by Tim Bryant
“You plow this whole field alone?” she said.
I wasn’t sure if she was surprised a young kid could do it or she was hinting at something. I answered the question assuming the first one but soon enough decided it was the other.
“Always ploughed it with Lizabeth when she was here,” I said. “Duke would let her ride right up on his back, and she would watch for tree roots and things.”
I probably said too much.
“All of this right across here was used for popcorn. Daddy always let us grow popcorn, as long as we helped with the plowing. Later, I sat up on that porch up yonder and watched Daddy go back over it and make it right. But after a while, I got good at it. I guess once I got it down, I didn’t really want to do it anymore.”
You couldn’t really see the truck there on the side of the road if you were in the house. That’s a good thing, because me and Donnatella shucked our clothes off at that point and did something those church ladies surely would have frowned on. I didn’t do that sort of thing all that often, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity. Donnatella was gracious, but she had no idea I was thinking of Alice Muncey in my head. Whenever I would feel myself starting to climax, I would switch over to thinking of my ex-wife Noreen. It always worked, sometimes too well.
We left part of ourselves there in the field that day, and I wasn’t ashamed in the least. It seemed like the grownup thing to do, and we were definitely grownups. On the way back to Dallas, we were both mostly quiet, listening to WBAP on the radio. Finally, Donnatella broke the quiet.
“Maybe you like sitting there in that spot in the field because it reminds you of Lizabeth,” she said.
“A Satisfied Mind” by Porter Wagoner was playing. I preferred the Red Foley, but I was satisfied enough just to let it ride. Maybe she was right.
25
There had already been murmurings that I had a half-sister living in Dallas. I had heard them again at the church after the funeral. People whispering, wondering, gossiping. Somebody said she retired from the railroad company and moved back to Cool. Cool? Really? How had I not run into her already? I was too intrigued not to act.
“Y’all talking about Lonnie Boy’s daughter?” I said.
They all recoiled like I had invaded their secret circle. Finally, the one who said if they didn’t have something then we didn’t need it nodded.
“That’s the one,” she said.
I aimed straight with them. Old ladies can always tell when I’m lying. At least, momma has convinced me that they can.
“I’m her half-brother,” I said. “Lonnie Boy was my father, but we had different mothers. I’d sure be obliged if you could give me any information. I’d like to say hello to her.”
“She lives way off in Cool,” one of them said.
Cool isn’t all that way off, but I wasn’t going to argue the point.
“Y’all know her name?”
I was asking her name because I didn’t have the slightest idea who she was. She could have been the one feeding me pimento and cheese sandwiches and I wouldn’t have known.
“Francis,” they said. “It was definitely Francis.”
I tucked that information away for later and went on my way.
Later, as Slant Face, Alto and me sat in the Skyliner bar waiting for Elmore James to take the stage, I tried to tell Slant about Francis. He was still mad as hell and said there wasn’t anybody in Cool that needed to see him anyhow. I figured a ride out that way would give him time to air grievances and everything would be squash. He wasn’t so sure.
James Alto brought along a badly bruised cheek and more bad news, although, at least it wasn’t plastered across the front page.
“Well, it is about Ruthie Nell Parker,” he said.
My first thought, logically, was that she was dying with the cancer. My second one was that she had married that goddamn string reporter.
“She said she felt very uncomfortable with you at the funeral,” he said. “She wanted you to know that she only came for your mother’s sake.”
Uncomfortable again. What was I supposed to do? Apologize and thank her for momma?
“I didn’t say anything to her,” I said. “Not one damn word.”
Never mind that she was a reporter and he was in charge of deliveries, I didn’t like that Alto worked at the paper with her in the best of times. As much as I was looking forward to Elmore James, this particular moment wasn’t the best of times.
“She’s asked Sheriff King and Judge Lynch to sign off on a restraining order. She doesn’t want you coming to the paper anymore.”
Coming to the paper was part of my job description. I got information there. I had contacts.
“Why?” I said.
No why was delivered. Best Alto could come up with, I had shown up in November asking her for information on a case involving a story from two years earlier, and she felt like I was taking advantage of her. I couldn’t help it if I had found her in that male reporter’s office, could I? What was his name? What did it matter?
The Elmore James show was amazing. No matter what happened to me in life, music was always there for me. So was the whiskey, for the most part, although it did leave me in the lurch a time or two. Women were purely optional. Chances not always worth taking.
Of course, I had heard Elmore James’ records for a few years, mostly on the jukebox at John Speck’s joint. It was a wild, electric style, looser and rawer than T-Bone Walker, and I liked it. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into with his live show though. He was louder than anything I’d ever heard. So goddamn loud, a time or two I wasn’t sure whether my good ear was going deaf too or the bad one was opening up. Listening to Elmore James fifteen feet away from the bandstand was like smoking black tar, which we used to do every once in awhile when I worked out at Top O’ The Hill. The intensity of it, the way the music seemed to hit your skin and get up under it, get all into your insides, made me think of those crazy nights when we would drive home down Arlington Highway with our eyes wild and the whole world lit up. One or two times it seemed like Elmore looked up from his guitar and grinned straight at me. The motherfucker was on fire, and when I say you could feel the electricity in the room, I’m saying the hair on your arm was standing up and it felt like your liver was shaking and your eyeballs were about to pop.
James Alto took about two songs and went out the back door. Slant Face found him puking into the bushes a couple songs later. I hung on through the first set. At the break, I ran into them coming back in the exit, where they were explaining to the bouncer that they did have tickets and weren’t trying to sneak in for free. The bouncer’s ears were ringing so loud, he finally gave up and motioned them through.
I can’t tell you exactly what Elmore played that night, but he played for a long time. I know I heard Dust My Broom at least twice, and I heard Mean And Evil. And a take on The Sky Is Crying where that guitar cried so loud, I thought he was going to break its damn neck.
I had heard a whole lot of music in my time, and a lot of it was raw, hillbilly stuff. I have never heard anything like Elmore James plugged into a valve amp turned all the way up in a medium-sized room. They say he could get the same sound out of a modified acoustic guitar. I don’t know about all that. He played an electric guitar that night, but the headstock didn’t have a brand name on it. Somebody said he had it replaced so the company wouldn’t get free advertising from him. That might be the case. I know, for all the blues players up and down Ninth Street in Fort Worth and Elm in Dallas, Elmore James played more like a man truly possessed than the whole barrel of them. People who thought Elvis Presley was possessed were playing with matches and calling it lightning.
Of course, I took a ribbing about Donnatella Silvestri. I played dumb and told them I was protecting her from a crazy ex-husband. They slapped their knees and laughed, but, as the night wore on, I could hear less and less of their shit. A sense of contentment fell across me. I felt like a baby rolling in its momma’s belly. It
wasn’t a perfect momma. Probably not even a good momma. It was a bank robbing, whiskey drinking, fornicating not-cut-out-to-be-a-momma momma. And I never felt more at home.
26
Every time I returned to Cool, I liked it a little better. It seemed a little wilder, untamed, like Fort Worth had been many years before. Not overgrown with concrete and steel and not buttoned down like Weatherford seemed to be. In Weatherford, it didn’t matter where you were or what you were doing, there was always somebody whispering in a corner. If it wasn’t two old ladies, it was one old lady and the goddamn sheriff. In Cool, there were no corners to speak of. If something was there, you could count on it being there because it needed to be.
I stopped at the store with the lady behind the counter. A lady I now knew as Della Sue. She said she hated being called that, preferred just Della, but everyone called her Della Sue anyway. I told her my landlord’s name was Sarah Bell, which she hated because people thought of cerebellum. I didn’t know what cerebellum was until she told me, so I called her Sarah Bell about half the time until she stopped giving me laundry privileges for it.
I asked Della Sue where I might find a Francis Curridge in the area, and she looked at me with a blank look on her face.
“The Curridge place is over there by the church,” she said. “I don’t know any Francis Curridge.”
She picked up her telephone, which was on a party line, and asked if anybody had heard of any Francis Curridge. Nobody down the line knew of her either. It looked like I was just about to pay Thomas Dearbohn another visit, which didn’t thrill me. I thought about Hoot Castrie and figured he would be just as likely to know something. And if he didn’t he might at least make something up.
Getting to Cuneytown from Cool was a trick and a half. There was an old dirt road just east of Cool, and, when I say dirt road, I mean a trail really. I don’t think it had ever seen a road grader. It hadn’t seen many automobiles. You had to take it about a mile and a half. It probably wasn’t half that far as the crow flies. One of the downsides of not being a crow.
You took that road until it ended at an old house that looked like the second pig in the Three Little Pigs built it. Hoot told me a family of twelve or thirteen lived there. You drove down a path behind their house, past their barn, then you hit another road that wasn’t any more of a road than the first one. That’s the one that took you to Cuneytown. You also went down a considerable slope as you made your way into town, as Cuneytown was built in the bottom land just east of Dry Creek.
I got to Hoot Castrie’s house easy enough, although there were a few weeds in my bumper and bugs in my teeth. I hit the horn, but no one came out. Hoot wasn’t at home. There were a couple of kids playing in the yard a couple of houses down, so I asked them if they had seen him. They pointed at the woods and said something into my bad ear, which, like the good one, was still ringing from the show the night before.
I’m not real good at standing around, waiting on people so I moseyed on down through the field toward the river. Somewhere out there in the woods, I heard a whistle and then a holler, and there came Hoot. He was walking from a more northerly direction and had a string of catfish.
“Thank you, my friend,” he said as he approached.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “What did I do?”
He laughed, and it echoed across the woods at me and added itself to the ringing Elmore James had put there.
“I went on up a little farther today, onto your family’s old land,” he said. “That’s where the best fishing is. Always I catch fish up there.”
It seemed like as good a time as any.
“Anybody living up there, maybe someone by the name of Francis Curridge?”
By this time, Hoot had walked the distance between us and stood before me. He seemed shorter than I remembered.
“Francis Curridge,” he said.
I counted the fish strung up and waiting patiently in his hand. One kept flipping itself against his side, and the cane pole flinched every time it did.
“She was Lonnie Boy’s daughter,” I said, and then added “my half-sister” as an afterthought.
“No, I don’t recall a Francis Curridge,” he said. “I think I would remember her.”
Part of me wanted to ask if he would remember her the way he remembered going to the Philippines, but I decided it wasn’t the time and place. I was beginning to think the trip through the weeds to Cuneytown had been a waste.
“Come back to the house,” he said. “We’ll clean this fish and have supper. Maybe something will come to me.”
What I didn’t know was that the supper would soon turn into a neighborhood fish fry, with four or five other men and women bringing their own fish. They fried fish for an hour, heads and all, and we ate them even faster.
These felt like my people. I discovered later that night, over Mason jars filled with moonshine, that I had worked with two of the men, many years before. Right after moving to Fort Worth, after discovering that selling rhythm and blues race records to white folks didn’t pay the bills, I had gone to work harvesting pecans for a pecan orchard in Fort Worth. They would come by with a tractor and shake the shit out of those pecan trees until the pecans just rained down onto the dirt. I’d seen them come down in such a number that they almost knocked the tractor driver right out of his seat and onto the ground one morning. As soon as those pecans were all shook out of the tree, we’d set to picking them up. We’d fill up buckets and take our pay by the pound. It didn’t pay very well either.
Somewhere over into the night, I brought my story back out about Lonnie Boy and his daughter. I don’t think I even expected much of an answer by that point. I was just telling a man named Cornray Jessup, one of those pecan harvesters, what brought me all the way out to Cuneytown.
“It ain’t Francis Curridge you’re looking for, Mr. Dutch,” he said. “That’s where you’re going all wrong.”
I was pretty damn sure I had the name right.
“Francis Curridge was the name I was given,” I said.
I was awfully damn sure it was. Cornray seemed sure of himself.
“She work with the Dallas County railroad?”
That was her. Whoever and wherever she was.
“You got any idea where to find her?” I said.
He pointed off toward the road into town.
“I reckon,” he said. “She lives right over yonder.”
There’s no graceful way to spill the beans when the beans must be spilled, but I was to learn a lot that night, and it didn’t all have to do with cooking fish with the heads still intact. I found out that Lonnie Boy had gotten himself on the bad side of the law, not only for holding up banks and shooting people, but for mixing it up with colored women at a time when doing so could get you hung up in the nearest tree.
I learned there was a hanging tree in Mineral Wells, or maybe it was outside Mineral Wells, where Lonnie had almost been strung up a few years before he went down to the Texas Rangers. Sure, the Ku Kluxers were quick to hang a colored man for looking too long at a white lady, but they also weren’t above hanging a white man for mixing with the coloreds.
Cornray swore that Lonnie Boy took a special interested in looting the Banks and stores of Mineral Wells, for no other reason than to piss off the people who had come after him for fornicating with the woman whose daughter I had been hunting for.
And the daughter’s name? Starletta Francis. Make that Starletta Curridge Francis. And she lived in a house in Cuneytown, on property that went back all the way to Lonnie Boy himself.
“Lonnie Boy bought that land and put that house there for Starletta’s momma,” Hoot said.
At the end of the night, not long before the first pale fingers of morning started to reach across the trees to the east, I asked Hoot a question. I had planned to ask him whether any of the things he’d told me on the previous visit had been true. I wasn’t sure I could believe the one he was telling now, even if he did have plenty of help with this new one,
and it would be easy enough to knock on a door and check it out. That would all wait for another day. My ears were tired. Too much music, too much news, too much too much.
“Hoot, why didn’t you already tell me about Starletta Francis?” I said.
It was the one last question I wasn’t sure I could sleep without hearing. He hemmed and hawed a little bit, or maybe he wasn’t sure just how to answer it himself. He finally found the right words.
“Mr. Curridge, you’re a good man. Alvis Sr. was a good man too. But even a good man ain’t always good all the time. I was afraid how you might feel about things if you knew you’re half-sister was a negro. Some people don’t take that too well.”
I didn’t have an answer for that at the moment, so I sat there with my hand on the steering wheel of the old International, looking across a row of houses that, even in the cool dark, looked more colorful than colored.
“I expect you’ll wanna know one more thing before you take off,” he said.
I wasn’t confident that I did.
“Alvis Sr. has a daughter grew up in that same house over yonder. I expect you’ll need to know that.”
Alvis Sr. seemed to have made it his life’s work following along behind his daddy and screwing things up. I was too tired to even think about asking Hoot any other questions. They would last for another day. I was just hoping I would. I drove home too hot wired for music, so I switched the radio off and tried to think of Donnatella’s naked body in the pale light of my truck. I still had a time with Alice Muncey fighting her way into the picture. And then there was Ruthie Nell Parker.
I don’t know if it was the lateness of the hour, my weariness or what, but I didn’t go straight home. Passing through Weatherford, I took an old familiar detour and found that sweet spot in the road on Clear Fork. The house was still dark except for the last bit of moonlight spilling off the tin roof. I pulled over and cried like a goddamn little baby. I flipped on WBAP just to drown out the unpleasantness of it all. Elvis Presley singing
