But he returned often to visit with those who had befriended him in the days when he and his mother and his eight brothers and sisters were living on the brink of starvation in a country town where nobody else had much, either.
Neil Williams, who still lives in a white frame house about a mile from where Audie was born, worked beside him in the cotton fields when they were fifteen or sixteen years old. “Those rows were only thirty-six inches apart,” he says. “When you’re hoeing cotton up and down them all day, you get to know each other pretty well. Audie and I even had to share the same bed in the upper story of that old farmer’s house.”
The historical marker is incorrect, Mr. Williams says. “Audie never got to the eighth grade. He had four years of schooling at Celeste and one over there at Floyd. Then his daddy run off, and Audie had to quit school to take care of his family.”
Emmett Murphy—a “drinking man,” they say in Celeste—simply went away one day and left his wife and children to fend for themselves. Audie, who was about eleven at the time, became the family’s chief breadwinner.
“He really come up the hard way,” Mr. Williams says. “I mean, just really hard. The Depression was on during the time we was growing up, and not anybody had any money hardly. But the Murphys was as broke as the Ten Commandments. They actually didn’t have enough to eat sometimes. A fellow I knew had a turnip patch. One winter, when the ground was froze, he looked out the window and saw Audie out there with a short-handled grubbing hoe, trying to dig some of them turnips out. His family was living in a boxcar at the time.”
The blackland prairie of Hunt County was cotton country in those days. Little one hundred-acre family farms surrounded Celeste, and the farmers raised enough cotton to keep four gins busy. U.S. 69, the town’s main street, was lined with grocery and drugstores, cafes, gas stations, a couple of honky-tonks, and four doctors’ offices. When the 1940 census was taken, 730 people lived there.
“It was a good little town,” says Bill Caldwell, who grew up in Celeste but lives twelve miles down the road in Greenville now. “We had a hardware store, a washateria, a cafe. There was a place that sold coal and grain. There was a couple of hotels.” They all huddled at the foot of a tall water tower in the town’s center. “Celeste was poor, but everybody seemed happy,” Mr. Caldwell says.
Neighbors gave milk, eggs, butter, and chickens to the Murphys sometimes, and Audie worked for whoever would hire him to do whatever needed to be done. In his spare time, he wandered the prairie with his single-shot .22 rifle, hunting squirrels and rabbits for the family table.
“Audie could hear a squirrel walking two miles away,” says Mr. Hackney, who often accompanied him. “He was an excellent shot. You know them Big Little Books kids used to have? Me and him would hold them up and shoot them out of each other’s hands with our rifles. That was real stupid, but neither one of us ever got shot.”
Audie loved guns, his friends say, and would play dangerous pranks with them, firing over people’s heads or near their feet to frighten them. “He always had some kind of firearm close by,” Mr. Williams says, “and he didn’t seem to fear them much. My daddy taught me when I was a small boy to respect those firearms as dangerous. Audie didn’t seem to think they were. He was a good shot, though. He never hurt nobody.”
Mr. Caldwell remembers buying a revolver from Audie when he was only twelve years old. “My grandmother had died, and they split up the inheritance,” he recalls. “I got ten dollars as my part. Audie had this old pistol that he had gotten somewhere, and I paid him my inheritance for it. Then I got afraid my dad was going to find out about it. I tried to find somebody to buy it off of me, and finally a guy said he wanted it. I sold it to him on credit and never got my money for it.”
Although small of stature—5-foot-7 and 130 pounds when he entered the Army—Audie is remembered in Celeste as a hot-tempered scrapper and a daredevil.
“He had more nerve than anybody I ever knew,” Mr. Williams says. “One time him and Monroe, his best friend, and Robert Cawthon climbed the water tower, to that platform that goes around the bottom of the tank, and Robert and Monroe was sitting there with their legs dangling over the side, and they noticed Audie wasn’t with them. They went all around that tank looking for him, but he wasn’t there. Then they saw this little bitty ladder that led to a big ball on top of the tank. And Audie had climbed that little bitty ladder and was sitting on that ball, right on the tip top of the tower.”
When the weather was good, trips up the water tower were almost nightly occurrences, Mr. Hackney says. “Sometimes we would just sit up there and look around,” he says. “Sometimes we would throw rocks at the honky-tonk that was down below.” The rocks made an awful racket on the sheet-metal roof, and the honky-tonk’s patrons would flee into the night. “It was just something to do,” Mr. Hackney says.
But there was a bitter underside to this Huckleberry Finn childhood in this poor-but-happy town. Because of Emmett Murphy’s bad repute, many parents in Celeste forbade their sons and daughters to associate with Audie and his brothers and sisters.
“When we was starting to school, some of the kids wanted to pull him down because of his dad,” Mr. Hackney says. “But they wasn’t pulling Audie Murphy down. He had more pride than anybody I ever met. He kept his head up regardless. He was a real nice guy. He had no bad habits or nothing. He didn’t use tobacco. He kept himself neat and clean. He was as honest as the day is long. And he wasn’t afraid of nothing. He was a little fighting Irishman, a real boogeroo. And you was either his friend or you wasn’t. And if you wasn’t, look out.”
When Audie was sixteen, his mother, whom he adored, died, and the burden on his narrow shoulders grew even heavier. Had it not been for the kindness of his neighbors, he and his brothers and sisters might not have survived.
“Audie Murphy never did forget people that was nice to him,” says Mr. Williams, “and he never did forget the ones that wasn’t nice to him. He would give you a fight, in the church house or anywheres, if you wanted one.”
The one hundred-acre cotton farms where Audie worked to feed his family are gone now, swallowed up by much larger operations that grow milo, wheat, and corn, and where cattle graze. Most of the people who lived on the land moved away long ago in search of jobs. “We’ve got only one cotton gin now, and it’s barely getting by,” says Mr. Hackney. Most of the old business buildings are empty, and pansies are growing out of the cracks in the sidewalks.
But, oddly, the population of Celeste is 733, according to the sign beside the highway, almost the same as when Audie put his younger brothers and sisters in an orphanage and marched off to war. “A lot of people come back here to retire,” Mr. Hackney says.
And as long as there are old folks in Celeste, he says, Audie Murphy won’t be forgotten.
“Me and my cousin George was talking about him just the other day,” Mr. Hackney says. “His name comes up in a lot of conversations around here. We want to keep it coming up. A country without heroes is hurting. We need to keep him alive.”
August 1994
When I was a teenager, my friends Albert Fryar, Horace Crawford, Bill Young, and I used to camp in a tent in Skillman Grove during Bloys Camp Meeting. There we would play penny ante poker, whittle, moon over girls we were too shy to approach, and, like everybody else, go to church. We earned our keep by working in the serving line at the Jones-Espy-Finley Camp at mealtime.
Albert is dead now. The rest of us are grizzled. The girls we mooned over are grandmothers. But Bloys Camp Meeting is vigorous and thriving, now attended by the fourth and fifth generations of the families who founded it.
The Meeting at Skillman Grove
While the wood-smoke aroma of the supper fires still lingers over Skillman Grove, a clanging bell calls worshipers to the tabernacle. “Lift up your hearts,” the Reverend Dale Powell tells them, “lift up your minds, lift up your arms, for God is reaching down.”
These words begin the 105th session of the Bloys Camp Mee
ting. Then the people sing How Firm a Foundation, the same hymn their ancestors sang when they first gathered under a huge oak in this grove in 1890, the same hymn that has begun all the gatherings in the grove every year since.
Mr. Powell, Presbyterian pastor for Fort Davis and Marfa and superintendent of the camp, which is held the first part of every August, reminds the people of the few simple rules that will govern their six-day stay:
No applauding in church, no alcoholic beverages, no firearms, no boulder-rolling on the mountain behind the camp, no loud noises after 11:00 p.m., no “kodaking” on Sunday, no short shorts on the women, no buying or selling on the campground.
He introduces the four preachers who will take turns in the pulpit during each day’s three preaching services. As always, they represent the Presbyterians, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Baptists, and the Methodists. Bible study will be at 9:00 a.m. each day, as always, and prayer meetings for men and women at 5:00 p.m.
But there’s bad news, Mr. Powell says: Estelle Bloys Fawcett is very ill, and unable to attend.
No one remembers when, if ever, Mrs. Fawcett has missed camp meeting before, for she has been accustomed to celebrating her birthday here. “I was told,” says Mr. Powell, “that she is very mad about this.”
Of the seven children of the Reverend William Benjamin Bloys, the Presbyterian missionary who founded the meeting, and Isabelle, his wife, only Mrs. Fawcett is still living. The birthday she won’t celebrate at Skillman Grove this year will be her 102nd.
For her and many others whose roots are deep in the rocky soil of Far West Texas and Southern New Mexico, the Bloys Camp Meeting is the hub about which the rest of the year turns, because the meeting—though established, according to its charter, for “the worship of almighty God”—also is a reunion of the now-scattered clans that settled the surrounding mountains and plateaus more than a century ago. And it’s a celebration of the order and civilization that a humble missionary helped bring to a wild and violent land, and the tolerance and generosity that he tried to plant in the hearts of his flock.
“From the very beginning, Brother Bloys insisted that members of every denomination would be welcome to worship here,” says Fritz Kahl, a recent president of the Bloys Camp Meeting Association. “He believed that the things people have in common are more important than the things they disagree about. I think it’s because of this that a feeling of good will, of religion, has been evident in Marfa, in Alpine, in Fort Davis, for over one hundred years. Brother Bloys brought that feeling here. It has affected the way people live to this day.
“If Brother Bloys heard that some boys were mavericking, he would tell them they had to quit. If they didn’t quit, he made them leave the country. And to this day, we have few cattle-stealings and few house break-ins. How has this worked over all these generations? I don’t know. But I make no bones about it. This meeting is one of the greatest evidences of Christianity at work that I have ever seen.”
The grove was named for Henry Skillman, who carried the mail between San Antonio and El Paso before there were any towns in the Trans-Pecos, even before the army established Fort Davis seventeen miles east of the grove in 1854. The spot provided wood, water, grass, and shelter under the oaks, and Mr. Skillman liked to camp there.
By the time Brother Bloys, a native Tennessean, and his family arrived in 1888, the Indians had been driven out of the mountains, replaced by ranchers who had moved their herds westward during the decades following the Civil War. But the ranches were scattered and isolated, and the few settlements that had sprung up were scarcely centers of civilization.
The adobe village that had grown beside the army post at Fort Davis had an especially notorious reputation. A haven for border riffraff, it was infested with gamblers, prostitutes, bandits, gunmen on the lam, and cattle rustlers.
“Perhaps no minister since the beginning of time ever has been set down in the midst of as ruthless, as wild and disorderly element as was this little pastor, one of the most orderly and peaceful of men,” wrote Will Evans, who knew him. “Then, it would seem as if the entire region was overrun by sin. Eleven saloons in the little town of Fort Davis alone were running full blast to the accompaniment of attendant evils. It was a time when the [Texas] Rangers had to take charge before court could be held.”
Brother Bloys seemed an unlikely match for such an environment. “He was a very small, frail man,” says Vivian Bloys Grubb, his granddaughter, who still lives in the house the minister built in Fort Davis. Brother Bloys had wanted to be a missionary to India, but two bouts with pneumonia while he was in seminary left him too weakened. He was sent to Texas instead. He got pneumonia again and almost died while living at Coleman, then moved to higher, drier Fort Davis on the advice of his doctor.
His small stature and fragile health notwithstanding, the preacher apparently was fearless, and made a strong impression on the toughs he encountered. “I have seen him walk into a saloon full of drunken men, who were yelling and cursing,” wrote C.E. Wray, the first clerk of neighboring Brewster County. “When he appeared in the doorway, every curse was hushed; glasses half-raised to cursing lips were lowered; profanity died half-spoken, and gambling games suspended operations. After speaking with whom he had business, with a friendly nod he went his way.”
Besides ministering to his tiny flock in Fort Davis, Brother Bloys carried the gospel by horseback and buggy to the far-flung ranches of the Davis Mountains and the Big Bend, preaching sermons, performing marriages, offering communion, and baptizing children into whatever Protestant faith their parents favored.
“He was very thoughtful of other people’s beliefs,” Mrs. Grubb says. “I’ve heard that Granddad and a friend of his, Mr. S.A. Thompson, sat up all one night, studying books, trying to figure out how to do a Jewish funeral for a Jewish fellow who had died.”
Brother Bloys nearly always traveled alone, and the ranches were days apart. “He spent many a night just out on the road,” Mrs. Grubb says, “but I’ve never heard of anybody trying to rob him or harm him, like so many bandits would do when they saw somebody camping.”
During one of Brother Bloys’ ranch visits, his hosts, John Z. and Exa Means, suggested that the preacher hold an outdoor meeting and invite all the region’s families to attend. He could give them a large dose of the gospel, and the ranch folk could enjoy a social time as well. Brother Bloys liked the idea and spread the word on his rounds. On October 10, 1890, forty-seven people gathered in Skillman Grove. There the missionary preached three sermons a day, with the shade of an oak as his sanctuary and an Arbuckles Coffee box as his pulpit. The families cooked in Dutch ovens and slept on the ground. Between services, the women—many of whom hadn’t seen another woman for six months or more—visited under the trees.
When the meeting ended, the families decided to convene again the next year. Later, they raised $1,250 to buy the section of land on which Skillman Grove stands as a permanent campground, and agreed to come together for a week each year during the idle time between the spring branding roundup and the fall shipping roundup.
As the crowds grew, the oak gave way to a brush arbor, then to a large tent, and finally to a permanent tabernacle, enlarged several times over the years. As other preachers of various denominations moved into the Trans-Pecos to establish churches, they were invited to share the pulpit with Brother Bloys.
The family cook fires grew into huge cooking sheds, where the food still is supplied by the ranchers and prepared by their range cooks. It’s still typical ranch grub—meat, potatoes, frijoles, chiles, biscuits, and coffee—and still is offered freely to all who wish to partake. Donations are welcome, but not solicited. The bedrolls under the wagons gave way to cots under tents, then to permanent cabins arranged in family groups around the cook sheds.
Today’s campground includes more than four hundred such cabins, six large cook camps, an RV park across the road, the main tabernacle and several smaller ones used for services for children and teen-
agers, a prayer chapel, a small museum, and a new reading room. It has become a rustic city, inhabited only one week a year by the more than three thousand people who attend the meeting.
In the early times, many families were on the road for several days in wagons and on horseback to reach the grove, spending nights with other families along the way, and joining with them for the rest of the journey. Even the automobile didn’t much ease the rigors of the trip, for the narrow mountain roads were still unpaved and the creeks unbridged. People who lived in the Pecos country north of Fort Davis, for instance, had to cross Limpia Creek, which runs through the Davis Mountains, thirty-one times. “Our dread was that Limpia would be on a rampage to delay our trip,” wrote Mrs. R.T. Lewis, a pioneer wife. “At times we were held on its banks overnight waiting for the waters to subside after a heavy rain.”
Now the interstates come within a hoot and a holler of the grove, and a commuter airline flight is available as close as Alpine, about forty miles away.
Even the preaching has changed. In earlier days, the preachers labored mightily to steer their listeners away from the primitive evils of the frontier into the arms of the Lord and onto the path of honesty, sobriety, nonviolence, and civic order. “In those times, a lot of the people were unchurched,” says Dr. Bryan Feille, a professor at Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School and the Disciples preacher at this year’s meeting. “The land was pretty raw. There were a lot of conversions and a lot of baptisms. But now most people have an affiliation with a church, so the preaching is more for enlightenment and nurturing, rather than for conversion.”
But even today lives are changed at Bloys, says Dr. Feille, who began attending the meeting with his uncle and aunt when he was seven years old. “It was here that I decided to be a minister. It was here that I first learned to read the Bible. It was here that I learned to really listen to sermons. And it was here that I first experienced the ecumenical spirit. My response to the preachers and the people here wasn’t on a basis of denomination at all. In fact, I decided I wanted to be a minister while I was here, but I didn’t know what denomination yet. That didn’t matter to me.”
Generations and Other True Stories Page 3
