Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  The tree is still there. And here we stand again, my dad and me. Nothing has changed since the last time. The Ur-Clarks are still underground sleeping their thousand-year sleep tucked under their heavy cement blankets. I look around. It has been a long time since anyone has been buried in this cemetery. Like last time, everything seems to itch and sting. The bushes still rustle, the grass is just as yellow, and my dad’s just as eager to show me the place. The wavering horizon, the entire insect-buzzing heat.

  roy isn’t very subtle. as soon as he discovers that I’m sitting on the porch, he shoots from the main house and darts across the lawn like a projectile, leaps onto my lap, and settles on top of the notebook I’m writing in. When the other dogs approach, like when the good-natured Pearl with her thick, bear-black fur lumbers over to say hello, he hops down and barks at her until she gives up and leaves. He even chases away the boss, the graying Dozer, without mercy or respect before crawling back up on my lap, a trifle embarrassed by his possessiveness and officious reign, but no more so than that it apparently must be done. Better to make a fool of himself than allow one of the other dogs to get a little pat or a glance from me. He only respects the thick-furred cat, Fancypants. When the cat comes over, its tail upright, as erect and festive as a chimneysweep’s brush, he doesn’t dare a direct confrontation. Without barking, he blocks the cat’s path as if he doesn’t notice he’s doing so. If the cat skirts around him, he repositions himself to block it, arranging a kind of absentminded bulwark to prevent the cat from rubbing itself against my leg.

  From my spot in the rocking chair, I watch these dramas play out day after day. All of Roy’s small, active maneuvers. It’s a pain to love someone the way Roy loves me.

  Each morning I wake up earlier than my dad to sit in the rocking chair and write for an hour under the pale morning sun. There’s always cover from the wind on one of the two porches. It’s perfectly still here even though the leaves rustle in the trees not ten feet away. Around 10:00 am I hear him in the kitchen, whipping eggs, foraging around and clearing his throat. He’s made scrambled eggs for me each day. When I enter the kitchen, he’s standing at the stove, his hair freshly washed, with a spatula poking up from his fist, keeping an eye on the eggs. I make tea and scrape the burnt toast. We carry everything outside to the picnic table. The furry cat flings himself lazily on the grass. Except for the three days in St. Louis last year, this is the first time I’ve spent contiguous days alone with my dad. The time before us makes itself agreeably heavy. Roy leaps up on the bench beside my dad and watches him eat until my dad caves and gives him some food. The morning spins long threads. The wind never seems to still. Some tarnished Christmas decorations rattle in the walnut tree. We sit listening intently. We listen through the noise from an entire life.

  But let’s be real. We’re both guests here. The trees tell their own stories. The wind can’t touch us. Ten days is an eternity, a nut, a capsule, inviolable.

  My dad sits beneath the walnut tree with a towel over his shoulder, waiting to be trimmed. A strange recognition when I comb his hair. It’s my own, just finer and softer. Sparser. It doesn’t take long to cut. He sits patiently, his palms resting on his lap as I stretch the time, taking a little off on one side, a little off the other. I think of something a film director once said. At the age of twenty he was going to meet his father for the first time. They’d never met, but there was a strange recognition the moment they shook hands. The way their hands clutched. His father’s hands were small, precisely as his own. As if the recognition had been waiting for him all along, in his bones.

  a balloon floats above the roof of h-e-b. From the parking lot it resembles a gooseberry on its way to the heavens. There always seems to be a welter of activity in the parking lot of the city’s only supermarket, cars weave between people pushing rattling metal shopping carts stuffed with bags toward their gaping trunks. On the way through this inferno my dad says, almost apologetically: It’s just a small supermarket, but we can get most of the things we need. Inside, we’re met with the most incredible surfeit, walls packed with vegetables I’ve never heard of, some of them sliced, peeled, and hacked into chunks, refrigerators and glass display cases with wonderful cakes, square and round and glazed in unimageable color combinations.

  I wonder what Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas who less than two hundred years earlier stood gazing across the void, would think of the fact that, at this humble spot, in a city of hardly 14,000 residents, you can choose between fifty types of bacon? Or eggs, sold boiled, shelled, and ready to eat directly from the bag? Would he be excited to see the wilderness so convincingly saved from its wilderness state? Or would he think something had been lost?

  My dad pushes the cart. It surprises me how much I enjoy the ordinariness of this activity, walking between shelves and dropping items into the cart, avocados, bananas, salted almonds. To discover that we know what we each want, even though we’ve never gone shopping together. Foreign beer for him, dill pickles for me, sparkling water for us both. The choreography, the synchronization, such gentle elegance. We dance, sway, and shuffle through the aisles with our shopping cart, refueling with ten thousand ordinary weekdays.

  On the way out, the sliding doors open to the sight of two men hugging, one white and one Black. See, in the South people are friends, my dad says, as if the two friends represented their own respective peoples, and the glass doors were a curtain opened so that their embrace would illustrate a larger point. Though I haven’t uttered a word, it’s as if he’s heard my thoughts, not about the two men before us, whom I don’t know, but my silent wonder that I’ve hardly seen any Black people in Texas. Except for the girl at the library and a few others, only whites and Hispanics. See, in the South people are friends. The assertion lies there, like a snowball on a mountaintop, fresh and round. When I was younger, I couldn’t resist. One little push, that was all it took, and it rolled down the mountainside gathering mass, and before we knew it, we’d be knocked about and peeved at the base of the slope, and he’d tell me that Europeans didn’t understand the United States, and I’d tell him that he didn’t understand anything.

  Over the years I’ve learned to resist this temptation. I’ve become less certain and more curious. Time is too precious. I don’t want to waste it fencing with words on subjects we can’t solve anyway. The world doesn’t depend on the two of us. The main thing must be the hope that ‘people’ are friends. The words vanish into the mild early evening, rising into the air like helium-filled gooseberries.

  Damn! Damnit! My dad slides his fingers along the fender. While we were inside the supermarket, someone notched a row of deep scrapes, a raw wound on the rental car. He was rash enough not to insure the car against this kind of thing, a decision, he says, that will now cost him a lot of money. Because people can’t steer their shopping carts and don’t have the decency to leave their numbers—damn! We’ll have to find some paint to cover it, he says. Cover the scrapes and hope the rental company doesn’t notice.

  We pile our bags into the car and drive to a hardware store, then another, where we buy a selection of varnish that may or may not be the right shade of silver.

  Afterward we drive the five miles out on Silent Valley Road. The sun is setting over the fields. For several minutes, the earth glows. Nestled at the far edge of the landscape are farms like dark stamps. The circular waterholes found on every lot, and which the animals drink from, turn radiant. As if the land has grown peach-colored eyes and gives in to a sudden urge to gawp at the sky.

  When we get home, we put our groceries away, and my dad gently places the small cans of varnish on the kitchen table right beside the door, so we will remember to fix the scrapes before we return the car.

  You paint it, he says. You’re the artist in the family.

  I prepare to fry some tofu and vegetables, and my dad gets the package from Smitty’s out of the fridge. I watch as he unwraps the meat on the table and lays slices of brisket on his plate. It looks battered and ten
der, with a smoked brown crust.

  May I try a little bite?

  Go ahead, he says. I can’t finish this all by myself.

  Even before we’ve sat at the table I’ve finished two slices. My dad thinks it’s only natural.

  Do you want some sausage also?

  No thanks, I say. Sausage. That’s where I draw the line.

  the girl with headphones sits at the long mahogany table in the same place as before, her elbows propped on the table and a smartphone in her hands. We give each other a knowing glance. There is hope, it says, for those of us who spend our days at a library.

  My dad sits next to the window in the corner, where there are four old movie-theater chairs, two and two across from one another. I sit opposite him. Time is a grain of dust, a white dot floating across darkness. We wait half an hour. We wait another ten minutes. Should we call her? my dad asks. I call Gloria on my cell phone, which apparently gets reception in the library. She left a voicemail on my answering machine the previous evening, she says. I didn’t realize I had such a thing. What did you say? I ask. That I had forgotten my doctor’s appointment, she says. Can we do the whole thing over tomorrow? Of course. Same time at the library tomorrow.

  All at once, the day before us is like an open field. We drive west, past San Marcos, traffic thickens along the stretch where they’ve built an outlet that offers name brands at bargain prices. The cars ahead transform into one long, glistening silver eel, and then discount city appears on our right as if from thin air, a mirage of red sandcastle, as unreal as anything here in the middle of Texas.

  We like old things better. In Gruene we sniff around antique shops. I pause before a display case filled with brooches, lost in thought. I think about the butterfly at home in my jewelry box, whether I should start wearing it. My dad comes over and stands behind me. When he sees what I’m looking at, he says: Why don’t I get that for you? He finds a woman who can unlock the case. Which one was it that you liked? I point, and the woman pries the brooch from the pillow. Up at the register she wraps it in wadding and hands it to me in a paper bag. My dad pays, and we head outside. There’s a cotton gin across the street just like the one William A. Clark is supposed to have built in Caldwell County. This one wasn’t powered by horses but a river, the Guadalupe River, which runs directly under it. The mill has now been turned into a restaurant. We find an outside table and both order grilled catfish, which arrives on plates along with butter, lime, and mashed potatoes. We eat and listen to the river gush somewhere below the trees. My dad tells me of the time he ate the best burger in his life. They were twelve and ten, he and Peggy. On a Sunday excursion with their parents, they’d stopped at what they thought was a nondescript roadside restaurant, but when they took their first bites, they gave each other knowing looks. This burger would never be surpassed. And they were right. The proportion of meat to bread was perfect, he says, not too soggy, not too dry, the quantity of lettuce and tomatoes, everything was just right. The high point of his burger-eating life.

  At a bend on the way to the river there’s a wine store in a shack. It looks like an old speakeasy. We enter to buy a bottle to take to Ginger and Ben’s and wind up trying their Gewürztraminer. The lady behind the counter, a pale woman wearing colorful makeup and hair bobbed in the ballooning style that is standard here, asks me if I’m German. Without any warning, and before I have a chance to respond, my dad interrupts: Guess how old she is? The woman doesn’t seem the least bit surprised at the shift in the conversation and guesses, to my dad’s great and shiny delight, that I’m twenty-three. It’s been a long time since someone was that far off, but it’s the third time it’s happened since I arrived in Texas, perhaps because I wear my hair down, something no decent Southern woman over the age of sixteen would normally do.

  The conversation continues without me. Now she wants to know, to my dad’s increasingly swelling pride, which skin products I use, and then she asks what I’m actually doing here in Texas, and I respond that I’m really just traveling around with my dad to learn more about my roots.

  She points at my dad and says: Is that your dad?

  Quickly we pay for the wine and leave. Neither of us wants to know what else she’d imagined.

  We walk down to the Guadalupe River that snakes its way underneath the trees, emerald-green and perfectly smooth, with a sandy bottom that’s barely visible from the bank. On the other side of the river, the cliff wall rises in scaly layers of flint up toward the town we’d just come from. Bald cypresses stand along the riverbank dipping their many toes in the water. Willows weep their leaves. Shadows snuggle on the water.

  We throw stones in the river. Peggy and Big Chan lived somewhere nearby, back when the place was named after the closest town, New Braunfels, before Gruene became an attraction on its own. We visited them the last time I was here, or rather, we visited Big Chan since Peggy was dead. I recall very clearly that their ranch, like Ginger and Ben’s, consisted of a large room with an open kitchen and a living room with several sofa clusters. Mostly I noticed the very Southern way with which the sofas were arranged diagonally and, what is probably even more Southern, that Chan had an entire room full of weapons. It was a sealed, windowless room just past the entrance, a kind of walk-in closet for guns, primarily rifles hanging in tight rows on a special mount, barrels pointing upward. My dad and Chan stood admiring the rifles, held them, felt their heft, discussed at length their magazine capacity. It surprised me how natural it was for my dad to handle and talk about these weapons, and how unremarkable it was to have an entire bedroom stuffed with weapons.

  Big Chan didn’t live alone. After Peggy and Little Chan died, he’d married a woman named June. And yet the house was filled with Peggy and Little Chan and Little Chan’s sister, Kendall, they hung on all the walls and sat on tables and shelves, Uncle Chan’s entire dead family. Our family. Now it was June’s dead family too, I thought, and it was somehow clear as we sat at the angled dining table eating June’s roast and buttered sweet corn and homemade pie that we’d come to visit the family on the walls, we were guests of the dead, and she was their hostess.

  My dad has forgotten the address. It doesn’t matter, because Chan is dead, and so is June. We stroll back to the car and cruise around in a kind of trance between the live oak trees on streets with names like Dewberry Lane and Oaklawn Drive. Without knowing how we got there, we come to a lattice gate, the last stop on a dead-end street. My dad recognizes the gate, the old sign is still there, rusty and practically fused with the fence underneath a newer sign. Williams, it reads, Chan and Peggy’s surname. It’s their old ranch, he says.

  We look at each other in amazement. The car knew the way! It’s the first time we appreciate the tin can.

  nancy and william a. clark were slaveholders. Cora’s book doesn’t indicate how many slaves, only that William, according to his eldest grandchild, brought “a number of slaves” along on the journey in the wagon train from Alabama to Texas.

  The only one I’ve heard about was named Jasper, and in my mind he stands as the representative for all the others, however many there were, they stand behind him, silent and nameless, their faces blurry.

  What I know of him is that they got him as a wedding present when he was around four years old, much like the plot of a novel Gloria gave me when we met in San Antonio, The Invention of Wings, in which a small white girl gets a little Black girl for her birthday. Did Jasper have no mother? Was she dead? Or was he simply taken from her and gifted to the bride and groom? I don’t know. To the extent that Jasper is discussed in my family, that is strictly speaking by my dad, he makes it sound as if it were a kind of adoption. From what I know, he says, they were always very kind to him. They treated him like their own. That’s what he’s heard, the story that’s passed down in the family, I suppose these types of stories are probably common in the South. The notion of slave and master as a special family arrangement. The slaveowner as a loving father, the enslaved as a beloved child. At the back of Cora
’s book there is a chapter dedicated to the family’s slaves. “Members of Our Clark Family” the heading reads, adding “Not Blood Related.” Nancy and William, she writes, got Jasper as a wedding present, “and they cared for him as if he was their own child.” Another part of the story is that, after the Civil War, Jasper and the others were granted a piece of land by William A. Clark. In the final chapter of Cora’s book, she notes that it was the house they’d lived in plus forty acres and a few mules.

  Cora had found the 1870 and 1880 censuses, where everyone is counted, Black as well as white. There are two Black families recorded, one being Jasper’s with what must have been a wife and two children. The other family consisted of a forty-six-year-old housekeeper, Holly Clark, along with what was most likely her two sons, Calaway and Lewis Clark, who were nineteen and seventeen respectively. The two boys were born in Alabama, so they must have been part of William A. Clark’s wagon train, one as an infant and the other as a two-year-old.

  Ten years later, in the census, Holly Clark and Cal’s family were down to just two members, mother and son. Lewis is no longer in the picture, either gone away or dead. Jasper’s family has, in addition to himself, grown to eleven, a number of which are recorded as lodgers. The children go to school, and one twelve-year-old daughter can read but not write. About Jasper’s mother’s birthplace, it says “can’t tell.” Maybe he’d never known his mother before he was gifted as a wedding present; maybe he’d only known his dad, who was from Kentucky.

  In addition to the two formerly enslaved families, there are two white families. William and Nancy, who turned sixty-three and sixty-two in 1880, live alone. The other family is one of William and Nancy’s four surviving sons, coincidentally the man who is my great-great-grandfather, Hugh Erwin Clark, a household with wife and four children, including my then five-year-old great-grandfather. Or to put it another way: My dad has a grandfather who grew up right next door with his family’s former slaves.