After we’ve eaten, Jon Swartz pulls out a tattered and yellowed notebook filled with codes and small pencil drawings. On the cover, in handmade three-dimensional letters, it reads: The Spiral. He’s saved the records from the secret club he and my dad and a third boy were in. A detailed summary of a scuffle on the courthouse square, who hid behind which buildings, that kind of thing. Even the scuffle is illustrated as a tumbling spiral.
It occurs to me just what kind of paradise Lockhart must have once been if you grew up in a white family during the 1940s. They’ve not grown out of it, my dad and Jon Swartz. Their childhood was so exemplary, they can’t resist fetishizing it.
Suddenly I understand what it is about the comic books. Why it’s so important for him to pass them on to me along with the small, cellophane-wrapped plastic prizes that he so meticulously showed me last year in St. Louis. He wants me to inherit his childhood. It’s that simple; the plastic prizes are the most valuable thing he can give me.
i have only the foggiest notion of how Gay’s mother died. I’ve always heard she was the prettiest of the four sisters, my grandmother was the smartest, and the eldest, Vivian, who never had children, was the bossiest. Christine, Ginger’s mother, never really had her own adjective. But Aunt E, whose real name was Louise, was pretty, that’s what’s I’ve always heard, and it was coupled with a sweet, gentle, and winning disposition. Everyone liked Aunt E. What amazed my dad the most, he’s told me, was that when he visited Ruby Ranch each summer as a boy, she made food for the dogs. She cooked for the dogs! he says. Various stews and cornbread with chunks of meat that she baked in the oven, earmarked for the dog bowls.
Whenever we discuss E, and her prettiness and sweetness come up, there’s an unspoken sense that perhaps she wasn’t the brightest of the sisters, that she didn’t possess my grandmother’s self-confidence and determination, but we all have something, and what E had was her looks and sweet personality. When she married Cecil Ruby, she also became the wealthiest of the four sisters, even though I’m certain that was never the point of the marriage. Maybe she just wanted a strong man to take care of her, even if it didn’t always turn out that way. Gussie has told me that Cecil once pointed a pistol at Aunt E for an entire night. He held her at gunpoint, she said. But my dad believes that she’s exaggerating. Gussie tended toward hyperbole. He certainly didn’t aim a pistol at her all night, it was probably more like a few hours.
The different versions I’ve heard concerning her death all implicate her husband as well. I’ve asked my dad, but he’s not completely certain of the story he’d heard, which, understandably enough, had been told to him with many muddled parts and darkened layers. But the one he heard was that Cecil stomped on the gas pedal and ran over Aunt E when she’d stepped out of the car to open the gate at Ruby Ranch. She was dead on the spot. Was he drunk? Had it been a malicious, spur-of-the-moment impulse? An accident? I am wondering about this when my dad and I visit Gay at her mill office. The office makes up the lowest floor of the tall wooden tower next to the silos. In the old days, you parked right below and the grain was shot directly into the truck bed through a chute in the mill. After the truck was weighed a second time you paid for the difference in weight.
Gay sinks down into a giant armchair here too, and again she’s wearing a turquoise-colored polo shirt and a pair of beige canvas pants. The animal head she’s sitting under, which resembles a cross between a rhino and an antelope, is sewed out of fabric.
It’s obvious how much she likes my dad, how happy she is to see him, and glad to reminisce with him on their long lives and shared stories. Memories of Gussie, who in a certain way was a mother—or became one—to all the children she grew close to, my dad’s cousins and the town’s constantly shifting years of fourth graders. Loving and funny, and the word everyone except for Gay used up till now is bossy.
Looking back, Gay says to my dad, I thought you dealt with Gussie’s old age really well.
Well, I could have done better.
I don’t agree.
I know I could.
Gay says that he let Gussie maintain her freedom. That’s the most important thing for an old person. To maintain control of one’s own life. Doing it their way ’til they die. You never took that away from her. Now that I’m eighty-four, I fight Celia all the time.
She doesn’t even know when Gussie actually started to get really sick …
When she was around ninety-five, my dad says. She had a stroke that wasn’t discovered right away.
Gay says that she’d once told Jack they really ought to have taken care of Gussie’s checks for her. But anyway, you did it right, John.
Well, not completely.
We all have regrets. We wish we understood better. You did the best, John. I just wanted to tell you that.
I muster my courage and ask, with all my foreigner’s innocence, and with the distinctive characteristic of being someone who’d been spliced out of all these stories practically from birth and is now sort of glued in like a slip of paper in a collage, how her mother actually died.
Oh, Daddy killed her, she says and laughs the squeaky laughter that trails from everything she says.
How?
With the car, she says. It was an accident. He was completely devastated afterward, completely devastated. He’d had no idea what it’d be like to live without E. She’d been his invisible balance in life, invisible especially to him. Her father, she says, was a bit of an asshole, but I loved him to pieces. I adored him. The word she uses is not asshole, but that’s what she means. A bully, a no doubt charming drunkard, difficult and flawed, but she loved him. Period. And so I don’t ask any more questions about what really happened to her mother.
in the evening, when we sit at the square dining table with all the papers and the sheet with the ever-growing, ever-lopsided family tree, the topic of my book comes up. My dad tells me that he’s happy I’m writing it. I think it will be a really interesting book, he says. Certainly, there’s a wealth of material. In fact, he’d thought about writing something similar himself, he adds, but now he doesn’t need to.
I look up from my tiny pencil squiggles, a little surprised. I think you should still write it, I tell him. When we visited Gay, she told us about Gussie’s funeral and said she couldn’t recognize her in the speech my dad gave. Your Gussie was not my Gussie, she said. And that is the point with any story. We can only share our own testimonial. We can’t speak on others’ behalf. My family chronicle will never be like your family chronicle, I say, adding that I don’t even know how I’ll write any of it yet. For now, all I have are clusters of notes and outlines. It’s a little like Grandma Clark’s quilt, I say. At some point I’ll have to begin stitching everything together to see if anything coherent emerges.
A pattern, he says.
Or maybe more of an impression, I say. Mostly because an actual pattern is too much to hope for.
Texas is bustling right now, he says. There’s an economic boom, it’s the fastest-growing state in the country. People are leaving California by the masses to move to Texas. My dad hates California almost as much as he hates New York City, and sees immigration from there to here as a 1-0 lead for Texas. That must mean something too, he says.
The strange rivalry between California and Texas means nothing to me, I tell him. I have nothing to compare it to. That’s exactly what has set all this in motion. The incessant Atlantic Ocean, that there was always something here and something there, and neither had anything to do with the other, except for—well, except for me. With the book, it’s my hope that I can somehow sew the worlds together.
I ask if he can recall, for example, the day he told me I had siblings? He doesn’t remember. Nor does he remember why he hadn’t said a word about them before Eugene was born. Why I had to be eight or nine before I even heard about it. That particular afternoon simply did not leave the same impression on him as it did on me. But he agrees that it probably happened at Hviids Vinstue. It’s the kind of place we would
go to.
See, I say. That’s what I mean. We notice different things. The only way I can piece it all together is to tell the story. Write it down on a sheet of paper and somehow make it all connect.
My dad grows thoughtful, and soon says that life is full of things that could have been done differently. Choices you believed were right when you made them, even though you knew very well they were wrong. All the things you could have done differently.
That’s what literature is all about, I say.
Yes, tragedies, he says. People making the wrong choices even when they know they are wrong.
The room goes quiet. He uses the word you, but I think he’s talking about himself. For a few brittle moments we listen to the ticking of the clock. Then I ask him if there’s anything he regrets?
Oh, yes, lots.
What?
Without thinking, he says: I should have had more understanding for your mother’s situation back then.
My mother was very ill when she was pregnant. Threw up, could eat almost nothing. When I was born, she weighed only ninety-three pounds. I, on the other hand, was a normal-sized baby. I’d sucked all the nourishment from her. Not until years later did the doctors discover that she’d been very sick. I ask him if he means back when she was pregnant?
No, not then. When she was pregnant, she was pregnant. I couldn’t possibly have known something was wrong, he says. Afterward, that’s when he should have been more considerate.
I tell him I’m sorry about Gussie. I should have just hopped on an airplane. I should have been more concerned for my own family than a strangers’ family. I consider saying something about the Letter. We’ve never discussed it, but it’s my biggest regret. That I wrote it and sent it, and that I wasted two years of my life, and his, being angry. But I say nothing, can simply not bring myself to mention it. What if he has forgotten it and I have to explain? What if it’s a living memory for him, and I don’t have to explain anything?
It’s all speculation, he says, and means that it’s impossible to erase a life lived, even in your imagination.
If this and if that, I say. If it hadn’t happened like it did, we wouldn’t be here right now.
And the other children wouldn’t have been born …
Exactly.
Contingency, he says. The notion that every event depends on every other event.
We remain seated. Everything seems to tremble and tears well in my eyes. You know that I also have to write about things that have been difficult, right? My voice sounds husky.
Of course, he says. I’ve known that all along. And there’s enough to choose from.
my dad is going to Skype with his wife. Who knows how it’ll go, he says, it’s best if I’m not in the house, in case it gets uncomfortable. He gives me a ride into town, and I can sense that he is restless, that his thoughts are elsewhere; after the call he’s meeting with Doug Field to look at some financial papers. We agree to meet at Smitty’s, which is now shrouding downtown in its smoky aromas.
I walk along the rust-red western buildings on the square, then down a side street toward 183, where there are abandoned car dealerships with faded, hand-painted signs. Decay, rust, chipped paint, grimy walls. I observe everything, hands clutched behind my back, as though I’m at an art exhibition. State Inspections, Oil Changes, Tire Repair. The teeth of time have a neat hand.
This place is distinctly masculine. Maybe all of Texas is masculine. Lockhart, in any case, is a real boy’s town with its gunpowder and smoke and grilled meat and soil thick with blood from rotten battles. As a woman, your best bet is to wear a sturdy corset. I’ve read a little of Bob’s book on the Comanches. The decisive battle between the Comanches and the white settlers happened right over here, near Plum Creek, the place where William A. Clark purchased his land.
The Indian Wars were actually over. But it grew dark, and the moon was howling. Or no, the Comanches were howling. The moon was blue, and the whites knew what awaited. The year was 1840. You could hear horses’ hooves pounding all the way from West Texas, they rode in a slanted line from the southeast across the prairie, down toward the Gulf of Mexico, in the largest raid ever. It was supposed to be an act of revenge. Earlier peace negotiations, held in San Antonio’s Council House, had ended in a bloodbath. The Comanches had sent thirty-three chiefs, and they’d brought a captive along as a sign of goodwill, a sixteen-year-old girl by the name of Matilda Lockhart, who’d been kidnapped at the age of fourteen, and who was now missing a great deal of her face. The whites did not view her as a sign of goodwill, her nasal bone was exposed, and after two years of daily torture she had burns over her entire body. No one could stand looking at her. Ultimately, the Indians and the settlers each doubted their enemies’ deep-seated motives. Nerves were frayed, and guns and arrows were at the ready. Translators translated back and forth, and something caused the Comanches to break out in a communal war whoop and raise their bows. The Texans shouted Fire! and the peace negotiations were over. The Indians’ peace committee was completely wiped out. Blood flowed thickly and irrevocably.
Afterward, there was great bitterness among the Indians, who’d lost nearly all of their chiefs. The remaining Comanches—around five hundred warriors, their families, and spies, approximately one thousand Indians in all—backed a chief called Buffalo Hump, and once things got moving, they thundered across the wide expanse on many stolen horses, raiding, killing, scalping, burning down houses and towns, leaving a long, bloody, scorched trail across the prairie.
When they’d reached the Gulf of Mexico and could ride no farther, they surrounded Linville, the second largest port south of San Antonio. The customs officer had a young bride, but it was the gold watch he tried to save. The Indians killed him on the spot, scalped him, and took his bride with an eye toward having their way with her later.
In the meantime, the town’s residents sought refuge on the gulf. They lay in their boats and watched as the Comanches opened a load of European finery meant for a merchant in San Antonio, as they tried on the clothes, tall silk hats, tailcoats with shiny lapels and bound silk bands in their horses’ manes and paraded the streets, brandishing fine canes and umbrellas.
When they grew tired of that, they guided all of the town’s cattle into their stalls and slaughtered them, then burned the town to the ground and rode northward. The Indians tended to travel light when they were on the warpath, but they were furious, and their blood-frenzy made them careless. Buffalo Hump had allowed his warriors to line their pockets, loot, take captives and mules, all of which weighed them down. And then there were the stolen horses, a herd of three thousand and counting, difficult to control.
As the Comanches ravaged the town, the Anglos in the north organized a volunteer army of Texas Rangers, a militia from Bastrop plus a number of farmers. In addition, the white settlers got assistance from another Indian tribe, the Tonkawas, who fastened white bands around their arms. This fly-by-night army lay in wait at Plum Creek. They never forgot the sight of the Comanches as they came riding in. Howling warriors with wildly painted faces on whinnying horses with fluttering red bands in their manes. One crazy-looking man rode around naked but for a pigeon-tailed coat worn backwards. Another wore a high hat. A third wore a headdress made from a white crane with blood-red eyes. Enormous deer antlers, buffalo horns, bones, feathers, blood-dripping scalps that hung like grotesque wreaths around the warriors’ throats.
The ambushing army surrounded the Comanches and pressed into the throng, firing their weapons willy-nilly. The huge herd of horses panicked, and the Comanches lost control of them. Those who hadn’t managed to flee were trampled to death by their stolen horses, and the rest were scattered and shot one by one. It was a bloodbath, a massacre, a chaotic nightmare. In desperation the Comanches attempted to kill their captives as a final act of revenge, but the customs officer’s bride was saved by her corset, which was so thick an arrowhead couldn’t penetrate it.
◊
The battle had raged for two d
ays. Eighty Comanche warriors and one Texan were dead. The moon howled again, no, now it was the Tonkawas doing a victory dance in the flickering ghost light, they lit bonfires and gathered dead enemies, sliced off their limbs and roasted them on the fire, and ate them and howled on. It was an ancient ritual of war. The whites kept their distance. There was so much the white man didn’t understand. Other Indian tribes didn’t like the Tonkawas. There was so much the Natives didn’t understand. All this happened right over here, near Plum Creek.
For one hundred and fifty years the Comanches had ruled a vast area, the southernmost plains encompassing much of Texas and some of New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
Things didn’t go much better for the Tonkawas. Forty years later, what was left of their tribe, which had once numbered five thousand and now numbered only ninety souls, was forced to leave their home at the Brazos River and relocate to Oklahoma.
The moon is long gone now, the Natives are gone and the day is white, but there is a smell of burnt flesh. When my dad was a child, he played ‘cowboys and Indians’ like all children, without realizing all that had transpired here. Only later did he discover that his Uncle Bud, as a child, had found arrowheads in the prairie soil. They had played cowboys and Indians right on top of the real cowboys and Indians.
I hear someone shout my name on 183. Who knows me here other than phantoms? I turn, and at the stoplight, waiting for green, I see a pickup truck with rolled-down windows and a line of eighteen-wheelers behind it. The driver, wearing a tattered cowboy jacket and hair parted straight down the middle, waves at me. Mathilde! I know his face, it’s the man from the breakfast café, the one whose thumbs are saved in my notebook, Her-nan-dez. I wave back. He gestures that he wants to meet me around the corner, and snaps on his blinkers, and when the light turns green, I see his pickup round the corner. I follow on foot, but when I get there, nothing.
Lone Star Page 33
