The United States congressman from their district was Jerome’s first-name buddy. Jerome’s regular hunting partners were the mayor of Elroy, the county sheriff and Reverend Wells of Elroy’s largest house of worship. On one occasion, when this prestigious group brought back a boar from a Big Bend safari, they were humorously referred to by the speaker of a rotary luncheon as the “boarsome foursome.” But they hunted anything. Quail. Mule deer. Dove. Rabbit. Anything that moved. Jerome, of course, was the best shot, but Reverend Wells was only a millimeter behind.
The president of the Elroy bank came to Jerome’s home to personally give him investment advice over a Saturday evening barbecue. Jerome built a warehouse and a motel, drilled for oil on his own land; he razed the corrugated auto agency building Papa Sowers had built in 1934, and erected in its stead a gleaming showroom with a square-block repair department, the largest such building between Lamesa and Vernon.
One Sunday morning in church, from the pulpit, Reverend Wells cited examples of rectitude to Elroy’s young and pointed to Jerome as a man they might do well to emulate. Eunice was so proud.
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Love-making was organic to their existence. They “did it”—Jerome’s term—virtually every time they touched each other. Dinner after dinner was relegated to a burnt destiny in Eunice’s oven because when Jerome came home in the evening from work, he and Eunice could not wait until bedtime to do it. They did it anywhere, anytime. Some days, in mid-afternoon, when Jerome felt the energy building up inside him to the point of explosion, he phoned Eunice at home; she would come to the agency and they would do it in Jerome’s office on his new Kroehler sofa. Driving home, they might do it on the warm earth behind a butte near the highway. At home, they did it on the floor, on the kitchen table. In the shower. Or the tub. Once, after a few beers, they did it in the basement on Jerome’s new pool table, but only once; Eunice forgot to remove her shoes and her spiked heels put two $180 gashes in the felt.
Eunice was his staff and his rock in both their business and their political life. She joined clubs, chaired committees, made speeches, sponsored benefits, gave teas. When Jerome was away looking after their mushrooming properties and interest, she ran the auto agency. Although she was a shy and artistic young woman, she had grown up in her father’s business, and actually knew more about it than Jerome. But when she redecorated their house, an incident occurred which was to convince Jerome that Eunice was truly happy with her life, that she was “with” him., all the way.
On the walls of his house—halls, living room, dining room, bedrooms, in every chamber—Papa Sowers had hung -all the watercolors Eunice had painted during high school and her half-year of college. The elaborately framed pictures had given incalculable pleasure to the old man. Wherever he looked, there was a reflection of his child’s soul. When Papa Sowers died, Eunice and Jerome felt it would be disrespectful, almost sacriligious, to rearrange the house or remove the watercolors. But the paintings made Jerome uncomfortable. He neither liked nor understood their dainty, pastel delicacy, subconsciously regarding them, as well as Eunice’s paintbox and easel, as symbols of a part of her he could never infiltrate and subdue. Whenever the muse inspired Eunice to set up her easel and daub a bit, Jerome would only pass through the room in which she worked; he would not remain there. Whenever he watched tv or dined, he always positioned his chair so that no painting was in his line of sight.
As their standing in the community demanded more entertaining at home, Eunice inevitably wanted her own imprint on her own house. She began to replace the things her mother and father had bought twenty years earlier. She bought carpets, drapes, furniture. She repainted the woodwork. Finally, she re-papered the walls. In the process, the watercolors naturally came down. This inspired no feeling, one way or another, in Jerome. He assumed that after the walls were re-done, the watercolors would be returned to their former hooks -all over the house.
He was wrong. He came home from work one Saturday evening and saw, in place of the watercolors, a panorama of prints by the French impressionists. He was agog at the sudden beauty of his house. Every picture matched the furniture, the drapes, the carpets. Not one object in any room was not color-coordinated with any other object.
He walked from print to print, beaming. Eunice followed, basking in his pleasure. “Van Gogh,” he read. “Manet.” (He pronounced it Minette.) “Them fellas, I hearda them. They got big reputations. Musta cost a lot.”
“Not that much. They’re prints.”
“Oh. I still like ‘em.”
She smiled.
“Where’djaget’em?”
“I ordered them. From the Sears catalogue. The frames, too.”
“Well, I like ‘em.” His antennae were out. He did not want to hurt her. “Uh, not as much as whatchoo drew with your watercolor paints.” He watched her. “But I like ’em. You got real good taste.”
“Thank you, J’rome.”
He put his arms around her, twirled her, kissed her. She hugged his neck tightly.
“Tomorrow mornin‘, will you help me with some-thin’?” she asked.
“You name it, you got it, sugar pie.”
“That ol' wooden boxful of paints and brushes, and that big clumsy easel. They’re takin‘ up too much room in the hall closet. Easel falls every time I open the closet door. Since I’m so busy with meetin’s and helpin you out down at the place, I might as well put that junk up in the attic, out of the way.”
He tried to read her mind with his eyes. All he saw was her open, honest face.
“You sure?”
“J’rome, I’m sure, darlin‘. Paintin’. I don’t have time for that kind of foolishness anymore.”
Next morning they pulled down the ladder that led up into the attic. She handed him the wooden box of paints and ‘brushes, then brought the easel up herself as he neatly made a place for her paraphernalia. When he had finished stowing away the symbols of the one misty barrier that had ever separated them, they made love, right there in the attic on top of an old trunk. As Jerome said a couple of months later, “I reckon that was the day I planted Henry inside ya, honey bunch. But I cain’t be sure, ’cause we did it so often.”
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Jerome’s imprecision as to the date of Henry’s conception notwithstanding, the facts of that winter of ‘58 were these: Jerome and Eunice were happy and in love; they were wealthy; they were successful; their life was full and rewarding.
And, best of all, of course, Henry was coming.
* * *
II
The worst and best year of her life was 1958. In the spring of that year her family doctor said the most beautiful words she had ever heard. He said, “Well, Eunice Sowers Steele, looks like you’re goin‘ to have a baby.”
Jerome spent that entire weekend alternately waiting on her and putting his ear to her stomach. She told him it was too early to hear or feel anything, but if Jerome wanted to hear or feel something, he heard it and he felt it. He kept saying, “I feel him, Eunice! I feel him! Right there!”
“Him?” she laughed.
“Him,” he said. Not an iota of doubt softened the gruffness in his voice. Even when Jerome was at his tenderest, he barked his words like a deep-throated mastiff. “S’gonna be a him. A Henry. After my great grand-daddy. He come to East Texas from Georgia. More’n a hundred years ago. He broke land that’d never been plowed afore. I was raised on that there land.” He searched her face. “Henry okay with you?”
Eunice looked down at her still-flat stomach and said, “Hello, Henry.”
He laughed. They kissed.
“I’ll getcha some iced tea,” he shouted, and was gone before she could say she didn’t want any. In the two days since the evening she had told him she was pregnant, he had brought her at least a dozen glasses of iced tea.
He’s so dear, and strong, she thought. Like a force of nature. One minute he shines on you and warms your soul; next minute he blows you over, like a blue norther out of Oklaho
ma.
She worshipped him. But in years to come she would often forget how much she loved him those years before Henry was born.
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Also in 1958, during the second Eisenhower recession, Jerome and Eunice went bankrupt.
That summer, that dusty, choking, terrible summer, they lost everything. Everything. Had Jerome not been such a fighter, they would have at least held on to the house Papa Sowers left them. Under the bankruptcy laws, the court could not have touched their paid-for home. But Jerome had begun to do his own financing a couple of years earlier. In late spring, because of the horrible economic conditions, a host of his credit customers could not meet their payments. Some of them went under leaving Jerome with a safe full of worthless paper. These disasters, coupled with a few dry oil wells Jerome had drilled on his five-bucks-an-acre land, and with buildings he had built and was still paying for, meant that Eunice and Jerome were suddenly out of cash and credit. And friends. The bank president, who had eaten Jerome’s barbecue in their backyard while giving advice on how to expand, now told Jerome he was overextended and undercapitalized. When Jerome sought the money-lender’s help, he was lectured, then shunted to a vice-president in charge of auto and vacation loans, then shunned altogether. So Jerome set about raising “fightin‘ money,” as he termed it. He sold their stocks at substantially below what Papa Sowers had paid for them, cashed in insurance policies, sold the land for half its purchase price. Finally, he mortgaged the house.
In July, Jerome was forced to file for bankruptcy.
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As Eunice blossomed with child during later summer and early fall, Jerome almost ceased to function as a human being. He withdrew into his own world of stunned disbelief, paralyzed by the shock of what had happened to his empire.
In her mind, Eunice could not help comparing the new Jerome to a hound dog she had owned as a child. Her folks had given her the pup for Christmas. A year or so later she left it with a neighbor who owned a ranch, while she and her parents went on a two-week vacation to Galveston. A ranch-hand who hated pet dogs cornered Eunice’s pup during her absence and whipped it nearly to death. That summer of her pregnancy, rummaging through one of her schoolgirl scrapbooks, she found the childhood poem she had written about her dog.
Once I had a dog named Flea,
The liveliest little dog you ever did see;
Now, my Flea’s just a scared old hound,
His tail between his legs, his head hanging down.
They could not meet the August mortgage payment on Papa Sowers’ house, and the bank took the two-story dwelling from them. Mercifully, an old Sowers’ family friend owned a tiny old frame house in the center of Elroy and allowed Eunice and Jerome to rent it on credit until Jerome found work.
The little house was on a corner. In its small backyard sat a one-car garage connected to the street by a narrow concrete driveway. The street side of the house faced a block-square park that sported a cracked cement tennis court, a few horseshoe pits, a World War I cannon whose muzzle faced the blacktop highway through town, and a few struggling trees that nearly died every summer when the West Texas sun got at them. Eventually, because Henry was born in it, Eunice came to love that little house. Though its shiplap walls sagged and waved, the outside was whitewashed, the inside was freshly papered, and the roof did not leak during the April gulley-washers. In fact, the little house looked much younger than it was. But its’ new master, thirty-two-year-old Jerome, looked old and empty.
He found work. Another old friend of Papa Sowers owned what had once been a rival to Jerome’s automobile agency. The elderly man graciously gave Jerome a job selling used cars, used trucks and used farm machinery on commission, despite the fact that a few years earlier Jerome had nearly driven his new employer out of business.
The last few months that Eunice carried Henry, they came close to not having enough to eat. Some of their new neighbors, poor folk all, gave them produce from their gardens. Old friends of Eunice’s family brought her cooked dishes. The kindly owner of the Elroy Variety Store gave Eunice a part-time job, but after one week her doctor ordered her to quit and stay off her feet as much as possible. The doctor looked after her lovingly —he had ‘brought Eunice into the world himself, twenty-three years earlier—and would take no money for his services. The food, the job, the medical attention were out and out charity, and ordinarily, she would never have considered accepting any of it. But inside her body, her precious baby nestled. As Jerome slipped away from her, as their love dried up like a West Texas creek in a drought, all she thought about was having a healthy child.
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Henry was born in October.
He was a gentle, happy baby, born laughing, a great-eyed, darling little boy whose sweetness danced forth from huge, grayblue irises. From the moment she first held him, Henry saved Eunice’s life. Jerome did not come into her bedroom to see her or his newborn son. Eunice did not care. She felt her warm, wonderful child in her arms, the hot, new life against her chest, and all she cared about was Henry.
For the first two years of Henry’s life, Jerome did not speak to Eunice. The young titan who had planted Henry inside her had become, by the time his seed ripened and his son arrived, a self-pitying, frightened strawman with barely enough courage to rise and go to work each day.
He hated himself, hated living. And one day, about a month before Henry was born, Eunice discovered that Jerome now hated her as well. Perhaps she reminded him of his halcyon years; perhaps, in his irrational mind, she was a symbol of his failure. Eunice could only guess, for Jerome would not talk. Nonetheless, before that particular day, she tried, truly and valiantly tried, to reach him. She spoke to him often and lovingly, even though she knew there would be no answer. She touched him, kissed his cheek, the top of his head. Sometimes he responded by nodding or grunting. Sometimes he sighed. Occasionally he rose and left the room. But on this day, he pushed her away. Hard. Angrily. She nearly fell. She might have lost her baby. From that day on, she never kissed him again.
After Henry came, Jerome paid his wife and son no mind, and they paid him very little. When Henry began to crawl, then walk, Eunice always made sure the baby never approached Jerome—though the child might as well have been invisible, judging by how much attention the distraught father paid his son.
Eunice kept house and cooked. Jerome went to work each morning, came home each night, ate in silence, listened to the radio or watched tv—or seemed to—then went to bed soon after on the living-room sofa. Eunice slept in the cottage’s one bedroom, where Henry’s crib was. Every Saturday night, Jerome put his wages on the kitchen table for Eunice to look after. On Sundays, Jerome and Eunice acted as if the other did not exist.
Repeatedly, Eunice thought to herself: All I can say about this bitter, strange man is that he hasn’t run off from us, he doesn’t drink, and he lives like a monk.
The pall that saturated their home lifted each weekday morning when Jerome left for work. The house brightened, the sun came out. Henry and Eunice ate together, cleaned together, laundered together, shopped together.
They sang, they strolled, they mud-pied, chattered, gardened, gathered acorns, peeped down prairie-dog holes. Henry was an affectionate baby. He loved to touch Eunice, for her to touch him. They kissed and cuddled.
Manly laughs came from his little gut, infectious, totally delighted. He laughed often and Eunice laughed with him.
One day in the variety store, Eunice lingered over a box of cheap watercolors. She had not thought of painting for years. Her old wooden box of paints and brushes, her old easel, had been washed away, along with everything else, in the riptide of bankruptcy. For six weeks she did without tea and cokes, saving enough to buy not only the watercolors for herself, but a box of Crayolas for Henry and drawing paper for ‘both of them. Thereafter, mother and son daubed and scrawled whenever they felt like it. Her work was precise, delicate and disciplined, but Henry’s two-year-old’s slashes and scribblings we
re formless, uninhibited, funny. When he found he could make her laugh with his creations, they became madder and madder. He would not consider a picture finished and ready for presentation until he had used all six colors in his Crayola box and covered every square inch of the paper with squiggles and swirls.
During those first two years of Henry’s life, Eunice refused to acknowledge Jerome’s obvious mental breakdown. She lived totally within herself and Henry. And therein in a schizophrenic way she was happier than she had been before the bankruptcy, happier than she had been as a child. However, as she told a friend years later, “I hadn’t learned my lesson about happiness. Bein‘ a West Texas gal, I should’ve known that anythin’ lovely and delicate and alive, things like yucca blooms, things like happiness, are mortal. The desert heat gets at flowers; human nature gets at happiness. If you want to treasure beauty, engrave it in your memory while you’re seein‘ or feelin’ it. Then, when beauty dies, at least you have the remembrance of it inside you.”
Just after Henry’s second birthday, Jerome began to take Eunice’s son away from her. The process took ten years, and Eunice was so unaware and unsuspecting that it took five of those years before she realized that Jerome had Henry’s life under siege. By the time she awakened to the danger, Eunice had as much chance of whining him back from Jerome’s hegemony as an armless man does of winning a wrestling match.
Segal, Jerry Page 2
