by Tim Bryant
“Dearbohn,” he said.
I turned around and stuck out my hand.
“No, I’m not Dearbohn,” he said. “Dearbohn is the man who stays out there on the old Curridge family property. Thomas Dearbohn, I believe his name is.”
I was holding the case of beer with the cigs stacked on top, so I wasn’t aiming to stand around and jaw, but he seemed to know what he was talking about, and it sounded like it might be something I could use.
“Deerbone, like the bone of a deer?” I said.
The old man acted like that was the funniest thing he’d heard all day. How the hell was I to know? Deerbone sounded like an Indian name, so I was hopeful. I liked real Indians like Quanna Parker and El Mocho the Maimed and my friend James Alto who threw newspapers at the Star-Telegram back in Fort Worth. Didn’t like fakes like Dead John Modoc.
I stopped at the wrong farm at first. It was an active, working cotton farm, and a colored man named Joe Coffey lived in the house with his wife and kids. He told me that the place was owned by a man in Mineral Wells, but that he had lived there and run it for ten straight years.
He pointed me right to the old Curridge place, which was a mile or so off the highway.
“You kin to the Curridge family?” he said.
By this time, I had already been invited inside the house by his wife and supplied with a Mason jar of what I had taken to be tea. I was a little surprised they would allow a strange white man past the front door. I quickly found out that the tea was not tea at all. It wasn’t coffee either. Joe Coffey seemed like my kind of guy.
“I am a Curridge,” I said.
I had already introduced myself twice, once to Joe and again to his wife. I guess they were naturally skeptical.
“See, I know all about the old man. Lennie, I think his name was,” Joe Coffey said. “Lennie Curridge. He didn’t have no children that I know of. He had a nephew that lived down there on that farm until not that long ago. I believe that nephew had him some kids, but they all went off. One of them got shot down in Germany or somewhere over there.”
I wanted to ask what it was we were all drinking, but I thought it might come off as inconsiderate. It looked like ice tea without the ice. It tasted like straight up whiskey. I liked it.
“The old man was named Lonnie,” I said. “I don’t know much about him. I know he was killed by the Texas Rangers.”
The man’s wife had been hovering around, darting in and out of the kitchen and watching to see if we needed our jars refilled.
“You’re right about that man named Lonnie Curridge,” she said. “I remember when he was shot just up the road here in Mineral Wells. My auntie worked next door to the undertaker, where they brung him. She said his body was laid out so pretty, you just wanted to reach out and touch it.”
She aimed a long, slow pour into my jar, nodded in satisfaction and retreated into the kitchen again.
“So exactly how it is that you’re related to this fella?” Joe Coffey said.
I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. It may have been the whiskey talking, but I decided on the truth.
“I grew up thinking a man named Alvis Curridge was my daddy,” I said. “In fact, I was named Alvis Jr., after him.”
I could have stopped right there. I did stop to take a sip, then I kept on going.
“I’ve recently been told that a man named Lonnie Curridge was my real father. I assumed that Lonnie and Alvis were brothers, maybe cousins.”
Mrs. Coffey didn’t re-enter the room. She didn’t need to.
“Lonnie Curridge was Alvis Curridge’s daddy.”
Old man Lonnie was Lonnie, and he was my real father. The man Alvis Curridge Sr. had been a liar, a phony, a fraud. He had seemingly taken advantage of a situation. And then when my sister Lizabeth, his real, true flesh and blood child, died, he had no more reason to stick around. I had never, until that moment sitting in the Coffeys’ living room, wanted to meet the man I was named after. Now I did, if only so I could punch him in his goddamn nose.
I stuck around long enough to talk about Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis, and found out that the two of them had been friends during the war. We also found agreement when it came to Elvis Presley.
“We got colored boys playing baseball and basketball in the white leagues,” Joe Coffey said. “I guess it’s only right that a white boy be playing colored music.”
I agreed. I only wished he did a better job of it. I had seen too much T-Bone Walker to be that impressed by Chuck Berry, and I had seen Little Junior Parker and The Blue Flames and Roy Brown up close and personal at the Rose Room, doing pretty much the same act that Presley was getting famous for.
I left the Coffeys with a promise that I would stop by again sometime. And I meant it too. I wanted to get Mrs. Coffey’s tea recipe.
7
The old Curridge property was located, just as I had been told it would be, a mile down a road named after the only other building on it, a Baptist church. The church was adjacent to a graveyard. I like graveyards, probably because I like dead people more than the living, breathing variety, so I pulled up to the gate and gave it a good look over.
It wasn’t big, as graveyards go, but there were obviously more folks six feet under Cool than above ground. That, I suppose, is true of all places though. Anywhere you go, there’s more in the rearview mirror than in the car.
There was a Sanders family buried there. Oscar and Elizabeth, a son named Charles and another kid with the sad and unfortunate name of Infant. I wondered if there could possibly be some long lost connection with Slant Face’s family. Surely he hadn’t been the first in his family to come to America. What were the chances a cousin had come over sixty years earlier and landed a spit and a shout up the road from young Slant Face? Maybe Slant Face even knew about Uncle Oscar. Who was I to know?
There was a Dr. Horace Randall Phelps. He had been dead for years, otherwise he might have been my old doctor, Randall Phelps. Nothing would have tickled me more. That son of a bitch had gotten his walking papers from me after sitting me down in front of his nurse and accusing me of going off the rails. I told him, far as I was concerned, it was the only thing to do. Who wanted to be on the Godforsaken rails anyway? I didn’t want to be railroaded. I was laying down my own tracks, goddamn it, going my own way. I didn’t need to follow Dr. Phelps, that was for sure.
Most of the other names didn’t mean anything to me. There was a Boyce Vasko in the colored section. Considering the dates, I was pretty sure he was Burl Vasko’s daddy. A crumbling stone from 1886 that said “Cyrus, a slave,” that made me wonder if Cyrus had remained a slave for that long after the War Between the States or if he had just never done anything else to take notice of.
The old farmhouse was set a good thousand yards off the road, and it was grown over enough that you might have missed it if you weren’t looking. There was a rusted out old tractor out front that didn’t look like it had seen action since I had, and enough grown over fields to press the point home. It looked like the Dearbohn family might have given up and lit out for California.
“Can I help you?”
Thomas Dearbohn seemed to come right out of the word work, standing on the edge of the front porch and holding a long barrel shotgun for exclamation point. He also had a way of asking if he could help that pointedly suggested that he already knew the answer, and the answer was no.
“I’m looking for Thomas Dearbohn,” I said.
I was keeping my distance, but, even so, I could tell that he was no Indian. I was disappointed.
“What you need him for?” he said.
I was conflicted. Part of me was asking the same question. What was I doing, driving down little wander roads in the middle of nowhere? What was I wanting to find? There was another part of me that saw this shitass standing on the porch of a house that had once belonged to the Curridge family. Lonnie Curridge and Alvis Curridge and, looking at the size of the house, quite a few more. Women and maybe even children. Fate had
denied my place there on the porch, but fate was fickle. There I was, back in a place that held the secrets to who I was and who I might have been.
“This used to be my family’s place,” I said.
I brushed against my right side where I had my .38 holstered. I had no want for killing this man, but, if he pulled the shotgun up, I would do whatever I had to do to dissuade its use.
“I used to be a gleam in my daddy’s eye,” he said.
A boy walked out onto the porch. He looked to be about the age of the dead left-handed girl. I wondered if he’d ever heard of Elvis Presley. He looked as poor and dumb as some of the kids who lived south of the viaduct in the part of Fort Worth known as Battercake Flats. He was smart to come out onto the porch like he did though, and he may have understood that. I could never shoot a man in front of his kid. It seemed to have a settling effect on Thomas too.
“I just thought you might know something about Alvis Curridge,” I said.
Thomas Dearbohn set the shotgun against the front of the house.
“He the dead guy they brought up here from the river?”
It occurred to me that I had no idea how Daddy had died. I hadn’t thought to ask. There was a creek running through the north side of Cool called Dry Creek. I had seen a sign pointing toward it. Had he drowned in Dry Creek, it would have been a perfect ending. Proof that there was a God, and he had a sense of humor as dark as mine.
“Maybe,” I said.
“I seen him,” the young boy said.
He said it like it was the first dead body he had seen. The first dead body I ever saw was Lizabeth. It was a memory that never faded, even if a few of the details had been replaced along the way. Of course, she lay there all peaceful, like she was napping. Which might have made the graveside service the horror that it was. I had just laid a flower above her prayer-like hands, right within reach but forever too far, when they closed her up and put her down in that hole. I cried like I would never stop. I did, and I had never cried that way again.
“This was where he lived for a long time,” I said. “This was our family home.”
The kid jumped down off the porch, which seemed to give his father permission to follow. Thomas was now a far enough away from the gun that I could relax just a little. Still, I knew he might have a pistol on him. I never trusted anybody totally. Anyone can turn on you. Even the person you know best.
“I guess it was his sister,” Thomas said. “She got married or something, I guess, and decided to sell off the house. I bought it fair and square, the house and one acre.”
I didn’t doubt that he did. I tried to think. If it turned out that Lonnie
was my real father, and if it was true that he was also the father of Alvis that meant that Alvis was my older brother. Furthermore, it meant, if Thomas was correct, that I had a living sister living less than an hour away from me.
“Any idea what they did with the rest of the place?”
Maybe all of this should have made me ecstatic. What it did was make me mad as hell.
“There’s four other acres up that-a-way,” he said, pointing north. “I don’t know who owns it now. If that dead man was your kin, I ‘spect he might have.”
The kid was trying to fish a dog out from under the house, but the dog had other ideas. He was barking, but it sounded like laughing to me. All of a sudden, he rolled over and leaned up on one elbow.
“Tell him about Castrie.”
Thomas had come close enough for me to get a measure of him. He was bigger than he looked up on the porch, but there was a softness in his face that I hadn’t expected.
“Yeah, Hoot Castrie might be someone you wanna look up,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s his real name. Everyone calls him Hoot. I guess he’s the one that found the body. He got everybody out here at least.”
Hoot Castrie, he said, kept up the grounds around the church and graveyard. He was a colored man. Older than Adam.
“He used to ride the rails. He’s told Paul here about going clear out to California. I think he just got too old to chase the trains.”
I asked where I might find the old guy. I have a strong belief that, when you’re on the right track, you just have to follow the signs. One will lead to another and then it will lead to the next. Signs everywhere. You just have to recognize them. If they aren’t there, you may need to back up.
“What I understand, there’s a bunch of colored folks up the other side of Dry Creek. I don’t go up that way. Me and Paul go squirrel hunting, we make sure to go out back of the house.”
I thought about asking if I could come back sometime and take a tour of the house, just walk around and get a feel for it. Somehow I had a feeling he might reach for the shotgun again. I left well enough alone and wished them well. Driving away, I wondered about the land surrounding the house. It was overgrown with slash pine and loblolly, but, if you knew how to look, you could see where there had once been a farm. Who it belonged to now, I had no clue, but I had made a living out of finding clues. I put it in the back of my mind to solve that little mystery too before I was through.
8
Hoot Castrie lived in a negro community north of Weatherford called Cuneytown. It had been established by a regiment of Buffalo Soldiers at the turn of the century, and was, at one time, one of the most advanced communities, negro or not, in the area. The Buffalo Soldiers knew how to string telegraph lines, so Cuneytown had telegraph, railroad and stagecoach lines long before I ever heard of the place. By the time I arrived, there wasn’t a whole lot left of the place. A train depot that hadn’t seen a train in years, a gristmill that had been in operation longer than I had, a church and a general store. And Hoot Castrie.
There were less than fifty people living in Cuneytown by 1956. Most of its citizens had picked up and moved to the city. There were two streets that intersected with each other. Castrie lived right on one of the corners.
“I was told you were just north of Dry Creek,” I said.
He was on the front porch with a flyswatter in one hand and a book in the other.
“Dry Creek is six miles back yonder way,” he said, pointing with the flyswatter in the general direction of Cool.
I walked up to the porch and introduced myself. He said he was Hoot Edward Castrie, which confirmed that I was at the right place.
“Man over in Cool named Dearbohn said I should talk to you about a dead man they fished out of Dry Creek a few days ago.”
Hoot Castrie wasn’t young, but he still had a strength about him. With his white hair and beard, he might have looked like a buffalo in his earlier years. I was pretty sure there weren’t any of the real Buffalo Soldiers left, but, Castrie had likely come from one. The next best thing.
“They didn’t fish him out of no Dry Creek,” he said.
“They didn’t?” I said.
I was suddenly aware of a row of kids standing at the edge of the yard. I wondered if they had seen a white man before. If they had only been told about us, I wondered what they had been told.
“I was the one fished him out,” Castrie said.
He stood up and looked over at our audience, which was slowly creeping closer.
“Look like we got ourselves a congregation,” he said. “You want to come on inside, I might be able to stir us up something to eat.”
The house was amazing. Walls filled with photographs. Regiments of soldiers in uniform, guns all pointed skyward, a single soldier saddled and holstered with a desert behind him, a man and woman dressed to the nines.
“These your family?” I said.
He rummaged around in the kitchen. I could see him from where I stood. The house brought back memories of my own house on Clear Fork Road, where I had grown up with my mother and my memories of the man I had come fishing for. The man whom Hoot Castrie had fished from Dry Creek.
“Those are me,” he said. “Ninth Cavalry, U.S. Army. Sent to the Philippines in 1902, the last damn year of the war. Wasn’t nothin’ but an eighteen-year old
boy.”
Learning more about this man became almost as important as learning about Alvis. I had no preconceptions about Alvis being worth a goddamn to anybody. This Hoot Castrie was a whole different kettle of fish.
“You see much action?” I said.
Castrie laughed.
“We didn’t know what we was getting into. They had been fighting in a war for years, and, all of a sudden, here we come. Landing right in the middle of it. We didn’t understand who we were shooting at or why. There was lots of action, if you mean running and hiding and trying not to get our asses shot off.”
The man smiling in the picture of the couple could have been Castrie’s son. I now knew it to be Castrie himself.
“And this is you,” I said.
When he smiled, it was obvious.
“I haven’t changed much, have I?” he said.
I looked on the end table where he had laid his book and, on top of it, the flyswatter. Cane by somebody named Toomer. It looked unfamiliar to me, but I put it in my memory to check out later at the Fort Worth Public Library. Castrie walked into the room and looked at his younger self there on the wall.
“That’s my wife Myra,” he said. “She was killed in a car wreck in 1938. I went to war in the Philippines, came home and they sent me to New Mexico to fight Pancho Villa. Then they sent us to the Battle of Bear Valley in Arizona. Somehow, by the grace of God, I make it home alive, and then Myra gets killed by a man driving a tow truck through Fort Worth.”
There’s God’s dark sense of humor at work again.
“General Patton died like that,” I said.
One of my favorite memories, after I had left the house in Weatherford, was working for Vita Calhoun in the record department of the dry good store in Quality Grove. It had been my first job, which I took right about the time I left Weatherford. Miss Vita took me under her wing, and I had quite a few meals at the back of the store. If it was through her that I learned to love jazz and blues records, it was also where I developed a love for things like oxtails and cabbage and collard greens. And pig’s knuckles, which the folks at Peechie Keen’s would later thank her for. With all of this in my head, I was a little disappointed when Hoot Castrie offered me apples and peanut butter, a combination I had shared with Slant Face Sanders on several occasions. Nevertheless, I sat down to eat with a hungry belly and mind.
