foot-high mesquites disappear as we move into the desert of West Texas. I am ten and do not realize that this kind of landscape exists in Texas. Our people come from the east. It is summer, and I have received a recorder for my birthday. It has a tiny microphone, and I spend the longs hours on a burnt-red highway sitting in between my father and my grandfather recording everything.We all

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Writing on the Wind get into the spirit of the event and beg Mama Cile to sing us songs from when she was “courted” by my grandfather. She smiles shyly, her small, even teeth still perfectly white. It’s three o’clock in the morning; We’ve danced the whole night thru. And daylight soon will be dawning; Just one more waltz with you. That melody, so entrancing, Seems to be made for us two. I could just keep right on dancing. Forever, dear, with you.

Mama Cile finishes the chorus with a high note that rings not quite true, a bit flat and grainy.We applaud wildly, though, all laughing while my grandfather calls her song, “chicken scratch.” We play and replay the recording of her song throughout the rest of the trip, as landscape rushes past the car windows, turning from burnt red to the burnt yellow of the desert. She is asked many times during the weekend about her song, and everyone delights at the true notes and even more so at the missed ones, all sung in her high-pitched squeal. We all know the story of her courtship and how this song might have won my grandfather’s heart in 1926.

Ten years later, when I come home from Texas Tech University to visit her, we again sit in the television room in front of her programs. She has still not found her hearing, so we do not really have conversations. The ones we attempt revolve around boyfriends. Some she likes, and others she does not. The distinction is drawn on whether these boyfriends have visited Breckenridge or not, and who has laced her arm within his own to help her shuffle along from the car to her own front step. “No Payne girl has ever been a spinster,” she cuts her eyes sideways at me one fall afternoon when I am twenty and a junior in college. I have recently been summarily dumped by the last boyfriend she liked, but the subtle difference between liking and being liked that I attempt to explain to her is lost in the yelling translation over the volume of her television program. I go outside to pick up pecans that drop from the giant tree in her front yard. 98

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* * * By 1940, Lucile desperately wants a baby girl. After three boys and two more miscarriages, she just knows this last one will be a girl.When it is not and the doctors tell her no more babies, she takes the opportunity provided by her husband’s shipping off to the War to grow her fourth son’s hair out. It is crimpy curly, and she shapes it in a long pageboy, just to his shoulders. He cries in the morning when Suzie combs it out. Lucile says,“I won’t cut it until his daddy comes home, safe.” She likes to feel his curls—strawberry blonde that pick up the sunlight shining through the window in the morning—twining them in her fingers, training them to curly-cues like Shirley Temple’s. When her husband does come home safely, he takes his screaming son, sore from a morning’s comb-out, to the barber and has his hair cut short, army-style. He brings the curls home to Lucile; she puts them in a wish-box, tucked away.

I am the daughter of that fourth son and the only granddaughter to be raised up in Breckenridge. It is Mama Cile’s true wish to see one of her girls married in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. It is the church my grandfather helped found, and she dreams of walking up the long, narrow center aisle in a new dress, the matriarch of our clan, all come together to celebrate the grand female achievement of a good marriage. I promise her that I will certainly get married in our church, in front of God, our family, and Breckenridge. So, she becomes alarmed when I graduate from college and—unmarried and twenty-five—move out east to my mother’s people to work at a newspaper and spread creative wings. At Christmas I return for a visit.This time, my grandmother again ventures into uncharted waters. She asks about boys, past and present, and actually strains to hear my answers, turning down her program and searching in what must be my impossiblymuffled tones for positive answers to her expectations. When my answers do not satisfy her desire for a wedding—I was dating a man, a playwright, but he was divorced and not particularly looking for a second wife—she again takes my hand like she had when I was eighteen. “Remember when I told you good girls don’t?” she asks, and I 99

Writing on the Wind rush to assure her I am still not one of those girls. She breaks in, though, to say, “Let’s take a few steps back and rethink that position. Times are different these days, and perhaps a little cart before the horse will better entice these boys to the altar.”

I think about the struggle my grandmother must have endured to have come to this position, all because, in her view, marriage after twenty-two was an impossible situation in which to find oneself. Perhaps she felt it was shameful. Or, I have thought years later as most likely, the prospect of losing this last chance to be the mother of a girl being given away at the church at which she served as head of the altar guild, brought back what must have been an unbearable pain of memory. I think of my grandmother’s life as a wonderful dance, one that lasted until at least three o’clock in the morning, full of romantic and delightful stories. She lived a pampered life in a comfortable two-story home and raised four adoring sons. But women of my grandmother’s generation had few choices in their lives. When Lucile was dressed up and placed at the piano by her older, almost-divorced, and working sister, I imagine that her life was settled upon by that sister who, herself, was imagining what a perfect life might be, of being the doctor’s wife rather than the doctor’s assistant. My grandmother took that life and asked for only a daughter in return.When she did not receive one, she waited for a granddaughter who looked like her—and got one. I take Mama Cile’s advice that afternoon when I am twenty-five and step back for a look and a rethink. I secretly sigh with relief that I am free to live out east and figure out who I am, to write little newspaper stories and date divorced playwrights.

In 1998, Mama Cile does not walk down the aisle at my wedding at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, although we finally have a wedding. I am not a spinster, but I am thirty years old. I keep my promise to be married in her church, but Mama Cile is wheeled down that narrow aisle, having long since lost her ability to sustain a walk that long. She now lives at Villa Haven Nursing Home and has just gotten over pneumonia. She is feeble—

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almost too sick to attend the ceremony—and it is I who take her cold hand in mine as I struggle to search in her eyes for signs that she realizes it is my wedding day and that I am blissfully happy to have waited until what she considered a middle age to marry. I hope she realizes how lucky I feel to have found a husband, proud of my accomplishments yet patient with my afternoons watching TV programs. I want her to know that I, too, want a daughter to look just like me and fear that this dream will also pass me by. She sits up front of the congregation. Her wheelchair is angled toward the altar, placed in front of the pew where my mother sits in witness, waiting for my father to escort me up the long aisle with my arm laced within his and give me away. The Payne clan takes up the first five rows of St. Andrews.The whole town of Breckenridge is there. Mama Cile wears a new dress, drop-waisted and lacy.

Genesis “It’s Three O’clock in the Morning” is a piece I have wanted to write for many years. It derives greatly from family folklore as well as my own personal folklore, those memories I find, as I move into middle age, to be moving, themselves, from my unshared remembrances into an oral tradition of storytelling. As I grow older, I have begun to reach back into my own history and grab onto memories for sharing. This is something my grandmother, Mama Cile, did so well—even after she lost her hearing—in her TV room, sitting on a La-Z-Boy. I have always thought of myself as being an extension of my grandmother; we shared a connection, a true blood-tie. This feeling served to punctuate the humor of our afternoon “chats,” because I was constantly aware of the differences that our environments, social expectations, and norms had made on two otherwise similar women.Thus, this piece emerged from a notion that the surrounding landscape that carves out the people who inhabit it also greatly dictates how those people will live their lives—and how they hope those who come after will live their lives as well. I found that landscape, of course, shifts just as people shift with it. It moves from our reality, the surrounding backdrop of our everyday lives, to that Technicolor grounding against which we place our stories and folklores. Landscape is what we first remember before

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Writing on the Wind we people those memories. My grandmother, Lucile Virginia Bedgood Payne, died a few weeks after I completed this piece.

is an Assistant Professor at West Texas A&M University, where she teaches English and directs the University Writing Center. Her fiction has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as South Carolina Review, Lake Effect, Sojourn, and The New Review, and has been anthologized in New Stories from the South. “It’s Three O’clock in the Morning” appeared first in Concho River Review in Spring of 2003. She lives in Canyon with her husband, Brad, and their sons,William Corry and Robert Wilson. L AU R A PAY N E B U T L E R

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The Summer My Engine Died Monica Teresa Ortiz D I M M I T T RU N S A B O U T two miles long, from one city limit sign just twenty feet before Roadside Park to a Welcome to Dimmitt sign on the other side of town, across the railroad tracks and near the grain elevators. Not much to see when driving through. On the south side of town, off Highway 385, driving in from Lubbock, just a sea of dirt ripples—sometimes cotton grows, but mostly terrible rainstorms flood and destroy the crop—so nothing remains.The town itself reminds me of those ghost towns in the spaghetti westerns I watched as a kid.You know which ones—the ones with Clint Eastwood, where the town divided straight down the middle, and the men stood facing each other at the end of a long dusty road, staring one another down. Dimmitt’s just like that, only fifty years later after the Industrial Revolution blew into town and built a corn syrup plant on the east side, pumping enough money into the local economy to give us a Lowe’s Grocery Store, an Alco, and a Sonic. The corn syrup plant employs more than half of Dimmitt—mostly men work out there, good strong men that never left the city limits of this town, men who were born in the 1950s and still keep a lot of those values and ideas, see the world through a black and white lens, raise families, coach little league, and work their asses off to ensure their kids would be better off than they were—men like my father. Dimmitt has a decaying red building right across the street from the First National Bank. It used to be a car wash, and once, I went to look around for a photo project. On the outside, it’s still nicely painted, but win-

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Writing on the Wind dows are broken and weeds eat up the ground. Inside, dirt and glass litter the floor, not to mention pigeon droppings. An antique Dr. Pepper machine still stands in one corner, though it has been busted open. My town is this car wash. On the outside, it appears intact and functioning, perhaps even charming; but inside, nothing but a total mess exists. There are overpriced clothing stores for elderly women, a dollar discount store, and the closed-down Carlisle Theatre—to name a few. The courthouse is a big, white, limestone building with three floors for county business and two floors for the jail. Generations of people returning or never leaving keep this place alive. Folks live here, breed here, die here; and not too many escape.

One hot August night in 1995, my engine died at the one stoplight, the only dangling yellow painted stoplight in our rural agrarian town of 4,200 people. A farmer in a half-ton white Ford 250 pushed my 1988 maroon Buick to the parking lot of Seven-Eleven, offering me a ride home, but I only thanked him and said my dad would come and pick me up. The clerk at Seven-Eleven looked like Frankenstein’s bride, a real nice lady named Paula, with long, manicured nails and a thick Mexican accent. She let me use the phone to call my house, but I couldn’t find anyone. My mother was probably at the high school, walking the track while my brothers played basketball in the gym. Dad was nowhere to be found— which worried me. Dad was the single most reliable person on the planet. There were only three places he congregates if he wasn’t home: the plant, the hospital, or the domino hall. My dad also did not believe in cell phones, so I couldn’t try and track him down that way. Instead, I only hung up after leaving a message on the answering machine, thanked Paula for the phone call and the Big Gulp she gave me, and walked to my grandmother’s house. Abuelita only lived a block from Seven-Eleven, but it was past 10 .. and extremely dark. It was a night without a moon, and the street from the convenience store to my abuelita’s little yellow house did not have any street lights. None of this fazed me. Nothing bad ever happens in a small town.

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The Summer My Engine Died

* * * Abuelita brewed a cup of mint tea and gave it to me, then heated up cold leftover tamales. My grandparents spoke mostly Spanish. Abuelita spoke English when she had to, but Abuelito always refused—though I knew he understood. I never quite learned to dance that language; yet I spent more time at their house than anywhere else.When I was younger, maybe five or six, I used to tell my mom, after one of our many arguments, I was running away to my abuelita’s house. Of course I never did, but that personified the relationship with my abuelos. We talked for a bit, her in Spanish and me in Spanglish, skimming through her photo albums. Christina Marta married Andres Montes in Chihuahua, Mexico, and they had four girls. During the 1950s, Andres entered the Bracero program, funded by the US government, and in the summer of 1957, he drove across the border from Juarez to El Paso in a Chevy pickup truck, no air conditioner, just a duffle bag accompanying him to West Texas. He worked in agriculture, plowing a dusky history on plains drifting for miles, retaining dust of his new blood. In 1960, my abuelita and her girls were allowed into the US, and they made their home outside Dimmitt in a tiny farmhouse. Later, after two more girls and a boy, the Montes family moved permanently inside a small three-bedroom house on 6th Street.While flipping through photos of my aunts in Mexico, I asked Abuelita why she came to America. “Abuelito was here, and we should never be separated. Each is half, and only together are we whole. Though we live here, we will always be Mexicans.” Sometimes in the summers before I turned thirteen, I thought I was white because growing up, all the Mexicans paid a dollar to swim at the city pool, and there’d be at least fifty kids in the junior pool built next to the middle school, with its arctic waters, paint chips floating to the surface, and a lifeguard named Rita, who called the kids cabron and pendejo and blew her whistle. Rita frosted her short curly hair at the hair salon every Friday—I knew because my mother always had her hair cut and styled on Fridays. Rita liked blonde, but since her hair was naturally dark brown, that Mexican kind of dark, it turned out an orange color, and if she went into the water, her hair squirted out the coloring into the water, and it swirled

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Writing on the Wind like orange smoke. She was a stern woman whom everybody listened to because she was also Officer Rita, and she showed the kids her gun one time and drove the black and white police car to the pool. All the Mexican kids swam at this pool, but I never did. My parents paid seventy-five dollars monthly so I could go to the Country Club, where the pool was indoor and heated, and the white kids paid extra to lie in the tanning beds so they’d darken and bake into brownies. I heard one of them call the city pool the dirty Mexican pool. I never thought I was different than those white kids. “Abuelita, what am I?” “You are Chicana. Part of your mother, part of your father. Part of Mexico. Part of America.” My dad always told me he was Mexican American and that the term Xicana equals bastard and is nothing more than a word born from bellies of Mexicans. I never told him my skin glowed in the dark, and if he traced the oceans on my back, followed ridges and trenches across my skin, Cortes blood mingled with the water, filled in my footprints, washed them out as the tide wiped away sandcastles, leaving a muddy mess. But it was still the earth, still sand, because brown is forever. That was how I felt after leaving my abuelos’ home that broiling August night.

My father not only worked at the plant but also as an EMT, and I couldn’t find Dad because he worked a wreck that night, wrapped his big arms around Omar’s mangled body, dragged it from the passenger side of a smashed 1985 Chevy truck toppled over in a ditch off Highway 385. Stacey the driver stood by Sal the cop handcuffed, sobbing, and smelling like gold liquor. Omar was fourteen, like me. Nobody blamed Stacey for being fifteen and drinking, driving, and racing. He was varsity running back, All-District, and Omar only played lineman on the freshman team. Besides, involuntary manslaughter didn’t sound as awful as murder. Omar’s parents forgave Stacey. We all attended the funeral and honored Omar’s memory at our high school graduation. I recall sitting with Dad later that morning, long after he had come back from the hospital and told me about the accident, and thought a single night was never as desperate as the night my engine died.

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* * * Seven years after Omar was buried, I returned to Dimmitt for a summer. Stacey’s little brother, Casey, died the same way Omar did. Casey was a passenger in a truck that veered off a dirt road going over a hundred, struck a barditch, rolled four times before stopping. A girl died, too. Dad worked that night, but there was less to pull out. I attended the joint funerals at the high school—a closed casket affair—and thought, some things never change. Because leaving a small town is not as simple as opening National Geographic, wishing for the snaking Amazon River and exotic black men with ashy skin and long fine feathers protruding from nasal cavities, daring me to be jealous of green canopies. Jealous? Yes . . . I am. Because one stoplight towns are more like the county newspaper, buzzing about the big accident, but the paper’s true intestines are written by priests and preachers and ministers, paid advertisements from different churches reporting times of mass and not a word of why Casey died—only how. No one wants to talk about alcohol or parties or speeding, and not a sentence on the page referred to Casey’s brother or how he killed a fellow student only seven years earlier. Coming back to this place is always bittersweet, decelerating as the stoplight goes yellow to red. My life stops because even in big cities on Interstates where I drive without ever stopping, grimy men in rags and overcoats sleep under bridges and on doorsteps downtown, riding the Metro to avoid summer days that hit a 103. Long-haired Vietnam and Gulf War veterans on crutches stand at Intersections begging for change or selling roses from an ice chest for a dollar, holding up a flap of cardboard with Help Me Out written by a black Sharpie, and a power plant whirs day and night bordering an elementary school in a neighborhood with barred windows and doors and no fast food joint in sight. And just the other day inside the university library jabbing the up arrow of the elevator, thinking if I hit it enough times, it comes quicker, and when it finally opens, and I step in, punch fifth floor button, doors slide shut and along with a watery reflection in the doors I see Kill Muslims written by a red, fat-tipped marker, permanently.

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Genesis I do not like to admit I came from Dimmitt, Texas. Often, when asked my origins, I mumble something about growing up between Amarillo and Lubbock. At least people know where those places are. Now at twenty-two years of age, I appreciate my upbringing in conservative, predominantly Anglo-American West Texas. Growing up in the Panhandle influenced me to seek out my culture, my heritage, and at the same time, taught me a lot about people and human nature. There is nothing like being raised in a small town, particularly in West Texas. It is a unique experience, and it created many struggles with identity and ethnicity; it stirred a tremendous desire to escape the Panhandle. Basically, I rebelled. I am now in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, the furthest pocket of West Texas. Being on the border challenges me, and I am convinced that no matter where I go or what I do, pieces of the Great Plains will haunt me and linger in my writing. After all, the advice you often get as a writer is that you should write what you know—and so far, the place I know best is West Texas. I know the road from Lubbock through Hobbs, New Mexico, and onto the burning desert that is El Paso, and I have the plains mapped out on my soul, from the thirty-foot Jesus statute outside Abernathy all the way up to I-40 in Amarillo.

grew up in the Panhandle; in May 2003, she graduated from the University of Texas in Austin with a BA in English. Currently, she is a graduate MFA student in creative writing as well as a teaching assistant at the University of Texas in El Paso. While at U.T. Austin, she served as the Editor-inChief of Analecta, a journal of literature. This piece has also been published in the Concho River Review.

M O N I C A T E R E S A O RT I Z

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Fast Women and Naked Legs Sharon D. Miller T H E W E S T T E X A S C L I M AT E is a new experience for me. I was born in Virginia where the climate is as old as Martha Washington and traditional as a Southern Baptist. When I tell people I’m from Virginia, the cliché response is I can’t believe you left Virginia for West Texas. I didn’t leave Virginia for West Texas. I came to West Texas to work for three months. I’ve been here six years. On the last day of my final assignment in Ohio, my contact person, Michelle, called. “Is your heart set on going to Florida?” “Yes.” “We need you to get to Lubbock, Texas, as soon as possible. We always need help in Florida.You can go there anytime.” “What’s the weather like?” “What do you mean, what’s the weather like?” “I just spent six months of hell-freezing-over cold in Ohio. I don’t want to be cold anymore.” “Oh. Lubbock is hot.” “I’ll let you know.” “You have to let me know today.” Michelle never actually lied. She made up answers. If Michelle said the town is only fifty miles from the state line, it was a hundred miles. If Michelle said the town never got snow, I never saw the ground while I was there.When I confronted Michelle, she responded, well, I’ve never actually

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Writing on the Wind been there. When Michelle called back in forty-five minutes, I asked for a bonus pay, hoping West Texas would be warmer than Ohio. Warm is not a word I use to describe the West Texas climate. The word warm is too tame. The West Texas climate is like Deborah in the book of Judges, Bessie “Queen Bess” Coleman, Amy Carmichael, or Mae C. Jemison.The people in Texas joke about the weather the way men joke about women who can’t make up their minds. The beauty of the West Texas climate is its imagination. Most of the time the West Texas weather is hot, freeing all sane women from pantyhose. Sometimes the West Texas weather is moody, forcing me to dig through my closet for red shorts in the afternoon and sending me on a hunt for red leather gloves later that evening. The diverse impulsive nature of the weather matches the rhythm of my soul and my lack of fashion sense. The Virginia climate parades through time in outfits matching the occasion—spring pastels, summer brights, fall earth tones, and dark winter pantsuits. The traditionalism of the seasons in Virginia bores me. Spring arrives on a lively beat that only a two-year-old can dance to. Most spring days are spent with butt in the air and nose in the dirt planting vegetables that could be bought frozen in the local grocery store. Blooming white dogwood trees implore you to sniff. Then the sneezing begins. The nose runs, leaking to the hot new spring lipstick that costs ten dollars. I am forced to walk around the spring season with free snot on my top lip and ten-dollar lipstick on the bottom lip. In the summer season, I am required to do something that I never do—sweat. I have wet spots on my body where no wet spots have ever been before. My crisp, white linen blouse becomes sticky, white tape to be painfully pulled off at the end of the day.The fall is one long, country song stuck on a twangy instrument, and the words I could die. Even the vivacious orange of pumpkins and Halloween want to die. The winter in Virginia is frozen pretending it’s at home up North. It closes the schools, the one lane road to our community, and cuts off the electricity. The monotonous cycle of seasons was the only weather I knew. It was, of course, accompanied by rigid fashion rules that I broke. My mother and sisters enforced the rules. “I know you’re not going to wear that yellow top to school. It’s cold outside,” said my always-appropriate seasonally dressed sister.

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“Why not? It has long sleeves.” I said. “Momma, Sharon is trying to wear a yellow top to school in the winter time.” “Take it off, Sharon. I don’t know why you try to wear spring colors in the winter time.” “Boots, boots—you’re wearing those red cowboy boots to school in September. Don’t tell anyone you’re my sister. People are going to know you got those boots from the Goodwill.” “Momma, Sharon has on a black top in May.” If I somehow escaped the fashion police before school, the FBA would be waiting after school.The Federal Bureau of Aunts was concerned with what I had on my legs. Their comments were limited to threats:You know you’re going to catch cold and die if you don’t wear stockings; boys think girls are fast who don’t wear something on their legs; and my favorite, white socks are only worn to bed. The last part had something to do with marriage and feet, which they never fully explained to me since I wasn’t married.Whether the clothing was a red dress or a white linen skirt, I had the seasonal confusion until I got to West Texas. In West Texas, I can start the day in a light fuschia jean jacket. By lunch, I marvel at how the temperature has risen, and the jacket becomes an over-sized belt for my short white linen skirt. I remove an oversized purple sweater to reveal a too-naked white tank top. At three, I pause to listen to the thunderstorm recital followed by a windowpane instrumental by the hail.When the rain starts, I rush into my loud, red vinyl raincoat to play in the rain.West Texas rain is rare. I always walk in it to make the rain feel welcome. At the end of the winter day, I’ve broken several of the secret fashion rules from Virginia. I remain free with hairy naked legs in West Texas. Unfortunately the men in Texas don’t know the rule about fast women and naked legs. The wind in West Texas, unlike the shy rain, frightens and fascinates me. The wind in Virginia never tried to blow my skirt over my head. The wind in West Texas blows so hard that it feels like it’s trying to tear my clothes off my body.When I roll down my window during a windstorm, it feels like a teenage boy on his first make out date has invaded my car—too much tongue and too much dirt in my ears and in my mouth. I become so overwhelmed that I want to push the wind out of my car with both hands.

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Writing on the Wind When I roll the window up, the wind shakes my little car. I won’t let the wind in again, but I can hear the wind, the low, lonely, mysterious instrument in an improvisational jazz trio of West Texas weather.

Genesis I fell in love with the vastness of West Texas when I saw the sun set in all its glory. I was on the County Line Road on my way to Lubbock from Olton. I stopped the car, worshipped the Lord, and cried. The West Texas landscape was liberating.The weather spoke to the adventurer in me. Thank you for the opportunity to write about two of my favorite phenomena in West Texas.

was raised on a tobacco farm in central Virginia with nine siblings. She won the 2002 Robert S. Newton Award for Poetry and the 2002 Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers’ Award for Graduate Creative Nonfiction for the essay, “The Trouble with Bras.” The essay is also forthcoming this spring in The Peralta Press. Miller received her BA from Longwood College and MA from Hampton University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing (her passion) at Texas Tech University where she is managing editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

S H A RO N D. M I L L E R

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West Texas Journal Carol Coffee Reposa J U N E 1 3 , en route from San Antonio to Canyon: For five hours now, we have been driving through miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles of nothing, from here to monotony. I am caked with sweat, despite non-stop air conditioning. My shirt clings in damp folds like a second skin. Strangely, this scorched landscape brings to mind Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”—an ironic association, since the problem in that short story is too much water, not too little: four shipwrecked steamer passengers crowd into a battered dinghy and row for their lives through the fury of the Atlantic.The opening line of the short story says it all: “none of them knew the color of the sky.” But that stark comment could as easily apply to us. Although we are not in the same life-or-death crisis as Crane’s unlucky foursome, like them we have no time to notice the omnipresent expanse above us because we are too busy fighting wind and dust on the ground. Also like them, we could disappear in this ocean of heat and dirt and no one be the wiser. Everything seems to be about the same shade of gritty beige: withered cornfields, shoulders of the blacktop, assorted peeling farmhouses, dust devils on the horizon. Maybe that’s why the slightest variation becomes high drama, the showdown at the O. K. Corral. In this part of Texas, barns and grain elevators titillate the eye the way a red hibiscus might do at home. Oil rigs seize attention like movie stars making a surprise appearance at a Diamond Shamrock. Anything higher than the highway takes on the visual importance of an Eiffel Tower. My senses yearn for variety, any variety. Earlier,

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Writing on the Wind when we stopped for lunch at Big Spring, I wallowed in the cold air, vinyl booths, and barbeque, all an indescribably delicious respite from the outside.Then it was back to our landlocked sea of maize flattened by sun and a juggernaut sky. This place crushes me. And another thing: when at last a town does appear, I never see it before we’ve reached the first stoplight. Somehow buildings seem to melt into their surroundings, so I have no sense of having left the country behind until a bank or post office suddenly materializes in my line of vision. Wind here is different too. Almost like something alive, it writhes through prairie grass, a giant serpent cutting oblique swaths through anything in its path, a somewhat sinister presence. Or, as Emily Dickinson writes, the wind moves like “A narrow Fellow in the Grass/. . . . a Whip lash/Unbraiding in the Sun” that makes her feel “Zero at the Bone.” I wish I had written that. Later. We reached Canyon at 6:00 .. or thereabouts and have settled in for the night. Sunset was dazzling. The big empty sky suddenly filled with flame, magenta, apricot. Light slid briefly down the fields in streams of rose and copper, flowed over everything in sight, and disappeared. The tints looked oddly tropical, something I would have expected to see at Cancun, not here, not following ten hours of grinding beige. During the last hour of our haul, I managed to scribble a few images for a poem on that most banal of subjects, the weather. Since I wrote these notes on the back of a WTAMU envelope, I guess I should transcribe them before they vanish into my handbag. So here are the bare bones:

Summer in West Texas In desert cities We seek dark, those spaces Without sun Find salvation In a single spindly mesquite Porches with the deepest overhang Porticoes that shut out everything But breeze The dankness of a stone arcade Anything to heal the heat.

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For here Light is extinction: A grove of charcoal trees The sky a line of fire Grass cross-hatched in gray and brown Like someone’s woodcut of the Final Judgment Dug into the landscape With a molten plow Heaven ending everything each day Except the memory Of green.

What a grim recital. Now that I am ensconced in a seriously airconditioned room with a king-size bed, West Texas doesn’t seem that forbidding. What’s the old joke about the frontier woman who went on a rampage after the loss of her rooster because it had been such good company? I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but like everyone else around here, I do know the rusty saw, “Texas is hell on women and horses.” Despite the hardships and isolation—or maybe because of them—this area of the Southwest continues to resonate in the minds of those who come here.The land has influenced creative outpourings of every genre, working on the imaginations of artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, Larry McMurtry, Bob Flynn, Buddy Holly, and Edna Ferber. I remember the first time I saw Hud: like millions of other women, I could feel the razor blue of Paul Newman’s eyes, even through the black and white cinematography. Even today, I can hear the screen door squeaking in the wind, see the herd about to be slaughtered. And then there was Giant. Who could forget that Gothic monstrosity of a house set in the middle of absolutely nothing, first cousin to the Bates homestead in Psycho? Or James Dean toiling doggedly to bring in his gusher and bring down the arrogant Benedicts? Or the slugfest in the diner, ironically orchestrated to the strains of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”? Enough of this. I’ve got to pack it in. June 14, 1997:This morning, we drove out to see Palo Duro Canyon, and I haven’t recovered yet. No one said anything to prepare me for the event. After rolling through twenty-something miles of the usual drab landscape, I could not register at first the sudden violent gash in the flat-

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Writing on the Wind ness, monotone plains sliced by a widening abyss of color—red, gold, orange, ochre. As we descended toward the canyon floor, jagged shapes, outcrops like puzzle pieces, seemed to jump out at us, almost like an hallucination. Rain had fallen recently, generating an explosion of wildflowers. Widow’s tears, vetch, and white poppies sprawled along the gullies. On the way back to the hotel, I started another poem, but this one is too embryonic to record. At least not yet. June 15, 1997, San Antonio: I’m back at home now, and everything looks strange to me. San Antonio had a thunderstorm while we were gone, and the resulting profusion of tangled vines and creepers, these layers and nuances of green, strike me as odd, almost suspect. In fact, I miss the miles and miles of nothing, the crisp geometric lines of the plains. Despite all the complaints recorded in previous entries, I found much to like during my forty-eight hours in Canyon and Amarillo and hope someday to return. From start to finish, the people of the Panhandle made us feel welcome and valued. As one colleague observed, “We are usually civil because out here all we have is each other.” I even enjoyed WTAMU’s Battle of the Bards, although I came in second. So what? I saw West Texas.

Genesis This essay grew from two of my long-standing preoccupations, journaling and travel. Although I began keeping my “official” journal about twenty years ago, the roots of this interest stretch back into childhood. Whenever anything important occurred in the family, I wrote about it. When my great-grandmother died at the age of 101, I recorded my reaction.When Mom took us to see the Grand Canyon, I posed with my sister on the South Rim (minus protective fences) for the obligatory snapshot before racing back to the Jeep to jot down my impressions. Later, I turned to the white pages of notebooks for insight into my often chaotic life: job changes, health crises, the adventures and misadventures of my two children, a tumultuous divorce. I also used the journal to ponder disasters and triumphs in the world outside: the Iran hostage crisis, Operation Desert Storm, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then there was travel. Perhaps because my widowed mother constantly sought new and better jobs, we moved often, back and forth across

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Texas, up and down the length of California. Packing, unpacking, settling in, and packing again set the rhythm of my first fifteen years, and in adulthood I continued this pattern, jumping at every chance to see something new. I yearned for faraway places with strange sounding names: Killybegs, Sorrento, the Galapagos Islands, Red Square, Machu Picchu. Not surprisingly, all these odysseys generated writing—journal entries, letters, postcards, and sometimes poems. Thus, when I was invited to read at West Texas A&M’s Summer Writing Program in 1997, the first things I packed were paper and pens. They came in handy, as all the way to Canyon I scribbled notes on what I saw while our Cherokee bumped along the highway and the sun turned us to metaphoric toast. I looked at, and wrote about, the vast emptiness of the landscape, its unforgiving heat, oil rigs and grain elevators on the horizon, occasional dust devils. I listed images for possible “place” poems, one of which I finished the next day. After my return to San Antonio, I added these materials to my other notebooks and for a time forgot about them. Then, in the summer of 2001, almost four years to the day after my visit to Canyon, I received a letter inviting me to submit a prose piece for Writing on the Wind. I dug out the appropriate journal entries and began working with them, combining genre expectations of both the essay and the journal. “West Texas Journal” was the result.

The poems of C A RO L C O F F E E R E P O S A have appeared or are forthcoming in The Formalist, Southwestern American Literature, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Borderlands, The Roanoke Review, Descant, Passages North, The Texas Observer, Concho River Review, and other journals and anthologies. She has two books of poetry, At the Border: Winter Lights and The Green Room, with a third collection, Facts of Life, in press from Browder Springs. She has conducted seminars in poetry and journaling for Gemini Ink and participated in the Borderlands Web Audio Project. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she also has received two Fulbright/Hays Fellowships, the first for study in Russia (1995) and a second for research in Peru and Ecuador (1999). Professor Reposa teaches English at San Antonio College and delights in running, swimming, laughter, travel, grandparenting, and every kind of music.

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Elizabeth Boyle (Aunt Hank) Smith                                        Janet Neugebauer O N A C R I S P AU T U M N M O R N I N G , wagons pulled into Blanco Canyon carrying the first permanent settlers to Crosby County, Texas. The date was November 14, 1878, and the settlers were Henry Clay (Hank) Smith, his wife Elizabeth, and their two children, twoyear-old George and two-month-old Leila, coming from the frontier town of Fort Griffin, where they had lived for several years. Elizabeth Boyle Smith was born on July 12, 1848, to Allan Boyle and Elizabeth Young Orr Boyle of the parish of Dalry, Ayrshire, Scotland, the youngest of eight children, five boys and three girls. They were raised on the Estate of Fleshwood, where their father had also been raised. Records do not indicate that the family had wealth; however, all of the Boyle children attended Blairmain’s Parochial School. In addition to the usual studies of that day, Elizabeth, who attended this school for seven years, received instruction each morning in the Westminister Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church. Her brothers received advanced instruction, and a brother, James, graduated from the University of Edinburgh. In 1867 John Boyle came to the United States, and he encouraged Elizabeth and three other brothers to join him in 1868. The four of them took a river steamer from Glasgow to Liverpool where they boarded the City of Paris, the fastest steamship at that time. The ship stopped at

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Elizabeth Boyle (Aunt Hank) Smith

Queenstown, Ireland, to take on additional passengers before crossing the Atlantic.The weather was favorable; however, when the ship passed near an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, Elizabeth returned to her room for a shawl. Seven days after departure, the City of Paris arrived in New York. The group looked around New York for three days before boarding a train for Palmyra, Missouri, where John lived. Elizabeth kept house, and her brothers took up work where they could find it. Brother Joseph found permanent employment with a friend of his from Scotland who owned iron pits in Illinois. The three remaining bothers decided to try their luck in Texas, where they heard that opportunities were better, and Elizabeth went along to keep house. They took a train to Dallas, arriving in September 1873, and traveled on to Fort Worth by ox wagon. Soon their sister, her husband, and three children from New Zealand joined them. Sometime during these years, Elizabeth’s mother died in Scotland, and her father also joined the family in Fort Worth. With Elizabeth in safe hands, her three brothers decided to move to Fort Griffin, a frontier town approximately 150 miles west of Fort Worth. The town, established in 1867, was located at the edge of a federal fort bearing the same name and enjoyed the benefits of a federal payroll. It also became a supply and hide-buying point for buffalo hunters on the Texas Plains. Fort Griffin was a pretty rough place in those days, as buffalo hunters, adventurers, and desperados of all sorts passed through. Most established businesses were saloons that specialized in gambling and other activities of the evening. Arguments were commonly settled with a sixshooter, and laws were enforced with a rope swung over a sturdy limb. Once again the brothers asked Elizabeth to come and keep house for them. Many years later in a letter written to Mrs. Phoebe K.Warner, that is now part of the Henry Clay Smith Papers, she recalled: Brother James came from Fort Griffin after Father and I by wagon to take us to Fort Griffin. I had never camped out by wagon. Indians were still in the country.We were nearly there.The last night out brother said we would camp and go on to the river early next morning to get breakfast.We had got our bedding in the wagon getting ready to start. It was still dark.We saw a lot of men on horseback riding toward us but could not tell who they were.We were sure they were Indians. Brother said “Sister you hide or

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Writing on the Wind they will steal you.” I told him there was no place to hide. Father had his gun so Brother was in the front of the wagon and Father and I on the other side.We thought sure it was Indians. Brother fired at them and shot the horse of the man in the lead.They called out that they would fill us full of lead so they come up to us and said that they were after a horse thief. Mr. Nagel had his fine race horse stolen.They thought we were the horse thieves.We were sorry that we shot his horse but they gave us a big scare too as we thought that they were Comanche Indians.They apologized seeing that there was a young lady and her father present. . . . You know there were plenty of Indians still in the country and I didn’t know what might happen to us. It seemed to me we were getting into a mighty wild country.

The remark was prophetic. Elizabeth spent most of her life “getting into mighty wild country” and taming it with her gentle strength. The Boyles arrived in Fort Griffin in late December 1873. Preparations were already underway for the New Year’s Eve Ball that was considered the social highlight of the year. Cowboys came from miles around as well as the officers from the post. Everyone had great fun dancing the breakdown, a rollicking folk dance. Elizabeth attended the ball and met a man named Henry Clay (Hank) Smith. His name was Heinrich Schmitt when he emigrated from Germany, in 1851, at the age of fourteen. Initially, he lived in Ohio with a sister and worked on a boat on Lake Erie. He Americanized his name to Henry (Hank) Smith before heading west to prospect for gold in Arizona. After serving in the Confederate and Union armies, Smith made his way to Fort Griffin in 1872 where he secured a government contract for hay. He was clerking in the sutler’s store when he met Elizabeth on New Year’s Eve 1873. “It was love at first sight,” according to Elizabeth, who remembered, “at first he came to see me every Sunday, then he came twice a week.” She kept house for her brothers until she and Smith were married on May 19, 1874, by Rev. J. M. Browning. They had to send to Palo Pinto, over one hundred miles away, to get a license because it was the nearest organized county. Most brides on the frontier were young, seldom older than fifteen, but Elizabeth was twenty-six, and her new husband was thirty-eight. Her maturity proved an asset on the frontier where self-confidence and ingenuity were essential. Elizabeth remembered receiving lots of pretty gifts, such as linen and

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silverware. General Buel of the fort gave her a silver butter dish because he thought she made fine butter. Elizabeth’s mother had taught her how make butter and cheese. The wedding itself was a social gala, for wedding celebrations in that era often lasted more than one day. Ranching families and cowboys from over the area, merchants in the town of Fort Griffin, and officers from the fort were in attendance. Hank continued clerking in the sutler’s store the first year they were married. The next year he built a hotel that he and Elizabeth operated for four years. On May 22, 1875, Elizabeth gave birth to a son named Henry A. Smith, but the child lived only five months. Sometime during the summer of 1875, the Smiths moved into their new hotel, which was said to be the best hostelry west of Fort Worth. Elizabeth remembered, “All kinds of people from every part of the nation stopped at our hotel; some were good and some were mighty bad. Cattlemen who drove herds from South Texas to Kansas stopped with us. They would send a man ahead to notify us of the number to be cared for.” She presided over the kitchen where her cooking skills became legendary, and the guests in her dining room relished visual as well as culinary treats. On Sunday she spread a beautiful table using the silverware, cutware, and fine china received as wedding gifts. Despite the rawness of the frontier, Elizabeth never lost the gentle refinement of her Scottish ancestry. In addition to a wagon yard and livery stable in back of the hotel Hank Smith operated a bar. He preferred not to call it a saloon because he considered it for the convenience of his customers who wanted a drink before dinner. It was not like the noisier saloons down the street; however, it paid off as handsomely as the saloons did. It was not uncommon for customers to pay more for drinks than they did for dinner and lodging combined. The livery stable also paid off handsomely. According to the Frontier Echo of February 16, 1877, the livery stable at the Occidental Hotel was patronized more than any other in town. The government payroll kept plenty of twenty-dollar gold pieces in circulation, and the Smiths made a lot of money in Fort Griffin. Two guests at the Occidental Hotel, a man named Charles P. Tasker from Philadelphia and an Irish lord named Jamison had a great impact on Elizabeth and Hank Smith’s life.These men were smitten with the romantic idea of establishing a great ranch in the West. Tasker claimed to be

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Writing on the Wind financially sound thanks to his millionaire uncle, a manufacturer in Delaware, who was backing him in this venture. Lord Jamison claimed to be providing his own share of the expenses. In 1876 Tasker and Jamison commissioned Smith to locate a suitable place west of Fort Griffin for their ranch.Very few men had seen more of West Texas than Hank Smith. He had been over the trail established by General Ranald MacKenzie during his pursuit of the Comanches that went northwest from Fort Griffin to Blanco Canyon. He knew that confining these marauding Indians to the reservation in 1875 removed a major barrier to settlement of the Texas Plains. Additionally, he understood that the extermination of the buffalo would destroy the Indians’ commissary so they would never again be able to roam the Plains. The greatest buffalo slaughter in Crosby County took place in 1875 and 1876, when hunters had hundreds of camps scattered over West Texas and in the breaks just below the caprock. Cured hides were taken to Fort Griffin by ox wagon for sale. No doubt Smith heard many stories from these hunters about the luxuriant grasslands that confirmed what he had seen. Smith and four other men came to Blanco Canyon in the winter of 1876 and stayed several weeks looking over the country. Their report to Tasker was favorable. After traveling to Blanco Canyon to see for himself, Tasker decided that was the place to locate his ranch. All of this happened during the era that big land and cattle companies were established in the West.Tasker acquired title to the acreage for his ranch through land scrip. He bought scrip to cover 2,560 acres, or four sections. When Texas became a state, it was allowed to retain ownership of its public lands, which became a major source of income for the state. After buying scrip, which usually went for fifty cents an acre, the owner had to locate vacant land and file for ownership. Even though one person could only purchase scrip for 640 acres of land from the state, scrip could be purchased from other individuals, thus allowing the buildup of large holdings. Tasker located his land in present-day Crosby County. Fine cattle and horses were brought in to become the foundation herd for this new ranch.Work was also started on a house. In the spring of 1877, Hank Smith and the masons from Fort Worth who were working with him returned to Blanco Canyon to begin work on a rock house. It was built of natural stone quarried about three miles southwest from the

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house, near the edge of the Plains. The stone was hauled to the site where it was dressed and the refuse burned into lime with which they made the mortar for laying the stones. The walls of the house were twenty-two inches thick. The outside dimensions of the house were as follows: forty feet long, nineteen feet wide, and eighteen feet high. It had three rooms downstairs and three upstairs, and faced southeast to provide a better view of the canyon. Lumber was hauled from Fort Worth by ox wagons and mules. They hauled buffalo hides down and lumber back to Blanco Canyon. Tasker named his new house Hacienda de Glorieta—The Glorious Estate. That was an appropriate name for the fine two-story rock house, rock barns, and corrals that were to be the ranch headquarters. While the work was going on, Tasker was having a high old time, gambling and spending money freely in Fort Griffin and in Fort Worth. In the meantime, Jamison became disgusted with Tasker and bailed out of the venture. The ranching project was abandoned the same year it was started, and Tasker skipped the country, leaving a sick wife in Dallas. After being chased all over Mexico, he was sent to the penitentiary for two years. The uncle, who was supposed to be backing him, refused to pay off his debts. Smith, among others, was left holding the bag. Smith had furnished Tasker with supplies and cash to the tune of eleven thousand dollars. Now all he could do was take over the house and ranch. Adding insult to injury, he had to pay an additional several hundred dollars to satisfy the mechanic’s lien against the house.The only way he could see to recoup his money was to move to Blanco Canyon. In his reminiscences published in The Crosbyton Review, Hank Smith described Charles Tasker as “a rattle brain and spendthrift.” Smith wrote: “In the fall of 1877, the writer moved to the ranch and finished work on the rock house, this being about all that was left to him as the result of placing too much confidence in the wrong man.” Descendants of Hank and Elizabeth Smith believe the final cost of the house was between $3,000 and $3,500. Compared to the humble dugouts that were typical of most pioneer homes, this was truly a glorious estate. One can just imagine Elizabeth’s joy over her husband’s misjudgment! At first sight of the house, Elizabeth must have thought it a castle. However, one thing had to be changed. Hacienda de Glorieta was far too pretentious a name for practical people like the Smiths. So beginning with

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Writing on the Wind their habitation, it became known as the Rock House. As the wagons pulled up to the house after their weeklong journey, Elizabeth’s head was filled with thoughts of making this a home for her family. Ultimately, she did more than that. In addition to making it a home, Elizabeth made the Rock House a meeting place for buffalo hunters, cowboys, and other settlers who soon moved into the area. Opening her new home to all who passed by helped chase away the specter of loneliness in a country that was open for more than a hundred miles in all directions.The nearest neighbor was twenty-five miles away. There were no roads, only a few trails. When traveling any distance from home, the Smiths had to take buffalo bones along to mark the way in order to get back. When other ranches were established, Elizabeth began caring for nearby cowboys, and anyone else, who got sick. One of the upstairs rooms with a big fireplace was reserved for visitors. This included any sick folks who needed help. At Fort Griffin she had learned how to care for the sick when she helped the two post doctors, Dr. Culver and Dr. Baird. These doctors were called when guests in the Occidental Hotel needed medical care. Buffalo hunters often stayed there, and it was common for them to develop blood poisoning from cuts on their hands and fingers. Many times amputation was the only way to save their lives. Before leaving for Blanco Canyon, Elizabeth bought a doctor book and asked Dr. Baird to prepare twenty-five dollars worth of medicines that she could use in her new home. Elizabeth said of the cowboys, “They were just as good to me as if I had been their mother or sister. When Mr. Smith had to go away to get supplies they would see that me and my little children were cared for.They got to calling Mr. Smith Uncle Hank and I Aunt Hank. Sounded funny to me as I had not been used to it.” Throughout West Texas they are known to this day as Uncle Hank and Aunt Hank Smith. The Smith family grew to include five living children, two of whom came with them from Fort Griffin. In 1881 another son, Robert Burns, was born. He had the distinction of being the first white male child born in Crosby County. Annie Josephine followed in 1883 and Mary Magdalene was born in 1887.When Bob was two weeks old, Elizabeth’s closest neighbor, Mrs. Campbell, came for a week-long visit. She lived twenty-five miles away on the Matador Ranch. By the time Mary was born, the nearest neighbor was two miles away. In 1879 Hank had the Rock House officially designated as Mount 124

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Blanco and opened one of the first post offices in West Texas. Prior to this, the nearest post office was in Fort Griffin, 175 miles away, and often months passed before anyone could go for the mail. Elizabeth was appointed postmistress. She got her bond in Fort Griffin and secured her commission on September 22, 1879, from David M. Key, Postmaster General. She served for thirty-nine years until that small post office was moved to the top of the caprock, southeast of Mount Blanco. Ultimately, even the post office at the new location was closed by the rural route system. At first the post office was the middle downstairs room in the Rock House; then a small building was constructed nearby when it was learned that a post office couldn’t exist in a personal dwelling. Initially, the mail was brought twice a week from Fort Griffin by horseback. Later when the railroad was extended to Colorado City, it was brought daily from there by buckboard. According to legend, a postal inspector rode in with the mail from Colorado City to check on the operation at Mount Blanco. He did not identify himself and went unnoticed among the other folks gathered there waiting for the mail. Elizabeth did not sort the mail. She simply put it on a table and allowed everyone to rummage through it and locate what was rightfully his.The inspector became angry and told her that her postal days were over because the way she was running a United States Post Office was unacceptable. Aunt Hank just shrugged indicating that was alright but told the inspector he would not be offered anything to eat and the closest place that he might find supper was Estelline, one hundred miles away. As the evening wore on and the inspector grew hungrier, he changed his mind and decided that she was doing a fine job as postmistress. Then he got his supper! As the country began to settle, nearby ranches sent someone to Mount Blanco for their mail and express. Aunt Hank became the express agent as well and collected all of the express charges for the mail carrier. At the time of her retirement, Elizabeth Boyle Smith held one of the longest records of postal service in the history of the United States Government. Aunt Hank believed that as a girl she had been fortunate to receive an education, and she was careful to see that all of her children got the same. Initially, George, and possibly Leila, attended the Quaker school at Estacado when it opened in 1882. Miss Emma Hunt was the teacher, and she is reported to have had six students that first year, including the two Smith children, neither of whom was six years old at the time.There is no 125

Writing on the Wind record of how many years they attended or with whom they boarded when school was in session, but it was common for children to board with families who lived near a school. Estacado was twenty miles from Mount Blanco. Also, it was not uncommon to allow children younger than six to start school if they appeared ready. However, Aunt Hank could not stand having her children away, and she decided to tutor them at home. According to legend, nearby children came to the Rock House to study with Aunt Hank also, giving her the honor of being the first teacher at Mount Blanco. By 1890 Mount Blanco had a school.The first teacher hired by the county taught at the Rock House for part of that year before moving into the new schoolhouse located about one-quarter of a mile west of the Rock House on the wagon road that went to Estacado. The new schoolhouse, a twenty by twenty-four-foot building, was painted white inside and outside. The eight pupils that attended the first year included four Smith children. In 1886, Crosby County was organized, and two months later the Texas Legislature approved the organization of the Thirty-Second Judicial District, which was comprised of the twenty-five counties surrounding it. Because these other counties were not yet organized, they were attached to Crosby County for judicial purposes and all district courts were held at Estacado from 1887 until some of the other counties were organized in 1889 and 1890. During district court sessions, even more folks than usual called on Aunt Hank’s hospitality. Many would get to the Rock House in time for supper and stay all night before going the final twenty miles to Estacado. When court was over, they would eat and spend the night again on their way home. In preparation for this, she always kept a supply of light bread, cakes, and pies baked ahead. She developed quite a reputation for baked goods. Many years later a granddaughter recalled for the newspaper, “I remember the wonderful bread that Grandmother Smith baked. She had everlasting yeast that she had made from hops.” Looking forward to baking day when there would always be hot rolls for dinner and supper, she added, “I just don’t believe I have ever eaten bread like Grandmother baked.” Homemade butter and wild plum jam topped it off. As Hank Smith entered the winter of his years, his health began to fail. He had helped others for so many years, but now he needed help. In 1906 the oldest son, George, and his wife, Sallie, moved into the Rock House. From 1880 until the turn of the century, the Rock House had 126

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been a favorite place for dances, picnics, and other social events. Now the music and laughter was replaced with the sounds of grandchildren. When the cowboys or visitors stopped, Uncle Hank regaled them with stories of days gone by. Erwin Smith and George Patullo were among the visitors who stopped, and they persuaded Uncle Hank to write his memoirs.They offered to publish them and, no doubt, include photographs by Erwin Smith. When only halfway through, Hank got sick and could not finish it. He also spent time reading, and when the weather was nice, he walked along the creek near the house where he picked mint for Aunt Hank’s hot tea. She never lost her love of hot tea nor her Scottish brogue. Aunt Hank, whose health was still good, stayed busy with her postal duties. Hank Smith died in 1912, and in 1914 George and his family moved into a home of their own. Elizabeth lived alone for the next two years, with her children checking on her often. After retiring from her job as postmistress in 1916, she began spending the winters with her daughter Leila, who lived near Ralls, and returning to the Rock House for the summer months. She also began recording her memoirs in bits and pieces in letters that she wrote to Mody C. Boatright, curator of the PanhandlePlains Museum in Canyon, Texas, and to his secretary, Hattie Anderson. Elizabeth also wrote a very long letter to Phoebe K.Warner,Women’s Editor for The Cattleman, that provides a good overview of her life. In 1923, Bob Smith moved back to the Rock House to be closer to his mother. Just before her death, Aunt Hank remarked that the hardest thing she ever had to do was adjust to being alone after her husband’s death. Even though he often had to spend time away from home during their marriage, “I had watched and waited so many times for his return,” she said, “and he never disappointed me, but now he never comes home any more and the days and nights of waiting seem so long and lonely.” After thirteen years of waiting, Elizabeth joined her husband, her lover, and her best friend. She died at the Rock House on June 5, 1925, and is buried beside Hank in the Emma cemetery. After his mother’s death, Bob began collecting the material that documented the life of his parents. In 1926, he presented over four hundred letters and other documents to the Panhandle-Plains Museum that are now available for scholars. In 1952, a fire, thought to have been caused by faulty wiring in the Rock House, destroyed all but the thick rock walls. A few years later, the 127

Writing on the Wind land on which the remains stood was sold to someone outside of the family. Even though only a shell remains of the Rock House that was so symbolic of the Hank Smith family, hardly a day passes in Crosby County without their name being evoked. For nearly ninety years, Aunt Hank has been a role model for young women. She is an inspiration for young brides adjusting to a new life, for mothers whose sacrifices will nourish a family and the community, and even for young women seeking a career in the business world. Her compassion, her inner strength, and her ingenuity are still a beacon in the twenty-first century.

Genesis Many times, when working with material about Crosby County, Texas, the story of Elizabeth Boyle (Aunt Hank) Smith surfaced, but it was always interwoven with the story of her husband, Henry Clay (Hank) Smith. Elizabeth would never have complained about that, but when her story stands alone, it provides an insight into how pioneer women dealt with this big, lonesome land called West Texas. The High Plains of Texas is not hospitable country. Generally, it is very cold in the winter, very windy in the spring, and very droughty in the summer. People had to adjust in order to survive. More often than not, pioneer women did more than survive, they thrived. Their spirit grew to fill the wide-open spaces, their determination became as strong as the wind, and they developed ingenious ways of coping with hardships. In the process these pioneer personalities became as colorful as the fire-like glow of a fall sunset. More of their stories should be winnowed out from that of other family members. When that happens, we will better understand how these pioneer women shaped a culture and a way of life that could thrive on this big, lonesome land.

J A N E T N E U G E B AU E R ,

an archivist at the Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University, has written about farming and ranching history. Additionally, she has collaborated with Walter McDonald, Texas Poet Laureate in 2001, on books that pair his poems with historic photographs from the Southwest Collection. She has received two citations for her books from the San Antonio Conservation Society and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

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The Art of Dipping Candles Judy Alter M Y M O T H E R D O E S N ’ T M A K E candles any more. Her candles used to be the smoothest and straightest in North Texas.They burned bright with an even flame and never smoked. Ma ran candles in the late fall, when Pa had killed a steer and she had rendered the tallow. She’d make more candles than we needed for daily use for the whole year, just so we could have them all around the house at Christmas. Sometimes, in the summer if she could find beeswax, she made a second batch, but beeswax was hard to come by. Ma knew just how much clay from the Red River bottoms to put in the kettle so the candles would have some color, and she knew how long to wait for the dirt to color the tallow and then settle to the bottom so that the candles wouldn’t be gritty. In front of our cabin Pa had built a stone pit just sized to hold the kettle above a fire, and Ma spent hours there, dipping a wick over and over again, hanging the finished candles to dry, admiring her handiwork when she was done. Sometimes she poured the hot tallow into a mold and it would set in a hour or two on a cold December day, but there wasn’t any art in that, she said. Ma liked to dip her candles by hand. “Mama, can I dip a candle?” “No, Elizabeth, you haven’t the patience yet to make it smooth and straight. Someday. . . .” I sat and watched and waited for the day I was grown enough to dip candles. To be able to dip a candle was the mark of a woman to me. It wrapped up in one skill all the things that a woman did, and I dreamt of

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Writing on the Wind the day I had a husband and children of my own to care for. When I was grown, I would dip candles.

Ma was dipping candles that December day when Pa had gone for supplies and Jeb came screaming across the prairie. “Ma! Ma! Indians! Indians!” he shouted, running so hard and desperate that I thought sure his lungs would burst. His eyes seemed near bugged out of their sockets, and his voice, just beginning to deepen, was now higher than mine. Any other time, I might have laughed at him for squeaking. “Mr. Belton says they struck the Simpsons and they’re headed this way.” He collapsed on the ground, his breath having completely left him. Jeb was fourteen and used to boast about what he’d do if the Comanche came near our house. Now his boasts had given way to sheer terror, and it was a terror that was catching. As I watched him approach, like watching a dream in slow motion, I felt my stomach lurch. Fear enveloped me—hadn’t we dreaded an Indian attack ever since Pa had moved us out to the banks of the Red River in 1866?—and I wanted to run and scream and do whatever I could to shake off that blanket of fear. If I expected Ma to be as frightened as I was, I was mistaken. Candle in hand, she whirled to look at Jeb. But there was no hesitation, no throwing her hands in the air, no instant of wondering what to do. Ma was in control, as though this moment was something she had been anticipating for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was calm and controlled. “Get inside, Elizabeth, and take Jessamine with you. Go to the attic. Quickly!” Her voice did what no amount of screaming and running would have done—it quieted my fear, and I did as I was told, grabbing two-yearold Jessamine, who whimpered at my roughness, and pulling her into the darkness of our cabin. It was a good wood cabin—Pa had sent to Fort Worth for the wood, when Ma said she wouldn’t spend more than one season in a dugout where bugs and dirt sifted out of the roof into the food. Behind me I heard Ma say, “Jeb, bring this kettle. Careful, don’t spill the hot tallow on yourself.” Jessamine and I peered curiously over the edge of the attic trap door while Ma closed the outside door to the house and threw the great

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wooden bar across it, ordering Jeb to climb the attic ladder and take the kettle with him. “Take this kettle up that ladder?” he asked incredulously, having regained his breath. There was no arguing with Ma. In that same deadly calm voice, she said, “Take it to the attic. Be careful.”Then she pulled the boards tight over each of the windows. Jeb labored up the ladder, having to use one hand to hold the kettle level while he pulled himself up the ladder with the other. A bit of tallow splashed on his leg, causing him to cry out. “Hush!” Ma ordered. He barely made it to the top and set the kettle down, with a sigh of relief, when Ma clambered up the ladder behind him. Once up, she pulled the ladder behind her, while we three watched silently. “Ma?” I asked. “Will the Indians . . . can they . . . will the door hold?” “Probably not,” she said calmly.“Now listen to me. It is very important that you do not move, do not make a sound if the Indians come near this house.” She paused and looked long and hard at each of us.“Jeb, you peek out that crack there and keep watch. Elizabeth, you tend to Jessamine. Give her that sugar tit and make sure she doesn’t cry. Rock her if you need to.” With those words, Ma set herself down beside the kettle, clutching it with both hands. I rocked little Jessamine until she slept while Jeb, less frightened now and more filled with the importance of his duty, peered through the crack in the roof boards. Ma sat by the kettle, her face expressionless, her hands still clutching. I wondered if the the kettle wasn’t hot next to her body. “Ma. . . .” She put her finger to her lips and looked sternly at me, so I hushed. Ma wasn’t much on discipline—Pa always saw to that, while Ma generally surrounded us with her love. It scared me more, now, to have her so grim and unrelenting, when all I wanted was for her to put her arms around me and tell me it would all be all right. She never did do that, the whole long day. I wanted to ask Jeb how he knew Indians were coming, and ask Ma if she thought Pa would be home soon, and . . . I just wanted someone, anyone, to talk to me. But we were quiet.

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Writing on the Wind It seemed to me we sat that way forever. My legs began to cramp, and I shifted position ever so slightly, causing Jessamine to wake and cry a little and Ma to give me another stern look.We probably hadn’t been there half an hour before Jeb, speaking so low we could barely hear him, whispered, “Here they come.Three of them. On horseback.” Ma nodded and then whispered her first words in a long time: “Our lives depend on how quiet you can be.” I could not see them, but I heard . . . their horses raced up to the house, then the hoofbeats stopped suddenly, and there was loud talking which I could not understand. The voices didn’t sound angry . . . more curious than anything, I guess.They stayed outside the cabin so long I was near desperate to ask Jeb what they were doing, but he kept his eyes riveted on the scene he saw through the crack, and Ma sat stone-faced, clutching the kettle. Then there was a knocking on the door, so loud it startled me and made Jessamine give a whimper. Ma turned the upper half of her body quickly, so that she stared at us, and I clamped a firm hand over Jessamine’s mouth while I found the sugar tit and gave it to her again. She sucked happily and quietly. I looked at Jeb, only to see that he was holding his nose, a desperate look in his eyes. Jeb was about to sneeze! I shook my head at him, as though to say,“You can’t!” and his shoulders convulsed but no sound came. Then I had to put my hand over my own mouth to stifle a fear-begotten giggle. Ma looked grim. The banging on the door kept on, and the next thing I heard was the splintering of wood. Then there was loud, masculine laughter and shouting, still in that tongue that none of us knew. Then came the footsteps . . . not loud, for they didn’t wear leather shoes like Pa, but still a tramping sound, accompanied by much talk.They were wandering about our cabin, knocking over the table, throwing crockery on the floor, laughing all the while. I thought about my doll, the one I kept on my bed, and wished I’d brought her to the attic with me. I looked at Ma. Her knuckles were white, clutching the kettle tightly, tipping it ever so little towards the trap door opening, though she’d put the board door over it.

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Then it came to me—Ma intended to pour that boiling tallow on the Indians if they discovered us. It had been her plan all along, a plan she probably formulated lying sleepless at night, worrying about the times that Pa was gone and she was responsible for her family. Candles were her pride, and candles would save her family. Ma didn’t have to pour the hot tallow on the Indians. Having done all the damage they could and taken all the food they could find—corn dodgers from our breakfast, flour, coffee, salt, and sugar—they departed. As I listened to their horses’ hoofbeats fade into the distance, I thought it was a good thing they hadn’t come tomorrow, when Pa was just back with enough supplies to help us celebrate Christmas, and I was grateful they hadn’t found the steer carcass that Pa had hung in the lean-to. Jeb watched intently long after the sound of the hoofbeats was gone, but at last he said, “They’re gone,” and then he added matter-of-factly, “we’d best go clean up the mess.” I started to cry, the relief from tension somehow bringing my fear to the surface. I just sat there, clutching Jessamine and letting big tears run down my cheeks while I sobbed quietly, my shoulders heaving. I knew Ma would come take me in her arms any minute. Instead, her voice was harsh when she said, “Quiet! They’ll be back!” “Ma!” Jeb complained, “They ain’t comin’ back.They’re gone.” I cried on, and Jessamine began to whimper, and all Ma did was clutch that kettle and command us to be quiet. Short of shoving her out of the way, there was nothing we could do—and we children didn’t dare do that. We knew something was wrong, terribly wrong, but she was our mother. So we sat the whole long day until dusk began to take away the light filtering through the cracks in the roof. Jessamine was hungry and fretful in spite of my best efforts to quiet her, and she needed to be changed desperately, which made me hate having to hold her. I myself began to need a trip to the bushes so badly that I squirmed from time to time. Jeb drummed his fingers on the board floor and wriggled in impatience, though I thought he, too, might have longed to run for the bushes. But Ma never moved, never loosened her hold on that kettle. “Here comes Pa,” Jeb said softly.

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Writing on the Wind Within minutes we heard the clop of the mules, the creak of the old wooden wagon, and then Pa’s terrified call, “Margaret! Jeb! Where are you?” His heavy boots thundered into the house. “We’re up here, Pa,” Jeb said. Still, Ma did not move. Jeb looked for a long minute, while Pa was downstairs demanding to know what happened and if we were all right. Shrugging hopelessly, Jeb went to the trap door, pulled it up and lowered the ladder. “You better come get Ma,” he said. Pa had to pry her fingers from the now-cold kettle and carry her bodily downstairs. Jeb followed and then held up his arms to take Jessamine from me. I had to bolt for that trip to the bushes, and while I squatted there I prayed that when I came back Ma would be her old self again, proudly telling Pa how she’d saved us from Indians. She never did tell him, and we had to do it for her, Jeb and I both babbling at once while Ma sat in the rocking chair where Pa had placed her and never said a word, never moved, didn’t even seem to recognize us. When at last the story had come tumbling out, Pa looked around at the mess the Indians had made—broken crockery, flour and sugar and salt spilled before they were stolen, blankets ripped off beds—and my doll flung into the fireplace, probably the cruelest blow of all to me—and then he went to kneel by the rocker. “Margaret, you saved our children.You . . . you are the strongest and most wonderful woman I know.” She smiled just a little and reached a hand out to stroke his beard. I thought that smile meant Ma was back to herself, but I was wrong.

It’s been a year now, and she still sits in the rocker. I cook the meals and clean the cabin and care for little Jessamine, but Pa says to give Ma time. “She’ll be all right,” he tells me. “She’s just had a terrible shock.” Pa has butchered a beef, and it’s time to make candles. I try, remembering what Ma said about patience, but my candles are lopsided, and they bend in the candlesticks instead of standing straight and tall. I want my Ma to come back and dip candles. It’s a fine art, candle-dipping is.

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Genesis This story is based on fact. At the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth, there is a cabin with a candle-dipping vat in front of it. In the last century, the cabin was in Parker County and was restored and moved to the recreated village.Today, the vat is used to demonstrate the art of dipping candles to visitors, particularly school children. But the story is told that one day the woman who lived in the cabin was alone with her younger children. Perhaps her husband had gone for supplies or was hunting. Her older son came running across the fields to the cabin, warning that the Comanche were coming. The woman herded the children into the attic and then pulled the kettle of hot wax up. She sat balancing that kettle while Comanche prowled through her house. The rest came from my imagination.

considers herself a woman of the American West by adoption. Born in Illinois, she has lived in Texas for over thirty years and traveled widely in the West. She is the author of over fifty books, fiction and nonfiction, many dealing with women of the West. Luke and the Van Zandt County War was named the Best Juvenile Novel of 1984 by the Texas Institute of Letters. Mattie won a Spur Award as the Best Western Novel from Western Writers of America.Two of her short stories about women in the West, “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance” and “The Art of Candle Dipping,” have won Western Heritage (Wrangler) Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance” also won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America. Alter is also the author of several nonfiction books for young readers, mostly about western subjects such as Rodeo! The Best Show on Dirt, The Santa Fe Trail, The Comanches, Meet Me at the Fair, Wild West Shows, and Extraordinary Women of the American West, and others. J U DY A LT E R

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Waiting for Gideon Prince Pat Carr T H E F I R E S H R A N K I N T O I T S E L F , and in another minute or two, the tiny irregular flames would blink out, would leave her in darkness and allow the chill to spread, but she didn’t stir from the chair to throw on another length of juniper. She didn’t have to look to be certain that more cedar layered the floor of the old ammunition packing case she used as a wood box—she always counted the exact number of logs she had of an evening, the exact number left for morning to edge out the night cold—and enough remained to build up the fire.Yet she sat motionless and merely watched as the charred wood broke into embers, split from the red center, and collapsed into the gray sift of ashes. She sat, seemingly unaware that the room grew cold or that her hands on the battered arms of the chair grew colder still as she waited. Something bumped the door, and she raised her head, stopped her breath to halt the wheeze in her throat. The gentle thud came again, and a dainty hoof tapped the porch boards. It was obviously one of the goats alerting her that it wanted in out of the cold. She strained to listen to something beyond the little goat, but at last she turned her stiffened neck back toward the fireplace and the final scarlet tracings of the fire. “There was no need to go out that door, Arvel,” she said. The mottled stones of the fireplace had stood the same, the flames burning low, almost going out in the same timid way the night she and

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Arvel sat waiting for Gideon Prince. An identical cloud cover had blotted the stars, darkened the hard packed ground, and an identical wind had clacked the brittle sage. That night a calf, rather than a goat, had nudged onto the porch. That night Arvel got up clumsily, stacked another log on the grate, and they’d watched the fresh log smolder and spurt arcs of fire from the bark, as if seeing the wood catch was important. Once she’d tried,“Maybe you ought to think about letting it go,” but Arvel hadn’t looked at her, hadn’t indicated he’d heard, and she’d stopped. Arvel was no great shot, and Gideon Prince would come with half a dozen hands anyway. A thousand meager fires totaled only three years’ worth of nights, and she’d stared into twenty times that many fires since that night. “But there was no need to go out that door,” she said again into the icy darkness. Arvel’s single declaration had been, “It’s my land. My pa staked it out above this canyon,” while his gold-bead eyes eased toward the slope that dropped to the rock bed of the river long since dried up, toward the strip of fenced land across the arroyo that lacked enough dry grass for even their bony, panting cattle. “But you ain’t your pa,” she’d said, and the gold-bead eyes had swung back, showing eyeballs woven with threaded veins. That was the first thing strangers remarked about Arvel, the thing that caught their attention whenever he looked directly at them—half the time making them forget their question—those bloodshot eyes like yellow bird eggs in a crimson nest. The red-gold of his eyes showed even in firelight, and when she repeated, “You ain’t your pa,” he looked as if he might say something, as if he might take offense at the implication he wasn’t half the old man who single-handedly held off a pack of bushwhackers. But then he glanced away without disputing that he indeed wasn’t his father. Arvel wasn’t the kind to challenge Gideon Prince to keep his distance and then fire a warning shot from the window the way his father had cautioned the raiders, and it was clear he intended to step outside to meet Gideon Prince and his men, intended to stand on the shrouded porch in full view, where Gideon Prince could gun him down any time he pleased. “But he’s got too much to lose now,” she said as if they’d discussed

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Writing on the Wind that possibility sometime during the waiting. “Maybe a few years back when his ranch was just getting started, when he was striving hard to slap that brand on whatever he laid his hands to.” She paused for a twitch or a muscle tremor from Arvel to show he was listening. That ridiculous brand Gideon Prince seared on everything he owned, a three-pronged fork, for the three converging rivers on his range, with the center prong embellished into a P. “Like something caught sideways on your pitchfork,” she commented dryly to him once, and he roared, his black eyes crimping shut with laughter, his dark hair swinging aside from his forehead. “Maybe five, six years back when the war was on, he’d a come with a troop and taken your land, but not now, not with the war ended and the state having a new governor and all. Gideon Prince—with all them medals for bravery—” she said sarcastically, “—ain’t about to risk jail for this piece a dry and dusty—” “Colonel Gideon Prince ain’t risking jail.” His eyes reflected the redgold flames. “He’s king out here, him and his Devil’s Fork Ranch.” A juniper log exploded, sprayed blazing cinders around the sooted hollow of the fireplace, and he waited before he added, “I got to defend what’s mine.” “Is defending what’s yours worth getting killed over?” He’d stared into the fire. When the calf thudded onto the porch, they both jumped, having been listening for horses, and Arvel got up in his ungainly way, went outside to slap the calf off into the scrub oaks. And later—she never calibrated quite how much later—when Gideon Prince rode up, she’d sat as she was sitting in the cold room and had let Arvel go woodenly out to meet him. “I’m coming,” he called, his voice not particularly loud, as he hitched his rifle against his hip without sliding the spotted golden-egg eyes in her direction. She listened hard then, too, and some of their talk had filtered through the wind that didn’t allow her to distinguish individual words or individual voices. Arvel had stepped off the porch, the conversation continued for a long time, and she’d sat and assured herself, “That’s all they’re going to do, gab out there in the dark. I didn’t have to worry about him doing anything foolish.”

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Then almost as an afterthought the two shots came. Two distinct shots, close together, having none of the urgency such shots might be expected to have, being almost casual as if they hadn’t really been important after all. And then there was more conversation, and she’d waited, not getting up even when Gideon Prince came in. “It was self-defense, Hadi.” He stopped in the doorway, and the fire behind her had played over him as if he stood in the middle of it. His leather boots, belt, holster, and vest, his black eyes and swatch of black hair flickered scarlet with it, and he shimmered against the night, mingled black and red. “Is he dead?” “It was self-defense, Hadi. He raised that rifle. My men saw it plain.” “You’re a fool, Gideon Prince.You had no call to shoot him.” “He aimed that damned rifle right at my chest.” “You’re a fool,” she said again, the last words she’d ever spoken to him. “You always were a damned fool,” she said into the cold air. Even when he’d deeded her the shack at the edge of the canyon and enough arid land to keep the goats, he’d been forced to do it through his foreman, an embarrassed man with a harelip that constantly grinned no matter what the occasion.“He don’t have to, Hadi. He bought the land fair at auction when you didn’t pay the taxes, and he don’t owe you a thing.” She’d only stared at him stonily from the porch and held out her hand for the deed. Three years later when Gideon Prince sent word he was dying and needed to see her, she’d said a flat “No,” to that same foreman who gaped and grinned involuntarily. “But he’s dying, Hadi.” She’d merely shaken her head, not repeating the “No” that might accidentally come out a “Yes” and bring her to look down into his devil’s dark glowing eyes. The foreman had ridden away, sweat soaking the back of his shirt, and within two days more, Gideon Prince was dead. Everyone had gone to the funeral, but she hadn’t, telling herself that Rachel might hold the services with an open casket, being one of the Beltings who did that sort of thing, all pomp and show and no feeling or sub-

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Writing on the Wind stance.“Which is why Rachel Belting Prince couldn’t keep her husband at home in the first place.” People came by, one, two at a time, to describe the ceremony, telling her how the Deputy Governor had attended and said some remarks about Colonel Gideon Prince being such a valued man in the state, and she’d listened and nodded as if it wasn’t important. For a while she’d gone to the graveyard, far from the big house, to gaze down at the headstone with that same ridiculous brand carved into it—the only thing Gideon Prince owned at last—but after a few years, weeds choked out the plot, dirt sifted up, finally obliterating everything but the curve of marble and the name GIDEON PRIN, and there seemed little point any longer in walking out to look at it. That was about the time Rachel and his boys moved away, and as she sat in the tiny shack overlooking the canyon, people also came to tell her about the grand furniture being sold out of the big house, about parcels of land being bought up one at a time, and then more of them at once, until at last the final sections went to a railroad company. “I hear, Hadi, they figure on laying track right through the south forty, making the house a hotel for trainmen,” and she’d nodded. “That’s what it come to,” she said as she’d said it many times before as she’d sat in the darkness. “That’s what all your land grabbing and your self-defense killing and all that branding of what you thought you owned come down to, some trashy railroad hotel.” But she’d said it so often that no heat remained in the words any longer. “I remember the night you even laughed about putting that brand a yours on me,” she said. Since she rarely voiced that memory aloud, it came out stronger. “That first night we spent together. I’d a liked to see you try that kind a nonsense, Gideon Prince.” Her tone was flat, but she smiled, then grinned outright, her old face puckering with the effort, her dry lips cracking in the black room. “You always fancied yourself a rapscallion, thinking yourself such a man with the ladies, laughing, calling yourself the Prince a Darkness with your arms tight around me there by the springs. But you always were a fool about any woman who could see into you and stand up to you. We were good together, you and me. But you had no call to shoot Arvel. He never knew.”

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But as she said it, the statement and its certainty faltered. “Arvel never knew about us,” she said again, testing it in the darkness, listening closely to her own wavering words. Had Arvel suspected and gone out to get shot, defending his own, as he stubbornly said, because of her and Gideon Prince? “Or is it just that it happened so long ago that I ain’t remembering it right?” she murmured. The scene of the two of them beside the fireplace, waiting, rose with absolute clarity. Arvel had gone out and talked, the two shots had come, and Gideon Prince had walked into the shack to her that last time. And the final words she said to him eddied around her as if she were saying them aloud. Gideon Prince hadn’t been closed in like Arvel, guarding what he thought, or suspected, behind bloodshot yellow eyes, and disbelief had washed over his dark face as he’d stood in the firelight. He’d watched her a moment before the realization had flooded into his dark eyes, the realization that he could never return. And along with it came the certain knowledge that the killing had done it. “We coulda gone on like before even if you bought up the land and Arvel moved away, if only you hadn’t shot him,” she said calmly.“I’d a done anything for you.You’ll never know how I missed you since,” she added as calmly, having said that many times as well in the solitary nights. “This piece a land was worthless, that dry river and that useless canyon running right smack through the center. And Arvel hadn’t been worth shooting since he was nineteen years old. But you couldn’t see that, could you, Gideon Prince? You couldn’t see that all the killing was spineless, that sparing woulda been more manly.” Her ancient hands lifted, dropped again to the arms of the ancient chair. “But then, you always were a damned fool.”

Genesis While I was reading in Civil War history for the stories in Our Brothers’War, I became more and more aware that the war had spawned the outlaws and the violence in the West during Reconstruction. I wanted to illustrate that point somehow in fiction and to make the conclusion that

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Writing on the Wind nonviolence is the more heroic path. I realized I was working with loss, and when on an outing from El Paso, we passed a desolate shack beside a canyon, I decided I needed that forbidding setting for what I’d conceived of as a very West Texas story.

was born in Wyoming but grew up in Texas. She has a BA and MA from Rice University, a PhD from Tulane University, and has published eleven books—among which are The Women in the Mirror, winner of the Iowa Fiction Award, and a seminal archeological study of Mimbres pottery, Mimbres Mythology, and nearly a hundred short stories in such places as The Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories. Her twelfth book, If We Must Die, a novel based on the Tulsa race riot of 1921, was published by TCU Press in September 2002. Among other prizes, she has won an NEH and the Texas Institute of Letters Short Fiction Award. PAT C A R R

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Cash and Doll’s Golden Anniversary Donna Walker-Nixon F I R S T B E A M S O F DAY shimmy across the bedroom floor. The chiffonier that belonged to Cash’s mother—when I detect its shape, then I’ll clutch the night stand and scour it with my hands in quest of my glasses, and I’ll quiver as I place one foot in front of the other as I make my way to the toilet. When Cash’s mother passed, he determined that he got the chiffonier before his other siblings. Even though Cash and I were never blessed with children to inherit what we leave behind, he would not hear of letting his sister’s daughter have the chiffonier. His mama promised it to him, and there was no use my trying to change his mind. With the first rays, I scoot myself to the toilet. Trying not to make a sound and disturb his slumber, my shin slams against the top of his sizetwelve boots that he arranges carefully each night in front of the chiffonier. I muffle the pain I feel arching into my spine. Cash won’t allow me to purchase the over-the-counter calcium tablets that the doctor says I need to head off osteoporosis. What’s more, Cash says it’s a waste of electricity to turn the light on at night, and he denies me even the smallest of night lights. “Woman,” he commands when I beg with my eyes, “we wouldn’t have what we have today if I’d let you run things.”When he barks, I question, what do we have? No children. Over a million dollars in the bank. Money saved over years of doing without, holding back every penny from his teacher’s salary.

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Writing on the Wind But today, our fiftieth wedding anniversary, we celebrate. My nephew Tommy and his wife Darlene will host a reception in the Papagallo Room of the Savings and Loan. Cash’s students and their parents will toast us with lemon-lime Jell-O punch. I’ll endure once more the stories of students and parents as they credit him for teaching them algebra at Downs Creek Community School. When they took the bus from the country school to the high school in Lindsey near Abilene, they didn’t have to study hardly a lick. He’ll lap up the attention, just as he laps up everything. I’ll sway at his side, smile, and grasp his arm while he calls me his Little Doll. I can’t say what we have to celebrate, but that’s just me, and the hours of waiting for the dark shadows to become crimson enough for me to clear my bladder. He wakes, not because of any noise I’ve made, and he stirs, reaching across to my bed, looking for me, but I’m not there. I know from habit that’s what he’s doing now as I hear the sheets rustle; fifty years married to one man and you memorize his habits. He bellows, “Doll, where are you? Where have you gotten off to?” I yell from the toilet, “Here, dear. Here.” “Where the hell’s here?” He mumbles under his breath, curse words that he would not utter in front of his students, even if most of them are grown and in their thirties now. “You know here doesn’t mean a damn thing.Where the hell are you?” he asks again, his impatience mounting. “The bathroom,” I answer. “I hope you didn’t turn the light on and waste electricity.” Today, girls pack their bags when a man acts like that. Not in my day. Women were taught to “dance with the one who brung them,” and I’ve been dancing his dance for fifty years now.You don’t leave a good provider. You just don’t do that. So I respond, “No, Cash, I didn’t.” “Good, Doll.” A bruise forms on my left shin where I kicked his boot. I rub my leg and hope that it won’t show under my hose for the reception this afternoon. From the bedroom, I hear him cussing again. “What did you do with my boot? Can’t you leave my things alone?” I want to tell him his boot would be where he left it, if only he’d let me buy a little night light to guide me to the toilet, but there’s no reasoning. So I scurry to the bedroom, grab his boot, and say, “Here, Cash.” “What was it doing over there?”

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“I must have kicked it when I went to the toilet.” He examines his boot to make sure that I haven’t tarnished it. Tommy presented them to him at Christmas last year. Every morning Cash scrubs and polishes them like they’re something of value.“Real ostrich,” he proclaims proudly and whistles when he tells me how much Tommy must have spent for them. “Not that I think they’re worth it.” He mumbles, but Cash takes all presents and gives little in return. Tommy’s courting us; he figures if anyone has a right to all of our money, he does, especially since we nearly raised him. That wasn’t my idea. We tried for years to conceive, but then the doctor said it would be highly unlikely for me to carry a baby to term. My sister Essie had four children of her own, and when Tommy the fifth was born, Cash declared him ours. Cash never had room in his heart for Essie’s other four, although I loved them all equally. But Tommy, born just after the doctor told me it would be highly unlikely for me to ever conceive, spent half of his boyhood with us, especially summers.

Darlene rattles on. “Aunt Doll,” she wheezes, and I can detect the Lady Lights on her breath that she is careful to extinguish before she gets out of her baby blue Volvo. Once I discovered her spraying her throat with breath deodorant before she knocked; she insisted the black stick that she shoved in her purse was the inhaler that the doctor gave her for her sinus infection. Cash doesn’t cotton to women smoking, and Darlene knows he would rewrite his will if he knew that Tommy’s wife smokes. I’m not sure that Cash has that much against smoking; he just thinks it’s a waste of money. Tommy smokes too, I’ve an idea, but you couldn’t prove it by me, just the way his hands have a yellow tinge to them. When Darlene sees Cash, she primps her harsh red hair and asks, “Well, Uncle Cash, as I live and breathe.” I have yet to figure out why she says those words every time she sees him. Then she adds, “Don’t you get handsomer by the day?” Never mind the fact that he lost all his front teeth to chewing tobacco twenty years ago, which he insists has been his only vice, forgetting the incident with the bottle that he put me through in 1945. His eyes twinkle, like they do every time Darlene lights up his space,

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Writing on the Wind and he pushes back a shock of his steel gray wavy hair that keeps moving from the position that he places it so that he can hide his bald spot.“Thank you, thank you,” he sounds like a schoolboy who has a crush on the teacher. “Are you folks ready for your big day?” She looks at my hair, and I know she sees the matted spots and wonders why I haven’t made an appointment with the beauty shop. But Cash would have a fit. He believes women waste money primping. Darlene would know that if she really cared, and she almost graduated from beauty college before she got pregnant and had to marry Tommy. “I must look a fright,” I tell her, hoping that maybe she’ll offer to help me pretty up for our celebration, but she’s more interested in Cash and our money than in me. “Nothing a little trip to Mada’s shop wouldn’t cure.” “We don’t have money for those frivolities,” Cash declares. She nods, again not offering, and finally I decide it’s also my money she and Tommy will inherit when we pass. So I ask,“Would you be willing to set my hair and comb it out for me?” She taps her fingers on the face of the Rolex that she made Tommy give her for Christmas last year. If Cash knew how much money Tommy spent on that Rolex, I think he’d change his will. For Cash, spending money on boots that can be worn and used is one thing; spending money on an expensive watch when a Timex works just as well is different. I know she’s about to say no, and I say,“You do want your Aunt Doll to be beautiful on her one day of happiness, don’t you?” I haven’t lived with Cash for fifty years and not learned how to manage people. “Sure, sure,” she answers and taps the floor with her foot. I can tell she must be having cigarette withdrawal. I offer to wash my hair, and I ask her if she’s got some of those electric rollers that people use today. She has some at home, and she volunteers to drive up the road to get them for me.

An hour later,Tommy lunges in the front door, acting more like Cash than my family. “Darlene took one of her sick headaches, and she’s resting up.” He winks at me and adds, “She won’t let you down, though, Aunt Doll. She’ll be here to pretty you up.” His crusty voice sounds more like Cash

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than it does my family. We thrived on language—verbs, especially. We scoured the dictionary to discover new verbs to describe our actions, but Tommy takes after Cash, who taught grammar to his students as if it were a mechanical exercise like the algebraic formulas that he had his students learn so early. Grammar, Cash saw a partial use for, but poetry and literature, heaven forbid. Tommy emulates Cash’s speech patterns as he thrusts the electric rollers at me and says, “Here. Darlene said you’d know what to do.” The problem is, I don’t know what to do. Plug in the contraption, swirl pieces of limp hair around the irons, and pray that the final result will be curls. So I leave Cash and Tommy to talk about “man” things: how much rent the Carletons are behind. And I plug the Clairol Fitness Center into the wall next to the dresser, and I wait, praying that Darlene will come to my rescue. I close my eyes and try to picture a time when Cash’s actions pleased me, but there is no time. Thirteen-year-old girls don’t know their own minds. My papa and brother Tom—the one Tommy was named after—cut cedar on the Oates place at Candies Creek, and after that he took employment at the cotton gin. Papa worked hard all of his days just to put food on the table, and that year I started school late with my sisters and brother William. My brother Tom stayed out to help Papa, but the rest of us began the year in October after all the other students had a good two-months head start. The day Mama went with us to enroll, she called me aside and said, “Dolly, this may be the last year that we can afford to let you stay in school. Next year we’ll have to find work for you, too.” I knew she had entertained offers from two families already for me to clean house and cook for them, but she and Papa both wanted us to have as much education as they could afford to give us. And then we went into the school; Cash had graduated from the eleventh grade two years earlier. He had gone to the teacher’s college in Canyon and passed the teacher’s examination. In those days, we only had eleven grades, and if a person could pass the teacher’s test, he could go straight from two years of college to the classroom, and that’s what Cash had done. That first day, he didn’t pay much mind to me and my sisters, but he examined William like the cattle he now buys at the county auction barn. So much so that Mama told me later she wondered if Cash was one of

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Writing on the Wind those men who like boys; we didn’t use the words gay or homosexual back then. Finally, Cash began talking to William, as if Mama didn’t exist. “Did you ever play any basketball, Boy?” William answered, “Can’t say as I have.” “With your height, you could become our prize player.” Mama tried to explain to Cash that we had come to school to get what education we could, not to play games. Cash went right on talking to William. “In two weeks, we play Carothers Springs. I can whup you into shape by then, if you have any talent whatsoever.” Nothing Mama said had an impact on Cash, and for the next two weeks, while the rest of the school studied math—which was just about the only subject Cash took an interest in—William shot goals and learned to take the ball away from Everett Douglas. Mama didn’t think too highly of Cash. Papa and Tom worked such long hours at the cotton gin that they didn’t have time to notice what the rest of us did.The only thing besides math that Cash cared about teaching was Civil War history, and I remember his tirades against President Lincoln, especially when he got caught up in telling us that Lincoln never meant to free the slaves. Then Cash would cite a letter that the president wrote in which he said colored people lacked intellect to control their own lives, and each time Cash made those comments, I sat with my head down, reading the poetry of Wordsworth that I discovered in an old book in the little storage closet that passed for a library. Cash didn’t pay any mind to me or my sisters, just William, who became the star player for the Candies Creek Badgers. In the spring, tragedy struck. Tom came home each day weaker and weaker, and at first we thought he had a cold, but then he got so he coughed all the time, and then he choked. In the end we couldn’t afford to pay for a doctor, and since William was Cash’s star player and he was afraid Papa would have to pull William out of school next, Cash asked Doc Lewis to come check on Tom. “We can’t afford it,” Papa said. “And there’s no way we could ever pay you back.” “No need,” Cash said. “Just get your boy well. That’s all the pay I need.” With those words, Papa thought Cash hung the world in its orbit. And I, too, began to have a higher opinion of him. The doctor came too 148

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late. To this day, I remember how he wiped his face with his handkerchief and said, “You should have called me sooner. This boy has the typhus, and all you can do is make him comfortable and pray.” Within two days, we lost Tom.There was no money for a funeral, and again Cash came through for the family. “It’s a shame when good folks can’t afford to bury their own,” he said as he talked Johnny Dwyer’s father into helping with the funeral expenses. The next school year, Papa said we had to pull up stakes and move, and Cash didn’t want to lose his star player, so he began to court me. At first, I didn’t know what he was up to. He didn’t like teaching poetry and reading, though he could do an adequate job with grammar, since to him, it was like the puzzles he taught students to solve in math. More and more, he began to rely on me to explain what poems meant and to help the younger ones with their reading. And when Papa said he thought it was time for the family to move to near Waco, where there was sure to be steady work picking cotton, Cash couldn’t stand the thought of losing his star player and his teacher’s aide. Each night he came over to the house and brought supplemental food for Mama to fix for him and for the rest of the family.Then one day, he talked to Papa, not me, and asked for my hand in marriage. Papa called me out to the porch, and he said, “This young man wants to marry you, Dolly.” He asked if I had any objection, and I was fourteen, too young to object.Within a month we married. Not as much fanfare with the wedding as we are now having with this fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. Cash took me to the county clerk’s office to get the license, and Mama came along to sign for me. The next Sunday, Cash had the Baptist preacher cut his sermon short to do the ceremony, and we spent the night in Cash’s room that he rented from his Aunt Cordelia. Within a month, Papa and the family moved on to pick cotton, and William moved with them, but then when basketball season started, he moved in with us. First we were happy. He didn’t have his degree, and each summer he went to school in Canyon to pick up a few courses. It took him all of twelve years, but he finally got the degree. Really, that degree was as much mine as it was his. I did all the work; the only part he played was passing his math classes. For all the work it was, helping Cash with his schoolwork during the 149

Writing on the Wind summer provided my only diversion from the sameness of our life. I relished opening his books each summer, reading about people and places that I would never hope to see in my entire life. During those summers, life sprawled out in front of us like a bright canvas, waiting for us to discover it. Especially in the literature courses that Cash took. One summer in particular, he studied the classics of British literature. Each day he came home, propped his book on the table, and proclaimed, “Pure garbage. I don’t see how this stuff is going to make me a better teacher.” I picked up the book and started to read the most beautiful words I had ever seen—poetry, the real stuff of my life. John Keats died at twentyfive, but what he wrote about discovering poetry in the dregs of life made my life with Cash at least bearable. Somehow in the midst of ugliness and distortion, John Keats latched on to beauty. A beauty stark and broad and vast like the Palo Duro Canyons, a beauty that Cash took for granted, a beauty that I wish now I could recover in my life. After that summer ended, I hid the book from Cash to keep him from selling it to a friend of his who would take that same class in the fall during the regular semester. Five years ago, he found the book when we were cleaning up for a garage sale, but so many years had passed that he had completely forgotten anything he might have learned about Keats, Shelley, Browning, and the others. “This won’t sell for much, but we might as well get rid of it,” he said. “No, we can’t. It’s poetry.” “That’s not useful,” he said and moved the book to the make-shift shelves that he had placed on the front lawn. Some high school girl paid a quarter for the book before I could rescue it from the shelves. And it’s at those times that I catch myself reliving the times when Cash disregarded all of my feelings, and I want out, out of this time and place. Even an old folks home would provide more pleasure than this life I endure with Cash, I tell myself. I hear a rustle at the door, and then before I see her, I detect the distinct aroma of Darlene’s Lady Lights. She opens my bedroom door without knocking and pronounces with her raspy voice,“I thought you might have at least set your hair by now.” “I can’t seem to master these new inventions,” I try to explain. “Not much different from the old,” she announces and begins to pull at my thinning hair with a comb. For all her impatience, she can work mir-

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acles with a comb, brush, and a few rollers, and within twenty minutes she has transformed me—as much as a sixty-five-year-old woman can be changed—into a passable beauty for this day’s festivities. When she presents me to Cash for his inspection, at least Tommy has the good sense to whistle and say I’m the living incarnation of his grandmother. Cash glances quickly at his watch and says we’ve got to get the lead out if we expect to arrive at the Papagallo room anywhere near the time our reception begins. But we all know Cash and his way of distorting time—we’ll be at least forty-five minutes early. Tommy takes Cash’s arm and guides him up the stairs, ignoring me in the process. Darlene has gone ahead to take charge with the caterer; I think it’s just her excuse to slip in a cigarette before the afternoon starts. Cash snarls, “These golderned parties, just for women to show off.” I don’t have anything to show off, I think. A balding, gray-haired cowboy with a wide grin and a huge belt buckle shoves the door open and blinks as he clears his eyes from the sun. Always quick to recognize his favorite students, Cash grins and says, like Darlene,“Why, Danny Craig, as I live and breathe.” The boy slaps Cash on the back and responds, just like his mind was a car with its gas gauge on empty when Cash funneled liquid knowledge into it, “You were the best teacher Downs Creek ever had. I learned more math from you than in the three and a half years I spent in Lindsey High.” Then he apologizes for coming so early, but he explains he drives the bread truck and is scheduled to make a run, but he wanted to come by and give his regards. “It’s your kind that make teachers proud,” Cash responds, forgetting that little Danny Craig dropped out of school when his girlfriend got in the family way. I remember the real little Danny Craig, not the cropped memory that Cash wants to create. We lived in the teacherage at Downs Creek, a hundred yards from the little two-room school, and I heard the children at play. There was a game they played that Danny Craig helped to invent. Him and Junie Dee Small. A Mexican family came to work on the Henson ranch.The oldest one started first grade the second year we were at Downs Creek. Danny Craig and Junie Dee Small changed the rules of the chase game they played at recess. Instead of having someone who was it, they

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Writing on the Wind changed so that the child who was it had Johnny Messy Skin—as if it were a disease that they all wanted to avoid. We didn’t have many Mexicans in the Panhandle back them, and the children didn’t know how to act. Each day, I heard them in sing-song unison yell,“You’ve got Johnny Messy Skin. Stay away from me.” Cash heard every word they sang at the poor little boy, but he didn’t stop them. I told him about it, and he just said, “Kids will be kids. Let me tell you what we did way back when I was in school way back when.” He told me about a boy who played with dolls. “We taught him the long and straight of it,” he said as he ended. So I well remember Danny Craig. He flashes a grin at me, and I notice that one of his front teeth is missing. Cash slaps his hand across Danny’s belly and says, “Putting on some, aren’t you.” “Yes, sir,” Danny gloats. Without any prompting, he wipes his forehead with his handkerchief, makes a comment about the stifling summer heat and how 1980 has been the hottest summer on record with going on sixty days of 100 plus degree temperatures. And then he adds, “I’ve got to tell you this one. Remember that Mexican family that moved here?” Cash nods, and Danny continues. “Well, we had this game.” “Like chase,” Cash recites. “Where the one that was it had Johnny Messy Skin.” “How’d you know about that?” Danny asks in awe of this old man who kept his secret, maintained his prejudice, colluded in the torturing of a little boy who didn’t know enough English to recognize what they were doing. In a flash, I recreate that little boy in my mind: sobbing into his hands because his parents couldn’t afford so much as a cheap handkerchief, not understanding the words, but knowing the intent. I cry inwardly for the boy, like the children I never bore, I cry for him. “Remember the time that Mexican kid lost my glove, and you made him pay for it?” “Every week a quarter until he paid you what it was worth.” Cash’s eyes pulsate in quick throbs. He licks his lips before he starts to laugh, relishing again the fear that he must have instilled. “Yeah, and at first the wetback wouldn’t own up to it, but you got him to confess. You kept us all out on the playground and said no one could go back in, never mind that the sun beat down on us, until the crim152

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inal owned his crime.You kept reminding us that no one can abide a thief and a liar. Finally, Bobby Joe Hanks remembered that the last person he saw with my glove was the Mexican kid.” Danny’s eyes pulsate with the same quick throbs as Cash’s, and I read in the paper four years ago that Bobby Joe Hanks went to the penitentiary four years for robbing a SevenEleven in Abilene. “You can’t let his kind get by with a thing.That’s what’s wrong with our country today.We don’t make people own up to their behavior,” Cash proclaims as if he has cornered the market on moral values. I never heard this story before, but I remember a time just after we married when Cash came home from school and I had spent the afternoon making tomato relish from some tomatoes that a neighbor gave me from his garden. Cash accused me of buying the tomatoes from the store, when I should know we could not afford extras. I could say or do nothing to get him to believe me, and then he raved at me for at least an hour, saying how I’d bring him to the poor house yet. “Women, the downfall of many good men,” he yelled and cursed. I couldn’t stand my own against him, how could a little six-year-old boy? In my mind, I see that little boy, hiding in shadows, ducking his head, afraid to make a sound. Once, I noticed that the soles of his old black tennis shoes flapped when he walked, and he didn’t have socks. I knew what the sand and the winter could do to his feet and tried to convince Cash to talk some of the parents into buying the boy some shoes. Cash responded, “Won’t do no good. Mexicans don’t take care of their things.” The boy’s parents couldn’t make ends meet, and Cash coerced that poor child to pay for a glove that Bobby Joe Hanks must have taken in the first place. Cash shakes his head, pushes back the shock of gray hair that falls forward, and pronounces again for emphasis, “Some might condemn you for taking food from the mouths of the poor. But we all know, you let them get by with something once. . . .” “You might as well forget about the rest.” I know that I might as well forget about the rest of this day, the rest of my life. I will not endure another moment in this room, observing Cash as he feigns that these celebrations are more for women than for men. I’ll only win a battle, not a war; no one wins a war with Cash, but this small battle means more than swaying at his side, smiling glibly up at him, knowing that people believe our relationship is rock solid. Instead of swaying at 153

Writing on the Wind his side, I sway to the floor and exclaim, “It’s my hip.The doctor predicted I might have problems. I think it’s broken.” And maybe, it is. Maybe, the doctor will pronounce me too feeble to live at home, and he’ll remove me to the nursing home, which Cash will pay for out of our hard-earned million dollars.

Genesis Many of my short stories take their roots in the community where I grew up.The one-room country school is quickly becoming a thing of the past. My grandmother started teaching at one of the schools in Silverton, Texas. She and many other teachers of that time taught during the school year and went to school during the summers to complete their degrees. This fact has intrigued me for years. I also attended a country school when my parents moved from Fort Worth to a rural community. When my mother went to enroll my sister and me in school, there was an Hispanic boy in the first grade who was crying about being parted from his parents. My mother immediately knew that prejudice existed; I didn’t. Mother told my sister and me to, under no circumstances, laugh at the boy. I couldn’t comprehend what she was talking about, but soon I discovered that there was a world of prejudice of which I was unaware. Many of these small slivers came together to help me formulate the story.

D O N N A WA L K E R - N I X O N ,

a former professor of English at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, grew up in a small community near Stephenville,Texas. Most of her stories, including “Cash and Doll’s Golden Anniversary,” take their genesis from that community and from her connections to West Texas. She also credits much of her support as coming from her husband Dr. George F. Nixon, who passed away in January 2002. She is the founding editor of Windhover, and she served as co-editor of the New Texas series with James Ward Lee from 1999 until 2002. She declares herself now officially “quitted” in order to write full time. During her teaching career, she was one of fifteen professors across the state of Texas to win the Piper Professor award. During her “quittedness,” she has founded Langdon Review, a new literary arts magazine, with Marilyn Robitaille from Tarleton State University.

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To Reap,To Thresh Jan Epton Seale W E S L E Y WA N T E D A C O M B I N E on his tombstone, not necessarily one with the John Deere sign on it, nor green and yellow like the miniature his wife had found him and put on the shelf in the bathroom next to his Avon Noble Prince glass collie filled with after-shave. “We got sheep. We got the Good Shepherd. We got angels. We even got wheat sheaves—that’d do.” Roger at Allen Feed & Seed & Monument Works in town was trying to be helpful.Wesley knew that. “We could put Ardith’s name to one side of the shock, yours to the other, make a border of the sheaves, carve in the dates you were born, and . . . I’d fix the other dates a little later.” Roger was thin, had no teeth, and coughed and hitched up his pants simultaneously. “I think not,”Wesley said, “I do think not,” and left through the side door.

“Clouds?” Roger called after him. Ardith had sure been cool toward the idea of Wesley having his own headstone with a combine on it. Death to her was a double headstone, red granite, a border of morning glories, with her and Wesley’s full names and dates, the names and birth dates of their four children, and “Beloved Family” right in the middle. “You can have whatever you want on yours,” Wesley said, staring at the dominoes as he shuffled slowly. It was April and they’d played them-

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Writing on the Wind selves silly since the first of the year, especially now since he’d given up feeding cattle in the off season. He’d felt unsettled lately. Ardith dotted the tally sheet over and over with the pencil stub. Finally she took the corner of her apron and carefully wiped her eyes. “Time to draw,” Wesley said. They drew their seven dominoes across the white oil cloth and studied their luck. Ardith sighed. “What if I was to say I wanted my very own tombstone with a sewing machine or a milk separator carved on it?” Wesley looked up. “You could have that.” “Well I don’t.” She anchored a string of gray hair behind her ear. “I sure don’t. Don’t want to be reminded of any kind of work when I die.” Wesley laid down the double-five as the spinner. Ardith played her five-three.“To tell the truth, I don’t give a hoot or a holler, one way or the other, except folks will think you’re crazy.” “I’ll be past caring,”Wesley said. “Not if you get it now.” “I don’t want to wait.” Wesley played the five-two and Ardith gave him a mark. Wesley had thought off and on about death, mostly off, ever since he’d had his prostate whittled on and radiated five years ago. Doc said after that not to worry at all. Said, “You got a lot a company—men your age— in this thing. Most of them outlast it.” So Wesley had kind of let it go, up until Earl pulled his stunt. Wesley brushed his hands together lightly and the calluses made a thin whisper. “Look what happened to Earl. Look what Priscilla had to do.” He wanted her to think he was being considerate but they both knew he wanted to be sure he had his combine. Earl was the mechanic for all the farmers and ranchers around. He and Wesley had been friends for forty-some-odd years. One day last fall Wesley had gone over to get a tractor belt, and Earl stooped down to pull the belt out from under some junk and toppled over dead.The week after the funeral,Wesley bought the lots right next to Earl’s and Priscilla’s. Ardith rearranged her dominoes. “But Earl’s crescent wrench wasn’t as hard to do as a combine. Priscilla said all they had to do was take a staff of life, cut the tail off and fatten up the sides a little.” Wesley spread his hands out flat on either side of his dominoes and

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looked straight at Ardith. “Can you think of something that’s meant more to us in this life than a good wheat harvest?” Ardith found a new place on her apron and dabbed her eyes again. “You don’t need me to answer that,” she said. “Play!”

So Wesley got in his pickup and drove to Kansas City to order a tombstone with a nice big combine etched into it. On the road, it came to him how he could even humor Ardith a little with the design. He had hardly gotten out of his mouth what he wanted when the salesman said, “Sure we got ’em,” and disappeared into the back. He returned with a die-cut pattern of a flower.“This here’s a daffodil but I can make a columbine out of it by adding some little horns on top. You won’t know the difference.”The man blushed and cleared his throat.“I mean, it’s all the same.” He rushed on. “They grow like crazy up in Colorado. Me and the wife saw them all over once on a trip up there.” Wesley took the picture he’d torn from High Plains Harvest out of his billfold and gave it to the man. “Oh, that,” the salesman said. He studied it a while. “Our cutter’s going to sweat this one. And I’m afraid it’ll cost you extra.” “No matter,”Wesley said. Then he picked out a red granite stone exactly like the one Ardith described—a red granite double. He made sure it had a border of morning glories and BELOVED FAMILY. About a month afterward on a Tuesday the freight company in town rang them up to see when they could bring it out. It wasn’t the sort of thing they would leave on a neighbor’s doorstep. In the late afternoon, Wesley told Ardith where he was headed and went to meet them at the gate down on the highway. Peaceful Dell Cemetery lay on John Jordan’s section and Wesley already had the gate open when the truck got there. He motioned them through, the load rattling over the cattle guard, and closing the gate, stepped around the prairie dog holes and cow chips to his pickup. The cemetery was up the long hill, the dirt road slow-winding until it crested and revealed a hillside dotted with graves. If there was some place on this earth that a person could settle down and sleep forever, Peaceful

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Writing on the Wind Dell was it. Others might not think it beautiful, with its one lone, bushy evergreen on the rise sitting lopsided from the constant southeast wind, and with no fence and no sign. So much the better. Wesley liked the way the dead looked to be just grazing there, happening to clump in that spot. It seemed that, anytime, they were free to move on. He found his plot by pinpointing Earl’s new tombstone, a white marble glittering in the late afternoon sun. When they were positioning the stone,Wesley merely glanced at the etching. It seemed too public, with the freight men around, to scrutinize it. When he’d led the men back to the highway, he returned and sat down in front of it. The combine was carved just as pretty as could be. They’d even put it in a little field, harvesting. He could feel the kernels popping, breaking up in his mouth to tell him it was time to climb on that thing, be ready to ride it day and night, if need be, to get the crop in. On the stone the combine was turned at an angle so he could see even the pick-up reel—if he strained, maybe the tines—inside the header. He ran his hand over the surface, feeling the sharpness of the grooves. It dawned on him how funny the dump auger looked, poked out sideways. “Looks like a devil’s tail, eh Earl?” He chuckled and looked over at Earl’s grave, studying with new eyes the crescent wrench cut into Earl’s stone. For a moment he thought his combine was more elegant, certainly more detailed. And then, ashamed of himself, his mind tried to patch it up by telling him Earl’s stone looked more balanced, what with the other date filled in. He noticed a mole had tunneled across Earl. Next time he came he’d bring mothballs to sprinkle around. Wesley heard a car crunching up the hill and turned to see Ardith coming on in her maroon Pontiac. He got to his feet, stiff in the hips from sitting on the ground. His heart bounced a little and he realized he seldom saw her at a distance anymore. Her coming this way reminded him of when she and the kids had brought their supper to the field during harvest. Those times, he’d climb down from the combine and they’d eat from the tailgate of the pickup by Coleman lantern. Cornbread and cold fried chicken and pound cake washed down with a quart jar of iced tea.The kids hopping around in the rows pretending the big combine with its staring headlights was a Martian landing.Then it was back on that thing for the night.

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Ardith pulled slowly to a stop and got out. Her door closed with a silly, clipped sound in the hush. He searched her face. She made her way to him, standing beside their lots, her apron furling sideways in the breeze. “Are they done?” she asked. She looked down at the stone and, after a moment, realizing he had bought a double one after all, she linked her arm in his.“Look at you!” she said shyly.“You do want to sleep on the same pillow with me.” So, that was it. Squinting, she began to read the names of the children and their birth dates.When she finished, she sighed. “It’s a miracle.They’re all right.” “I made sure,”Wesley said. He knew she saw her morning glories but that she would keep silent about them to save back a little of her pride. She looked up. “Peaceful Dell. The sky always looks like a big clean Pyrex bowl up here,” she said. Wesley shaded his eyes and pointed. “I was just thinking, how if Jesus was to come and raise Earl up, the first thing he’d see was that clump of ash and elm where his schoolhouse used to be.” Ardith laughed. “For Pete’s sake, that wouldn’t be any heaven!” she said. “Wish him something else.” As if in answer, there arose the howl of a lone coyote. It came out of a windbreak to the southeast. Wesley cupped Ardith’s shoulder in his hand and she hooked a finger in one of his belt loops.They stilled themselves to listen. The old coyote had only let out a few yi-yi-yi’s when another coyote joined her, and then another, and another until there was a whole chorus singing and moaning, scattering the sound up and down the slopes, across the buffalo grass, into the little two-bit canyons. “Pups,”Wesley said. “Listen to ’em.” Finally, the tender yearning calls died away. They turned slowly to go. “Sure not much grass on Earl’s grave yet. Grass takes a while to catch on up here,”Wesley said. “Earl made a big lump,” Ardith said. Now the sun was running out in long lines, dividing the sky into wedges of pink and gold. Wesley pointed. “Looks like your peach pie,” he said. They started toward the cars and Wesley looked back one more time at his combine.The operator’s seat was still empty.

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Genesis I discovered the Panhandle when I was a child, and it lodged itself in my brain and heart as a spiritual place. Growing up, I spent many summers there with my Aunt Irene and Uncle George, who lived at Gem, some thirty miles southeast of Canadian and now a ghost town. Long days and evenings, I listened to the talk of the grownups, absorbed the rhythm of the wheat harvest, and came to understand what meant most to those who had chosen to live with space defining their existence. Always miles from town, on high hills or down in draws, with “close neighbors only five or six miles away,” when they came together, their talk was strong and honest and earnest. “To Reap,To Thresh” was a pleasure to write because the elements I wanted to use in it were very clear in my memory: the special folk temperament of Panhandle dwellers, the outsized sky and land, the beauty of the work ethic, and the dependence on the land for existence. When I went back to visit my uncle’s grave in Prairie Dell cemetery, I saw how the grownup life I observed as a child there was all changed: the tough hardy admired grownups lying side by side now, one I remembered from childhood now with a combine surprisingly engraved on his tombstone. And so, I began a story imagining how Wesley might have struggled to get that wish. I wanted to honor the Wesleys and Ardiths of that hightabled land. The story seemed to unfold so logically, like it could never have been any other way, like those West Texas people always seemed to know their mind, had to know themselves, if they were to survive in that breathtaking place where sheer distance is a blessing and isolation demands living the authentic life.

a lifelong Texan, lives on the Mexican border but she was born in North Texas and spent teenage summers on the Caprock, helping her aunt feed the wheat harvest hands. Her stories are collected in Airlift (TCU Press). Her latest books of poetry are The Yin of It (Pecan Grove Press) and Valley Ark (Knowing Press). Her work has appeared in such publications as The Yale Review, The Chicago Tribune, and Writer’s Digest. JAN EPTON SEALE,

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Box Canyon Jewel Mogan S H E C O U L D T E L L he was an important man. An urban man, not at home in the natural world. A young man carrying oldman responsibilities. And single. Her practiced eye told her he was single. From his burnished black loafers to black jeans professionally creased, to commercially laundered white shirt and worn but immaculate white windbreaker, there was no spot or taint of domesticity to him at all. His face was stern behind the half-smile. Dark, possibly thinning hair, layered to look careless, warned, “Don’t touch.” Clearly, something other than a wife obsessed him. Even before he introduced himself, before he asked her about Father Adrianopoulous’ whereabouts, she knew. It was the Bishop. “At the police department, they told me either you or the sheriff ’s office would be able to direct me to his place. They said, even with directions, I might not be able to find it. It’s pretty inaccessible, they said.” “It is.” “I’m Royce Gunderson,” he said. “You are his bishop.” “Yes.” Gunner. He was coming to fetch him back. She said, “I am Cherie Featherstone and you need a four-wheel drive to get in there. The post office doesn’t deliver there. It’s off the route. He has a box in town. You might want to just communicate with him by mail.” “I want to see him,” he said, frowning. Still learning to keep a lid on

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Writing on the Wind himself, she reckoned. He would have already tried the U.S. mail, of course. Father Adrianopoulous never picked up his mail, even on those rare trips to town to get food and supplies. His box was always bulging with mail, and there was more bundled in the back.The postmaster had warned Father Adrian he was fixing to send it all back. The padre didn’t pay him any mind. You couldn’t stay peeved at Father Adrian. He was just maddeningly slow, like time was the only thing in the world he owned. Simple, with his skinny frame and long handsome head like an ascetic horse, he was one you just had to leave be until he worked things through. She said, “He lives a good piece away. Clear on back to the box canyon. One way in and same way out.You have to go in on foot a couple of miles after the last ruts give out.” A box canyon, the last refuge a hunted animal would take, she thought. The last place any canny creature would enter. If the raptor did not corner his prey there, prolonged drought or its bad sister, flash flooding, could finish off the creature. The man put his hands in his pockets like he was holding back. He looked around the store and seemed to realize for the first time that he was surrounded by books. He paced slowly around the shelves, browsing the books. Woofie followed, sniffed the man’s black heels, and wagged his tail slowly. Kitsy blinked awake from her nap on the coffee table, leapt up, and melted into a high empty niche in one of the bookshelves. Cherie poured him and her a cup of coffee.This was to be a waiting game. Well, she had all day. The thin coffee aroma cut across the smell of old paper and dust. She watched as the man glanced over dimly-lit books shelved under Benign Tumors until he realized with a little start that they were romances. He moved on to Liar, Liar, leafing through several biographies, and Been There, Done That (Travel), next to Same Ol’ Same Ol’ (Hilton-Cronin-Cozzens novels of the forties and fifties). Then to NonCarnal Cookbooks. A soft yodel from Dovie, nested among the cookbooks, startled him, and he laughed. He pulled out Vegetables—A New Approach, flicking what appeared to be a dried bird dropping off the cover. “Are you a vegetarian, Miss Featherstone?” he asked. “I don’t eat anything that can look me in the eye.”

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“Would you recommend this book for a beginning vegetarian?” “Yes, for a very beginner. Most of it involves pulling vegetables out of clean organic ground, washing in bottled water, and eating them raw. What’s new about that? I like to be more creative with vegetables. . . .” “You are a creative person. I can see that from the way you’ve categorized the books.” “I’ve been to college. On a little oil money. I had two years at San Marcos State. Just enough to ruin me for living in Dry the rest of my life. I’m still looking for what I want to do.” She handed him the cup of black. “Take you three hours from Austin?” “Not quite. I’ve been to Dry a few times. I’ve visited Father Lucero at St. Margaret’s. By the way, Father Lucero doesn’t know how to get to Father Adrian’s either. Guess I’ll have to try to ask the sheriff ’s office at Post to get me in.” “They don’t have a four-wheel vehicle either.” It might be true. “And their cars can’t get in there close enough.” No way was the church and state going to bust in there on him. Cherie Featherstone wouldn’t see that happen. She remembered Adrianopoulous saying that the mesa he lived on was not now physically in the Austin diocese. Strictly, he was now under the Bishop of Lubbock. Did the Catholic Church have extradition agreements, or whatever, between dioceses? “Cream and sugar?” “No.” He took a sip and swallowed hard, staring awhile into the cup as though trying to read something in the bottom of it through the transparent light brown liquid. Adrianopoulous had told her this bishop was brought in out of New Orleans.That must be the problem with the coffee. He glanced over at her and said, “You’ve misspelled ‘Stationery.’” “I spell it that way because it doesn’t move. Doesn’t sell.” “Oh.” He lingered under the heading The Good Stuff, sandwiching Dubliners, Montaigne’s essays, and Crime and Punishment under one arm. “I’ve always wanted to read these.”Then he moved to Baby Wipes, the bargain table, picked up a foot-shaped book on Reflexology, chuckled, put it down again. He stopped laughing, looked her straight in the face. Cherie heard herself say, “I’ll take you there.” She took his money, twelve dollars, for the books, locked the antique cash register. Craven had been sitting on top of the romance section. He suddenly flew down to her

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Writing on the Wind shoulder. “He knows I’m fixing to leave and wants me to feed him.” Her lips formed a kiss for the big black bird. “Good God!” said Craven. “Fact, I have to feed and water them all before we go. We all better take a bathroom break before we leave.” She pointed out the bathroom and he obediently went inside while she let Woofie and Kitsy out the back door onto the patio.When the man came looking for her on the patio, she was putting out bowls of cat and dog food. Beyond her patio was a little pond and a fountain. “I built this with my own hands for my boys and girls.” Two mixed-bred mallards were wildly web-footing it to greet her. “Bishop Gunderson, meet Dooney and Bourke.” After a few squacks and a hopeful peck at the man’s shiny black loafers, they moved away, dropping identical splats on the stepping stones, wagging their tails, arching their necks in unison.“They do everything together,” she said.“Entirely compatible.” She scattered cracked corn for them on the patio. “That’s nice.” “Having a pet is better than having a man. I’ve tried both.With a pet there are no Issues. Well, sir, my Pathfinder is sitting in the drive.You can wait for me out there while I take care of a few things and close up.” She took a bathroom break herself, gave her face a skeptical look in the mirror before she freshened it up, thinking of the hours ahead. Two men and a woman. “No way,” she sighed into the mirror. She pulled her blouse out of too-tight jeans. The only love triangle here involved two men and their God. She cut off the switch on the coffee pot. Finally, she turned over the sign for “Dry Bookstore. Open. Buy. Sell. Trade. Read” to a simple “Closed.” When they were on the highway, he asked,“Is he likely to be there?” “Oh yes.” This was, judgmentally, the last piece of information he needed from her, and he said nothing for miles except when they swerved to avoid an animal carcass laminated to the concrete.The wheels on his side caught the edge of the mass. Bump. Bump. He coughed and cleared his throat several times. “Sorry. Acid reflux.” When they left the highway for dirt, she jounced him as viciously as she could in axle-deep ruts. Even these ruts eventually petered out two

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miles from Father Adrian’s place, to where a broad gulch narrowed to the box canyon, then to a narrow arroyo where he kept his birds closed off by three natural walls, the fourth wall being a barrier of two horizontal metal bars. They turned out of the gulch into the arroyo that meandered up between two mesas, then came abruptly to a dead end. She stopped and killed the engine. “He lives yonder on that ledge.” She pointed up to an outcropping of yellow rock under a cloud-darkening sky. “We hike up. Only takes about twenty minutes.That’s his pickup over by the side of the stream bed.” A sharp turn as they ascended hid the arroyo from their view and revealed the one-room rancho of crumbling adobe and an outhouse without a door, perched on higher ground. Her sweating companion took off his windbreaker and squinted up. “Some bad weather on the way. How does he get water up here? Does he have to depend on rainwater?” “It’s been piped from the ranch for years. He’s part of the Cibollo Ranch.They let him use the place. No electricity, though.” “He must be down in the arroyo,” she said as they entered the little fenced-in compound. There was a strong eggy smell in the wind. The Bishop was already on his way to the outhouse. Prostate trouble, she thought. Adrianopoulous had it, too. He had once solemnly quoted his doctor, who, he said, spoke the words with an evil smile: “Continence crucifies the prostate.” She wouldn’t touch that, and there had been a little awkward moment between her and the priest. Then the moment, if it had been a moment, had passed. Adrianopoulous hailed her from the rim of the trail they had just come up, his white hair lifting in the wind, making his face look twice as long. A camera could pan around that face forever. “Is that who I think it is,” he said rather than asked, indicating the man’s backside visible through the doorless outhouse. “Yes. Gunner Gunderson.” “The worst time he could have come. Breeding season just beginning, I’m down there now sexing the new birds every day and observing pairs at night.” “Well, it’s not his fault he mistimed it. He may have a direct line to heaven, but he don’t know a whole hell of a lot about emu ranching.”

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Writing on the Wind He wasn’t listening. He was speaking slowly, as if to himself. “You have to look in on them every few hours to see if the female will be accepting him, if they’re compatible yet or fighting. This is the worst time for him to come.” Moosehead! There isn’t a worst or best time. He’s come to take you down. “See? I have a pair in the enclosure now I’m watching.” “I don’t see them.” “They must be hidden by the outhouse. That’s why I made the enclosure to include the outhouse. It acts as a blind when two of them are fighting. One goes behind it and the other doesn’t have sense enough to know it is there and quits fighting.” “Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe they are making love back there.” “I wish.” “Oh, here comes one around the outhouse!” Something hard, pointed, and insistent dealt the Bishop two sharp tweaks on the back and side of his neck. His first reflex was to duck his shoulders; his second, to guard his penis, which he put away with all speed. Only then did he turn around to see what had attacked him, and was met by two intensely inquisitive large brown eyes in a cocked head on a long serpentine neck.“Snake!” screamed his nerve-endings. But no! It was some kind of ostrich! An emu! Great God! The couple watched as the bird continued to block the man’s way out, thrusting its beaked head at him whenever he moved a muscle. Parry and thrust. It was going after the genitals! No, only the belt buckle. “Here,” the man said hoarsely, stripping the belt from his waist and holding it out with the buckle swinging like a censer. He edged around the big thing—it must have been six feet tall!—swinging his belt as the monster lunged at the glittering object, and so they scrambled across the yard pen, joined on the way by another big bird, just as vicious, that came trotting and bouncing up like a runaway grass hut on stilts, attacking his head and shoulders. He got through the gate just in time. Cherie was limp from laughing. Adrianopoulous had his head on the gatepost and he stomped his left foot rhythmically. “Thank you for coming to my rescue and preserving my manhood,” said Gunderson.

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“Oh, you handled yourself right well, Bishop,” said Cherie. “You didn’t need our help,” said Father Adrian. “Actually, they were just being friendly.”The priest stripped off a sticky latex glove, shook Gunderson’s hand, and said, “I’ve been sexing birds.” On the way to the house, Adrianopoulous explained that breeding season, October through March, was just underway. “In season, a male will hump anything on two legs. In fact, that’s how I proceed when sexing them. I squat down like a female, ruffle my feathers, and see who tries to seduce me. That’s one way to single out males. Others, you have to do it manually by holding them across the chest and feeling inside the cloaca for a phallus.There’s absolutely no other way to tell male from female.” Cherie caught Gunderson checking out his fly. Sure enough, it was unzipped. Inside the house, Adrian passed a bottle of tequila around the kitchen table. Cherie relaxed a little into the warmth of the moment. But when Gunderson set his glass down like a bishop would and cleared his throat, she excused herself for the outhouse.They needed to talk. Sure enough, when she came back, Gunderson was talking about Father Adrianopoulous’ long-expired leave of absence and that the diocese could not extend him any further, and besides, they needed him desperately, what with the shortfall of priests and money, what with millions and millions in sexual-abuse case settlements—cases that he had inherited— that everything and everyone must be squeezed all down the line, “beginning with myself ”—that the diocese simply couldn’t continue to carry him and subsidize this ranching endeavor.What was the purpose of it, anyway—Father Adrianopoulous was supposed to be on some kind of R & R leave for discernment of his vocation—to see if he wanted to permanently become a contemplative—and now he was into this commercial venture— how much does one of these things cost, anyway? Forty-eight thousand! Oh, my, you’re kidding! The price has dropped considerably? They’re giving them away now, as pets? But did my diocese pay ninety-six thousand for your first pair? No? They were a gift of the Cibollos? You are raising emus on halves with the Cibollos? Well, the diocese can’t put anything into this operation. No, not even your $800 a month salary, under the—ah— circumstances. Not with the pack of debt from the previous bishop. You can understand our position, you know the situation first-hand—

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Writing on the Wind Cherie moved around the kitchen to hunt up something for them to eat. Father Adrian poured them each another shot of tequila. The worm moved languidly in the bottom of the bottle as if alive. Cherie saw the Bishop’s throat move to stifle a reflux. Father Adrian looked depressed and distressed. He’s been out here a year and a half, she reckoned, and he’s about a year and a half from retirement. Now the rain began to fall, splatting on the roof like the droppings of a million angry birds. It became a regular clod-buster. “Father Adrian’s increased his flock to forty,” Cherie said from the sink, where she had started to marinate some emu jerky in water and cumin. No response, so she offered to fry up some corn tortillas and shred the emu jerky to make fajitas, but they both said they weren’t hungry. “Suits me,” she said. “I don’t eat meat anyway.” From the kitchen window ledge she took a big egg the size and color of an alligator pear and put it to boil on the propane two-burner. Might take an hour. It got darker and the rain continued to beat the roof. Out the window, over the canyon, lightning was striking like the god of all rattlers.The padres were getting pretty well oiled, which might be good, might be bad. “I’ve got to go get my birds out of the draw,” Adrian said suddenly. He lit the kerosene lantern on the kitchen table.“They’ll drown if it floods down there.” “Won’t they automatically go up the sides to higher ground?” asked Gunderson. “Nope.” “You mean they’re those birds that gaze up at the sky and drown in the rain?” Gunderson looked around as if he had said something supremely funny. Cherie said, “You’re thinking of turkeys.That’s a myth about turkeys, anyway.They don’t do that.” “But the emu—it won’t seek higher ground?” “You’ve observed the size of its brain case?” “Well, we each have our own brand of stupidity, I suppose.” Adrian was out of the door with the lantern. “I have to try to get them up here in the enclosure. If I leave them on the sides of the ravine, they’ll scatter at daylight.” “Wait!” She turned off the hot plate. “I’m coming.Wait! How do we get hold of them?” 168

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He demonstrated stalking a bird with his long arms forward.“It’s best to grab them just in front of the wings. Pin their wings to their sides and walk them where you want them to go.” “Ah hah?” Gunderson rose, too, and put on his windbreaker. “Let’s go get those sons-of-bitches.” When they got down to the floor of the canyon, the water was running high. By lantern light they saw the sodden flock huddled against the far wall. A few birds broke from the edges and came toward them. “Get the tamest ones first,” said Father Adrian, swinging the lantern at certain birds. He gestured up the muddy slopes. “Get them up there in that area! We can’t get them all the way back to the house. Don’t have time.” He set the lantern on a rock. The rain had settled from squally and windy to steady downpour. “O.K., easy now. Approach them easy. Watch me. O.K., I’ve got him. Get your bird and walk him like this, up into that area—not so steep. That-a-way baby, O.K. Easy, old boy.” Cherie didn’t get hers on the first two tries. Then she managed to grab it from the side, and held on desperately as the bird hot-footed it in the opposite direction. She got it turned around when it slowed down, and then she let it have its head up the muddy slope. It dug in and disappeared, over the rim, she supposed. It was too dark to know for sure. The Bishop was stalking a bird that seemed gigantic in the lantern light. Gunderson’s white windbreaker and face flashed in darkness as the big dark shapes of the birds shifted nervously around them. “Don’t spook them, now,” Adrian said in a steady voice.“Let’s get this one and that one.” He grabbed another emu from the rear and walked it firmly away. The Bishop pounced on his bird and flew off behind it, his legs windmilling like a puppet’s. “Whoa! My God in heaven! Whoa!”The emu took its own route up a different slope. Gunderson’s face, by turns agonized or ecstatic in lantern shine, said, “This isn’t real. I’m in the middle of some Hieronymus Bosch bestiary!” “Go, Gunner!” she shouted. At first she had thought it was hopeless, but as they worked the flock one by one out of the water, up to ledges, and over the top of the ravine, the job got somewhat easier—the rising water slowed the birds down. We can’t quit, she thought, with Adrianopoulous working so furiously. It did look like they might get the birds 169

Writing on the Wind out. But to what end? They would be clear to Old Mexico by first light. There were not as many of them left now, about half of the original flock. They were working them a little faster, but it was still a race. Now the water was halfway up to their calves. They and their birds would lose their footing on the muddy slope and slide back into the ravine. Some dozen of the birds had broken their legs in falls and Adrianopoulous said, “Just leave them.They’ll die anyway.” They joined forces on the remaining few. They found that two on one worked a little better. Adrianopoulous and Gunderson wrestled the last big specimen to the path up the ravine, halfway up to the rim, and released him near the top. Adrian turned and yelled down to her, “Get out, up this way, not the way we came—that might be flooded. Come this way!” She snatched the lantern and followed his voice. “What will happen to them loose out there?” Gunderson asked her on the way back. “They’ll eventually die.” “Impossible to capture them?” “Impossible.They’re six ways from Sunday by now.” “What was the whole point?” “Only the satisfaction of saving creatures too dumb to save themselves.” At the house they each swallowed another shot of tequila.To stop the shakes, they drank again after putting on some old pants and shirts of the priest. As she tossed back her drink, drunken Cherie mocked sober Cherie: “Only way you’ll ever get into his pants.” Father Adrian was grieving his birds.Was Gunderson missing his own skittish human flock back in the city? Bishop, poor Bishop, dealing with all those stiff necks in the congregation and stiff pricks in the clergy. Probably in the Bishop’s mind, God’s will for Father Adrianopoulous had been manifested in the flood. But just like old Noah before the flood, Father Adrian had held out a pair, male and female, and they were safe in the yard enclosure. He could start all over with these two. But would he? Father Adrian fired up a propane heater and Cherie fired up both burners of the stove. Now they were hungry enough for emu fajitas.While she padded around the kitchen—they all three were barefoot because Father Adrian owned only one pair of shoes and no socks—the priests said

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their Office at the kitchen table by lantern light. The Office was not mumbo-jumbo, she discovered, but selections from readings and psalms she had heard all of her life.The men invited her to read, too, but she declined. The priests alternated reading. At the end of an hour, Gunderson read, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork; day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. . . .” And Father Adrian finished with, “May the words of my mouth always find favor, and the whispering of my heart, in your presence, Yahweh, my Rock, my Redeemer!” It was all very different from her thundering childhood church of God-duh, Jesus-suh, and death-thuh. The lamplight shone through Bishop Gunderson’s ears. It lit Father Adrian’s white hair, softening the wild disarray. They stuck their bare feet out to the warmth of the heater. “Have another drink, Gunner,” said Adrian. Gunderson declined. “I always wanted to live solitary,” said Adrian. “When I was coming up, I always used to go out and sit on a particular rock.” “We can take our rocks with us wherever we go.” The Bishop, it seemed to her, had a great knack for pulling the right words from a file in his brain. “That particular rock rested on its ground without thought or passion.” “Maybe you need to be here. Maybe God needs you more, here. But I remember how you loved and served the people.” Dressed in the priest’s ragged shirt and workpants, he leaned to Adrian like a beggar. “Sleep on it. If you can’t give me your answer in the morning, write me when you have decided.” When the food was ready, they asked a blessing and ate silently. Cherie peeled and ate the emu egg. There was rolling, departing thunder, and then the rain ended. Father Adrian gave her his bed, no arguments, and the men slept on the floor. Rolled in their three cocoons, no one stirred. She wrestled with their problems while they snored. City or wilderness, solitude tasted the same to her. But him? He is not him except out here. Can he escape the world while jumping back into the middle of it? She turned the argument on herself. How should I live, then? Damn it, they’ve got me thinking that way. They act like every life has to be the answer to some question.

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Writing on the Wind The wind, after the rain, was blowing and going, searching. It sounded like God over West Texas, his winnowing fan in his hand. Before dawn, house sparrows were chatting it up, singing before it was light enough to go hunt for food. She awoke thinking that the lives of birds are sacred, too.Then she thought of her own animals. Next she automatically looked over at the two men, nothing resolved, their brows furrowed even in sleep, still fruitlessly hauling those birds uphill in their dreams. She and the Bishop cleared out early and returned to Dry. On the way they were not blinded and thrown from the air-conditioned Pathfinder to the desert floor. No voice from heaven told them where they must go and what they must do. No, the Bishop wordlessly roughed out his schedule for the day, for the week, for the month, for eternity. She would let the Bishop go. She would feed her pets. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. She will let Adrian go. And Adrian? He will go out under the blue morning vault of heaven to his flat rock where he will empty himself and become boundless.

Genesis In one sense this story contrasts the active versus the contemplative life.The West Texas landscape particularly heightens this dichotomy, as endless space invites the spirit to expand in meditation while the sharp air and the vigor of the people invite to action—particularly to the obvious needs of a large Hispanic and Black population burdened by lack of education, lack of decent jobs, and inequitable treatment in the justice system. In a deeper sense this story is about loneliness: interior, spatial, and spiritual loneliness caught, for example, in the image of the three characters individually wrapped in their cocoon-like bedding and in the figure of the wind like God over West Texas, his winnowing fan in his hand. The life of the woman from Dry is just that, and the priestly life (both of Gunderson and Adrianopoulous) is solitary, particularly so in urban and rural mission territory, where isolation sorely tests one’s spiritual depths and resources. I originally wanted to do a comic piece based on a local priest’s anecdote of his visit to a priest-friend-eccentric in the area who raised emus. He was startled when one of the long-necked birds poked his head

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into the bathroom window. Of course, there had to be more than that, and the story evolved to a set of relationships comprising two men, a woman, and their God.

J E W E L M O G A N was born and raised in Plaquemine, Louisiana, and has worked as a book editor for LSU Press and as a postal clerk. She is nearing her fortieth year in West Texas along with her husband, Joe, who taught English at Texas Tech University. Ontario Review Press published a collection of her stories, Beyond Telling, in 1995. Two of the stories were Pushcart Prize Selections for 1994–1995 and 1996–1997, and one was reprinted in Joyce Carol Oates, ed., Telling Stories (W.W. Norton, 1998). Additional stories have appeared in the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, North American Review, and other publications and have been featured readings at the Dallas Museum of Art’s Literary Café and Texas Bound series.

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How I Got into Big Trouble and the Mistakes I Made                    Carmen Tafolla W E S T T E X A S —some

people think it’s a huge expanse of nothing. But that’s just ’cause they don’t have the right eyes to see it with. They see a long dry desert, interrupted by a few small towns where folks watch the highway, and a few long highways where the highway patrol passes you going ninety-five, and no lights on top ’cause he’s not going to arrest anybody—he’s just going home.What they don’t see is that it’s so empty that it’s full. Too many memories visible. Too much space in which to hear what’s been said these last five hundred years. Too many ghosts, and plenty of space for them to move in and get comfy. Driving through it with nothing there, I almost veer off the road. Flying over it, I feel I’ve left something behind. And then, at the end of the road, the modest reward—El Paso—a world of its own.Together with Juarez, they create the universe of Yin and Yang, completely self-sufficient, isolated, exotic, a world complete. Several of my best friends have sprouted here, grown up, gone on . . . from Fort Stockton, Sonora, El Paso, their lives like the desert—deceivingly empty, emphatically full. One, a native of El Paso, grew up and married, went elsewhere, took West Texas with her. One day, her life came tumbling out like a comically-bare list of chores, a sequential grocery list of life, and

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spilled onto my paper. I laughed when I saw it, recognized her. I called her, read her what was on the paper. She just laughed. Just laughed. * * * M I S TA K E # 1 :

First, I fell in love with my priest. That was enough right there, but then I made Mistake #2. M I S TA K E # 2 :

I told my parents that I fell in love with my priest. (My parents got very mad.) M I S TA K E # 3 :

I told my priest that I fell in love with my priest. He already knew. Told me he was in love with me, too. (My parents told me it was all my fault.) M I S TA K E # 4 :

We tried to figure out a way to make it work. Asked the Church if he could leave the priesthood to get married. Waited for permission. They didn’t give it. He left anyway, and we got married by a judge. (My parents quit talking to me.) M I S TA K E # 5 :

Asked the church what we could do to have a full church wedding. They said it wasn’t possible. Asked if they could at least give the marriage their blessing. They said it wasn’t possible. Asked if they could give a sorta, kinda half-blessing. Asked for eight months solid, and finally they figured out a way. But we had to promise to tell no one, and the church records were sealed in confidentiality. Got our half-blessing. (My parents said that nineteen-year-old “muchachas locas” should never be allowed in the congregations of thirty-year-old attractive single priests. I just shrugged my bythen-pregnant shoulders and said I didn’t know any priests who weren’t single.They ignored me.) M I S TA K E # 6 :

We kept thinking we needed to “do the right thing” and be married

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Writing on the Wind fully in the eyes of the church. The church made us fill out a thousand forms and talk to a hundred officials and make 10,000 separate vows, including that we would never tell anyone. We didn’t. Except for my parents. (My parents started talking to me again. But probably just because their one-year-old granddaughter was already part of the wedding party.) M I S TA K E # 7 :

Tried to celebrate our anniversary. We had had, by now, three different wedding dates and two children.The children were a lot less confusing than the wedding dates. One of the weddings had been so secret that we can’t even remember the date of it anymore. Oh well. Happy anniversary anyway. Whenever it is. (My parents at least agree that he’s a very good man.They’ve always loved their priest. It’s me that they’re not sure about.) M I S TA K E # 8 :

He tried to find a job. It’s not that he didn’t have talents galore. It’s just that I kept asking, “Well, what would you like to do?” and what he would like to do was be a priest. Manager of a K-Mart couldn’t compare. For three years after I’d finished my nursing degree, he was even a househusband. Did a great job and the kids were delighted. He even sewed up down jackets on the sewing machine and re-paneled the den! But underneath, he knew it was a job on a “mommy-track” and a sure-thing-deadend once they graduated. M I S TA K E # 9 :

They graduated. He turned to drink. Lots of it. Just beers in social settings to start with, but sopping drunk fog-outs sprawled on the living room couch at the end. I’d get home from work and they’d get home from college, and the smell of wine would hit us at the front door. Just reliving the transubstantiation of Christ in communion over and over, I guess. (My parents started patting me on the back, saying things like “Be strong, m’ija” and lighting candles for me.) M I S TA K E # 1 0 :

I went to church. Heard a sermon about the evils of over-indulgence and the selfishness of intoxication. Got tired of never being able to use my

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living room couch.Told my parents that I was getting a divorce. (They put out their candles and decided to quit trying to understand me; maybe I was just born bad.) M I S TA K E # 1 1 :

No. No more. Quit counting.This is my life. Come on, I’m serious. I married a patient of mine. Wonderful man, with a kind heart. Kind heart, but weak heart. In fact, waiting for a heart transplant.We didn’t even try for the church. Married in the hospital where I work. He was still in the hospital bed. Sign two pieces of paper and just take the marriage and go. But this time, I remember my anniversary with NO problem. And we celebrate it. Every month. (“M’ija, that man could die at any minute.You’re making a big mistake.”) “No, mamá. No more mistakes. I’m the judge, I’m the jury, I’m the church, and I’m giving me a full blessing!”

Genesis When they ask do I have a relationship with West Texas, I say, “O, sí. Sure I do.” But then I try to remember if I was born there or lived there or even went to college there, and the answer is no. “But I’ve known West Texas all my life,” I insist. They’re not convinced, so I have to explain. “Well, when I was a kid, we drove through there almost every summer on the way to California. And when I grew up, for about eight years when I lived out of state, I drove through there every Christmas and Easter, coming back home to San Antonio. And, well, my mother came through there on the train in 1942, and my great-grandfather came through there with the U.S. Army wagon trains in the 1850s, and—well, about four hundred years ago, the Tafollas came through there from Mexico City, going to Santa Fe, where they lived, and—well, why do you think they call it El PASS-o? The PASS, the way through . . . ?” They’re still not convinced, but when I start to talk about the towns, the people, the crazy pyramid-hills, the history and spirit of this place— then, they understand. They understand that I understand. My relationship

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Writing on the Wind with West Texas? Migrating resident, spirit of the highways, citizen by absorption of the dust in my shoes.

has held numerous faculty positions at universities throughout the Southwest. She has been recognized by the National Association for Chicano Studies for her outstanding contributions to the arts and academia. In 1999, the President’s Peace Commission of St. Mary’s University selected her for its Art of Peace Award. A poet, author, and sought-after speaker and performer, she has published five books of poetry, seven television screenplays, one non-fiction volume, and numerous short stories, academic articles, and children’s works.

C A R M E N TA F O L L A

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Gold Stars and Silver Wings Betty Wiesepape M Y S I S T E R , the gold-star Christian, was in the third grade when she got the call. She marched down the center aisle, accepted Jesus as her personal Savior, and left her sins in the corrugated tin baptistery at Straightway Christian Church. Soon after Sheryl descended the steps that led from the baptistery, she was afflicted with missionary zeal. My father blamed Miss Lucy Hightower, Sheryl’s third grade Sunday school teacher. I suppose the relationship that developed between Sheryl and Miss Lucy was inevitable. Miss Lucy held the record for the most souls brought to Jesus in a single revival, and Sheryl was the only child in the third grade Sunday school class who could recite the items of Christian armor in order, from the helmet of salvation to the sandals of peace, without taking a breath. Sheryl was the kind of kid who never forgot her Bible, never stuck chewing gum under her chair, and always got more gold stars on her Sunday school chart than anyone else. I, on the other hand, had passed from the gold-star stage of Christian development into the doubting-Thomas phase of adolescence without so much as a whisper from the Lord.The larger-than-life mural that occupied the wall behind the baptistery of Straightway Christian Church didn’t appeal to me. Something about John the Baptist’s foot at the edge of the River Jordan didn’t look natural. The more I looked at that foot, the less inclined I was to be baptized. I knew I should. I was way past the age of accountability, and I tried.

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Writing on the Wind I really did. Every Sunday when Brother Bledsoe closed his Bible and descended from the pulpit and the organ pedals squeaked out the first bars of “God Is Calling the Prodigal,” I closed my eyes and listened for the Lord to call me. He never did, or if He did, I didn’t hear him. It is possible that the Lord’s voice was drowned out by Ivetta Hightower’s. Ivetta was Miss Lucy’s twin sister. She sat four rows behind our family, watched every move we made, and sang soprano half an octave higher than everyone else. Nobody ever sat on the pew with Ivetta except Miss Lucy, and she sat on the opposite end. As long as I could remember, no one had ever sat between the Hightower sisters. And for good reason. Even Sheryl and I got along better than the Hightower sisters. They disagreed about all the important religious issues—whether or not Christians should have a kitchen in the church building, whether communion should be served before or after the sermon, whether any translation of the Bible other than the King James had the Lord’s approval.The Hightower sisters only agreed about one thing—that women should have their heads covered when they entered the sanctuary. And the Hightowers felt it was their duty to set a good example for the rest of the congregation. I know they did because they sat on the same pew in the center of the church and wore hats and gloves every Sunday. Miss Lucy’s favorite was a white-felt pillbox that she fastened to the back of her head with a stickpin, and Ivetta’s favorite was a black straw with a brim as wide as her shoulders. That was one reason Miss Lucy liked Sheryl better than me. Sheryl was the kind of kid who liked to wear hats. Her idea of fun was to put on a hat with ribbons, a dress with ruffles, and socks with lace around the top and go to a tea party. My idea of fun was to put on a baggy tee shirt, cut–off jeans, and roller skates and go out to Silver Wings. Silver Wings was a recreational facility located just outside the city limits. It was a skating rink six afternoons a week, a dance hall and beer joint on Saturday night. My problems with Miss Lucy went all the way back to one Sunday when I was in her third-grade class. Miss Lucy told the third-grade class that people who went out to Silver Wings were sinners.When I asked Miss Lucy what was wrong with roller-skating, she said Jesus Christ was our example. He never went roller-skating at Silver Wings so we shouldn’t either.

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Miss Lucy told my mother I smarted off in Sunday school class, but I didn’t. All I did was ask her very politely to show me the scripture that said Christians weren’t supposed to go roller-skating.Then I asked if anyone in the third grade knew where the Bible said anything about Jesus Christ wearing a hat. Five years had passed since I was in the third grade, and Miss Lucy hadn’t changed. She still wore the same hats, told the same Bible stories, and awarded gold stars to miniature missionaries like my sister. Miss Lucy still gave one gold star for each visitor brought to Sunday school, two if that visitor stayed for church. I told Sheryl taking the Patterson kids to Straightway Christian wasn’t a good idea when she first mentioned it, but she said they were the only kids she knew who didn’t go to church somewhere. I knew taking them was a bad mistake as soon as we pulled into the driveway of the trailer park. One of the boys, the one who looked like Howdy Doody with a burr haircut, was on the roof of Ike’s Service Station chunking rocks at passing cars.The older boy, the one with hair that hung into his face like a shaggy dog, was on his knees gathering up chinaberries and stuffing them in his pocket. As soon as he saw us, he scrambled up, chased our car to a stop, and yanked the back door open. “Hi, I’m Darryl. Move over.” I braced both feet on the floor and didn’t budge. I had no intention of giving up my window seat to a kid with grimy hands.The next thing I knew, the heel of Darryl Patterson’s shoe was pressing down on my foot. I shot a see-what-you-caused look over the seat at Sheryl, but she was too busy calculating the number of gold stars she would get to paste on her Sunday school chart to notice. Angela Patterson and her little brother Sammy crawled into the back of the station wagon with Sheryl. Sheryl started begging Angela to stay for church as soon as she sat down. Angela had a pretty face and soft blonde hair that curled into ringlets, but I knew she wasn’t going to feel comfortable at Straightway Christian wearing a hand-me-down dress that was two sizes too big for her and dirty tennis shoes with a hole in the toe. Angela reminded me of Cinderella before Cinderella met up with her fairy godmother, but Sheryl was too busy playing missionary to notice anything. My father couldn’t help but notice Darryl. He held onto the back of

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Writing on the Wind Dad’s seat with both hands and bounced up and down. “What do you do at church? Is it fun?” Darryl shouted in Dad’s ear. It was obvious that Darryl had never been to a service at Straightway Christian. Brother Bledsoe was almost as old as Moses. His sermons were nothing to bounce up and down about—except when he preached about Hell. Brother Bledsoe’s sermons on Hell were interesting.They started out slow like all his sermons, but every time he said the word “Hell,” he got a little more excited. By the end of the sermon, he was dancing back and forth across the podium and whipping his wooden pointer through the air like he was fencing with the devil. I always wanted to laugh, but I didn’t dare. Straightway Christians were serious about their religion. Straightway Christian Church was the place people went when they wanted to suffer. Silver Wings was the place they went when they wanted to have fun. If anyone at Straightway Christian so much as looked like they were having a good time, Ivetta Hightower wrinkled up her nose and sniffed at them.

At first, I wasn’t concerned when Sheryl didn’t come into the auditorium and sit down with the rest of our family. I assumed she was still in the third-grade classroom pasting gold stars. But when Miss Lucy came in and sat down on the opposite end of the pew from Ivetta and when the song leader stood up and announced the first song, I got uneasy. By the time Brother Bledsoe began his sermon, I was worried. Before Brother Bledsoe made the first point of his three-point sermon, the planks in the balcony started to creak. No one ever sat in the balcony at Straightway Christian, not since the Episcopalians built a new building out on the loop and sold the old one to the Straightway Christians. The only thing up there was a couple of storage closets, a few dusty pews, and a room full of cobwebs. I knew this, because every year Miss Lucy took the children in the third-grade class up there on a field trip the Sunday she told them the story about John the Baptist baptizing Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. She showed us all the baptismal garments—the preacher’s rubber boots and rubber trousers with suspenders, the white robes and shower caps in assorted sizes, the stacks and stacks of white towels.

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By the time Brother Bledsoe made his second point, the creaking and popping in the balcony had gotten louder. One by one people craned their necks to see what was going on in the balcony. I saw something that looked like a chinaberry bounce off the brim of Miss Ivetta’s hat and roll down the center aisle.Then another chinaberry landed in Miss Lucy Hightower’s lap.Then a rain of chinaberries began. Chinaberries sailed over the balcony railing. Chinaberries pinged off pews. Chinaberries bounced across the hardwood floor. “Achoo.” At first, I thought Ivetta Hightower had sneezed, but when I looked, she wasn’t holding her handkerchief. Then I heard another sneeze. Then another and another. Five sneezes in all.That’s when I knew Sheryl was up there in the balcony. Sheryl always sneezed five times before she stopped. I glanced at my father. His mouth had a tight, white look about it. I glanced over my shoulder at Ivetta Hightower. She was staring straight at my father. She might suspect Sheryl was in the balcony, but she couldn’t prove it. No one could if we left the sanctuary during the closing hymn and got Sheryl and the Patterson kids out of the balcony before the last Amen. If anyone asked about Sheryl, we could say she was sick. I figured that wouldn’t be a lie. If Sheryl wasn’t sick now, she would be as soon as my father got her home. Then Brother Bledsoe stopped preaching. He quit in mid-sentence, lifted the marker from his Bible, turned a page, and stood looking down. Brother Bledsoe didn’t say anything else until the last chinaberry quit bouncing.When he looked up, his expression was serious, but his voice was pleasant. “If the young ladies and gentlemen in the balcony will quiet down, I’ll continue.” And that was that. Not another sound from the balcony. No more chinaberries, no creaking boards, no more sneezes. I prayed through the rest of Brother Bledsoe’s sermon that Sheryl and the Patterson kids had tiptoed down the stairs and walked home, but they hadn’t. Later, Sheryl explained why things in the balcony got so quiet. She said she had convinced all three Pattersons to stay for church by the time Sunday school let out. She pasted six gold stars on her Sunday school chart and led her visitors into the auditorium. They didn’t go far before Darryl Patterson

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Writing on the Wind stopped and pointed at the larger-than-life mural behind the baptistery. Darryl wanted to know why those men were holding hands and why they were going swimming in dresses. Sheryl explained baptism about as well as baptism could be explained by a third grader. She told Darryl that getting baptized was more like taking a bath than going swimming because you left your dirty sins in the water. But getting baptized wasn’t exactly like taking a bath because you didn’t take your underwear off and you didn’t use soap. While Sheryl was explaining baptism to Darryl, Ivetta Hightower was staring at Angela Patterson’s hand-me-down dress and sniffing. Angela tiptoed out of the auditorium and was halfway down the front steps when Sheryl caught up with her. Angela told Sheryl she didn’t like the woman in the black hat staring at her dress and had changed her mind about staying for church. Sheryl didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how she would get those six gold stars off of her Sunday school chart if the Patterson kids went home. That’s when Sheryl remembered the balcony. It seemed like the perfect place. Darryl and Sammy wouldn’t bother anyone up there, and Ivetta Hightower couldn’t sniff at Angela’s hand-me-down dress. The Patterson children liked the balcony. Little Sammy had fun trying to catch the patches of colored light streaming from the stained-glass windows, and Darryl entertained himself pulling down cobwebs. Things didn’t get out of hand until the deacons started to serve communion.That’s when Sammy decided he was hungry and wanted to go downstairs and have crackers and grape juice like everyone else. When Sheryl said no, Sammy bolted. Sheryl and Angela chased him back and forth across the balcony, and Angela finally caught him when he made a break for the stairs. Sheryl didn’t know the creaking boards were disturbing the church service, and she didn’t know Darryl was chunking chinaberries over the railing until Brother Bledsoe stopped preaching. When that happened, Sheryl knew she had to do something so she herded the Patterson kids into the closet with communion supplies and shut the door. Sammy tried to convince Sheryl to let him out. He whined because he was hungry. Then he said he hated Straightway Christian Church and wanted to go home and get a peanut-butter sandwich. Sheryl opened a box of unleavened wafers and passed them around. Sammy ate

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half the box, then whined because he was thirsty. Sheryl finally lost her patience. She shook her finger in Sammy’s face and said, “Sit down and shut up.There’s nothing in here to drink.” “Uh huh,” Darryl Patterson said and pointed at three bottles lined up on the top shelf. Sheryl said the bottles looked like the bottles of grape juice at A&P. She wondered if she should feed the Lord’s grape juice and wafers to the Patterson kids who had never been baptized. Two of Miss Lucy’s stories about Jesus came to her mind. Sheryl remembered that Jesus fed a bunch of hungry people at a picnic and turned water into punch at a wedding in Cana when his friends got thirsty, and Miss Lucy had said that everyone in the third grade should try to be like Jesus. The only cups in the closet were communion cups and they were tiny. Sheryl sat three of them on the floor, lifted the bottle with both hands when she poured so she wouldn’t spill it, and passed them around. Angela and Sammy only took a sip. Sammy said his juice tasted funny. Angela said hers certainly didn’t taste like grape juice. Darryl swallowed his cupful in one gulp and begged for more. He said it tasted a little bit like his father’s beer. Darryl licked the inside of his cup, drank what was left in Angela’s and Sammy’s, and begged for more. Sheryl lost count of how many times she filled Darryl’s cup.When her arms got tired, she handed him the bottle and told him to fill his own cup. It was hot in the communion closet with the door shut. After Sammy tried several times to escape, he curled up in a ball on the floor and fell asleep. Sheryl must have dozed too, because the next thing she knew, my father was knocking on the door and the bottle was empty. After the service, my mother and I waited in the foyer. Brother Bledsoe stood by the front door as he did every Sunday to greet Straightway Christians as they filed out of the auditorium. “Fine sermon today, Brother Bledsoe.” “Fine sermon, Reverend.” People shook Brother Bledsoe’s hand and said, fine sermon, whether the sermon was fine or whether it wasn’t. All but Ivetta Hightower. She said, “Brother Bledsoe, I couldn’t concentrate on a word you said.” Ivetta looked over her glasses at my mother. “If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s undisciplined children that—” Ivetta Hightower never finished her sentence. She was interrupted by

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Writing on the Wind the sound of footsteps on the stairs. My father and Sheryl led the way down the stairs, hand in hand, followed by Angela, Sammy, and Darryl Patterson. Darryl gripped the stair railing and inched his way down.When he reached the landing, he turned loose of the railing, swayed twice in a circle without moving his feet, and clutched his stomach. “Watch out,” one of the Straightway Christians called out, but it was too late. Darryl, his shaggy head leading, lurched forward. My father reached out, but Darryl knocked Dad’s hand aside and stumbled the rest of the way down the stairs and into the foyer. Darryl plowed head first into Brother Bledsoe’s rear, ricocheted to the right, and headed straight for Ivetta Hightower. Darryl’s arms were spread like the wings of a B-52 bomber, and he was flying. Ivetta saw him coming and started backing up. She backed until she reached the wall. Feet pumping, she stuck her white gloves straight out in front like a policeman and waited for Darryl to hit. You’ll never guess what Ivetta Hightower did next, so I’ll tell you. She said the s-word. Right there in the foyer of Straightway Christian Church, Ivetta Hightower said the s-word in front of God, Miss Lucy, Brother Bledsoe, and everybody. Darryl didn’t run into Ivetta. He did something much worse. He leaned forward, opened his mouth, and threw up on her. He spewed communion crackers and wine all over Ivetta’s dress.Wine spotted her skirt and ran down her hose. Wine splattered her white leather pumps and puddled on the hardwood floor. First Ivetta Hightower’s face turned red, then it turned white.Then she swayed twice in a circle without moving her feet. “Oh, Lord. Ivetta’s going to faint.” “Sit her down. Not in the vomit, on the stairs.” “Put your head down, Miss Hightower. All the way down between your knees.That a girl.” “Somebody go up in the balcony and get towels—and a pan of water.” “I think she’s going to be all right. Are you all right, Ivetta?” Ivetta nodded. “Whoever got that child drunk should be arrested,” she said. Sheryl let out a scream and covered her face with both hands. “No, I thought it was grape juice. Please don’t take me to jail.” Brother Bledsoe squatted beside Sheryl. He put one arm around her

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waist and the other arm around Darryl. “Shhhh. Calm down. Nobody’s going to jail. Settle down. It’s all right.” There was so much confusion that no one missed Sammy until we heard a big “Amen” coming from the loud speaker. “Amen” was followed by a giggle and a splash. I took off down the center aisle as fast as I could run. By the time I got to the front of the auditorium, Sammy was dog paddling around the baptistery in his underwear. It was absolutely amazing how much that kid resembled Howdy Doody. Everyone in the foyer came into the auditorium and crowded around the baptistery. I had never seen the members of Straightway Christian Church laugh like they laughed then. They were actually having fun— right there in the sanctuary. As soon as Miss Lucy removed Ivetta’s shoes and washed her feet, they came into the auditorium. Ivetta, wearing a white baptismal robe, white gloves, and a broad-brimmed black hat, padded down the center aisle barefoot. The Straightway Christians went into hysterics when they saw the way Ivetta was dressed, and for the first time that I could remember, she and Miss Lucy were both smiling. Suddenly, in the middle of all the laughter and confusion, I got my call from the Lord. Not the way I expected—no voice, no Heavenly vision, not a single halo of golden light. I stood at the front of Straightway Christian auditorium, listening to those Straightway Christians laugh and watching that little boy from the trailer park swim around that corrugated-tin baptistery in his underwear. I looked up at the larger than life mural of Jesus and John the Baptist standing waist deep in the Jordan River. I stared straight at that foot that had never looked quite right until I knew—it wasn’t about gold stars. Brother Bledsoe’s sermons would always be boring. Miss Lucy would always believe roller-skating at Silver Wings was a sin. Ivetta Hightower would always sing half an octave higher than everyone else, and I would always have a smart mouth. Nobody at Straightway Christian was ever going to be perfect. Nobody in this world ever had been. Maybe nobody had to be. Then I was standing at the front of Straightway Christian Church wearing a white robe, and my sister, the gold star Christian, was drying my feet with a towel.

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Genesis “Gold Stars and Silver Wings” is one in a series of coming of age stories narrated by the teenage Beth Bradley.These stories are set in the Texas town of Bingham, a place that exists only in my imagination. Bingham may or may not be located in West Texas, just as I may or may not be a West Texas writer. As the daughter of a road contractor and the wife of petroleum engineer, I have lived in so many regions of the state that my writing reflects a blend of cultural influences. But the real-life incident that seeded “Gold Stars and Silver Wings” occurred in West Texas in the town of Anson.When I was seven years old, I really did sneak up to the church balcony with a friend.We didn’t throw chinaberries or get drunk on communion wine, but we made so much noise that the preacher stopped preaching to call us down. I refuse to tell the name of the church where the incident took place because Straightway Christian Church and the people who attend it are imaginary creations, exaggerated representations of attitudes and attributes I have observed in churches in West Texas and other places. It is these interior landscapes that inspired “Gold Stars and Silver Wings.” An earlier version of the story failed, and I filed it away in a drawer. As a child, I spent many hours in Sunday school chairs and church pews, listening to sermons and Bible stories and puzzling over baptistery paintings of the Jordan River in landscapes that looked a lot like West Texas. As an adult, I occupy the teacher’s chair in the kindergarten classroom, and it was one of my student’s comments that caused me to return to the story. I was reminded how innocent and honest and literal and refreshing children’s interpretations can be, and I tried to capture those qualities in the characters of the Bradley and Patterson children. Some of my writer friends have criticized the story’s ending, but I refuse to change it. For all the Beth Bradleys who still occupy church pews, this one is for you. I hope the story provides a moment of recognition as well as a moment of laughter.

teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. Betty holds a PhD in literature. She writes short stories, creative

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nonfiction, academic articles, and book reviews. Her work has appeared in a number of publications and anthologies, including Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Dallas Morning News, Blue Mesa Review, New Texas, Texas Short Fiction I, Riversedge, Concho Review, and Suddenly. One of Betty’s stories along with a critical discussion of the body of her work appear in Let’s Hear It: Stories by Texas Women Writers, from Texas A&M University Press (2003). In addition to writing fiction, Betty is engaged in academic research of Texas literary and writing clubs. Lone Star Chapters:The Story of Texas Literary Clubs was published by Texas A&M University Press in 2003. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

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Welcome to Magdalena Shirley Sullivan Last night she dreamed of ice. With a first blue light breaking over the mountains, she sits in the drive with the engine idling and looks back at the house. When she inadvertently hits the left-turn signal, causing the green arrow to flash, she feels the fear rise from her stomach. She rolls down the window and listens. Nothing. Just a faint sound of wind moving the pines. When she sees the silver plume of her dog’s tail moving tentatively back and forth behind the painted fence, she pushes the gear into reverse. She slips the brake and backs the Suburban down the drive. Once in the street she turns on the headlights and heads for the highway. The weather forecast calls for snow.

L A S T S U N DAY, from an upstairs window, as Joanna watched the melting ice drip off the branches of the trees, an old-model car drove up and parked in front of the house, blocking the drive. Perhaps as a last act of proprietary outrage, for she was leaving her husband before the week was up, she had flown down the stairs and after struggling with the bolts, thrown open the front door. She half-ran down the walk and approached the old brown car with distaste, taking in the worn tires and rusted fenders. A middle-aged man opened the door on the driver’s side and stepped

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out, as if in apology. He removed his hat and held it deferentially beneath his chin with both hands. Inside the car a family sat and waited for her to speak. A mother, a child, a grandmother.There was lunch, spread across the seats; sandwiches and crumpled wax paper and assorted mess. She opened her mouth to say, this is restricted parking here, you’ll have to clear on out now, when the small girl rolled down a window in the back. “Listen here,” she demanded, “are there fairies living in these trees?” For a moment Joanna regarded the child in disbelief.The child, who was no more than five, wore eyeglasses that magnified her eyes. Joanna glanced up at the huge willows that formed canopies like great crystallized arbors across the road. As they watched, the ice branches shifted and settled. Overhead, a hawk glided soundlessly. “I’ve seen a few fairies,” she said. “What do they look like?” “Well,” Joanna thought a minute, “they have wings, of course, small transparent wings, and when they sit on the boughs in their green and red striped socks, they cross their ankles.” The child, satisfied, rolled up her window. “I told you so,” she announced inside the car. The man thanked her and slid behind the wheel. Joanna heard the motor kick over and the gears grind. He drove to the end of the block and turned the corner, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe.

For the first few miles the highway is empty. She follows the river, her tires singing when the car crosses a bridge. Down along the water, banks of cottonwoods grow.To the left are cotton fields and fields of alfalfa. An area of farmland parallels the river and within a half mile on either side is desert. Red-soiled and unembellished, with sunsets that wrap the world in fire. An occasional truck passes. Back at the house, her husband, Sam, is peaceful in his sleep. A generous and patient bear of a man, he’ll awaken to a thermos of fresh-brewed coffee on the kitchen table, placed next to a linen napkin and flowers floating in a bowl. He’ll pour the coffee and sit by the window, looking out across the canyon. He’ll wipe his mouth with the napkin and check the clock over the stove, wondering where she is. He won’t find a note of explanation because she was unable to leave behind the note she

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Writing on the Wind wrote. There was too much to say. The cruel act of leaving left no further room for laying blame or chronicling discontent. She might just as well struck him full in the face. She watches the ribbon of highway slip beneath the wheels and turns on the radio. She turns it off. She needs silence. And for memory to cease. She wonders how long before Sam starts to go through her things, helpless in his self-deceptions. Surprise will delay his reaction. He’ll go back to the window in the kitchen and look out. He might even open it, to listen for the car. He’ll wait.

Their daughter Eleanor had married in the spring, after dropping out of school and working as a cocktail waitress.What had she cared about wasted tuition? She just got by as usual on her looks and then, there she was, all slender and luminous and surrounded by so much attention. Joanna was lost in the flurry. In the lifetime competition that had existed between mother and daughter, Eleanor was clearly the winner. It was apparent in her demeanor, in the deliberate, lazy movements of her body and halflidded glances, the waved hair that curved against her check. She’d always been the winner with Sam. Now she had Collin as well. Collin. He stood tall in his lawyering suit and fine leather shoes, cool and bleached of color, like an aspen stripped of its leaves. His blonde good looks were a personal affront to Joanna. All the needs that she had kept in the dark moved into the daylight, and she became aware of her own heartbeat, her own breath. In this new-found fear, she imagined tumors growing in her ovaries that resembled crabs. She began to draw them in her mind. So much ruined time. In preparation for the wedding, an army of specialists invaded and took over, arranging flowers and swagging tablecloths with pins stuck between their teeth. Tents were erected in the garden, a flotilla of white sails hoisted on a sailboat.They floated there in a sea of grass. It was a garden of excess. The night of the ceremony, hundreds of birds flew in, as if they’d been rented, and roosted in the trees while the band played cuando, cuando,

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cuando. There in the midst of it all, all the lovely, tremulous, and shreiking bridesmaids, Joanna felt old. She drank more than she should have, way, way more, and flirting with Collin’s brother, stumbled backwards into a hedge. Falling, she thought she saw fireflies darting back and forth between the roses. She reached out for them, to break her fall. The ground around her, glazed with the vibrant colors of spring, opened up and she dropped in. Lying there, she waited for the shovels of dirt to start dropping.

At six o’clock in Taos, New Mexico, Joanna is in the restaurant next to the motel she’s checked into, and she’s drinking Scotch at a table covered with a white cloth. She wears slim pants and a loose-knit sweater under a huge fur coat. Her handbag is on the seat of the chair next to her. She stirs the ice in her glass with a finger and wonder idly how she looks. “There’s a nice Chilean bass tonight,” the waiter tells her. He hands her a menu. “That’s your recommendation?” she asks. “One of them.” “Fine.” Ski-bum waiter. They’re all over these mountains. They’re always glib and charming and used to easy conquests. “My name’s Mike,” he smiles. A simple enough announcement. She dislikes ski resorts. She watches a crowd of skiers pour through the door, returning like gladiators from the slopes, and they fill the place. Noisy and self-assured and expensively dressed. She’s suddenly surrounded by them, the sight and sound and smell of them.They order Margaritas and Mexican beer and greet one another loudly from across the room. The place fills up with ski-talk. She knows it by heart. She could join any one of them, any table, could pull up a chair, cross her legs, and talk easily on the subject of how tough the runs are this time of year. She could sit with them, frowning and beautiful, her coat slipping from her shoulders, and lie about the last run of the day like she had, many times. Mike delivers her dinner and she picks up her fork. She orders a glass of wine. She eats and wonders what their friends will say when they find out she’s gone.That she’s left Sam with no provocation? Is that what they’ll say? That’s she’s reckless? Perhaps they’ll decide they never knew her and that could make them sly and contemplative and angry. Angry that she’s

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Writing on the Wind fooled them, that she’s moved among them, year after year, smiling and somewhat remote, and they’d never known. On the other hand, her own perception of how she’s perceived is probably delusional and she hasn’t fooled anyone. When they discuss her, over lunch, it will no doubt be with a solemn, nodding concern, but there will also be concern over who’s ordering the salmon. By the time dessert is served, a certain amount of giddy delight will surface. Delight and quickly waning interest. After all, women leave their husbands all the time. More than once.They leave them two, three times.What’s the big fuss? Her waiter returns with a pot of coffee and fills her cup. “I’m off at ten,” he grins. She’s tired from the drive and a little bit drunk. She looks up at him and her eyes are swimming. She grins back. “What room are you in?” he asks, no longer grinning. “Room?” “Yeah. The number of your room?” It’s the first demand after a done deal. Back at the motel, she sits in bed without turning on a light. There’s light from the television, but no sound. She can see her long legs stretched out in front of her and the outline of her shoes. She’s sober now. She hears traffic from the street and, next door, people quarreling. The mattress is hard and the room smells of Pine Sol, and in ten minutes a young man will knock on her door expecting sex. She feels the pain of anticipation like a fist in her stomach. She thinks of kissing him, of clothes dropping to the floor. Of stepping out of her underwear and touching herself. She reads the digital clock on the bedside table. On the screen in front of her, a police officer pulls over a motorist on an abandoned road. The officer orders the man from the car, then shoots him in the face.The man’s hands rise upwards in surprise. Joanna slides off the bed and unzips her slacks. She pushes them to her ankles and kicks off her shoes. She steps out of the pants. She peels off her underpants. The man on the screen falls sideways onto the road. She pulls the sweater over her head and drops it on the floor. As the police officer walks to the back of the dead man’s car, drag-

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ging the body and lifting the trunk lid, Joanna sees her own body walking toward her, barefoot across the cold tile floor. She sees her breasts and rounded pudenda and eyes half glazed and that’s when she knows she can’t go through with it. She hears the young man at the door. She goes to the window and raises a blind. She sees him illuminated by the neon sign in the parking lot, flashing Sorry, no vacancy. He’s out there, slouched against the door frame, doing male things. Checking the crease in his pants, scratching an armpit. He smokes, half-bent over. He steps back, flicking the cigarette away. It trails ash through the dark. He knocks again and listens for sound. She drops the blind and goes to her clothes on the floor. She gathers them up and places them on the bed. Carefully, she shakes out the slacks and pulls them on. Half-dressed, she sits down and pulls the sweater to her chest and begins to weep; deep, soundless weeping that wets her face. On the television screen a list of credits roll by.

She falls into a fitful sleep and dreams of skiing on slopes that have closed for the night. The clanking iron lifts have shut down and overhead, the empty chairs swing back and forth. Ahead of her, blue-shadowed valleys fill with pines that loom up like prehistoric icemen. She has trouble picking her turns. She swings from mogul to mogul, unable to gauge the distance or speed and she feels tiny inside her nightmare. She awakens around four in a prickly darkness with Sam’s name on her lips. The tv control is next to her in the twisted bedclothes. Her heart is beating in big thumps beneath her ribs and she lays a hand there. She thinks she hears a bat above her head, that little high-pitched eeek, it will probably get hung up in the curtains and knock over a lamp. Then it will land in her hair. It occurs to her that no one knows where she is. She gets up and finds the two-cup coffee maker and fills it with water. She places the packet of coffee in the basket and flips the switch but the red light won’t come on. She hits it with her fist. She gathers her things and heads out to the parking lot, throwing her bags into the car.The lot is lighted and full of muddy SUVs, all nosed in, loaded down with ski racks.

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Writing on the Wind She sees road maps and sunglasses scattered on the dashboards. Slightly out of breath, she looks over her shoulder at the dark windows and wonders if she’s being watched, and if so, will they think she is one of them? Or someone out to rifle a car? That isn’t her crime, hers is yet undisclosed. She drives past the office and onto the street, looking for the highway out of town.

The road curves with the river, climbs and falls and curves again, and there’s little traffic. It’s not yet dawn and if there are farm houses out there, they give up nothing of their whereabouts. No sprinkling of light across the valley or along the horizon. The clouds that usually sit above the mountains have drifted loose, a group of errant cattle, traveling down to a few feet above the road. She hasn’t seen this before, clouds so close, so silent, the headlights barely penetrate. Joanna turns the lights on bright, straining to see, and wishes she had coffee. She remembers Sam’s face at the wedding, sagged with sadness, and looking older because of it, the pain beneath the kindly smile. He cried openly during the service, then turned to her and took her hand. “Oh, hon,” he said. She could turn back. She could turn the car around and head in the opposite direction. She could stride in the house and throw her keys on the counter in the kitchen, next to the bowl of green apples, and say, I just felt like a drive. Sam would accept it because that would be the easiest thing. She drives her car up over the crest of a hill and for a split second the headlights flash against a figure standing in the highway; then, with the swerving of the car, it’s gone. The heavy car rocks on its wheels and veers off the road onto the shoulder. She rolls to a halt and sets the brake. Against the redness of the taillights, she watches in the rearview mirror, holding her breath, and she waits.Was anything there at all? Loosening her grip on the steering wheel, she sags against the back of the seat and closes her eyes. When she opens them, the girl’s face is pressed against the window glass. “Ohjesus!” Joanna whispers. There are sounds of disturbance all around. Wings thrashing in the

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tree limbs overhead and quail in the brush, calling frantically back and forth. Joanna pushes the door open, forcing the girl to step back.The girl is small and stands with her legs apart. Her arms hang quiet at her sides. She wears jeans and a light jacket with a pack strapped to her back and she seems abundantly calm. Joanna looks past the trees into the distance, suddenly alert. Had she seen something moving beneath the trees? The girl peers off in the same direction, as if responding to some signal of danger. She walks around to the other side of the car, moving quickly and light as a cat, pausing for a moment in the direct beam of the headlights. “Is there someone else out there?” Joanna asks, her voice harsh to stave off the dangers of the dark. “Waiting to join us?” “Not even,” the girl answers. She opens the door on the passenger side and slides in. She bounces on the seat, making herself comfortable, her schoolgirl face smooth and expressionless. She slips off the backpack and reaches inside, rummaging around until she comes up with a cigarette. More rummaging, then she finds a lighter. “That a dog in the back seat?” She flicks the lighter and inhales deeply. “A dog?” Joanna looks in the back. “There’s no dog.” “Looks like a dog.” “I guess you mean the fur coat.” “That’s what that is?” She reaches across the back of the seat and strokes it. “Oh, wow, it’s soft.” “Look,” Joanna steps back into the car, “I don’t know what you expect here, but I’ve got way more than I can deal with.” “I just got dumped,” the girl says. “Dumped? At this time of night?” Home seems suddenly very far away. “Isn’t that a little reckless?” “Happens all the time.” She blows smoke into the space between them. “Take me wherever you’re going.” “The thing is . . .” “I heard wolves out there.” The girl rubs her shoulder against the leather upholstery, like a cat that wants to stay put. Joanna puts the car in gear and lets off the brake.“Whatever you heard,

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Writing on the Wind it wasn’t wolves.They don’t live around here. Maybe you heard coyotes.” “What’s the difference?” She sounds oddly unaffected. Joanna maneuvers back onto the road, quite sure she’s landed in the middle of someone’s drama worse than her own. “I had a dog once,” the girl offers as they pull away. “He looked kinda like a wolf.” “You had a dog?” “Yeah. But he bought the chops.” Something about the girl seemed familiar, something in her expression, the way she moved, a lazy sexuality.

They drive the first miles in silence, with the girl smoking and the windshield misting up and the road floating in front of them like a lake. It isn’t long before Joanna begins to feel sick, as if she has a virus. Headache, nausea, she even feels feverish. She’s afraid to look over at the girl, her own need to be rid of her might show on her face, even in this light. The girl rolls the window down and throws out the cigarette. She reaches into her pack and eventually finds lip gloss. “What’s your name?” Joanna asks. “Sophie.” “That’s very pretty.” “Is it? Better than Maya?” She smears goo on her mouth. “Why?” Joanna asks. “I may change it.” Joanna wonders if there will be a hamburger place in the next town. She can stop and buy her a hamburger, something hot and substantial. She can supply her with quarters for the phone.Then she’ll say goodbye.

They’d had dinner the week before with friends. She and Sam.The Wimbleys, the Pattersons, all fairly sensible people, and well mannered, with carefully constructed visions of themselves. A small group that had been young together and were now middle-aged together. They gathered at regular intervals, talking about old times, when the men played tennis like young lions and the women took their babies to the mountains for the summer. Wonderful times, full of exchanged confidences and mutual admiration 198

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and now, there was the disappointment that all things had been attained and there was little to look forward to. Long past flirtations with one another, what they mainly had in common was the need to drink until they began to see themselves as interesting and funny.There were few surprises. Until last week. Last week offered up a great unwelcome surprise. After coffee and brandy, Claire Wimbley had pulled Joanna into the bathroom. Wobbly and flushed in the overhead light, she blurted out, “I’m seeing someone.”Then she began to giggle. “I feel so . . . nuts.” “Anyone I know?” Joanna had asked, attempting to keep her voice light and her face from crumpling. As she struggled with her own wild discontent, she could see triumph in Claire’s grin. “His name is Lubash. God, I don’t even know how it’s spelled, but he’s on the teaching staff at the university. You know, the fiction-writing class I’m in. He tells me I have promise.” She had the grace to look away. “He’s not from a privileged background, he’s from Dubrovnik. That’s part of it, you know, that foreign masculinity.” She turned to look at herself in the mirror, combing her hair with her fingers. “We do it everywhere.” Joanna wondered why she’d just noticed the change in Claire’s appearance. The tight, blonde-colored curls had given way to long, natural hair, grown past her shoulders. She no longer used much makeup. The mode of dress, that was different. She’d gone to wearing caftans and strappy sandals and very possibly no underwear. Joanna had a sudden vision of a group of students, with their book bags and bottles of water, coming upon Claire and Lubash in the blind of damp grass behind the library. Why hadn’t she realized how ridiculous Claire was at her age, ridiculous and such an imposter, pretending to be intellectual, with her classes and readings and literary talk. It wouldn’t be long, with the shifts and changes in partners, before their little group fell apart. She wanted to rush into the living room with Claire’s news. Pour another brandy and watch the room fly apart. “Foreign men know what they’re doing in bed.” “Really.” “I never thought this would happen to me, that it could be like this. I had no idea.” At that moment, Joanna felt an intense hatred for Claire. “Well, good for you,” she said, turning toward the mirror to examine a tooth. 199

Writing on the Wind Soon after, Joanna was overtaken by a fatigue so deep she began to feel defined by it. She fell into having unaccountable emotional outbursts, the noisy kind, where someone had to close the windows. Other times she couldn’t stop laughing. Why had she waited so long, why hadn’t she done life better in her twenties?

“You have a dog?” the girl asks from her side of the car. Startled, Joanna has actually forgotten for a moment she is there. “I have a dog,” she replies. “I also have a husband. I have a daughter who sometimes calls me by my first name. It always felt like a reprimand.”Why has she divulged this information to a stranger? A girl so different from Eleanor. Eleanor was born out of a fairy tale. This girl, whose name changes at whim, came out of the night, stepping into frame as if she’d just been formed. “I had a daughter.” I had a dog once. “You had a daughter?” “Yeah. I never gave her a name.” “Was she stillborn?” “Nothin’ like that, I just couldn’t keep her.” “I’m sorry,” Joanna says. “Yeah. I was fifteen.” At least she didn’t buy the chops. Joanna gives the radio a try, but it’s mostly static.There’s been a shift in the weather and a fine snow is coming down, the flakes slant against the windshield and blow off. Before long they’ll accumulate on the hood.“Are you cold?”The girl wasn’t dressed for this weather. “You must be.” “I could put on that coat.” No one had ever worn her coat. “I suppose it will be okay,” Joanna says reluctantly. “Just be careful.” The girl turns, dragging the coat over the seat. “What kind of fur is this?” For a moment she holds it close before she slips it on. It seems huge on her, and her face is lost in the fur. She looks very young. “It’s lynx,” Joanna tells her. She strokes it lovingly and her fingernails are very short and painted a red that’s almost black. It’s then that Joanna realizes why the girl seems

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familiar. Of course, the same curiosity about nice things, the same hunger. She looks like a young woman named Mary Carlyle, who’d worked for her mother as a maid the summer Joanna turned eleven.They’d rented a house by the ocean where the beach was wide, mile after mile of white sand sloping down to the blue water. The place was painted white, inside and out, even the wicker furniture was white, and the slip-covered sofas. Her father came on weekends, dapper and dressed in a white suit. So much white it dazzled the eyes. It was a wonderful place that filled up with guests. Lots of people coming and going, but Joanna was the only child. Mary Carlyle was closer by far to her age than anyone else. She was probably seventeen, eighteen. Sometimes the two of them watched the stars at night, when Mary was through with her chores, from a place on the beach where the tall grass hid them from sight, for Joanna’s mother had been clear about keeping a distance from the help. Deep into their star-struck daydreams, the air filled with murmuring insects, Joanna talked to Mary about the Milky Way and the seven sisters and grew to love the strange girl who lay by her side and listened avidly to her babbling. Mary, in turn, talked of boys and kissing and touching and things that fed Joanna’s dreams. There was a lot of cooking that summer, prepared by a cook brought in just for the occasion. Buffet lunches with platters of chicken and ham were laid out on the verandah, and Joanna remembered bunches of gathered flowers and wasps that sat atop the green gelatin salads. Late afternoons, cucumber sandwiches and butter cookies were served. Just like the British, her mother had said, when it was hot and the guests lay around, lazy and barely moving.There was a steady flow of liquor. Her mother was a prideful yet solicitous hostess, twirling her skirts and mixing gin fizzes. She forced Mary to wear clumsy shoes and an ill-fitting uniform, in an effort to conceal the youthful roundness of her body. She made a point of rearranging everything Mary did, and reprimanded her in front of the guests. Joanna’s mother had sent Mary away very abruptly in the middle of a huge afternoon storm, with the pine trees creaking in the wind. Joanna had been at her mother’s side when they caught one of the male guests kissing Mary in the kitchen. It was right after lunch. He’d held her loosely, with one hand up her skirt, and his mouth covered hers. He’d sauntered

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Writing on the Wind from the room when Joanna’s mother began to carry on. She carried on for what seemed like hours before someone calmed her down. Joanna could still see Mary’s face, her dark eyes swimming, like she’d lost all her powers. So that’s what happens, Joanna had thought, and later Joanna went to Mary’s room and stood in the doorway while Mary solemnly gathered her few things. They had no words for one another. When Mary brushed past her with a small cardboard suitcase, her features appeared to have sunk deeper into her face. The memory leaves Joanna feeling strange and buoyant and relaxed, almost disconnected from previous and future events. As if destiny has taken a hand in her life and brought her to this point, a point of definition, underscored by a dawn flicking light against the windshield. She rummages through her cassettes. She finds Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain and pushes it into the tape deck. When the music begins to play, her mind empties and she relaxes, believing she’s been given the opportunity to settle an old family debt.

With the day breaking, it occurs to Joanna that the countryside is no longer familiar. It looks more like grassy ranch country and the river, lowbanked and smooth and glistening, has disappeared from the side of the road. Rounding a curve, a passing car slaps past, flashing its lights. Her headlights are still on bright. “Take a look in the glove box,” Joanna tells the girl. “There should be a road map.” “You need a road map?” The girl tenses and leans forward, peering out the window. “I need you to tell me where we are.” The girl rummages through the compartment until she finds the map. She shakes it out. “Can I have some light?” After a few minutes of studying it, she sits back. “Looks like we’re on our way to Magdalena.” “That’s not possible. We’re on the main highway headed north.” Joanna hears the disbelief in her own voice. “The sign back there said Highway 60.We’re headed west.” “West?” Joanna slows the big car. “How did that happen?” “Beats me. I thought you were the fairy godmother of the road or something,” the girl says. 202

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“Where you headed, anyway?” “Listen you! Where the hell are you headed? You just climb in with anyone and go in any direction?” The girl Sophie folds the map and turns off the overhead light, her face unreadable. A few more miles go by before a road sign appears. “Take a look at that sign,” Joanna says. “Tell me what it says.” The girl turns to look. “It says Welcome to Magdalena. Five miles ahead.” Joanna presses on the gas pedal and the speedometer slides up to eighty. “Then that’s where we’ll stop. Before we turn around.”

By now Sam has long left the window. He’s gone through her things, checked pockets, drawers, the jewelry box. He’s sat at her desk, hunched over and wearing her glasses so he can read her correspondence. He’s called a couple of friends, cautious, not wanting to sound alarmed. Today he’ll call Claire and she’ll bring food to the house. She’ll bring pot roast or something equally as substantial and sit across from him, on the other side of the bowl of flowers. They’ll drink a lot of wine and after they’re done with the food, she’ll lean forward and tell him about her foreign lover, partly because it’s all she has to talk about and partly to frighten him.

Joanna finds a small diner with a phone booth outside, parks, and steps out into the crunching snow. She sends the girl inside and tells her to order breakfast and coffee, whatever it is she likes to eat. Joanna enters the cramped phone booth where the air is freezing and the floor is littered with bits of crumpled paper. Breath pluming in the small space, she goes through her coin purse and drops quarters into the slot. As the phone rings, she wonders what she’ll say. I didn’t mean to worry you, did I worry you? Sam’s manner will guide her, the necessary words will find their way. I’m coming home because I awakened in a strange motel to the realization that the world out there is still the scary world of my childhood. And you’re what I have. After a long wait, she hangs up and when the change clanks down 203

Writing on the Wind into the receptable, she redials. She hasn’t counted on Sam not answering. Now there’s an urgency about it. But he doesn’t answer. She slams the receiver into the cradle where it promptly falls off and dangles by the cord. In the silence that follows, she opens the door and steps out into the morning air. Someone, a man holding a paper bag, walks by and looks her over, then looks away. Up and down the road are gas stations, a café, a trailer park. About a mile of them, covered by a thin layer of snow. A motel with a pink sign that reads Desert Sky. Buildings tired and insignificant next to the highway, as if they hardly matter.Who lives here? So far from a future with any expectation. A single truck passes trailing exhaust. She sees empty corrals and a train track past the main drag. Everyone here lives by wages, in an unchanging life. This is Magdalena, dear God, and feeling an immediate sense of lonely despair, she returns to the phone and tries a different number. “Eleanor?” Joanna laughs in relief when her daughter picks up. “What’s wrong, Mother?” “Why does something have to be wrong?” “It’s pretty early.” “Is it?” Joanna can hear Collin’s voice. They’re probably still in bed, he sounds so close. She feels she’s intruded on something terribly personal and intimate, her daughter lying next to that young man, her face full of sleep, his arm across her body. Joanna thinks she hears the word hysteric. She’s always imagined their conversations about her, Eleanor’s anxious apologies on her behalf. In this moment she’s not sure why she’s called. “Mother?” “I’m still here.” She hears the suspicion in Eleanor’s voice, more now than ever, and feels the stinginess with which her daughter protects her time. “I’ll call you later, this afternoon, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Always put on the defensive, even now. Lost somewhere, somewhere unfamiliar, she might as well be in Mexico, that’s how it feels. Like she’s wandered across a border into no man’s land. Maybe she’ll rent a room in the motel with the pink sign. Sleep for a week. She’s no longer in a hurry. If the girl doesn’t need to sleep, if she doesn’t want to share a room, stretch out on a second bed, then Joanna can send her off. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

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* * * “You get through?” the girl asks. She’s eating a hamburger with the coat on. Joanna can barely see her hands. “No, and try not to get mustard on the fur.” “Didn’t talk to anyone?” She has fries and a glass of milk. She’s ordered two hamburgers. Joanna picks up the other hamburger and begins to eat. “They fix hamburgers in the morning?” “Farm town.” As if she knows what she’s talking about. “Right.” Joanna sips the coffee. It’s fresh and tastes wonderful. The place is not crowded, just a few men seated at the counter, talking quietly to the fry cook. As if they come every morning and pick up their conversations where they left off from the day before. A German Shepherd lies by the door and never takes his eyes off the cook. The two women eat in silence until Joanna pushes her plate away. “It’s time.” The girl Sophie does the same, pushes her plate away and looks at Joanna, waiting for whatever comes next, like the dog by the door. “I’m turning back and heading south,” Joanna explains. “Along the river.” She no longer feels a debt. “You’ll have to find someone else. Do you understand?” “Sure.”The girl’s face is partially hidden. “Are you finished with that?” Joanna points to her plate. “Sure.”The girl stands and slips out of the coat.Without it she looks emptied out. She holds it against one cheek, then hands it over. “You’ll get another ride.” “Sure.” Joanna approaches the counter and lays out some money. “That’s a fine dog you have,” she tells the cook. “That old dog don’t belong to anyone.” Outside the restaurant, Joanna tries the phone once more. From the booth she watches the girl walk to the edge of the road and look both ways. In the time it takes to dial, the girl is dusted with snow.When Sam doesn’t answer, Joanna slumps against the wall.“Hey,” she calls.The girl walks slowly back and Joanna hands the coat over.“You might as well come with me.” The girl’s smile shows like a cat’s, with little gratitude.

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Writing on the Wind * * * Joanna is restless with the motion of the car and the curving road and the sound of the windshield wipers clearing the glass. She’s following the tracks of the car ahead, but the tracks are fast disappearing. She speeds up. Soon the white sky will be indistinguishable from the white fields, and the herds will turn their backs to the sleet, bunching together for warmth. She’s focusing on the smallest details, minutes changing on the digital clock, when the girl says, “I’m going to need you to pull over.” “Are you sick?” They may be no more than fifteen miles east of Magdalena. “Just stop the car.” Joanna slows and pulls off to the side. She’s next to a cornfield, and wind slaps the car around. She sets the brake. The girl works out of the coat, leaving it on the seat. She opens the door and leaning over, throws up her breakfast.Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she gets out and walks back and forth.Then she goes to the driver’s door and opens the door.“Turn off the motor and get out,” she orders.There’s a small revolver in her hand. Joanna slides out.“Where did you get that?” she asks. She smiles foolishly. “Was that in your backpack?” The wind pulls at her hair and lifts it skyward. Her heart begins to pound. “Stand away from the car.” “What?” A heat releases itself, surging up through her body, her legs and arms, as if she were flammable. It blurs her vision. “Why?” “Away from the car.” The girl Sophie has started to shake, and the gun in her hand seems unsteady. She doesn’t look like Mary Carlyle, not one bit. Mary Carlyle was soft, she was soft ripe fruit, an innocent, nothing like this girl. “You’re taking my car? Is that it?” Joanna tries to raise her voice, to shout. She needs to hear her voice above the wind. She forces her chin level and she won’t look down. “What have you done? Who did you leave back there? Did he get away, is that why you found me, someone else got away? Oh sweet mother of God.” It’s harder to get the words out. Her tongue feels huge and unwieldy, soon she won’t be able to talk at all. The girl motions with the gun. “Move closer to the cornfield.” “Don’t do this, don’t leave me here. How far do you think you’ll

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get?” Joanna puts her hand in the pocket of her slacks and takes out the note she wrote to Sam but didn’t leave.The wind plucks it from her fingers and sends it cartwheeling along the ground. “You’re a nice lady.” The girl steadies the gun with both hands and fires. Joanna hears the shot, then she’s on her back in the dirt. Briefly, she struggles to lift up. There’s a second shot, then she lies still. She’ll get up in a moment and brush off. She hears the car start, hears the tires spin for a moment or two, then she sees the girl through the window as she pulls away. She just slides by, inside the big car, like a fish in an aquarium.Then she is gone. Joanna, listening, hears nothing. Not so much as the buzz of an insect. Before long, the faces of the family in the old brown car come into focus, the family with their picnic lunch and five-year-old child with the thick glasses, whose hopeful intuitions about fairies living in the trees were confirmed. Last Sunday.Was it just last Sunday? Joanna knows why the girl Sophie removed the coat. She didn’t want blood splattered on it, once she knew the value. My life for a car and a coat.Why not. Time passes and the ground turns red beneath her body. She tries to stem the flow from the holes in her chest by taking an edge of her sweater and forcing it in, but there’s no strength to do it. When they find her, they will have to do it. They will have to press against the wounds with their hands and piece together what has peeled apart, then she’ll be fine. She thinks, preposterously, how sweet the air smells, that sweet, fresh smell of baled alfalfa waiting in the fields. She is back in her kitchen laying out ingredients for an omelet. Fresh rosemary, unsalted butter, shallots. She is at her best in the kitchen. She reaches for the copper pan and sets it on a burner. She breaks eggs into a bowl, a bowl she hand-carried back from Italy, and whips them with a fork. Everything just right, edges bubbling, then, spooned onto the plate and sprinkled with parseley. A bowl of strawberries set to the side. She invites the five-year-old in and watches as the child picks up a fork. Joanna helps her with the napkin, tucking it into her shirt.

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Writing on the Wind She hears an occasional car go by, hears the shooshing that tires make. She thinks she sees something in the distance, moving along a fence line. Maybe a farmer riding a tractor, perhaps the plume of a dog’s tail, feathery and pale. She tries calling out, is anyone there? Is she ringed with creatures moving through the darkness? A family of wolves? Would they soon trot down from the hills on quiet pads, one behind the other, sniffing the ground? Finding her, will they turn her body with their paws and lick the wounds with long, pink tongues? There are no wolves in this country. Maybe cattle chewing, forging through the corn, vaguely curious. But then it disappears, whatever she thought she might have seen, or heard, she can’t be sure she saw anything at all. She begins the journey between consciousness and unconsciousness. She sees the sun through the kitchen window, laying patterns on the grass as it filters through the trees. She can smell the roses on the stems. Past the sidewalk, out on the road, is a dilapidated truck, open in the back, with blocks of ice covered in burlap ready to sell.The iceman wears a leather apron and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up. It’s warm and there are beads of perspiration on his brow. Joanna watches her grandmother walk from the house. Her step is light and she is wearing a familiar blueflowered dress. She sees Joanna and the child standing by the window. She waves and says, wasn’t it lovely, this life? Joanna lies there until nightfall, with the snow falling on the mountains and the fields, listening to her own helpless laughing and crying. This is where I was coming all along. If the sky would clear, she could find the evening star, solitary, regal, brilliant, or her beloved seven sisters, vaguely luminous as they walk their paths. She doesn’t have long to wait. If they are going to make an appearance, they better hurry. By morning, she’ll have sailed right past them. She has a sense of someone sitting close by, reading from a book of verse, one finger following the lines, Sam perhaps, or her father. She can smell the shaving soap. The same as when she was small and fraught with chills, propped up by huge downy pillows, as the snow now offers itself.This is her room, spacious and crystalline and sugar-crusted. She turns her head slightly to hear the words. You linger your little hour and are gone, there’s kindness in the voice, and still the woods sweep leafily on, missing the coralroot flower you took as trophy of the hour. He’d changed the words and made it right.

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She is incredibly cold and can’t feel her legs. Her mouth is choked with blood. There’s only a center of warmth left, but it grows smaller. Downwind are voices, barely heard, cheering her on, gogogogo, and she’s running at top speed down the track to clear the hurdle. Something in the night air changes, as if the ground is somehow forfeiting all claim, and the last thing she feels is an unfastening, as if she were being gently relieved of her clothes, a gentleness she has never known, and her heart is astonished at the speed of such belonging.

Genesis “Welcome to Magdalena” is a story that came out of those years when my own discontent and longing and need to blame were right below the surface. I’ve long believed that people who leave one person for another often regret it, given enough time, realizing too late that it wasn’t about the other person at all. The winter landscape reflects Joanna’s cold interior and fear of an outside world.Yet the snow becomes her final comfort.

grew up in West Texas and lived there until five years ago when she moved with her husband to southern New Mexico.They now live on a farm and share their place with coyotes, rabbits, and a whole bunch of amazing birds. They have a wrap-around sky, with long, clear light specific to the Southwest. It’s a great place to write, says Sullivan. She began writing late in life after several years of working as a designer. She entered graduate school at the University of Texas at El Paso to study with Rick DeMarinis. She now works with Sally McElwain, a member of the Writer’s Studio in New York. She has published in the Rio Grande Review, and the Chaffin Journal.

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Nell Peterson’s Right Hand Man Kelly Teague Smith E V E R S I N C E that hot fall day on the draw when she realized what she had done to her “right hand man,” Nell Peterson never hosted another Bible study. She stopped cleaning the house, and the only time anybody saw her was when she was outside, toothless in her house coat, picking stray leaves from her chain link fence when they fell wayward from the arbor above her lovely, lonely house. That was years later, though.The Tuesday night before Nell Peterson began to lose her mind, her husband, Eugene Peterson sat idling in his pickup at the busiest intersection of town. The traffic light flashed yellow to the east and west, and red to the north and south. “Damn it!” said Eugene Peterson, “Where did that cop come from?” He smiled phony in his driver’s side mirror at the traffic cop sitting behind him in the intersection. “Great,” he growled through clinched dentures. “What am I going to do with all these empty beer cans? Sneaky, Eugene, steady now, keep smiling.” Luckily, the police officer couldn’t see Eugene Peterson grasping furiously at the “dead soldiers” that littered his floorboards, trying to hide them as discretely as possible in the small space between the seat and the rear window. When Eugene Peterson headed south across the street, to his great relief, the police car turned to the east. Eugene Peterson rolled down his windows and let the cool, dry evening air blow up his nose and, hopefully, to his swimming brain. His feathery gray hair slapped around his forehead as he said a prayer to God: Thank you, Lord, for not letting that cop stop

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me.Thank you for protecting me against the drunk tank at the county jail. Please guide me home to my wife with no other scares, and I promise I will never get this drunk on a weeknight again. Eugene Peterson got home to his wife about five minutes later.They lived in an old, but neat, part of town where oak and pecan trees were planted close to the sidewalks, covering the street with great boughs of leafy branches. Any number of townspeople drove down Eugene Peterson’s street for no real reason except for the fact that the trees were about the only plant life in this dry, flat, West Texas town that stood bigger than a bush, and they seemed almost mystical. Their shade somehow warmed the many bodies that passed beneath. Eugene Peterson had lived in his house for about thirty years, so the romance of the tree arbor had ceased to amaze him. He drove right under it without even taking it in, turned off the headlights of his car, snuffed out the engine, and crept into the last few feet of his driveway. It was the kind of old driveway that had two long cement rows for the tires to tread. He was glad for those two defined rows of cement because they ensured a steady straight path to the garage on nights like this one when he wasn’t too good at doing anything straight. “Safe at home and none the worse for wear,” said Eugene as he rolled up his car windows with the electric switch and tried to unlatch his seatbelt. But he couldn’t move. He tried again. Nothing. Now, Eugene Peterson began to pray again: Oh Lord, I know I already told you I wouldn’t ever get that drunk again if you let me get home safe, but I didn’t think you’d try to punish me anyway. Please Lord, do not let me be paralyzed. My poor wife, hasn’t she had to put up with enough already? Please Lord, if you unparalyze me, I promise I won’t ever drink again. I’ll sign up at the AA tomorrow. Just then, he heard a “tap, tap, tap” at the window of his pickup. He beheld an angel of the Lord coming finally to rescue him. It glowed white and fluttered around its ethereal edges in the motion-sensitive light on the driveway side of his house. Oh, thank you, Lord, Eugene Peterson said to the second answer to his prayers in the same night. Then the angel spoke: “Gene, what on earth is the matter in there, honey? Come on inside. I hate it when you have to work late. Good Lord, you’ve got your hair rolled up in the window.” It was Nell Peterson in her white terry cloth bathrobe, and her face

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Writing on the Wind was covered in a clay beauty mask just visible under the toilet paper wrapping her rollers.The light paper flailed in the late breeze. “Uhm hm!” Eugene Peterson cleared his throat in a business-like voice and put the key back into the ignition of his pickup to roll the window down enough to unleash his hair from the electric pane. He accompanied his wife into the house and slept in his bed hard until Wednesday morning when he got up, drank his coffee, watered his lawn, and drove to work as usual.

Eugene Peterson had worked as an attorney for what seemed like a hundred years. He had his own private law practice and everyone in town who was anybody—well, anybody who ever got into any trouble—called upon him for all types of woes. He had the kind of sense about the law that brought justice to the wrongdoers and justified the wrongdoings of folks who really didn’t mean to do anybody any harm. These were the people who occasionally ran over somebody’s show sheep on a late night drive back out to their farms, or rolled through a stop sign right in front of the sheriff, or went out of town only to come home and realize their teenage children had thrown a party and disturbed the peace. He had really hoped to be “the people’s lawyer,” who helped out his neighbors and kept the sanctity of the small town with great discretion. He was that, in a way, but some people thought his discretion was not really a virtue, rather a symptom of his drinking problem that disallowed any real remembrance of anything, including other people’s business. He had noble intentions as a young man entering law school, but things had changed. Eugene Peterson felt like all he ever did was take care of nice people’s messy divorces so that they stayed looking nice to the rest of the polite townsfolk. “I end up getting the angry children of their divorces out of trouble when they get drunk and do stupid things like tearing traffic signs out of the ground and painting nasty words on people’s sidewalks,” he would comment to his wife. He figured that if his wife ever discovered how much of an old drunk he really was, she’d probably want to divorce him, too, and for that reason, he sometimes guessed it was probably a good thing that they’d never had any children.

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* * * On his way to the office that Wednesday morning, Eugene Peterson drove past a sloping field that fell down hard in the middle to create a passage for the draw. It was supposed to run water, but it mostly just sat dry and sandy in the midst of the burnt yellow grass turning into hard sticks in the absence of any significant rain. For years, the field had sent waves of tumbleweeds through the streets in summertime, but, recently, the town hall board of trustees had enacted legislation to ensure the proper upkeep of the historic draw and the fields that housed it. Now, instead of great dry tumbleweeds floating around on the draw, a large tractor mower hovered across it and decapitated any of those field weeds before they could grow big enough to break off and cause harm to the aesthetic sanctity of the field, and, ultimately, the streets. As he drove, Eugene Peterson missed passing people with large, dead bushes trapped in the front undercarriage of their cars. Nonetheless, driving past the field, Eugene Peterson waved to the man who drove the mowing tractor and gave him the masculine head nod of, “Good work, man,” even though he didn’t mean it. He headed on down the road a little ways past the YMCA as he did every day on his way to work.Today, he started to hum the tune of “Y-M-C-A, it’s fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A-A.” He tried to get the silly song out of his head, so he started to sing, “Drifting along with the tum-bel-ling tum-bel-weed.” But it was no use. Very soon, his subconscious replaced the tumbleweed song with “Y-M-C-A, it’s fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A-A.” Eugene Peterson was very annoyed, not just because he couldn’t get that song out of his head, but because the “A-A” on the end of the chorus reminded him ever-sopainfully of his promise to the Lord last night and the fact that the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous met every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the sweaty, steamy meeting room of the Y. Eugene Peterson pushed the accelerator down hard on his new Ford pickup and kept on going, past that horrible reminder of his most fatal character flaw and of a promise he did not want to keep. Eugene Peterson wasn’t a very religious man, hadn’t been since a somewhat disappointing experience with the power of prayer in childhood. But, when he met his wife in college and hoped to woo her into

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Writing on the Wind marriage, he sacrificed himself to weekly church services in order to spare himself from the nightly “come to Jesuses” he’d have to endure from her if he didn’t stop “acting the fool” and be a “respectable man.” Nell Peterson told her husband, “You know a respectable man in West Texas goes to church. And when he gets older, he is on the church’s board of trustees. Then, when he gets older than that, and he gets buried in the cemetery, the ground and his body are blessed, and the women in his wife’s Bible study group bring casseroles to his wake, and comfort his wife, and say nice things about him when he is gone. And I will be married to a respectable man.” So, Eugene Peterson went to church and sat politely in his pew alone while his wife sat up in the choir loft with the rest of the good singers, or nice people who really couldn’t sing but got to anyway because nobody wanted to hurt their feelings. Of course, he oftentimes snuck a bit of the Sunday newspaper in his hymnal and read it during the service, but nobody knew that.They thought he just really liked to read those beautiful old songs. Everybody thought he was nice for doing that. Eugene Peterson always figured the real reason people acted like they liked him—besides the fact that he kept them all out of trouble—was because they knew he couldn’t have children, and they felt sorry for him. Before Eugene Peterson was old enough to go to college, or law school, or even had high expectations for himself about being “the people’s attorney,” he was a local boy on a small farm outside of town. Eugene Peterson was one of seven children. Everyone in town called his mother a “saint” because “she had all those children and worked her fingers to the bone trying to keep them up nice on the little bit of nothing her husband made.” If you cut his father open and looked all the way down to his bones, you still wouldn’t find anything dirty or bad. He was all light, deep down to the core of him. He was jolly and smart and kind.This was evidenced by the townsfolk’s recollection that, “If their country dogs got pregnant and had too many pups, old Mr. Peterson would never take a handful of them and dump them out in a field somewhere” like a lot of the farmers did. He’d find some way to keep them fed, and he’d build a new wing on the old doghouse to keep them in. “He sure is nice,” people would say, but they’d mean he was maybe too nice, because he never got anything accomplished besides his good deeds. 214

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On sunny summer mornings when the other farmers were out moving pipelines to water their crops, old Mr. Peterson would find himself too involved in a book. He loved to read, and he often imagined himself as one of the swarthy heroes he’d find within the pages of his novels. Unfortunately, he couldn’t imagine himself into ambition. If he ever did get a crop to come to fruition, it was mostly by the grace of God. Mr. Peterson only made enough money to keep his family starving instead of dead. When the family got the mumps, Eugene Peterson was a little boy. He was the youngest of the children, and he was small. Mr. Peterson called him the “runt of the litter” and loved him even more because he was. But, in spite of his great love for Eugene Peterson, he was too poor to get him any real medical attention when the mumps “went down” on him. As a last ditch effort, the Petersons had gone to their church congregation and said, “We sure need your help. Please pray for Eugene’s recovery.” He didn’t die. But before Eugene Peterson was even old enough to know what he’d lost, he was sterile. Perhaps it was his sterility that made him so incredibly ambitious. Eugene Peterson grew up from a runt, into a feisty schoolboy, and then a heroic athlete. Ultimately, he became the first college graduate from the Peterson family. Eugene knew three things: he would never be poor, he would never be lazy, and he would find himself a wife and love her even if he was damned to die without a legacy. “What did growing up with a bunch of brothers and sisters ever do for me except make me sick and sterile and hungry?” Eugene Peterson once asked his childless wife. It was the general opinion around town that what growing up with all those brothers and sisters did for Eugene Peterson, really, was to let him ache for what he was missing. “That’s real sad,” they said. “Reason enough to hit the bottle now and again.” They forgave him his drunkenness and never let his wife in on their secret knowledge of it.

Everyone figured Nell Peterson to be more naive than she was. She knew her husband in college, and he liked to drink then. She also knew he was sterile, and she was married to the man. But she loved him so much and tried to look past these things. It was easier from the house of her dreams on the most beautiful street in town. She knew that all things get fixed in heaven. That was the reason she was so adamant about Eugene’s going to 215

Writing on the Wind church. If she could just get Eugene to heaven, they could meet all over again, maybe at a heavenly social like the fraternity one where they’d met the first time. Only this time, when they got re-married, she’d get those children. It would be her divine reward for a lifetime of faithful service. So, Nell Peterson, she never missed a Sunday at church, she planned and orchestrated all the summertime revivals, and she made sure to host the best ladies’ Bible study meetings at her home, which she kept beautifully decorated and immaculate: cleanliness was next to godliness, of course.

Eugene Peterson finally got past the YMCA and the draw and over to his office by nine Wednesday morning. He settled into his desk but was distracted all day. He kept looking out his window to the sunlit lawns. Ever since he left the old, dry fields of the family farm where sharp brown dirt and tumbleweeds would blow by and scratch the uncovered shins of sterile little boys, Eugene Peterson had never let a lawn go yellow under his supervision. Just as he did this particular morning, he would always wake up early at his house and water the lawn. He’d sit on the front porch, drink his coffee, and watch and listen to it sputter in sprays out of the spinning propellers of the walking lawn sprinkler. As soon as sprinkler systems became available in his small town, Eugene Peterson got one installed, and, even when it was set to a timer and came on by itself like clockwork, he’d still watch it with hawk eyes over the smoky steam of his morning coffee. He had taken the same care with the lawns of his private law practice, and now, looking out his window, their greenness reflected off his glasses. Eugene Peterson smiled a bit and began humming pleasantly, “hmhm-hm-hm.” Soon enough, he realized he wasn’t humming just any old tune. “Hm-hm-hm-hm, It’s fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A-A.” It was that lousy chorus again. Eugene Peterson’s grin fell off of his face and sunk into one of the folding wrinkles of his neck. “Damn it,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. I feel like I’m hexing myself because of some drunken, prayerful promise. I don’t need to go to any damn Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the Y-M-C-A. Damn it!” With the last curse, Eugene Peterson slapped the leather-bound top of his mahogany desk. With a thud, a picture of him and his wife at a church meeting fell off the corner of his desk, face-first onto the floor. 216

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Eugene Peterson picked it up and put it neatly back into place, but he was still upset. He tried to distract himself by doing some work, so he dug around in his file cabinet and began to alphabetize the townsfolk’s indiscretions. By the time he got to the “Ms,” he was depressed. “Oh Lordy. The Masterson, Morgan, and Motley divorces were bad ones,” he said, “I need a drink.”

Eugene Peterson hadn’t always been an alcoholic. Sure, sterility was a burden to his masculinity—not to mention his trust in local religious congregations—but he had achieved so many things and reached so many personal goals, he’d almost forgotten all that, especially now that he and his wife had gotten old and couldn’t possibly have children if they tried. No, what had mostly “driven Eugene Peterson to drink,” as the townspeople said, was not so much the sterility. Besides his wife’s painful attempts at perfecting him, it was the constant dealings with the town’s troubles that made a drunk out of Eugene Peterson. Never, in all the years that Eugene Peterson had been practicing law, had anyone ever called him at work just to talk or invite him to a party; they did all that through his wife. Every call that came over the lines at Peterson and Associates was a bad one; somebody on the other end of the line was either crying, cursing, or echoing from the cold, solid cement walls of the county jail. And, as Eugene Peterson thought about all that, he took a few deep, long swigs off of the flask he kept in the desk drawer, the flask he playfully called his “right hand man.” After replacing his “right hand man” back in its hiding place, he closed shop early—like he did every Wednesday—to get home in time to go to church with Nell. “Thank God it’s quitting time,” he said. As he began driving tipsily home, he switched on the radio and tried to find something good to listen to.“I’ll be damned,” Eugene Peterson said for the second time after turning to the classic rock station where “Y-MC-A” came blaring out. Eugene Peterson quickly changed the station and found something else much more bearable to listen to. After a bit of careful navigation, Eugene Peterson found himself again near the newly-trimmed draw. The sun was setting low out over its fields, and Eugene Peterson pulled his new pickup off to the bar ditch so he could take a little time and watch the sunset. “It’s going to be a beauty,” he said. 217

Writing on the Wind For the most part, the sky today had been blue, but it had skinny clouds upon it that looked like something his wife would have painted with an unsteady hand in one of her church craft groups. Tiny, feathery clouds made little pockets of fluff in the otherwise monochromatic sky. Bits of color got trapped and striped the sky when the sun set, like markings on a pink and yellow zebra with a pale blue head. When Eugene Peterson exited the cab of his pickup to watch the sunset, an empty beer can rolled out and made a tinkling metallic sound as the aluminum bounced on the blacktop road. “Oops,” he said as he giggled and kicked it under the pickup, “Time to watch the lightshow.” And he turned wobbly to the west. All those colors he knew so well his whole life got stirred up like wiggly circles of watercolor paint on a giant canvas. First came the pink, softly against the blue, and it powdered the feathery clouds with rose petal dust. Then, the lavender grew slowly in the places where the edges of the pink paint touched the blue. Suddenly, the heavens dropped a whole can of marmalade paint on the canvas, which turned gold all across the bottom where it leaned against the easel of the draw. The falling sun was a huge drop of burnt sienna, a round, red blob of a porthole. It was so close, Eugene Peterson thought, “If I walk out far enough onto the fields, I can pass right through it and right off the edge of the earth.” The porthole turned from a round red disk to a half circle and then to little more than the tip of a red manicured fingernail. And then, it was gone. But, the sky remained lit, a little red and yellow on the bottom, blue and white in the middle, and navy and black on the top. “Well, would you look at that,” laughed Eugene Peterson as a tiny, lonely tumbleweed, no bigger than a little brown house finch, scurried across the fields of the draw. It danced along the yellow-brown stage and flittered in spite of itself across the still-glowing horizon. He was filled with childhood joy and memories he hadn’t even known he had. In spite of all the mowing and caretaking, this single soul of the wild plains survived, and it was a sight to behold. And then, to Eugene Peterson’s great surprise, the tiny tumbleweed was caught in the grasp of the evening breeze. It rose a great distance into the air before tumbling down again. On the hard grass, it lost control and ran smack into the side of the YMCA. Its dry, delicate branches smashed into a heap that fell around the tiny dead stalk.

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“Humph, figures,” said Eugene Peterson as he heaved himself back into the cab of his pickup and, once again, headed for home. Eugene Peterson liked going to church on Wednesday nights because, before the service, there was always a “Family Night” dinner at which Eugene could feast on all the wonderful things his wife used to cook before the doctor told her to cut them out of his diet. There would be honey ham and greasy, buttery biscuits, cream corn, salty green beans, and a delectable dessert to devour with both the eyes and stomach. Eugene Peterson was awful hungry after his afternoon drunk, and he loved the irony of eating extravagant, gluttonous food in a place where one was always told that the body was God’s temple. After Family Night dinner, the sermon began in the chapel. During the service, Eugene Peterson was distracted from the local paper tucked inside his hymnal when he heard the preacher start to talk about signs that the Lord was working in a man’s life and how he needed to go about looking for them. “The Lord’s always working His wonders and giving us signs for the path we’re supposed to take,” the preacher said. “He’s always there, right next to us, holding our hands down the trail of life. Jesus is our right hand man, brothers and sisters.The problem with us is, we keep closing our eyes and praying for signs and miracles, but we forget to open our eyes back up again to see them.” This was one of those sermons that Eugene Peterson always listened to. Even though he didn’t much believe in the ways of religion, he still sometimes prayed for those signs of help and protection. But it seemed the only time he ever saw any signs was when he was drunk. And any man who’d been sober for the last thirty-five minutes, like Eugene Peterson, was smart enough to know that that wasn’t any real sign, just a drunken hallucination. The end of a sermon crescendoed into a powerful, “So sayeth the Lord,” and the congregation “Amen-ed” and “Uh hummed,” which was a little out of character for an all-white, West Texas congregation. However, like Eugene Peterson, everybody listened to and got excited at those sermons about signs.The only difference between everybody else in the congregation and Eugene Peterson was that he was the only one who was no longer hopeful—or naive enough—to believe he’d ever get one.

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Writing on the Wind When Eugene Peterson left church that Wednesday evening, he said to his wife, “I’ve got a little more work to get done over at the office tonight, so I’ll just drop you off at the house and head back over there.” When he pulled away from the driveway of his house, Eugene Peterson said, “Good night, honey,” and drove away through the majestic arbor of trees. As he did, something plopped down hard on his windshield. “Damn blackbirds,” Eugene Peterson said as he turned his windshield wipers on full blast and drove on down the street. The only unfinished business Eugene Peterson had was with his “right hand man,” not the One that helpfully led a person down the path of life, but the one in his desk drawer that made a man stumble down it, cross-eyed. Sometimes, after a particularly rousing sermon, Eugene Peterson felt an extra need for a drink, and as going to the local bar on the ground floor of the motel would have been a little too conspicuous after Family Night, he decided to go and finish off whatever was left in that old flask in his desk. When he again got close to the draw, his windshield brightened by the lights surrounding the draw in case any tourists wanted to visit it in the evenings.This never happened, much to the town council’s chagrin. In the unnatural lighting, Eugene could see a chip of a bird shell on his windshield. Apparently it wasn’t the bowel of the blackbird that had hit his window, but rather the small egg of its innocent, embryonic child smeared across the path of his wiper blades. Eugene Peterson thought, at first, that he felt a little sick at his stomach, but then he realized that he wasn’t sick at his stomach at all. He was having some sort of an attack and was filled with a pain he had never felt before, even when he was sick to death with the mumps as a child. The pain pulsed and stabbed his abdomen. He tried to unhitch his seatbelt and pull his pickup into the bar ditch. But the pain wouldn’t stop, and he couldn’t get out of the seatbelt. He lost control of the steering wheel. Seven minutes later, the county police and fire fighters arrived to a call from the YMCA. The north wall of the building was smashed in. Bricks were lying around on the edge of the draw, and dust billowed in great tufts in the still, crisp, nighttime air. Two of the county officers and a pair of EMTs huffed around to the front of the building and entered through the glass doors of the YMCA. “Go on around to the right there. It’s in the conference room,” the desk clerk told them. 220

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They could see the front end of a new Ford pickup parked within the north wall. The horn was blaring because the driver’s head was lying heavily against the steering column. As the EMTs raced with their tools and equipment to rescue the man in the pickup, one of the police officers started asking questions to the men in the conference room. “All right gentlemen, is everybody O.K.? I need to know what ya’ll saw and how it happens that there’s a Ford in that wall over yonder.” One of the gentlemen stood up to answer the officer’s questions, but the others sat dumfounded in their small circle of chairs. The gentleman tried to explain things the way he saw them, but he was pretty shaken up. Finally, an old, thin farmer spoke up. “That’s Eugene Peterson’s truck. I hope he ain’t hurt too bad. He helped me out with something one time.” As he said this, the old farmer twirled a six-month sobriety chip in one of his shaking hands. Apparently, Eugene Peterson had made it to the AA meeting, after all. The doctors told Nell Peterson the news about her husband right there in front of him in his hospital bed. Of course, he had a concussion and couldn’t hear a thing, but his wife sure did. The doctor said, “Eugene has developed some pretty nasty liver problems, and he is not a good candidate for a transplant what with his age, and his head injury, and his taste for the bottle, and all.” Nell Peterson took the news like the lady she was. She held her head up and said, “Thank you, doctors,” and pulled a clean handkerchief from her handbag to wipe away any pesky tears that might well up in their presence. She took her husband home a couple of weeks later.They had dinner each night on the porch of their house and watched as the branches greened and then yellowed and then browned on the great arbor overhead. And when the brown leaves fell and all the birds flew south, Eugene Peterson told his wife, “Well, Mrs. Peterson, I guess I better go on.” She stroked his feathery gray head as she said the Lord’s Prayer over him, and then, he went. All the ladies in Nell Peterson’s Bible study came over with casseroles and pies and finger sandwiches. She said, “Thank you all so much for your kindness. I’ll just have to nibble on every dish.” She did, too, and most of the time, she could make it until they left to throw up. After the funeral, she walked over to the cemetery to put fresh flowers on Eugene Peterson’s grave. She took the long way most of the time so 221

Writing on the Wind she wouldn’t have to cross the draw. One day though, she was late to her Bible study group, so she couldn’t take the path that went around the fields of the draw, and she forced her heavy steps across its mountainous flatness to get to her husband’s resting place. It hadn’t rained in some time, and the draw was bone dry. She remembered when she was young—long before she met Eugene Peterson at college—coming over to the draw with her sisters and romping in the waist-high waters in her bloomers for fun. She couldn’t remember when it had dried most of the way up, but she thought it was about the time that they had that real hot summer and everyone had gotten the mumps. As she remembered those days, she started to cry. She cried hard, heavy tears that fell to the sandy draw bottom and left round wet spaces on its cracked and creased face. She cried until the sun began to burn through her black shawl and made her back hot and fiery. She fell to her knees and tore her stockings, and still she cried. She cried right through the time she should have been at Bible study. She cried because she realized, for the first time, her part in drying up Eugene Peterson’s life water and hopes and ambitions and forcing him to find refreshment elsewhere. She raised her wrinkled hands up to the hot sun above the draw and cried out through a whisper, “All these years I was trying to lead Eugene to the water, but oh, Lord, there wasn’t any of it left to drink.”

Genesis In the months since I’ve dug my roots from the dry, flat ground of West Texas and gone about the business of acclimatizing them to the plush humidity of Dallas, I’ve “discovered” Nell and Eugene Peterson, the fictional characters of my story. “Nell Peterson’s Right Hand Man” fit perfectly on the stage of a West Texas plain. The internal desolation and drought that face the characters are mirrored by the landscape that surrounds them. However, the simple beauty and bounty of life are also there in sunsets, tumbleweeds, and planted trees that work hard to survive, majestic in spite of everything. Nell Peterson allows exploration, at the regional level, into a seemingly universal phenomenon among some “good” women to love and marry a man and his flaws but eventually see nothing but those flaws that

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must be changed, hidden, made up for. She is not really all that bothered by them, but she thinks they might be noticed and get people to talking. So, instead of claiming her roots, her life, her people with pride, she cleans them up for the town folk. She dusts and hides under the rug what’s dried up and scattered, hoping her Bible study guests don’t trip over it on the way in. Eventually, she stands perfectly clean, but alone, in the brown West Texas breeze, eyes closed, teeth clinched. She discovers she should have just smiled dirty and cherished it all.

received a Master of Arts Degree in British and American Literature in May of 2000 from Texas Tech University where she was the recipient of the Benjamin Rude Memorial Scholarship. She is currently a full-time Lecturer of First Year Writing at Southern Methodist University. She and her husband Ryan live in Dallas where she has just begun writing fiction. This is her first published story. K E L LY T E A G U E S M I T H

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Lisa and Her Brothers Laurie Champion I ’ M D R I V I N G D OW N I - 2 0 , headed for home. The West Texas heat is blaring. I’ve got all the windows down in my Jeep Cherokee, and my wife, Lisa, is sitting next to me. I’m watching Lisa’s hair blow all around her face. Her two older brothers are in the back seat, and there’s this big fight about money going on back there. I’m trying to drown them out with a Waylon Jennings tape. “Didn’t we shine?” Waylon blares through the front speakers. Lisa starts giving me one of her looks again, the look that suggests she wants me to guess what she’s thinking. Her brothers are getting on her nerves. “What is it?” I finally give in and ask. I know what she’s going to answer. “Nothing,” she says. She shrugs her shoulders, pretending she doesn’t know what I’ll say next. “No, come on, you’re thinking about something.” “No, really,” she says. “Nothing. I’m just sitting here, not really thinking about anything.” “Nothing. How do you manage to think about nothing?” “Alcohol,” her brother K.C. says from the back seat. He holds up a Coors and gives us all a sermon on the thrills of alcohol. “Right on,” her other brother, Randy, mumbles. Through my rearview mirror, I see K.C. roll his eyes at Randy. “Oh yeah,” Randy says, nodding his head and tapping his leg. “Shut up!” K.C. tells him.

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“Remember that Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters?” I ask Lisa. “Yeah,” she nods. “Well, I’m going to write one called Lisa and Her Brothers.” I’m trying to get a laugh out of her, and she laughs real loud. “All right. Kick ass,” Randy says, and K.C. rolls his eyes again. K.C. needs a car, so I told him I’d help him get one. He demanded we go to one of those “we-tote-the-note” places, even though I told him those places are rip-offs. Now Lisa swears that over her dead body will K.C. pay way too much for some Silverado pickup with 80,000 miles. “And that’s miles showing,” Lisa says. “No telling how many real miles. Any moron knows that means 180,000 or God knows how many real miles.” “So what,” K.C. keeps repeating. “It’s my money.” “Right on,” Randy mumbles.

I should set K.C. straight, remind him it’s my money, but it’s starting to get real loud back there, so I figure I’d better keep my mouth shut. I ask Lisa if she’ll reach back and get me another beer. I tell her I’m scared to stick my arm back there. Lisa reaches back and gets me a beer out of the Styrofoam cooler. Lisa’s got four big brothers, and I learned a long time ago that the way to survive in her family is to fight my own battles but avoid getting in family squabbles that don’t involve me. I just turn Waylon up and start singing “Didn’t We Shine,” even though that song isn’t playing anymore. “Didn’t we shine, didn’t we shine?” I sing. Lisa and I got married thirteen years ago. She divorced me three years ago, and now we live together. Weird, especially when I have to explain it to someone. Simple census surveys and stuff like that used to be so easy. Here lately, the marital status question throws me for a loop every time. I was putting “married” until Lisa saw it on my life-insurance policy and said I was into “wish-fulfillment” or some weird psychology stuff. Probably some idea she got from a talk show. “Well, what do you want me to put?” I asked, hoping she might at least be thankful I was making her my beneficiary again.

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Writing on the Wind “‘Divorced,’” she said, then gave me that suspicious look. Of course, I went through my routine again, but this time she convinced me she really wasn’t thinking. No, she wasn’t thinking at all. “Or ‘single,’” she suggested. “Put ‘single.’” “‘Single?’” I asked. “Yeah, or leave it blank. Don’t answer that question. It would be kinda funny.Who cares if they can’t take a joke.”

Yeah, easy for her to say. Lately, I’m beginning to wonder if the joke’s on me. I mean, I moved back in with her a year ago, and she may not know it, but we are married. I think we’re legally married. At least as far as the state of Texas is concerned. But maybe not here in West Texas.You know what they say, “There is no law west of the Pecos.” That may also include no common law marriage. I’m not sure. I don’t remember exactly how or why I moved in with Lisa. I know one thing: she left me, and I wanted her back. Real bad, I wanted her back. At first, I’d call her, and she’d just answer direct questions or mumble or say she had ironing to do and couldn’t waste time talking on the phone. I guess I sort of left my shoes over at her house one day, then kind of moved my tool box over there. Finally, as she says now, I “caught her at a weak moment.” “No,” I always correct her, “I caught you at a strong moment.” She always agrees, so I figure I’m in like Flynn. Now we live together, but she still won’t say I’m her husband. She always introduces me as her friend or sometimes her boyfriend or every now and then she just calls me by my name. When she does that, I always quote David Allen Coe. “You don’t have to call me Darling, Darling,” I say. Gradually, I’ve worked my way up to where I sometimes call her “my wife,” and she doesn’t say anything. When I pull off the interstate, onto the service road, Lisa points to the video store. “Want to watch a movie tonight?” Lisa asks. “Okay,” I say, and it does seem like a good idea. I switch from Waylon and start singing Hank. “I got a hot rod Ford and a two-dollar bill,” I sing. I pat Lisa on the leg and tell her how pretty her hair looks blowing all over the place.

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* * * “Man, you and Randy don’t know nothing about used cars,” K.C. says real smart-ass like, directing the comment at me. Randy still sits tapping his knee and nodding his head. “Oh yeah,” he says. I’m not even expecting any trouble. I swear, I’m just sitting in the front seat, singing to Lisa. All of sudden, K.C. starts in on me. He goes on and on about how I didn’t help him like I said I would. Luckily, Lisa chimes in and puts in a good word for me. She says, “Yeah, K.C., he is helping you. He knows about that kind of stuff. He doesn’t want you to pay too much. Face it, it’s a waste of money.” “Yeah, well, it’s my money,” K.C. keeps saying. “Right on,” Randy mumbles. Finally, I can’t help myself. I have to set him straight. “No, K.C.,” I say, “It’s my money.” Then, of course, Lisa has to put in her two dollars worth. “Our money,” she says. “Well, yeah, our money,” I agree. K.C. gets real mad. I just laugh. He’s drunk. But I get a little worried when Lisa and K.C. start yelling at each other. Now Lisa’s making faces at K.C. I turn around and see K.C. making faces at Lisa.This should be funny, real funny. It’s not even about money anymore. If Lisa wasn’t so mad, I’d tell her this argument is something more serious, something left over from childhood. She’d get a good laugh if she could see herself.

Randy keeps saying, “Right on” and “Oh yeah,” every chance he gets. Lisa looks at Randy. “What are you on?” she asks him. “Get a life,” she tells both of them, rolling her eyes. Randy ignores her, acting like he doesn’t know what’s going on. Maybe he really doesn’t know what’s going on. “Fuck you,” K.C. tells her. “What’s the problem, Lisa?” I ask. I’m starting to get a little ticked off myself. “Hey, don’t talk to my wife like that,” I tell K.C.

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Writing on the Wind “Wife?” K.C. asks. I look at Lisa, and she doesn’t say anything. “Shut up,” she turns around and screams. For a minute, I wonder if she might jump over the seat and go after him. “You shut up!” K.C. hollers. I know they don’t mean all this, and I’m hoping I can keep out of it. It’s getting hard, though. They’re screaming at each other. I can’t even understand them anymore. I’d sing Waylon again, but nobody could hear me. “Everybody shut up!” I finally yell. “You shut up!” K.C. screams at me. “Shut up. Shut up, mother fucker!”

I understand that. I slam my Jeep in park, not even thinking to stop it first. Everyone sort of wobbles around in the car for a few seconds. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m diving over my seat, punching toward K.C. I get him down on the back floorboard, and I’m laying on top of him. Lisa opens the back door and starts pulling on my legs. She grabs my shirt, trying to pull me off K.C. K.C.’s punching me in the gut, but I can’t feel the blows. I’m trying to get a grip around his neck, and finally I do. “You’re in the middle of the road, for Christ’s sake,” Lisa says. “Stop,” she says, but nobody’s listening to her. Someone jerks my arms and pulls my hands behind my back. It’s not Lisa because whoever it is seems strong like a man.Whoever it is yanks me out of the Jeep, and I feel myself sort of flying all over the street. A man says, “You’re under arrest,” but he’s got me from behind, so I can’t see him. He throws me against the Jeep, tells me to keep my arms up, and pushes my hands against the Jeep. “It’s a cop,” Lisa shouts. Randy runs across the street to Seven-Eleven, and Lisa and K.C. stand on the other side of the Jeep and talk to two cops. By now, I know the guy behind me is a cop, and I feel sharp pains in my calves. He’s yanking my arms behind my back, pulling them almost out of socket. He’s going to beat the hell out of me. He keeps kicking and kicking me. The gathered crowd just stands there in the middle of the street, staring at the show. I see Lisa look over toward me. She runs around the Jeep, screaming something. I can’t really make out what’s happening. All I know is I’m get228

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ting the shit knocked out of me. I make a mental note never to help anyone buy a car. “What are you doing?” Lisa asks the cop.The cop immediately stops kicking me. Thank God. He lets go of me, and I stand there looking at Lisa. Beer cans are scattered around the Jeep. “Excuse me, Miss?” the cop asks. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’” “Who is this man?” the cop asks. “That’s my husband,” she says and looks me straight in the eye. I can tell by the look on her face it takes her a few seconds to realize exactly what she’s said. I wait for her to correct herself. Any second now she’s going to correct herself. She’ll say, “Ex-husband, I mean that’s my exhusband,” but she doesn’t. She comes over and asks me if I’m all right. “Husband?” I ask, not really wanting to push my luck but unable to resist. “Yeah,” she says to the cop, “That’s my husband, and I saw you kicking him.” “You’re both drunk,” the cop says. “A&M, Alcohol and Muscle,” he shouts to the other cops, who are still talking to K.C. “I’m not drunk,” Lisa says.Then she moves closer to me and tells me to pretend she was driving. The two other cops come around to me, and they put me in the squad car. K.C. tells the cops to take him instead, and Lisa says she was driving. “It was my fault,” K.C. tells Lisa. When the squad car starts rolling, I figure K.C. has failed to convince the cops to take him instead of me. Oh well. “Here, take these,” I hear Lisa shout. She runs beside my window, holding out a pack of cigarettes. “I’ll come get you out of jail,” she hollers as the car turns the corner. So, here I sit in my cell, knowing Lisa will come get me any minute. Any second, she’s going to plow through the jailhouse door and take me home with her. I can’t wait. I look over at the guy next to me. “What did you do?” he asks. “Nothing,” I lie, giving him the standard jailhouse answer. “What did you do?” “Nothing,” he says. 229

Writing on the Wind “My wife’s coming to get me,” I say. “I wish I had an ol’ lady to come get me out,” he says. “She’s coming to get me, and I bet she’s going to say, ‘What kind of bird don’t fly?’” The guy looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah,” I say. “Her brothers are always going to jail, and when they get out, I always say,‘What kind of bird don’t fly?’ Course, they always laugh.Yeah, they laugh because they’re out and flying by then.” I look at the guy, and he doesn’t think it’s too funny. It hits me why he doesn’t think it’s funny, and I wish I’d never said it. I try to think of something else to say to him, so I tell him about the cop beating me up. I roll up my pants leg and show him my swollen red ankles. “It don’t even hurt,” I tell him.

Genesis “Lisa and Her Brothers” takes place on a West Texas highway. It presents the long stretches of highway and barren land that separate West Texas cities. Long drives across these West Texas highways became an experience I got accustomed to when I lived in Alpine.Although the scenery in Alpine is beautiful, the mountains sometimes surround the area in a way similar to a hot-wired fence around a chicken pen. Frequently, my husband, Bill, and I would get in our Jeep and take weekend trips to Midland, El Paso, or even as far away as Austin or Dallas. During these excursions, we would try to accomplish everything that could not be done in Alpine. We would go to restaurants, to big grocery stores, and to the movies, activities limited in Alpine.This story is based on a true experience Bill and I had during one of these excursions.As do most of my stories,“Lisa and Her Brothers” explores relationships, which have always intrigued me: there seems to be no pattern to what makes them work or not work. Although, as the title suggests, the story concerns the relationship between Lisa and her brothers, it is more the story of the complex bond between Lisa and the narrator.The kinship the narrator feels with Lisa’s brothers is also revealed.When writing the story, I thought of the time my mother sent Bill a cartoon that portrayed several weirdos standing behind a woman, who stood across from a man. The woman in the cartoon says to the man, “Whoever marries me marries my family.”

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was born in Dallas and lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex most of her life before moving to Alpine,Texas, where she lived for five years. Currently, Champion is Associate Professor of English at San Diego State University, Imperial Valley. Her essays on American literature have appeared in Southern Literary Journal, Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, Studies in Short Fiction, Journal of the Short Story in English, and other journals. She is co-editor of Blacks in the West: A Century of Short Stories and editor of The Critical Response to Huckleberry Finn, The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction, and American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Champion’s fiction has appeared in several Texas publications, including New Texas ’99, New Texas ’98, Texas Short Stories, Texas Short Fiction, and Texas College English. She co-edited, along with Billy Hill, Texas Short Stories II. L AU R I E C H A M P I O N

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Road Signs Jill Patterson K I M M Y S T RU T T E D across the Seven-Eleven parking lot.The sun gazed at her like the angry eye of a cyclops. Under the heat of its stare, the blacktop melted and stuck to the soles of her tennis shoes. She would have shielded her eyes with her hand, but she needed both of them to grip the Big Gulp of Pepsi. “Want some?” She poked the straw near Clint’s mouth as he pumped gas. He squinted at the scarlet cup. “You have a peanut bladder,” he said. Kimmy supposed Clint intended to shepherd her with that statement, to guard her against the consequences of intemperance. Still she felt her stomach tighten, not with gratitude or remorse, but with anger. You have a peanut bladder didn’t sound at all like thank you very much for asking. And before they had been on the road twenty minutes, Kimmy guzzled that thirty-two-ounce beverage and chomped every last chip of ice though she had meant to ration it, sipping on the cola during their threehour pilgrimage to Cedar Canyon Retreat. Her Big Gulp was a spurt of rebellion that Saul, Clint’s prayer partner, blamed on Kimmy’s refusal to repent of old ways. Lecturing from the back seat, he thumped her shoulder. “You’re wanton,” he said. “Sure, Pepsi Cola today, but tomorrow—. Tomorrow it’ll be beer, dancing, orgies.” He grabbed the back of Kimmy’s seat, yanked it, pulling himself forward so he could peer over her shoulder. His mouth tightened. His eyebrows arched, woolly like tarantula legs, and the backs of his hands were furry.

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Kimmy shivered. She was grateful Clint was not a hairy man. She would praise God for his bald body later, during her quiet time, for true Christian women learned to give thanks in all circumstances. Kimmy turned to show Clint she appreciated his clean-shaven face, but she caught him exchanging a look with Saul in the rearview mirror. The two men shook their heads: Kimmy’s lack of spiritual growth was such a shame. She couldn’t resist the lure of a good bargain at Seven-Eleven. Saul sat back in his seat and sighed. His brows twitched. He elbowed his wife. “Tell her.” Fran slipped her freckled arm between the bucket seats and patted then clasped Kimmy’s left hand. Fran’s bracelets jingled around her wrists. “Everyone struggles with temptation, sugar,” she said. “You pray about it.” Kimmy took no solace from this advice.What she needed right now was a gas station, a roadside park, a Porta-Potty. She wished Fran would sense her peril and claim she needed a bathroom, too. But Fran could not be depended upon. Women like her visited the ladies’ room only to check their make-up.They were plain sparrows, caged in the desert of West Texas, wishing they were bright cockatoos flying free in the tropics. They shook the dust from their feathers, painted colors on their faces, and squawked church hymns in the cool hours of early Sunday mornings. In the back seat, Fran opened her compact, peered into the tiny round mirror, and groomed herself. Patting some powder on her cheeks, she erased her freckles. Her fingernails clicked like tweezers and plucked a wayward lash. It didn’t matter. Interstate 20 was forsaken. The road’s arm stretched for miles, long and scrawny, not rippled with the muscle of hills. Occasionally, tumbleweeds, some the size of their car, somersaulted across the road, but no trees or bushes dotted the horizon. Kimmy saw no hint of a Love’s heart or a Texaco star either. She supposed she should be thankful. If she saw a gas station, she would have to admit the Big Gulp had been a mistake and ask Clint to pull over. She couldn’t do that. Clint and his friends felt their weekend trip fulfilled a covenant with the Lord. As overseer of the drive, Clint steered the two cars in a tidy line leading straight to Cedar Canyon. He would not allow a spiritual stray to scatter the herd because she couldn’t bear the outcome of her prodigality. Kimmy tried to comfort herself. She focused on Clint’s trusty nature,

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Writing on the Wind how he resembled her father, grim and dry maybe, but reliable, too, like the hard earth beneath her feet. He cropped his hair close to his scalp. He dressed neatly. No matter what the occasion—cookouts, tag football games, weekend retreats—Clint wore a button-down Oxford, starched and with an undershirt. When traveling, he prepared an official map. He traced the trip with an orange highlighter and tabulated the exact mileage between cities. And he never listened to the radio in traffic or heavy storms: distractions caused accidents. Clint so closely resembled Kimmy’s father that she began to worry he, too, kept a stash of Styrofoam cups in the glove box and, if petitioned for a pitstop, would only pass her a tiny cup. Her left eye blinked guiltily. She squirmed, crossing and recrossing her legs. Her chances with Clint, a potential mate, faithful and tidy like her father, might be ruined. Little annoyances often snipped fresh relationships: things like a drink so large it required two hands to hold it, or that gurgling a straw made whenever there was no liquid left in the cup but you doggedly sucked away. Such irritations tortured Clint. He was a tender man, this Kimmy knew, for he had shown his sensitivity the first time he took her to Calvary Temple. It was there, five weeks ago, she learned to sign the lyrics to “Jesus Loves Me.” Not that sign language interested her. She did not know any deaf or mute people. Frankly, she did not see one deaf or mute Christian sitting in that sanctuary. Instead, everyone sang boisterously, their eyes closed and their heads tilted toward the ceiling.They raised their arms, too, making the signs for the deaf high in the air, as if the handicapped members had been corralled in the balcony. Some swayed back and forth, left to right, left, right. Clint leaned with the rhythm, forcing Kimmy to join him because he kept bumping her shoulder. This type of worship startled her. She felt sinful for not knowing the signs to a familiar childhood song. People might think she was a fraud who, for the mere show of it, attended church only on Easter and Christmas. So she disguised her ignorance by trying to mimic the hand movements. But always, she fell one word behind, making the sign for love when she was already singing me. Clint glared at her. His forehead flipped into wrinkles. He lost his place, lost the rhythm, stopped moving his hands altogether. Kimmy recog-

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nized this confusion. She had caused such clutter in her aerobics classes whenever she step-ball-chained the wrong direction, colliding into the other women, buckling their uniform line of Danskin bodywear and Nikes. Kimmy panicked. She wanted to crack a one-liner, but when she grinned at Clint, half-embarrassed and half-flirty, he did not smile back. “It’s more reverent,” he explained. “Lifting our hearts, souls, and hands.” He looked upward—to the heavens, Kimmy supposed. “We’re communicating with God.” “Why?” She winked. “Is he deaf?” “Be serious.” Clint’s voice stiffened. “People are watching.” Kimmy peered down their pew and, sure enough, caught a couple spying on her and Clint. The man’s long hair and goatee reminded her of pictures she had seen of Jesus. He looked away. The woman hesitated but smiled. When she did, her face flushed though she wore no make-up. She mouthed the words to “Jesus Loves Me” and formed the hand signs in exaggerated movements, like big, curly writing. For this woman, Kimmy gave an extra effort, and by the last verse, her hands kept pace with the lyrics. During the invitation, this woman joined the crowd, pressing the altar. Some bowed their heads in shame and mumbled prayers. Others sang, clapped, danced, leapt in the air as if overtaken by a rabid spirit.The clamor of the show reminded Kimmy how a gentle rain in West Texas could, within seconds, explode into the racket of hail, the din of thunder, the groan of wind, the crash of lawn furniture in the yard, trees blown over, roofs torn loose. For Kimmy, religion had always been ladylike, sunny and warm; she had never associated it with turbulent weather. She clamped her hands over her ears. After the service, the woman tracked down Kimmy and hugged her. Like a mother checking her child for a fever, she brushed Kimmy’s bangs out of her eyes and cupped her cheek.Then she signed that she (as well as the Lord) loved Kimmy. Kimmy knew this was her opportunity to prove her Christian character, but she did not know the proper response. She hesitated. Her pink sweater grew too warm, too tight. Her body felt clammy. Did she forget her deodorant? At the last second, with Clint and the woman waiting, Kimmy wiggled, stammered, forced herself to say, “Bless you.”

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Writing on the Wind By the time the woman introduced herself and her husband, said their names out loud, Kimmy was completely frazzled. She cackled in response, though the names Donald and Marcia weren’t particularly humorous. She couldn’t quit laughing then, laughed so long she choked the sound and doubled over with mute merriment. Horrified, Clint stared at Kimmy. “She gets tickled when she’s hungry,” he offered. And if Donald’s ratty jeans hadn’t been unzipped that day, Kimmy would have never recovered from her delirium. But Donald’s fly was open, and when Marcia said, “Ping Pong,” quite casually, as if it made perfect sense, Kimmy’s laughter shut off. “Excuse me?” she said. Marcia said it again, looking at Donald, not Kimmy. “Ping Pong, honey.” Donald snickered and zipped his pants. He twisted bashfully the love beads strung around his neck. Sure, a secret code for an open fly was fairly odd, especially when it was Ping Pong, a phrase you couldn’t possibly drop into a conversation without attracting attention. Nonetheless, Marcia’s sharing such a confidence made Kimmy feel included. Although religious groups had snookered her before, she trusted Marcia and her promises that God welcomed to his throne the worst of sinners and that they at Calvary Temple did likewise.

Now, when pleasant conversation might offer a distraction from her urgent need to find a bathroom, Kimmy wished Donald and Marcia were riding with her and Clint, but they were driving the Volkswagen Bug behind them. It was Saul and Fran who roosted in the back seat, clucking and pecking at Kimmy. Unlike Marcia, Saul had introduced himself to Kimmy by warning her that Calvary Temple did not encourage mixed relationships. As Clint’s prayer partner, he frowned upon Clint’s decision to date an outsider, a floozie, a used-to-be-Baptist. Pressing his face close to hers, he had demanded to know where her Bible was. His lips smacked. His fuzzy brows writhed as if snagging an insect in their web.When she told him she didn’t own a Bible, he gasped and clutched his chest. Now, hovering buzzard-like over Kimmy, Saul leaned forward again, eyeing her, waiting to feed on any iniquity. Fran preened, poking her 236

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plumage of red hair with her sharp nails. Trying to instigate friendly chitchat, Kimmy faced the back seat and mentioned how the day was beautiful, hot and windy but blue nonetheless, nothing like the dust storm the weatherman had predicted. “I worry about visibility,” she said,“when the wind kicks up. But you can see to New Mexico today.” Saul mangled her words. Obviously Kimmy believed in the power of divination: she accepted as gospel the oracles of crystal balls, Tarot cards, meteorologists. “You call the psychic hotline, don’t you?” he asked. “It’s satanic.” “I ate a fortune cookie once.” Kimmy hated how Saul coerced confessions from her. Clint rubbed the top of his wiry haircut. He tugged at the collar of his button-down, clamped tight by the neat knot of his tie. “Don’t tell him that,” he said. He looked in the rearview mirror at Saul. “She does not eat fortune cookies. Really.” Saul looked skeptical. His hairy paw reached for Kimmy’s purse as if he wanted to search it for licentious contraband, but then he changed his mind and asked instead if she ever sacrificed pleasure for the Lord. “Maybe a monthly haircut, ER, or, say, a Pepsi?” He stared at the empty cup nestled between her thighs. “Isn’t it hard to get a good cut these days?” Fran put her compact away. “Course, I have such thick hair. It takes two hours to cut it evenly.” She scooped her red hair to the top of her head and let it fall back one silky layer at a time. “You’re lucky,” she added, probing Kimmy’s fine hair with her skinny finger. “You can probably get a cut in—what?—five minutes.” Kimmy turned away from Fran and Saul and faced the windshield. Pulling down the visor to examine her own make-up in the vanity mirror, she discovered her eyeshadow had settled in the oily creases of her lids. Her lipstick had disappeared from the plump part of her mouth where she’d slipped the straw from her Big Gulp in and out. And, worse yet, she was aging. Anyone could see the wind had scuffed and the sun faded her cheeks. Wrinkles cracked around her mouth and across her forehead as if her skin was as dry and crusty as her front yard. It was hardly the face of perfection. Then again, no one could be flawless. Kimmy knew this. But Clint’s 237

Writing on the Wind friends appeared to be spiritually superior to anyone she had ever met, and she worried that one day they would catch her in a wayward act—like peeking during the prayer or using the Table of Contents as a cheat sheet because she didn’t know the books in the Bible. Clint would surely break up with her then, and she would find herself all alone—no church, no family, no friends—exactly what happened when the Baptist Ladies’ Circle disfellowshipped her for drinking beer three years before.

Not that Kimmy had an alcohol problem. But work had been vigorous that day. Her seventh graders decided Romeo and Juliet was too long and too far-fetched. In the balcony scene, just when Susie Meyerson, who was reading the role of Juliet, said, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” the class stood up, stuck straws in their mouths, and fired spitwads at Kimmy. Afterward, when she was still combing out her sticky hair and wasn’t in the mood to be forgiving yet, she refused to let Tim Fuller, the mind behind the mutiny, go to the boy’s room. He swaggered over to the trashcan, unzipped his pants, whipped out his doodad, and urinated right there. Kimmy almost quit. Instead she decided to treat herself to a cold Miller Light, something she hadn’t done since moving to Abilene. At least Kimmy didn’t have to worry about being seen: while some townfolks swore the neon billboards and flashing lights promised something Edenic—a paradise of bliss and revelry—in the middle of the West Texas wilderness, true Christians, including the Baptists, believed the gaudy signs set the night sky aglow like the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Her Ladies’ Bible Circle was always praying about the drive-up liquor stores that clung to the outskirts of town like cockleburs stuck to your clean white socks. They prayed for the men who sold the liquor; they prayed for their wives and families; they prayed for the drunks swerving in their cars like loose marbles on the road between downtown and the city limits. Unfortunately, Kimmy didn’t realize that, besides praying, several ladies from her study group frequently staked out her house on routine crackdowns. Driving the church school bus, the words Praise God! painted in the red-letter voice of Jesus down the driver’s side, they tailed her to the strip. And on February 15th at approximately 7:15 .., Kimmy waltzed

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out of Pinkies, toting a six-pack in plain sight—no sack, no nothing. A camera flashed in her face. She stood there, blinded by the bright bulb, the accusing stares of her Bible buddies, and the neon billboards in the parking lot, blinking over and over: Cheap, Cheap, Cheap. The next day, Kimmy received the church’s form rejection letter. It suggested she join AA and seek out counseling that might set her life right with the Lord. Should she try to infiltrate the Ladies’ Circle again, they would be forced to hand her over to the church elders and the school board. Meanwhile, they would pray for her soul.

Looking in the vanity mirror, Kimmy imagined those ladies caught with their camera the same pale face she stared at now. Hopefully, Saul would stop testing her faith after this weekend retreat. Until then, she would ignore that faint stir in her stomach that seemed oddly familiar though she couldn’t place it. “You know,” she offered, “I can give up fortune cookies for the Lord.” Clint smiled. His white teeth gleamed as if freshly polished. Fran clucked her tongue in approval. Her lipstick did not budge. Saul looked at Kimmy, then at her purse. His nostrils flared, and Kimmy could see the wiry nose hair tangled inside. “You keep marijuana in there, don’t you?” His arm reached through the bucket seats, and he fingered the clasp on her purse. Then he looked at Clint—not Kimmy—for the go-ahead. Clint stared out the windshield, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. An Amy Grant song played on the radio, its tinkly tune like inappropriate laughter. Clint snapped off the radio. He jerked his head in a salute. “Check it. She has nothing to hide.” Kimmy didn’t have time to warn anyone. With a quick tug, Saul opened the purse, yanked the bottom of it, and dumped the contents in Kimmy’s lap. Out tumbled a brush, a lipstick, her driver’s license, some loose change, and, when Saul gave the purse one last shake, a maxi-pad wrapped in its pink, sanitary pouch. “I told you,” Saul said. Kimmy glared at him. “There are no drugs. I don’t use drugs.” She

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Writing on the Wind scooped the maxi-pad back into her purse. Shaking from anger, she couldn’t pick up the coins, kept dropping one when she snagged another. She slapped the purse shut, threw it in the floorboard, and sat with coins, make-up, and other articles still jumbled in her lap. “Well, not marijuana,” Saul admitted. “But I bet you use Pamprin. Midol maybe.” He sat back in his seat and smirked. Kimmy looked at Clint, but he stared straight ahead, his gaze taut as a clothesline. “Do you need to go to a ladies’ room?” he asked. Kimmy shook her head. She did not want anyone thinking she needed a bathroom now. She did not want anyone imagining her using feminine products. She had read passages in the Bible that declared women “unclean” during certain times of the month, and she worried that Saul would use her fertility against her. Frequently he suggested that the ability to birth babies made women frail and susceptible to the darker sins. Better for women to be as barren as the range outside the window. The earth’s dusty skin reminded Kimmy of old widows—holy matriarchs with powdered faces and the hint of whiskers, like tufts of dead grass, sprouting from their chins. No, Kimmy would not tell Clint she needed a bathroom. Even when Donald and Marcia flashed the headlights on their Volkswagen, Kimmy did not squeal with relief. She hoped Clint would notice the signal and pull over without her having to ask, but Clint did not slow down, much less stop, though Donald and Marcia kept signaling. Just when Kimmy grew anxious that Clint might pass the next gas station, Donald and Marcia honked their horn. Clint checked his rearview mirror. “I guess they can’t wait,” he said. “Yes,” Kimmy agreed. “Pull over at the next station.” She smiled. But Clint edged onto the shoulder. Dust swirled around the car, and Kimmy realized her mistake. Clint wasn’t going to backtrack, nor was he going to find the next station. He expected her and Marcia to squat like animals behind tumbleweeds. No thanks. She could wait two more hours till they arrived at the mountain retreat if necessary. Clint leaned toward the rearview mirror and squinted. Then he whirled around in his seat and gaped out the back window. “What on earth?” he asked. Before Kimmy could look, Donald flung open the back door, and

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Kimmy nearly peed in her pants right there. She caught the flash of Donald’s love beads and mirrored shades—his last vestiges of clothing—as Marcia yanked them off and tossed them onto the caliche. Then Donald flipped his wife’s bra and big white panties onto the hood of the VW Bug. Grinning and buck naked, they stood at attention in front of the open car door. “Praise the Lord!” Donald shouted, and the couple smashed into the back seat, beaming with pride, their flesh catching on the leather interior as they slid across it. “The Lord said we needed to trust him,” Marcia explained. Her breasts bounced with enthusiasm. “Told me and Donald to leave the supplies in the Volkswagen, strip, and hop in the car with you guys. He promised to fill our needs later.” She signed the words, Jesus loves the little children. Her bare face seemed so honest. “See how the lilies of the field grow without labor; yet see how gloriously the Lord clothes them.” Donald tilted his voice so it sang like the televangelists that Kimmy had heard on The 700 Club. He waved his arms in front of the window like he was unveiling a miracle—the invention of ground, water, flowers. His eyes were closed. Kimmy thought maybe he should open them and take a good look at the desert. How many more hundreds of years before the Lord granted West Texas some lilies—even some grass—for clothing? How long before He would cover Donald and Marcia’s bodies with the cloak of vines and fruit? “See how the sparrows do not sow; yet our heavenly Father feeds them.” He cupped his hand and placed it by his ear as if, even then, he heard the chirping of heaven’s birds praising God for his protection. Saul rubbed his hands together like a chipmunk fondling a nut before feasting. “The Lord has big plans for us this weekend.” He slapped Clint’s shoulders. “Didn’t I tell you? Big plans.” Kimmy had never seen a naked man before and was trying not to stare at Donald. She studied her things still resting in her lap. She read the Estee Lauder label on her lipstick as though she’d never seen its crucial information before. Her stomach cramped, her throat tightened, and she knew her giggling was about to burst free again, though she wasn’t the least bit giddy. “What if we’re in a car wreck?” her tiny voice peeped.

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Writing on the Wind “There isn’t going to be a car wreck.” Clint patted her knee. The clean lines on his face relaxed, and he looked as if he might call her PoohBear like her father always did when he wanted to reassure her.“This is the sign Donald and Marcia have waited for. This is great, you guys!” He smiled into the rearview mirror and wiggled in his seat. Clint had told her that people at his church spoke directly to God. Last week, God had even sent Clint a sign. Ever since he met Kimmy, Clint had been praying and studying the Bible thoroughly, and God finally spoke up and rewarded his diligence by revealing the intricate meaning behind the Song of Solomon: God wanted Clint and Kimmy to consummate their relationship. “Have sex?” Kimmy couldn’t believe it. “I’m Baptist,” she offered. But Clint told her it was time she abandoned her heathen ways and listened to the true Lord. “You got to trust Jesus,” he told her. “You got to turn loose of Baptist propaganda. The Lord’s testing you. Your faith.” His face cracked into the smirk of romance. Kimmy pondered her options. Have sex for the Lord or disobey God? Her stomach warned her, churning like it did on roller coasters. She told Clint she couldn’t do it—yet. He had looked down at his Bible, fingering the passage in Song of Solomon that he had read aloud to her. A white ribbon cut down the binding, marking the sacred verse. The gold edges of the pages sparkled as if brand new. Clint shook his head. He would stand by her, but he didn’t know how long God would continue to reach out to a heart that remained closed to the gospel. Kimmy had never felt more alone. Sitting in the car, she felt loneliness wrap around her like a feverish chill. Her stomach contracted, and her head throbbed. Maybe the Spirit was reprimanding her, sending her body physical signs that the Lord would no longer tolerate her miscreant ways. Still, she didn’t remember Moses and the Israelites ditching their clothes in the wilderness, though she recalled something about bread from heaven, but maybe that was one of the ten plagues. “What do you mean?” Kimmy finally asked. “What sign? Like a burning bush or something?” “No, no, honey.” Marcia squeezed her shoulder. Her eyes closed with fervor, the lids quivering. Without mascara, Marcia’s lashes were blonde, naked. “The Lord talks to Donald sometimes. It’s a tiny voice in his head.

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His ears stop up all the sudden, and then he hears the Lord’s instructions. It sounds like the buzz of fluorescent lights, like when you have a bad cold and your ears plug up but you can hear that high-pitched squeal.” Marcia went on to explain how God had told her and Donald to marry, and they had obeyed immediately, saying “I do” only two weeks after they met. Now Donald, who had finally graduated from law school, was jobless, and he and Marcia were waiting to hear from the Lord again. He had big plans for them.Yes, money was tight, but they had concocted a dollar meal plan and were far from going hungry. “It’s amazing what you can buy for a buck. Frozen pizza sometimes goes on sale four for ninetynine cents.We get to buy pop then.” “The Lord thinks we’re useful,” Donald added. He tugged on his goatee. Fran smacked her red lips together as if blotting her lipstick. “Ooh, I always wanted to be a martyr,” she cooed. “Now we’ll have to fast till the Lord provides. It’s so spiritual.” “Way scriptural,” Donald said.“The Word.” He made a sign in the air with his hand. Kimmy had seen some of her students make that same sign when they said, Word, but they always added mother-fucker right after, so Kimmy suspected they weren’t referring to the same word Donald was. Perhaps he had learned the sign language wrong. She wanted to ask him, but she found her eyes creeping down his stomach, heading toward that forbidden part. No one else seemed to feel ashamed by Donald and Marcia’s nakedness. Kimmy’s friends chattered about the weekend, how they would pray and fast, but their voices seemed muffled as if Kimmy wore earplugs. Donald recited Bible verses, a poetic lilt transforming his words into sacred prophecy, until his voice trailed off. Kimmy shook herself out of her reverie and turned to face the back seat. Everyone was staring at Donald. He looked like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, his eyes focused on the distant pleasures of the Promised Land he would never see. Then Donald sat up stiff, like a divining rod, and jerked his head toward the back window. “Praise God!” he said. “Pull over, Clint! Pull over!” He reached around Clint’s shoulders and tried to spin the wheel himself. Clint knocked his hands away.“Okay! Hold on, brother.” He swerved

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verses about lost deer in the wilderness. “See how the hinds panteth for water. See how God offers them a drink from His own hand, but they turneth their heads away.” The blue sky stretched above Donald’s head like a beautiful lake, though thin clouds, like whitecaps on choppy water, whipped across the surface. Kimmy wanted to ask Donald if he had seen the deer foraging for food along the highway between Abilene and the caprock? They were scrawny as dogs; their coats, thin and mangy. When she looked into their eyes, she saw anger. That’s what drought and severe heat did: it made animals mean and desperate. Saul stepped forward and pointed down I-20, his arm straight and firm as the horizon. As if he understood Kimmy’s worries, he warned her that wild animals stalked the highway and she better make plenty of noise if she didn’t want to surprise one. Then with Clint at the wheel, Saul, Fran, Marcia and Donald crammed into the back seat of the old Chevrolet and spun off, leaving behind their clothes, their food, and Kimmy. She walked the lonely road back toward Abilene, hoping the jingle of coins in her pocket would protect her from hungry animals. When her hand grew tired of shaking the change, she started singing. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. But the words meant nothing to her now, for they fell on deaf ears, and she couldn’t remember the signs.

Genesis When I moved to Lubbock after four years in Stillwater, Oklahoma (where there were numerous lakes, cliff-diving trips, and trees everywhere), I had to adjust to the harsh landscape and abrupt weather of West Texas. My first summer, city crews had to sand the roads because the continual 100º temperatures melted the streets and made them as slippery as they became during winter ice storms. I had scorpions in my apartment. And most days at 5:30 P.M., it was impossible to drive due west because the sun lasered through my windshield, blinding me. Besides the weather, I had to adjust to severe religious groups as well. It seemed the Christians who inhabited West Texas couldn’t help but become hard as the bone-dry ground, mean as the electrical storms, sharp as the sun. One of the myths I

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Writing on the Wind heard during that first summer was how the local police had arrested several men and women who were walking along the highway, headed toward Amarillo: They were on a pilgrimage to a nearby retreat and had abandoned their cars and supplies and were all buck naked—because, they swore, the Lord told them to trust in his care. Three miles away, the cops found their cars, their luggage, and bags of groceries as well as a trail of cast off clothes. I couldn’t imagine the scene at the city jail when they hauled in all those naked Christians (I tried to write that story). But I could imagine a tale in which one woman, looking for companionship and peace, found herself wandering a stretch of highway, forsaken by her spiritual friends. I wanted her faith to be softer than theirs, tender as rolling hills, not prostrate as the West Texas horizon. And that’s the story I eventually wrote.

teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech University. Her work has appeared most recently in Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, Comstock Review, Southwestern American Literature, South Dakota Review, and Yemassee. She serves as editor of Iron Horse Literary Review and director of The San Juan Workshops in Ouray, Colorado.This piece also appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of Black Ridge Review.

J I L L PAT T E R S O N

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Only Connect Jacqueline Kolosov T H E S M E L L O F E G G S F RY I N G in the pan wafted up from the small kitchen to the corner room where Stevie slept. For a little while she just lay there, listening to the familiar kitchen sounds: the twins’ rippling laughter, the clatter of dishes as Jenna brought eggs and toast to the table, the tip tap of the dog’s nails on the tile as he worked the margins of their breakfast routine. “You up?” Jenna called from downstairs. “Sort of.” “You want eggs?” “No.” Jenna knew full well that Stevie never ate anything cooked before noon. Stevie glanced at the clock and then sat up on her elbows, arching her long back in a cat’s stretch, then touching her chin to her knees. Yoga is the union of body and mind. Downstairs, she found the twins and her stepmother still gathered around the kitchen table. The dog, eyes fixed on the toast in Casey’s hand, waited below. “You two look pretty great,” Stevie said, gazing at Casey’s Charlie Chaplin and Meredith’s Princess Lea. Meredith grinned. With her heavy brown hair coiled in two thick braids and suspended above either ear with a fistful of bobby pins, she really did resemble the futuristic princess. Stevie poured a tall glass of orange juice and tried to remember the last time she dressed up for Halloween.

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Writing on the Wind “You sure I can’t fix you an egg?” Jenna asked again. “Positive,” Stevie said, aware of Jenna’s eyes on her shorn hair. “Aw, Stevie,” Jenna said at last, “what prompted you to cut it off anyway?” Stevie shrugged. “I guess I just felt like it. Don’t worry, it’ll grow back.” Jenna furrowed her brow. “Couldn’t you at least have gone to a salon?” Ignoring this last comment, Stevie gulped down her juice, then poured a second glass.The flu was going around. Always one of the first to get sick, this time Stevie planned to build up her immunity. In the bread box she found only white bread—no nutrients here—and quickly dismissed the thought of toast. “I’m going to do the neighborhood rounds with the twins this afternoon,” continued Jenna. “Will you be here to meet the trick-or-treaters?” “I don’t think so.Today’s my day to help Jared.” “Oh, right.” Jenna seemed puzzled, despite the fact that Stevie had worked nearly every Friday afternoon since she’d started this job. Meredith jumped off the chair and grabbed her book bag. “Come on, Mom. I don’t want to miss the parade.” Jenna rose from the table, swiping her hair away from her forehead, revealing the dark shadows beneath her eyes. She looked tired and older than her thirty-seven years. Still, Stevie knew better than to tell Jenna what she ought to do. Like Stevie, Jenna rarely heeded another’s advice. She did as she thought best, and sometimes she just muddled through. Stevie had been nine years old, exactly the same age as the twins were now, when their father was killed in an automobile accident near the New Mexico border. He died on the twenty-first day of October ten years earlier. Today is Halloween. One more day until October is behind us. One more day. . . . Stevie still missed her father. She would always miss him. It was her father who taught her to love the treeless spaces of West Texas’s high plains. When she needed to find him, she searched the bronze-red sunsets, the milky lilac dawns. Thanks to him, Stevie knew that more birds passed through Texas than any other state in the country: white-winged doves,

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chimney swifts, cedar wax wings, vesper sparrows, and sometimes even a scarlet tanager. Already the geese were arriving by the hundreds. Last year, thousands wintered in the big reservoir on the edge of town. While Stevie clung to her memories of her father, she knew very little about her mother, whose name was Joy. Stevie thought this strange, considering the fact that her mother had never brought her any joy. Had she brought much to Dad? Stevie sometimes wondered. Billy and Joy had come from different worlds, or so Stevie had been told when others tried to explain the breakup of her parents’ marriage. Billy and his father before him had grown cotton in the dry, wind-swept land just north of Lubbock.When the cotton failed, they turned their hand to raising cattle. But Joy had a college education—a masters degree, even.When Billy decided to take a night class in painting at the university, Joy was his teacher. In the way of such things, Joy and Billy fell in love and got married. Stevie was born exactly eleven months after the wedding. Stevie could see how two people could fall in love for a while but eventually realize that they couldn’t stay together for the long haul. What Stevie could not understand or forgive was her mother’s absolute absence from her life. Stevie would be nineteen in December, and yet she hadn’t received a single word, not even a birthday card, in ten whole years. (The letters stopped the year Billy died so that Stevie wondered if the only tie Joy had felt was to Billy, and not to her.) Today Stevie didn’t know where to find her mother, even if she wanted to. There was an old address in a wealthy Dallas suburb, that of her maternal grandparents, but Stevie had never met them.They wanted to forget their daughter’s mistake, Stevie supposed. After Jenna drove off with the twins, Stevie went back upstairs to get dressed. Her small closet was crowded with thrift store finds: bell bottom jeans, Peter Pan blouses with embroidered collars, platform shoes with cork heels, vividly-patterned skirts. Stevie was thin but long-limbed, and many of the clothes fit her awkwardly. Still, she liked the make-believe quality of the things she wore. Dressed in a sateen blouse with billowing sleeves, she felt as if she might be anyone: a Parisian student of art, a New York beatnik, a celebrity from Vogue, and not just a girl with freckles from Lubbock, Texas.

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Writing on the Wind On this last Friday in October, she slipped on jeans with a chartreuse green polo sweater and her beat-up Keds, then poked delicate amber spheres into her ears. But she didn’t look in the mirror.

Annie Gray, Stevie’s English teacher, was young and pale and pretty in a 1940s movie sort of way. Stevie had heard a number of the guys trying to guess her age. Stevie thought such things a waste of time.What did it matter anyway? Stevie may have been eighteen, but most of the time she felt a lot older: forty-five at least, older than Jenna, older than her father would have been now. Stevie guessed that it was Annie Gray’s first year teaching. There was a roughness, an “I’m just getting the hang of this” quality to the way she shuffled student papers and bit her lower lip when the class didn’t respond. Occasionally, Dr. Gray blushed violently, and once she burst into embarrassed laughter when a student misread consumption as constipation. Stevie entered the classroom, and Dr. Gray glanced up from her notes. “Hey there, Stevie, what happened to you the other night? You didn’t stop by.” “I know,” Stevie stammered. “Truth is, I couldn’t find the house.” “Too bad, I was looking forward to seeing you.” Her face grew thoughtful. “Something’s different. I know,” she said, leaning closer. “You cut your hair.” “Yeah.” Stevie stepped back a little. “I did it myself.” Dr. Gray’s eyes lingered on the rough edges around the ears. “Wow. Well, I have to hand it to you—it looks great.” Stevie stepped closer. “Thanks.” Stevie took a seat, then watched the young teacher’s eyes stretch out over the noisy classroom. On the first day, Annie Gray told the class that she’d come to Lubbock from New York City. What she didn’t say, though Stevie noticed it right away, was that Annie Gray had trouble adjusting to West Texas culture—and to her students. Most just didn’t seem terribly interested in the social issues embedded in modern poetry: homelessness, poverty, and the complexities of gender, all of which Annie Gray had lived with daily in the crowded northeast. Or so she told the class. Only once did Annie Gray’s patience falter. It happened when Sam

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Tucker called Mark Doty a “homo poet.” “Sam,” Dr. Gray spoke softly, tears pearling in the corners of each eye, “I hope you got more out of Mark Doty’s work than that.” She didn’t say another word that day, just let the class leave early. Stevie wasn’t sure if she was interested in Dr. Gray’s barrage of issues either. Nevertheless, she liked this teacher, liked the fact that Dr. Gray came from a part of the country that was radically different from West Texas. “On any given morning in Washington Square in Greenwich Village,” Dr. Gray once said,“you can find people from half a dozen countries. Lovers kiss among drug dealers, and students debate philosophy, physics, and medieval poetry beside mothers with small children. And always, there are the old men who gather to play chess on the park benches bordering the dog run.” “What’s that?” Someone asked. “A city playground for dogs.” A couple of the students chuckled. One day, Stevie promised herself, I’m going to study art in New York. For today, Dr. Gray had asked the class to read a poem by James Wright called “A Blessing.” One by one, her questions were met with silence. Dr. Gray’s gaze inevitably landed on Stevie. She smiled tentatively. “Any ideas?” Her voice sounds too eager, Stevie thought, and although she didn’t have an answer, she scanned the lines, tried to coax out a meaning. “The closing line—If I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom.” “Yes?” Dr. Gray craned forward, her brown eyes wide. “It’s about losing oneself in the world around you, isn’t it?” Stevie’s cheeks reddened. “And that’s meant to be beautiful: freeing.” A smile swept over Annie Gray’s face, and Stevie knew that she had connected. It was going to be okay.

At lunch time, Stevie took her place in the cafeteria line, the words of the poem still running around in her head.Trevor Sanders was sitting alone at a table by the window. Immediately, Trevor noticed Stevie. He waved, then called out to her to join him.

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Writing on the Wind After collecting her soup, she headed through the dining room, her gaze pitched beyond the windows. The changing colors of the trees brought a harvest rainbow inside. Usually, the wind blew the leaves off the trees before they had a chance to turn. But this fall the weather had been surprisingly sweet and mild. The crimson brilliance of a Japanese maple nearly stopped Stevie in her tracks. If I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom. Stevie lay her tray down on the table, then sat down opposite him. Trevor’s face broke into a wide grin. “Good to see you.” “You, too.” Stevie liked Trevor well enough, though she had the sneaking suspicion that his feelings for her were a lot more intense. When he looked at her, his eyes seemed to hold her face so that she had to look away. “What are your plans for the weekend?” he asked. Stevie sprinkled crackers into her soup. She liked the way they floated on top, polka dots against a red background.“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve got to work after class.” “What about afterwards?” “Really, I think I’ll be tired afterwards. My job’s pretty exhausting.” Stevie could feel his eyes traveling down from her face to the open place at the center of her throat that Jenna called the “kissbox.” Trevor leaned closer. “You work with the handicapped guy, right?” Stevie scowled. “I work with one guy, Jared Fletcher. I help him take care of his place. Grocery shopping, stuff like that. Sometimes,” she scattered more crackers into the soup, “Jared and I go to the park.” “Could I come along sometime?” “I don’t know. I’d have to ask Jared.” Stevie had been involved with guys she’d liked a lot less than Trevor. Was it because she really did like Trevor that she had a hard time letting herself connect? Or was it because she wanted something more the next time she let someone get closer to her like that? She looked over at him, then looked away, her eyes drawn once more to the Japanese maple outside. Just then, Annie Gray happened to be passing by on the other side of the street. The teacher held herself erect, as if she were bracing herself against the day, her battered suede coat hugging her thin body. How small she looked against the wide-open space, Stevie thought, and for a

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moment, she wished her father were here. He would be able to teach Annie Gray how to see beauty in the clouds that stretched out and shifted across the endless palette of shifting colors, creating variegated ribbons of light.

Afternoon classes resumed at one. First came European History and then Painting. Stevie didn’t really think about the fact that her mother was an artist or that it was her father’s interest in art that brought them together. Stevie just loved colors and textures, and she liked to mess around with paint and clay.When she worked at her art, she could go anyplace on earth, and be anyone. Stepping into the studio, Stevie’s heart quickened its pace. For the past two weeks, the class had been working on self-portraits. Her canvas stood in the shadows, so she had to turn the board toward the window in order to evaluate her work. Her instincts had told her to use loose brushstrokes and to work in shades of brown: from chocolate to umber, then all the way to a warm, honey gold. Now, surveying her canvas, she knew she’d made the right decision. The painting had the feeling of movement. Her eyes traveled slowly over the canvas, and she felt a deep surge in her belly. I like this. Using a fine-tipped brush, she drew a line of smudgy cerulean beneath the eyes.The sheen of blue seemed a bit odd on her own freckled face, but it simultaneously brought to mind Jenna’s own wearier eyes, so Stevie left it there. One by one, the other students meandered in. First came Abel Walker, who painted the Caprock with an engraver’s eye. Entering, he nodded to Stevie. The fact that he recognized Stevie made her feel good: real. It was not until all twelve other students had been standing at their easels for a good ten minutes that the professor, Corey Higgins, entered also. Usually, he seemed distracted and had trouble keeping track of the time.Today was no exception. She’d tried, but Stevie just couldn’t warm up to Corey Higgins. Too often, he reminded her of a caricature of an artist with his shaggy hair constantly falling in his eyes, his paint-splattered faded blue jeans, and “lost in

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Writing on the Wind the sixties” way of talking (despite the fact that he was only thirty-eight— at the most). Even his tanned skin seemed unauthentic. Stevie’s grandfather and father had gotten that leathery look from working out of doors. From working hard. Stevie didn’t get the feeling that Corey Higgins worked terribly hard, or even spent much time out of doors. Sometimes, she actually pictured him lying in one of the sun beds at the tanning salon. Corey Higgins entered, and the regimen of weekly critiques began. First, he headed over to Miriam Stein’s canvas. With its soft colors and wispy brushstrokes, Miriam’s self-portrait reminded Stevie of the Impressionists. Miriam’s work was pretty, but it was more than that. Much, much more. To Miriam, Stevie actually heard Corey Higgins use the phrase, “bourgeois,” and felt herself cringe. Bourgeois brought to mind the middle classes against whom Karl Marx struggled.What does that have to do with Miriam’s vision of herself? Stevie felt like asking, as she squinted at Miriam who was biting her lower lip, trying to hold back her tears. It came Stevie’s turn, and Corey Higgins strode toward her easel, the smell of turpentine and stale cigarettes preceding him. “Well now, Stevie, let me see—.” He placed a paint-stained hand along the edges of the canvas. Really, Stevie wished he wouldn’t touch it. “Somber. The brushstrokes have an edge.” He pronounced the word as if Stevie should understand the additional meaning. But she didn’t. She simply looked directly at Corey Higgins, seeking his own brown eyes beneath the shaggy fringe. “Careful not to overwork it,” he added, before heading on. Grateful to have the critique behind her, Stevie squeezed some acrylic paint onto her palette and filled her pitcher with clean water. She let her mind wander as she mixed her colors, then laid the squirrel-tipped brush against the grainy canvas and resumed work. Her mother had left just one painting behind in the house on the shady side street where they continued to live. Stevie knew the painting intimately, for it seemed the one clue to her mother’s character. It was a still life showing a vase of cut flowers from the garden: dahlias, purple larkspur, climbing roses, Queen Anne’s lace. Stevie thought it strange that Joy had left a painting of flowers

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behind because Jenna’s greatest love was flowers. In New Orleans, where Jenna had grown up, lush gardens bearing flowers like calla lilies, birds of paradise, roses, and even camellias bloomed year round. Windswept West Texas wasn’t a place where flowers and plants that needed a lot of water and tending thrived. Here the flora had to be tenacious. But Jenna was a nurturer. In fact, it was Jenna who salvaged the neglected garden that Joy painted, then abandoned. Although the painting was delicate and meticulously detailed—capturing the exquisite beauty of the larkspur’s fluted blossoms, the misty loveliness of Queen Anne’s lace, and the papery fineness of black-hearted poppies—Stevie thought the perspective was wrong. The flowers were painted in a ceramic pitcher by a window. Beyond lay the garden. Joy’s mistake seemed to be her desire to paint both the garden and the flowers in intricate detail. Stevie believed her mother should have chosen only one and left the other shrouded in mystery; she should have left something to the imagination instead of trying to capture it all.

Toward four o’clock, Stevie drove her old Honda Civic down the busy street, managing to catch the green light at the intersection from hell. She neared the fruit and vegetable stand run by students in the horticulture department and slowed down. She’d made up her mind to buy Jared a pumpkin, maybe a bag of apples. Then they could spend the afternoon carving the pumpkin into a winking jack o’ lantern. Already Stevie could see herself coring the apples, then putting them in the oven to bake with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar. While they waited for the apples to soften and absorb the spice and sugar, she and Jared would talk and listen to music. Stevie got so lost in the image that she almost missed the exit. Just in time, she swung the Honda into the gravel driveway, her eyes fixed on the brilliant cluster of orange that was the pumpkin patch. Jared lived in an old mansion custom built in the 1950s by an oil millionaire’s daughter. Twenty years later when the oil millionaire’s daughter took over the top floor of Lubbock’s only luxury hotel, the mansion had been converted into apartments. The building had become a historic landmark and an enigma, for the daughter had been eccentric, filling the

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Writing on the Wind twelve bedrooms with hundreds of cats.The stench still lingered, even after thirty some years. Still, it was a beautiful place in a theatrical sort of way. Thirsty magnolia trees, impractical in the dry high plains, shaded the gray stone walls from the sun. There were cherubs carved into the awnings. A pair of pink marble pillars buffeted the entryway. An old married couple, the Blys, lived upstairs. In exchange for their apartment, they maintained the property. Sometimes they ran errands for Jared. When the Blys weren’t feeling well, Stevie did their shopping as well as Jared’s. This wasn’t part of her job. She just liked looking out for them. “How’ve you been?” Stevie asked, stepping through the door, in her arms, the bag of apples and the fat pumpkin. “Pretty well,” Jared replied, just as Stevie dropped the pumpkin in Jared’s lap. It was a burnished shade of orange with a thick, coiled stem like an umbilical cord. “You don’t have one yet, do you?” she said. “I thought we could carve it this afternoon.” “No.” Jared eyed the bag of blush-colored fruit. “You brought apples, too.” Stevie’s face broke into a smile. “How do baked apples sound?” “Wonderful.” Jared wheeled himself over to the window and placed the pumpkin on the ledge. “Let’s not carve it,” he said. “I like it just the way it is.”

Later, Stevie and Jared sat side by side listening to a concert he had recorded from the radio. The program was called Horowitz in Moscow. Listening, Stevie pictured Russia’s snowy landscapes. A photographer friend told her that parts of Russia resembled Texas—lots of wide open land.The furthest Stevie had ever been was Colorado. She liked to think of the long drive out there, the way the high plains would turn to rolling hills and then to mountains. By now the sun was setting, and the little apartment glowed. Everything smelled of cinnamon and warmth. The apples had been a success. As the music washed over her, Stevie’s gaze traveled to Jared’s lap where his long, graceful fingers tapped out the chords. Jared’s hands were the most beautiful part of his body. So much life seemed to be contained in his fin256

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gers as they danced across the keys of the piano, strummed the strings of his guitar, or stroked the fur of his ever-wandering cat, Slim. After her first visit to Jared’s apartment, Stevie had a dream. She never mentioned the dream to anyone, though occasionally it floated back to her. In the dream, she and Jared had made love in the heavy oak bed that Stevie occasionally helped him make up. In the dream, Jared wasn’t paralyzed. The concert ended, and the cassette player snapped off. They sat there for a while, then Jared looked over at Stevie and smiled. His cheeks were flushed. Music did that to him, she’d noticed. “It’s getting late,” he said. Stevie stared at her knees. “Is there anything else I can do before I go?” “No.” His voice was gentle. “You’ve been wonderful.” Stevie didn’t really want to go. She felt like putting another tape on, having another apple. They were still warm in the pan, and it smelled so good. It felt so good here beside him. She rose to her feet. “I’ll be back on Sunday.” Watching Stevie shrug into her sneakers, he said, “You really should get some thicker shoes for the winter.You might catch cold.” Stevie’s eyes floated up to meet his. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Jared reached out his hand, and she clasped it. Immediate warmth. Stevie continued to stand there, suddenly wanting to tell Jared about the poem and the words, break into blossom. But it was time to go. “See you next week,” Jared said. “Thanks for everything.” Another soft smile. “Don’t even think about it,” she told him, immediately regretting the words. Stevie always tried to shrug off his gratitude, though it went straight to her heart. Sometimes, his words burned. Outside, Stevie turned around just once to gaze back into Jared’s glowing window. There on the ledge stood the chubby pumpkin that would never be a jack o’ lantern. She gazed at the cherubs, their fat bodies suspended above the lamplight. Then she headed for the car, reminded of what Jared had said about her needing thicker shoes. Before next Friday, she’d be sure to get them.

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Writing on the Wind * * * Stevie pulled into the driveway, her car full of the distinct smells of pepperoni and hot cardboard. The old frame house looked particularly inviting. The twins’ jack o’ lantern flickered in the window, its crooked grin looking more like a sickle moon than a mouth. For a few minutes Stevie just sat in the car, the only sound the wind in the trees. After her father’s death, she often listened for his voice in the wind. Sometimes, she still did. Inside the house, Stevie knew that Jenna was flipping through a gardening magazine, reading up on forcing bulbs or the temperature orchids require. Meanwhile, the twins would be parceling out their spoils, sorting the chocolates into one pile and the hard candy and jellies into another. The chocolates were certainly the best. If they were lucky, the dog wouldn’t get the chocolates this year. Who knows? Stevie thought. Maybe one of them had even won the prize for Best Costume.The jack o’ lantern flickered in the wind.Would the candle blow out? As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she sought the place beside the house where Jenna would plant her spring bulbs before the cold set in. Come February, the fierce purple tongues of crocus would brave the end of winter.The daffodils and peppermint-striped tulips would follow. Stevie had never expected to live the last ten years of her life with her stepmother and her half-siblings. It had just worked out that way. She thought about this now, sitting in the warm, pizza-fragrant car, and gazing at the drowsy jack o’lantern. Everyone thought Stevie had been too young at the time of her father’s funeral to fully understand what was happening. Everyone had been wrong. Stevie could still see herself standing in the kitchen doorway on the day of her father’s funeral.Too small to be really noticeable amid the grieving adults, Stevie had borne it all in her best corduroy jumper, a dark forest green that she’d never worn afterwards. It was hot in the crowded living room, and she was thirsty, so she went into the kitchen to see to the drink herself. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but when she saw Jenna and Grandma Bess standing beside the stove talking softly, something inside Stevie made her stop where she was. And listen. 258

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Bess turned to Jenna and wrapped an arm around her shaking body. “There, there,” she said. “You go ahead and let it out. It’s okay.” Bess continued to rub Jenna’s back, and Stevie watched it all, hands jammed deep into jumper pockets, thirst forgotten. Standing there, part of her longed to join the two women. She, too, wanted to wrap her arms around their waists and become part of the hushed comfort. After a while, Jenna’s sobs subsided, and she stepped away from Bess, turned on the tap, washed her eyes. “You want me to take Stevie?” Grandma Bess asked Jenna then. Stevie heard the question, and her whole body tensed with—what? Had it been fear? Stevie didn’t know. She never had time to react, so swift had come Jenna’s answer. “I want to keep Stevie with me.” Jenna’s voice had been strong, sure. “But I thought you’d want to go back to your own people,” Stevie’s grandmother said. “West Texas isn’t your country. Thought you might miss New Orleans. Want your own home and your own people around you now.” “I’m going to stay right here.This is home to me now.” Had Billy taught Jenna to love this land, too? Stevie now wondered. The memory floated through her then sank back down to where it remained, silent but always present. Jenna was as much a part of Stevie as the wide-open sky and the birds that crossed it, just passing through or lingering for a while. For a moment, she thought about Annie Gray, wondered if she had such things in her life. Stevie wondered, too, if she might be able to show her teacher how to love the place where she now found herself. The heat had gone off in the car, and Stevie realized that she was shivering. She reached beside her and picked up the box of pizza, inhaling the cardboard-cheese-pepperoni smell. Then she got out of the car and slammed the door. As soon as she stepped inside, Stevie knew that the twins would run up to her, calling, “Stevie’s home, and she’s brought pizza!”

Genesis I wrote “Only Connect” for my students. I love teaching, in large part because of what my students teach me about literature and life. I’m 259

Writing on the Wind always amazed by how much they juggle—family lives, jobs, love, all sorts of tumultuous issues. And they do so bravely and often, with great compassion. I’ve taught in Chicago, New York, and Ohio, and although there are commonalities among students, West Texans seem to really trust their teachers, and I cherish that trust. I tried to bring these qualities forth in Stevie and her relationships. So too, this is a story about literature.The line from James Wright’s “A Blessing” has been one of my mantras since I first read the poem in 1994. I want literature to be a friend—a real companion—to my students as well, and the story tries to ferry that across. As for Annie Gray, well, she’s not me, despite the similarity in our backgrounds. Unlike Annie, I fell in love with this place when I came here—so much sky and the tenacity of the landscape.What survives in West Texas needs to be hardy: resourceful. I like that.

J A C Q U E L I N E K O L O S OV grew up in Chicago and earned a doctorate in Eng-

lish from New York University. She is on the creative writing faculty at Texas Tech University. She has published four chapbooks of poetry, Danish Ocean, Fabergé,Why Plant Bougainvilla, and Souvenir, Modigliani. Her poetry, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals here and abroad. Souvenir, Modigliani won Winnow Press’s Summer 2004 Chapbook Award. Grace from China, a young adult novel, was published in June 2004.

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READING WEST TEXAS A Selected Bibliography

native Mary Lasswell, creator of Mrs.Tinkham, Mrs. Rasmussen, and Mrs. Feeley, the inimitable old-girls troika in a series of popular novels in the 1940s, returned to her home state in 1953 after three decades of globe trotting. Immediately, she felt compelled to reacquaint herself with her native land. By car and by plane, Lasswell traveled the state from border to border, visiting with citizens in each region and learning much about their thoughts and their beliefs. In I’ll Take Texas, an account of her travels, she observes: “It came home to me that each of us carries within him an imperishable core of regional memory.” Clearly, the writers who have created Writing on the Wind possess that “imperishable core.” Reading history, biography, and literature that explores further the life and landscape that these authors have shared will enable readers to understand even more fully why this “core of regional memory” inspires West Texans to write so vividly about their experiences. True understanding of any region begins with knowledge of its history. John Miller Morris provides a good beginning with his awardwinning examination of El Llano Estacado, a well-researched narrative of the Llano’s history from 1536 to 1860. Taking up the region’s history beginning in 1864, long-time Texas Tech professor William Curry Holden traces both the social and economic developments on the Texas Frontier in his classic Alkali Trails. For the parallel story of the birth of the Texas cowboy, Paul Carlson enlightens readers in The Cowboy Way on both the ranching history and the culture that created a livelihood soon to become iconic in Texas life. B ROW N S V I L L E , T E X A S ,

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Reading West Texas Frederick W. Rathjen traces Panhandle past in Texas Panhandle Frontier, the definitive chronicle of how the Panhandle was transformed from buffalo ranges to farms and ranches. For a more comprehensive understanding of the region, David Lavender’s in-depth discussion of the stories and legends emerging from the history of the Southwest creates context for the Llano, Panhandle, and West Texas borderlands’ past. Lavender’s discussion of the conflicts between Mexico and Texas and his anecdotal explanation for legends emanating from Indian, cowboy, and outlaw lore adds dimension to the Texas scholar’s informative histories. Learning the history of how West Texas developed into a settled civilization becomes more significant with knowledge of the nature of that civilization. For an entertaining means of becoming acquainted with the unique character of this “raw and wondrous land” and its citizens, the peripatetic Mike Cochran and John Lumpkin share their observations of the landscape and the people of West Texas from the Panhandle to the Big Bend and from El Paso to Fort Worth in West Texas. These two observant and gifted writer-travelers also define the boundaries of the region that the authors of Writing on the Wind perceive as West Texas. Numerous studies have been published offering specific discussions of ranch history and the lives of the remarkable men and women who settled this region. Among the better resources are Frances Mayhugh Holden’s history of the Matthews ranch, Lambshead, and the region north of Albany, Texas; Steve Kelton’s history of the ranch Renderbrook; Curry’s book-length narrative Sun Rising on the West and Hutto’s essay, both discussing the pioneer Smiths; Spence’s biography of three Pioneer Women of Abilene; and Nellie Spikes and Temple Ellis’s Through the Years: A History of Crosby County. Words capture many aspects of West Texas life, but the topography and natural world motivate not only wordsmiths but photographers with their inquisitive cameras. As in Cochran and Lumpkin’s West Texas, which says much about its content in the subtitle, A Portrait of Its People and Their Raw and Wondrous Land, landscape has inspired Texas State Photographer Wyman Meinzer to explore the Canyons of the Texas High Plains. Old photographs, always valuable to regional history, discovered by archivist Janet Neugebauer illustrate former Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald’s poetry in All That Matters:The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems.

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Reading West Texas And finally, as in all western life, a discussion of people and place cannot be complete without consideration of water, which more than any other natural resource, preoccupies social historians as it has settlers of West Texas from the time human occupation began. Two writers cited here enlarge discussion of this vital subject. Stephen Bogener traces the establishment of the irrigation systems along the Pecos after controversial dam construction along that once-formidable river. Such discussions of the uses of water in the West have led Peter Longo and David Yoskowitz to gather a collection of ten essays discussing the future of the region in Water on the Great Plains: Issues and Politics. The authors look back at projects that have failed in water management and forward to recommend policies that may save the most precious natural resource in the West. That West Texans believe their lives to be unique and worth sharing becomes obvious in both the many biographies and the well-written memoirs recounting the satisfactions as well as the trials of settling and living in an often difficult environment. Two studies will give readers both critical appraisal and definition of what good biography and memoir can be. One of the best discussions of several West Texans’ personal stories cited in this bibliography comes from the facile pen of Bert Almon, who reveals his judgment of Texas memoir writers in his title, This Stubborn Self. In his opening paragraph, he says best why reading these personal chronicles are worth the time: “Writers in this study can be read for their literary qualities, for their profound self-revelations, and for their record of the geography and history of a state often considered unique by its citizens and the world in general.” Here Almon provides the rationale for reading these accounts if knowledge of a region is the reader’s objective. For further enlightenment on the art of composing good memoirs, a graceful Wyoming writer provides the model. Page Lambert, although not a West Texan, demonstrates the kind of craftsmanship good autobiography demands as she writes of her loss of heritage in western life and points out that the purpose of her examination has been In Search of Kinship. Her story of that search clearly is not unlike the searches some of the writers cited here have found necessary to survival. Almon discusses at length the merits of five West Texas writers who measure up without argument to the model Lambert creates. Included in Almon’s study are analyses of the life writing of Pat Mora, Pat Ellis Taylor, Hallie Stillwell, Gertrude Beasley, Sal-

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Reading West Texas lie Reynolds Matthews, and A. C. Greene, whose book-length responses to West Texas enlarge readers’ concept of the region as place. Chronologically, among Panhandle memoirists, the pioneers who illuminate the daily struggles of early life in the land, Nonie Laune in Sand in My Eyes says upon her family’s arrival in that windy, dusty land that she “realized with shocking clarity that we had no business being there in the Panhandle at all.” The then teenager and her family prevailed and made a home, as did Nellie M. Perry, whose journals and short stories are included in Woman of the Plains, edited by Sandra Gail Teichmann.As the editor points out, place is important to Miss Nellie, but her chief contribution is her stories of the people she encounters around Perryton early in the twentieth century. Ella Elgar Bird Dumont’s memoir tells more of one woman’s responses to life before the turn of the twentieth century when she lived in a buffalo hunter’s camp, lost her first husband, and, through her ingenuity as a seamstress and hard worker, managed to raise her children alone until she remarried. Because of her family responsibilities, public school teacher Laura V. Hamner did not begin writing until she had reached midlife, but before her death at age ninety-seven, she collected and recorded stories that preserved Panhandle history and told the personal stories of pioneer women, cowboys, and early ranchers. For some years she told those stories as a radio personality. The collections of her stories in Light ’n Hitch and Shortgrass & Longhorns, like Perry’s, reveal the hardiness of the early settlers in the Panhandle.The novelist Loula Grace Erdman, who came to the Panhandle in the 1920s as a teacher, reflects in her memoir, A Time to Write, what life was like in early twentieth-century Canyon,Texas, where she taught at the university now known as West Texas A&M. Reading these responses to the landscape and life of early Panhandle pioneers firmly establishes the sense of the place where these writers thrived. One of the best accounts of growing up on the Staked Plains is Helen Mangum Fields’ aptly-titled Walking Backwards in the Wind, a story of life on the edge of the Caprock during the Great Depression. Below the Caprock on the Rolling Plains or the Breaks and in the Big Country around Abilene, as much of the land east of the Llano Estacado is designated, many have been inspired to write about their life and times. Naomi Burns, who recounts life on the Pitchfork Ranch in This I Can Leave You, writes of the same area that Jim Corder, who is said to have proclaimed this region “the Big Empty,” did. Corder explains the urge 264

Reading West Texas Rushing and others have felt to tell their personal histories when he points out that “good writing saves, renews, re-creates us all.” He tells of his return to Jayton in search of who he once was in two short memoirs, Chronicle of A Small Town and Lost in West Texas. To re-create his own early life, A. C. Greene, who grew up in Abilene, wrote the now-classic A Personal Country. Albany writer Sallie Reynolds Matthews, one of the first of many writers to narrate the history of Shackelford County and its surrounding regions, composed as a gift to her family the much-praised memoir, Interwoven, the story of how two families in the Albany area, the Matthews and the Reynolds, intermarried and established a ranching empire in that region. This area, rich in history, became the focus of one of the best known regional storytellers and historians, Lawrence Clayton, before his untimely death in 2000. In both Tracks Along the Clear Fork and 31 by Lawrence Clayton, a clearer picture of this land of legendary ranches, the fabled Fort Griffin, outlaws, and unforgettable characters emerges. One other Big Country writer, Larry L. King describes in “Requiem for a West Texas Town,” his nostalgic and moving introductory essay to Warning: Writer at Work, how it once was and is no longer in West Texas. Larry King spent his adolescent days in Midland, and it is in Odessa, the town just west of Midland, that Sandra Scofield grew up. Both writers candidly reveal the sometimes painful lives they led as teenagers. The Panhandle, Caprock, Rolling Plains, and the Big Country undisputedly can be labeled West Texas, but the Texas borderlands are also the setting for works in this collection. As Cochran and Lumpkin point out, these regions, too, can be declared historically and culturally important to the definition of West Texas then and now. Among El Paso writers, many native to the region, Pat Mora’s memoir, House of Houses, and her essays in Nepantla examine the double identity she experiences as a Latina growing up on the border. Mary Rodge, on the other hand, reveals in her nostalgic and frank exploration of growing up in El Paso in the 1920s both the positive experiences and the social problems she encountered. For the early history of El Paso during the days of the Mexican Revolution, Adah Hadlock, who came to El Paso as a young woman, married another expatriate, and became a town leader, narrates with zest her personal adventures in My Life in the Southwest. Yet another El Paso dweller Pat Ellis Taylor (now known as Pat Little 265

Reading West Texas Dog), during her graduate school days, traveled to the Big Bend region to conduct numerous interviews with Jewel Babb for her biography, Border Healing Woman.Taylor learned from Babb both regional history and reflections on Big Bend’s early culture, since the healing woman lived in the Valentine area all of her long life. In the memoirs of rancher Hallie Stillwell and Patricia Clothier, the early days in this isolated region where Babb lived assume the spirit of adventure. Not far from the Big Bend area, Charlena Chandler, who grew up on a ranch along Independence Creek, traces the history of both her family and their more than century-long occupation of this ranch near the Pecos River. As one of the women that Laura V. Hamner interviewed in the Panhandle once pointed out, “It took guts and nerve to get along then.”These life writers prove that many of the early women settlers in West Texas possessed both traits. Two men, the country’s best-known writer of western fiction and an early-day traveling photographer, provide further knowledge of life along the Pecos and in the Big Bend. In two speeches published in Living and Writing in West Texas, novelist Elmer Kelton discusses his early days growing up on a ranch in the Pecos River region and how West Texas life and people have inspired his fiction.W. D. Smithers, an early-day photographer, had the foresight to capture Big Bend life with both camera and words beginning in 1916. Three decades later in the 1950s, Mary Lasswell responded with enthusiasm to the natural beauty she saw and to the unique people she met in both the Big Bend and El Paso in a long chapter in I’ll Take Texas. A contemporary traveler about the state, Bryan Woolley, who grew up in Fort Davis, includes essays about place and people of West Texas in two collections gleaned from newspaper features. Across la frontera, or the border between New Mexico and West Texas, the blend of Anglo-Hispanic culture has inspired numerous personal accounts.The journals of the New Mexico writer Peggy Pond Church and the history of a ranch on the western edge of the Llano Estacado that Fabiola Cabeza de Baca records in We Fed Them Cactus may inspire further reading in New Mexico history and literature. No examination of West Texas society can be complete without some knowledge of how these two rich cultures have influenced life along the border. Along Interstate 35, sometimes referred to as “the corridor,” a few literary critics advance the myth at times that creative writers cluster in

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Reading West Texas Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio, or so common wisdom proclaims. The wiser critical observers, however, have recently become aware of the many capable writers out in West Texas who have created some notable works. Recently two Texas scholars, Maceo C. Dailey, Jr. and Ruthe Winegarten, discovered that as early as 1925, a bright young African-American woman was composing poetry in El Paso. Bernice Love Wiggins at first self-published her Tuneful Tales, poetry in which she captures the Far West black experience during a period when most black writers were participating in the Harlem Renaissance in African-American literature in Chicago and New York.West Texas landscape and culture have inspired a number of modern poets as well, who are as diverse in style as Walt McDonald, Janice Whittington, Betsy Colquitt, and Red Steagall demonstrate in their work. Latina writers include Roberta Fernández, reared on the Texas-Mexico border, who portrays six remarkable women in a series of linked stories in Intaglio. In his anthology Daughters of the Fifth Sun, Bryce Milligan includes poetry by poets Gloria Anzaldúa and Pat Mora, as well as stories by Denise Chávez and Carmen Tafolla, Latina writers who have their own unique perspective on life in West Texas. For his thorough examination of the split identity some citizens of the borderlands sometimes feel, Tom Lea, both artist and novelist, created Martin Brady/Martín Bredi, a young man who has spent much of his life in Mexico but longs to connect with his origins in Texas. His artist’s eye aids Lea, a careful writer, to create graphic and elegant descriptions of the El Paso and Chihuahua landscape in The Wonderful Country, but for the region most think of as West Texas, Jane Gilmore Rushing serves as historian and storyteller. An expert observer of people in the region near Snyder where she grew up, Rushing chronicles life in this region from the days of early ranching to contemporary farm life. Of her six novels set in the region, her most illuminating of West Texans’ trials and triumphs settling this often unfriendly land include Mary Dove, Walnut Grove, and Tamzen. Rushing, one of the most courageous of Texas novelists, thematically explores religious bigotry, racial prejudice, unabashed xenophobia, and child abuse in her fiction. Early ranching in the Breaks furnishes the setting for Mary Dove, the love story of a lonely cowboy and a mulatto girl, long sheltered from outsiders by her sheepherder father. Settlers begin to move in and censure the

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Reading West Texas relationship, and the couple learns how unreasoning the prejudiced pioneers can be. Walnut Grove traces the development of both the “too-late frontier,” as some have called it, and the slowly emerging realization of a farmer’s son that heading for college offers escape from stultification among good-hearted but narrow-minded citizens. In Tamzen, Rushing recognized later, she characterizes a young, independent woman homesteader who will become the sturdy figure the novelist says she finds she includes in most of her West Texas fiction, “The Grandmother of West Texas.” When not long before her death in 1997 Rushing published Starting from Pyron, it seems clear that she wanted readers to perceive that the West Texans she knows may have their faults, but their strengths outweigh whatever negative themes inspired her novels. In plain-spoken, elegant prose, Rushing portrays West Texans candidly and usually sympathetically. For critical commentary on this region and its writers, readers may turn to Texas Women Writers, to the foreword of one of the least complimentary novels about West Texas, The Wind, and to Jim Lee’s introduction to Betsy Colquitt’s poetry. Archivist Janet Neugebauer cites the PanhandlePlains Historical Center as source for her essay on the pioneer Aunt Hank Smith. Other archival resources are housed in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University and at The Nita Stewart Haley Memorial Library in Midland. Jim Corder asks as a chapter title in Lost in West Texas,“Can poetry, or water, be found in West Texas?”Water may seem scarce at times, but fortunately its limitless landscape will continue to inspire writers determined to capture West Texas uniqueness in words. L O U H A L S E L L RO D E N B E R G E R

Selected Bibliography for Further Reading H I S T O RY, L A N D S C A P E , E N V I RO N M E N T

Bogener, Stephen. Ditches Across the Desert: Irrigation in the Lower Pecos Valley. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2003. Carlson, Paul. The Cowboy Way: An Exploration of History and Culture. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2001. Cochran, Mike, and John Lumpkin. West Texas: A Portrait of Its People and Their Raw and Wondrous Land. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 1999.

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Reading West Texas Curry,W. Hubert. Sun Rising on the West:The Saga of Henry Clay and Elizabeth Smith. Crosbyton,Tex.: Crosby County Pioneer Memorial, 1979. Holden, Frances Mayhugh. Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848–1878. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1982. Holden,William Curry. Alkali Trails: Social and Economic Movements of the Texas Frontier, 1846–1900. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 1998. Hutto, John R. “Mrs. Elizabeth (Aunt Hank ) Smith.” West Texas Historical Year Book 15 (1939): 41–2, 44. Kelton, Steve. Renderbrook: A Century Under the Spade Brand. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 1989. Lavender, David. The Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Longo, Peter J., and David W. Yoskowitz, eds. Water on the Great Plains: Issues and Politics. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2002. McDonald,Walt, and Janet Neugebauer. All That Matters:The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 1992. Morris, John Miller. El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536–1860. Austin:Texas State Historical Association, 1997. Meinzer,Wyman. Canyons of the Texas High Plains. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2002. Rathjen, Frederick W. Texas Panhandle Frontier. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 1998. Rodenberger, Lou. “West Texas Pioneer Women:The Wilder Stronger Breed.” West Texas Historical Year Book 77 (2001): 38–53. Reprinted in The Haley Library Newsletter 24: 1 (Spring 2002): 1, 8–10. Spence,Vernon D. Pioneer Women of Abilene: A Trilogy. Burnet,Tex.: Eakin Press, 1981. Spikes, Nellie Witt, and Temple Ann Ellis. Through the Years: A History of Crosby County Texas. San Antonio: Naylor Co., 1952. B I O G R A P H Y, AU T O B I O G R A P H Y, M E M O I R

Almon, Bert. This Stubborn Self:Texas Autobiographies. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 2002. Armitage, Shelley, ed. Bones Incandescent:The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2001. Beasley, Gertrude. My First Thirty Years. Reprint, with afterword by Larry McMurtry. Austin: Book Club of Texas, 1989. Boley,Tommy J., ed. Ella Elgar Bird. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

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Reading West Texas Burns, Mamie Sypert. This I Can Leave You: A Woman’s Days on the Pitchfork Ranch. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1986. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola. We Fed Them Cactus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954. Chandler, Charlena. On Independence Creek:The Story of a Texas Ranch. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004. Clayton, Lawrence. 31 by Lawrence Clayton. Ed. Lou Rodenberger. Abilene,Tex.: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2002. Clayton, Lawrence, and Joan Halford Farmer, eds. Tracks Along the Clear Fork: Stories from Shackelford and Throckmorton Counties. Abilene,Tex.: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2000. Clothier, Patricia Wilson. Beneath the Window: Early Ranch Life in the Big Bend Country. Marathon,Tex.: Iron Mountain Press, 2003. Corder, Jim W. Chronicle of a Small Town. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1989. ———. Lost in West Texas. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1988. Erdman, Loula Grace. A Time to Write. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1969. Fields, Helen Mangum. Walking Backward in the Wind. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 1995. Greene, A. C. A Personal Country. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Hadlock, Adah. My Life in the Southwest. El Paso:Texas Western Press, 1969. Hamner, Laura V. Short Grass & Longhorns. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1945. ———. Light ‘n Hitch. Dallas: American Guild Press, 1958. Kelton, Elmer. Living and Writing:Two Speeches by Elmer Kelton. Abilene,Tex.: FourO-Imprint, Hardin-Simmons University Press, 1988. King, Larry L. Warning:Writer at Work:The Best Collectibles of Larry L. King. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 1985. Lambert, Page. In Search of Kinship: Modern Pioneering on the Western Landscape. Golden, Col.: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996. Lasswell, Mary. I’ll Take Texas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958. Laune, Seigniora Russell. Sand in My Eyes. Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1974. Matthews, Sallie Reynolds. Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle.Third Edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958. Mora, Pat. House of Houses. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

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Reading West Texas Rodge, Mary King. Where the Creosote Blooms. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 1999. Scofield, Sandra. Occasions of Sin. New York:W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. Smithers,W. D. Chronicles of the Big Bend: A Photographic Memoir of Life on the Border. Austin:Texas State Historical Association, 2000. Stillwell, Hallie Crawford. I’ll Gather My Geese. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1991. Taylor, Pat Ellis (Pat Little Dog). Border Healing Woman:The Story of Jewel Babb. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Teichmann, Sandra Gail, ed. Woman of the Plains:The Journals & the Stories of Nellie M. Perry. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 2000. Woolley, Bryan. The Edge of the West. El Paso:Texas Western Press, 1990. ———. Texas Road Trip. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 2004. F I C T I O N , P O E T RY, L I T E R A RY C R I T I C I S M

Colquitt, Betsy. Eve—from the Autobiography and Other Poems. Ed. James Ward Lee. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 1997. ———. Honor Card & Other Poems. Socorro, New Mex.: Saurian Press, 1980. Crawford, Max. Wamba. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Fernández, Roberta. Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories. Houston: Arte Publico, 1990. Grider, Sylvia Ann. Foreword to The Wind by Dorothy Scarborough. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Grider, Sylvia Ann, and Lou Halsell Rodenberger. Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1997. Lea,Tom. The Wonderful Country. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. Lee, James Ward. “The Poetry of Betsy Colquitt” in Adventures with a Texas Humanist. Fort Worth:TCU Press, 2004. 127–39. McDonald,Walt, and Wyman Meinzer. Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2003. McDonald,Walt, and Janet Neugebauer. Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2001. Milligan, Bryce, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos eds. Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry. New York: Riverbend Books, 1995. Rushing, Jane Gilmore. “The Grandmother of West Texas:The Myth of the Pioneer Woman in the Novels of Jane Gilmore Rushing.” Texas Women:The Myth, the Reality. Ed. Joyce Thompson. Denton:Texas Woman’s University Press, 1985.

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Reading West Texas ———. Mary Dove. Garden City: Doubleday, 1974. Reprint, Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2003. ———. “People and Place.” The Writer (Sept. 1969):9–12. ———. Starting from Pyron. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 1992. ———. Tamzen. Garden City: Doubleday, 1972. ———. Walnut Grove. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964. Steagall, Red, and Skeeter Hagler. Born to This Land. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2003. Whittington, Janice. Into a Thousand Mouths. Lubbock:Texas Tech University, 1999. Wiggins, Bernice Love. Tuneful Tales. Ed. by Maceo C. Dailey, Jr. and Ruthe Winegarten. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, 2002.

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C I TAT I O N S

Introduction 1. Page Lambert, In Search of Kinship: Modern Pioneering on the Western Landscape (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996), 237. 2. Jane Gilmore Rushing, “People and Place,” in The Writer 82.9 (September 1989), 10. 3. Sylvia Ann Grider,“Foreword,” The Wind by Dorothy Scarborough (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), xvi. 4. Loula Grace Erdman, A Time to Write (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1969), 150. 5. Seigniora Russell Laune, Sand in My Eyes (Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Press, 1974), 11. 6. Laune, 17. 7. Adah Hadlock, My Life in the Southwest (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1969), 3. 8. Mary Lasswell, I’ll Take Texas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958), 217–18. 9. Frances Mayhugh Holden, Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle 1848–1878 (College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1982), 5.

West Texas Journal The references to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and Emily Dickinson’s “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” were taken from Literature and Its Writers, 2nd edition, by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001).

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Citations The poem “Summer in West Texas” was first published under the title “August in West Texas” in English in Texas. Fall/Winter 2000 (Vol. 30.2): 17.

Elizabeth Boyle (Aunt Hank) Smith Credit for locating and identifying the original sources of Elizabeth Boyle (Aunt Hank) Smith’s story belongs to others. Part of her story can be found in the Henry Clay Smith Papers housed in the Panhandle-Plains Museum/Archives in Canyon,Texas.W. Hubert Curry’s book entitled Sun Rising on the West,The Saga of Henry Clay and Elizabeth Smith contains valuable information as does “Mrs. Elizabeth (Aunt Hank) Smith,” John R. Hutto’s article in the West Texas Historical Year Book, 1939.Through the Years:A History of Crosby County,Texas by Nellie Witt Spikes and Temple Ann Ellis provided background information on early-day life in Crosby County. Georgia Mae Ericson generously shared her reminiscences of her grandmother. The Crosbyton Review contains insightful articles about Elizabeth and the Hank Smith family that cover nearly one-half century. “Texas South Plains, Settled From a Dream,” by Mike Kerr that was published in Exordium was also helpful.

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