Generations and Other True Stories
Bryan Woolley
Introduction by John Nichols
Dzanc Books
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Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1995 by Bryan Woolley
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
“Generations” originally appeared in Redbook; “Herbert Kokernot, Satchel Paige, and Me” and “How He Played the Game” in Tuff Stuff, under different titles; “A Memoir of Hamilton and Comanche Counties,” also under a different title, as the introductory essay to The Way Home: Photographs from the Heart of Texas, by June Van Cleef, copyright 1992, Texas A&M University Press. The other pieces appeared in The Dallas Morning News and its magazine, Dallas Life. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint my work here.
Published 2016 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-38-9
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers
Published in the United States of America
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Contents
Introduction by John Nichols
1. Generations
2. The Hero’s Hometown
3. The Meeting at Skillman Grove
4. Herbert Kokernot, Satchel Paige, and Me
5. The Art Snobs Meet Frankensteer
6. Kinky in Character
7. The Long Journey
8. Mrs. Miller
9. The Plant Hunter
10. An Ordeal by Fire
11. Where the Falcon Dwells
12. The City Tribe
13. Poets Lariat
14. The Mighty Quins
15. Fundamental Differences
16. The “Last Cowboy” of Brewster County
17. The Incident at Roswell
18. A Memoir of Hamilton and Comanche Counties
19. A Far-Gone Conclusion
20. A School of Hard Knocks
21. A Time to Reap
22. Crazy Water Days
23. How He Played the Game
24. Bloodline
25. Trouble Across the Pecos
26. The Reflecting Pool
27. Our House
FOR TED, PAT, AND CHRIS
the next generation
and in memory of JERRY
who was murdered
Introduction
by John Nichols
Yes, I’ve known Bryan Woolley for a right long spell, but I think I’ve only met him twice. His book, Time and Place, started the relationship—I really loved that tale of small town west Texas in the Fifties. And then one day we sat down to some serious bourbon in an upscale air-conditioned Dallas fleabag and discovered we had some kindred blood. I liked the dude right off the bat: he knew how to drink and he knew how to tell stories, and he seemed like a real nice guy into the bargain. Later, he suckered me into writing a few book reviews for the old Dallas Times-Herald, but I don’t hold that against him. And it wasn’t long afterwards that I read his small novel, Some Sweet Day, and it knocked my socks off. I thought: This man is one of those rough tough gentle souls who deep down isn’t much afraid of anything, and he really knows how to see clearly with the heart.
No, I wouldn’t call him sentimental, though he is not afraid of nostalgia, either. Bryan’s memories of his own childhood are as vivid and moving as the classic sepia prints in an old family album. Seems like he always has an insight into something of value, plus a gift of being able to care about most anything that crossed his path forty years ago…or only yesterday. Respectful compassion lights up the past, the present, and his observations concerning the future. Too, the man goes about his business with a seemingly effortless savoir faire, a bullseye instinct for the truth, a rapacious curiosity, and a gratifying tendency to do his homework: the consummate pro.
Bryan doesn’t manipulate or stack the odds; he lets you decide. He isn’t really a neutral observer, however: the impact almost always evolves out of a quiet place, then hits hard. And, no matter how harsh a story might be, there’s always a thread of hope running through it. Even when the outrage is evident the decency of vision keeps a balance. For some reason, that makes me think Bryan would be a handy person to have around in an emergency; he’d keep his head, figure all the angles pretty quick, make sense out of the confusion, decide what to do, and probably save my life.
And even if he blundered and didn’t save my life, he would probably feel obligated, out of guilt (deriving from the code that requires honor among thieves), to immortalize me in his sweet prose!
So here it is, no literary gee-gaws, do-dads, gimcracks or gimmicks, and no wiseguy fancy stuff, either…though I must admit Bryan is often funny as hell. But he gets you to laugh with people, as opposed to at the foibles of others. Put another way, Bryan can dissect like a skilled surgeon, but he ain’t much for overtly twisting the knife. I don’t believe the man has a malicious bone in his body.
Born and raised in the Lone Star state, Bryan naturally considers his roots a most merciful benediction. Yet he never struts them with any of that big bold brassy tacky braggadocio so often associated in our national mythology with the inhabitants of Texas. Hence, anybody who reads this book, even a xenophobic highlander (like me) from the sierras of New Mexico, is bound to enjoy being Texasified, Woolley style—
I guarantee.
Bryan knows his home territory in spades. And you will too, after this intriguing journey. These tales are all over the map and you don’t need to read them in order. They’ve got quirky facts galore, fascinating lingo, and a slew of eccentric, noble, bawdy, reserved, heroic, humble, crazy, intelligent, small town, big city characters. There’s even a cowboy poet who grooves on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and T.S. Eliot; there are urban Indians who keep the faith; there’s an old time gospel horseback rider who’s “very thoughtful of other peoples’ beliefs.” And just when you think it might be safe to go back into the desert, there’s a flying saucer somewhere across the border in New Mexico.
One minute we have a young kid, Bryan himself, watching—in person!—as the immortal Satchel Paige strikes out six major league batters in a row. In St. Louis?…nope, that happened in Alpine, Texas, in 1951. Where is Alpine, Texas? Beats me, but in Bryan’s memory, and in his imagination, it’s a fabulous place to visit.
Next minute, we jump from Satchel to whooping cranes down in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on San Antonio Bay; and from those whoopers Bryan diddy-bops through a riotous elegy (or do I mean eulogy?) for the cartoonist, Gary Larson. (Is Gary from Texas?—I don’t know. But so what? There’s another nonsequiter riff in here about Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon’d San Francisco.) Then, before you can say “To Hell and Back,” Bryan is over at Audie Murphy’s hometown of Celeste learning about that war hero/movie star’s hardscrabble childhood, a time when the Murphy family was “as broke as the Ten Commandments.” A few pages later, Bryan gives us a jive riff on Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, after which we gallop right up to a cowboy poet hootnanny…then zip!—out west we go to meet a strange guy (in a piece of wild country called the Trans-Pecos) who’s marveling at the blossoming Leucophyllum candidum…a flower which probably wouldn’t mean horsesquat to the maniac Dallas Harlequin rugby players (that Bryan eventually follows all the way to a tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada) for whom mud, blood, and Bud is the name of the glorious
game.
By the way, you know what Kinky Friedman thinks of Garth Brooks? He thinks Garth is “a cultural mayonnaise” and “the anti-Hank.” I think Garth is…rich.
But these stories are richer, by far. Some are funny, all are interesting, a few will break your heart. The title piece, “Generations,” is as lean and poignant as anything I have ever read. A hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction, Bryan’s spritz on the arcane double-dealing scuttle-butting backbiting Public Art Follies in Dallas is hilarious. (Show me another town in America that could put seventy bronze longhorn steers on a grassy knoll in front of its Convention Center a couple of blocks from Nieman Marcus and get away with it!)
But it’s not funny at all when Bryan tells us about an internationally famous Dallas balloonist who is badly burned in a flying accident: the man’s courage sure will make you sit up and take proper notice. And there is no glamour, either, in a short piece on an ex-Pentecostal preacher, abandoned by his church because he’s gay, who dies of AIDS. The preacher has the kind of decency that resonates throughout this book.
Bryan moves around easily from a lovely hosannah for Nolan Ryan (the great baseball pitcher) to a history of that zany crazy healthfood water burg, Mineral Wells. And though his take on a steer wrestling school in Madisonville doesn’t resort to much hyperbole in the telling, it is graphic enough to leave me feeling black and blue!
One of my favorite moments involves an elderly teacher who remembers a night from her young womanhood when she camped outside in her backyard because of the heat…but still couldn’t sleep, the moon was so darn bright. How do you solve a problem like that in small town Texas? She opened an umbrella to shade herself from the moon’s brilliant rays.
Do you know who the “Last Cowboy of Brewster County” is? I do now, but I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll let Bryan take you there to meet the guy, who right now might be the most famous writer in America. The question is, will Bryan himself be able to track down that elusive celebrity? And, if so, what then—?
Much of this writing is about change. The old days; the new days. Sacred traditions die out; land gets developed; native people decide to assert their rights. After nearly fifty years of Woolley occupation, Bryan’s mom sells the family home, and that is a melancholy process.
There’s difficult history here—racism, prejudice, reaction, fear of development. But you won’t find an ounce of sarcasm, cynicism, or petulant whining from the author. Maybe these days it is old-fashioned (or even the kiss of death) to be honorable, but to my way of seeing, that’s what we’ve got here: this volume is purely intentioned, it is considerate, and that sort of quality is hard to come by anymore. Bryan mocks nobody; he himself is “very thoughtful of other peoples’ beliefs.”
Still, before you enter these pages, there is one important question I feel compelled to ask: Have you got that “Baptist booster spizerinctum?” I hope so. But if you don’t have it yet, do not despair. Because no matter who you are or where you hail from, by the end of this collection of fine stories, you’ll have spizerinctum up the kazoo—in your head, in your heart, in your belly, and pulsating neon-bright smack dab in the exact center of your soul—
Guaranteed.
—Taos, New Mexico
April 1995
When Redbook magazine published this piece in 1981, I called it fiction, but it wasn’t. Everything in it happened as I wrote it. I just changed the names.
Since then, the father of the story and his wife have died. So I’ve changed the fictitious names back to the real ones, and I’m publishing the story here as the truth, which it is.
Generations
The last place I had seen my father was on the left front fender of the 1939 Chevrolet in front of a tourist court hundreds of miles from the farm where I had lived all my life. It was 1945, not long after V-J Day, and we had moved only a few weeks before—my mother, my grandmother, my younger brothers and sisters, and me. I was eight years old, barely. School had just opened, and my grandmother was my teacher in the town’s third grade—one of the third grades; the Mexicans went to another school. My mother took in sewing. We lived in two cabins of the tourist court, so we had two kitchens and two bathrooms. One of the kitchens was my bedroom. Being the eldest, I got to sleep on a cot there. I was the only member of the family who slept alone. Sherry, the baby, slept with my mother, and Linda with my grandmother. My brothers, Dick and Mike, slept together. We were crowded but I didn’t know it, for we had been crowded at Carlton, too, in the house on the farm, when my father was living with us.
I didn’t know why we had come to Fort Davis, or why he hadn’t come with us. If I asked, they didn’t tell me. And I didn’t know why my father had come now or why he was going away again. I didn’t know why we were sitting on the Chevrolet in the dark, he on the left fender, I on the right, or why the other kids didn’t come out of the cabins and climb on the car with us. I didn’t know someone was making sure we were alone.
Nights were cool in those mountains, even in August. A breeze drifted through the apple orchard that separated the tourist court from the road, and through the huge cottonwood in front of the cabins. It was nothing like the sultry summer nights on the farm, with not a breath of wind stirring in the live oaks. It was a strange place to me, high in those rugged mountains—the first mountains I had ever seen—in that strange town with so many strange brown people speaking a language I didn’t understand, where the white boys wore jeans and cowboy boots and hats to school and stared at my farmer’s overalls and bare feet. It would have been worse if my grandmother hadn’t been my teacher, I guess, and if Clay, the son of a rancher whose big stone house was just over the orchard fence from the tourist court, hadn’t been my friend.
If there was a moon, it was hidden by the trees, and I couldn’t see my father’s face. I asked him, “Are you going to move here too?”
He was a long time answering. “Yes. Maybe.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Someday.”
“Will you live with us then?”
“I think so.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Don’t worry.”
I don’t think that’s what he was supposed to say. They wouldn’t have kept us alone if he was meant to tell me that. I think he was supposed to tell me I would never see him again.
It was at school, months—maybe a year—later, that I first heard the word “divorce.” I was lying belly down on the merry-go-round, dragging my hands in the dirt, when some kid mentioned to another kid that my mother and father had got one. The other kid asked me if that was true and I said yes, although I didn’t know what the word meant. And they seemed impressed, as we had been in Carlton when the father of a schoolmate of mine was killed in the war. Well, I guess I did know what it meant, for I never asked. It meant that my father wasn’t coming to live with us, which I had begun to suspect anyway, since so long a time had passed and he hadn’t come. I had stopped expecting him.
Maybe that was how kids learned about divorce in those days. It was something that didn’t happen often. I knew no other kids in Carlton or Fort Davis whose parents had got one. So far as I knew, mine were the first and, until I was much older, the last. And in that time and place it was a dark thing that nobody talked about. Whenever I was reminded by the earth or the weather of my father and asked my mother or grandmother where he was or the reasons for the divorce, their replies were soft and evasive, designed to tell me not to ask. Only once do I remember my mother’s mentioning him, and that was two years later, when she discovered I had stolen a pocketknife from a store. She whipped me with my belt, and while I lay on my bed crying, she cried too. Her thin face, tight with fatigue and worry, was wet with her tears, and her teeth, clenched to hold back her anger and grief, ground against each other. She said, “Do such a thing again and I’ll send you to your father!”
I can’t describe the terror those words inspired in me. The thought of living away from my mother and grandmot
her and brothers and sisters, having them disappear from my life as my father had, was frightening in itself. But now the man about whom I had ceased to ask, whose features had dimmed in my mind, whom I recalled only as a tall, dark figure trudging across furrowed fields and as a shadow on the fender of the Chevrolet, entered my dreams.
“Will you live with us?” I dreamed myself saying.
“Yes,” the shadow replied.
“When?”
“Don’t worry.”
What had once been a wish was a nightmare, powerful enough to end my experiments in crime. And when months of being good finally cleansed my soul, I no longer had the dream.
My brothers and sisters and I grew up without seeing him again, and I remember only one other mention of him during all that time. I was fourteen or fifteen, and Dick and I had climbed Sleeping Lion Mountain and were resting in the shade of an oak at the top, looking down at the town. Out of the blue, Dick said, “I wonder if any of us look like our daddy.”
His words startled me. “I don’t know,” I said.
When I told Isabel all this, I was almost a year past my own divorce but still deep in its pain, still appalled that I had walked in my father’s footsteps. My older boy, Ted, was eight when it happened, the age I had been in 1945. Patrick was five, as Dick had been then. But the world was used to divorce now. It had happened to friends of my children’s; I didn’t have to explain what it was. I had to explain why it was happening to them, though, and I tried to be honest. No, I wouldn’t be moving to St. Louis with them. I probably would never live with them again, and they shouldn’t hope that I would someday. But I would see them at Christmas and in the summers and would always love them. No matter what happened, I would always be their dad.
“I want to go there,” Isabel said.
“Where?”
“To Carlton, where it happened. Where you knew your father.”
Someday Isabel and I would marry, we had decided. She wanted to know things. “Who do you look like?” she asked.
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