The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  “What on earth … Murl Dean, are y’all in there? Open this door.”

  “No!” Frances shouted.

  “I said open this door right now.”

  Frances was sobbing. “So you can cut off our heads? So you can take us to the train tracks? I can’t let you in, Mama.”

  She heard her mother’s hand let go of the knob. Then a voice—weary and frail—saying, “I would never hurt you kids.”

  Frances heard footsteps, then the front door opened and closed. Through the wall outside, they heard their mother crying. They pulled back the dresser and Frances went outside. She found Bertha sitting on the front step with her face buried in her hands, her body heaving.

  “I’m so sorry,” her mother said over and over.

  Frances sat beside her and smoothed her dark hair, stroked her back.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” she said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  * * *

  But things were not okay. The dark visions made Bertha afraid of her own failing mind, so she began staying away from her children, each time a little longer. The kids were basically on their own. Most days, John stayed at Fannie and Abe’s. Then Flossie disappeared for a week, only to show up one morning hunting for food.

  “Where have you been?” Frances asked.

  Flossie shrugged.

  Even Leamon left during the day, playing with cousins or friends in town. But he returned each evening before dark because he didn’t want his sister to sleep alone.

  But Frances was never alone. She had little Jimmie, who was nearly a year old. She had him on her hip every time she hauled those sloshing buckets from the tourist court to boil his dirty diapers. Had him underfoot as she prepared their breakfast and supper. And she brought him outside in the afternoons, to sit on the front steps and watch the world turn without her.

  * * *

  On the evening of June 11, 1938, a powerful storm struck. A tornado ripped through the western edge of town, killing fourteen people, while ten inches of rain fell on other parts of the city in less than two hours. Creeks jumped their banks and devoured homes and farms. Streets turned into violent rivers that flooded downtown businesses. Lightning flashed and thunder pounded. And at some point amid this powerful display, John Lewis Mealer took his final breath.

  In room 1303 of the Dixie Camp—a tourist court in south Big Spring where he’d recently moved—John Lewis suffered a fatal heart attack. Neighbors found him the next morning in his thinly furnished room. He was sixty-eight years old.

  The news of his death brought family from all around. Bob and Opal drove over from Wink to join his sisters, who were living in Big Spring, Beeville, and Odessa. And together they grieved once again. The next afternoon they laid John Lewis to rest at Mount Olive Cemetery: devoted father and grandpa, lover of jokes and stories, a man who’d witnessed historic advancement, seen an oil empire rise and fall and rise again, yet had reaped little of its reward.

  In death, at least, he was given a last recompense. Bertha relinquished her burial plot next to Bud and gave it to his father, deeming herself unworthy to occupy the same ground. “I couldn’t face my husband in heaven,” Frances heard her say. “Not the way I’ve been.”

  * * *

  Once a week now, Frances left Jimmie with Flossie and went to collect their three dollars from the government. The woman who ran the relief office was named Miss Cronck, and by the fall of 1938, she’d grown accustomed to seeing Frances without her mother. Although the government wasn’t supposed to issue money to unaccompanied minors, Miss Cronck overlooked the rules. Frances collected her check and walked back to Lakeview Grocery, where she cashed it for food.

  A good portion usually went toward Carnation milk for Jimmie—four cents per can. And with the rest, she’d learned from her mother how to feed the family for pennies, buying only essentials such as lard, sugar, salt, flour, and baking powder, along with beans, potatoes, and yams, which were cheap and kept for a long time without spoiling. Some weeks, if there was extra, she splurged on luxuries. Nothing tasted better than fired eggs and bologna.

  But whenever the pantry emptied, which it did that autumn, Frances had to get creative. Several times, the clerk at the grocery store let her take some bananas that were turning brown. Then she discovered that the bakery next to the Buckhorn camp would barter for day-old goods.

  Back when they lived there, she’d overheard the owner complain about not having enough boxes for deliveries. So Frances and her siblings started digging through the alleys in town collecting stacks of flattened cardboard, which they presented to the man in exchange for fried pies. Although a bit stale, they were filled with delicious strawberry, lemon, and coconut cream, which the kids lived on happily until the next week’s check.

  Then winter arrived and the north wind flew down off the Rockies and sliced across the Caprock, bringing short daylight and more dust. It whistled through the slats of the little yellow house and created a draft that chilled the marrow. The kids wore their Salvation Army coats most of the day, even with a fire in the stove. At night, when the coals turned to powder, Frances buried Jimmie in his crib under a mound of old cloth scraps they’d acquired in their many wanderings. The three kids then huddled under a single blanket, using their body heat to stay warm.

  But as the days grew shorter and colder, the stove gobbled up the wood that Frances fed it—mostly knobby mesquite. And when there was no more wood to consume, it grew cold.

  Already, it was hard to find mesquite and other deadwood in the nearby fields, which were mostly sand and scrub. And as the weeks wore on and the temperature dropped, travelers in the tourist courts, too poor for coal oil or gas heat, worked to scavenge whatever wood was left. One morning, the kids awoke to a house so cold they could see their breath. Out in the kitchen, Frances started a fire with the last bits of kindling, but it lasted only minutes.

  Outside, she combed the pastures for any wood but found none. Then finally she stumbled upon a blown-out truck tire lying in the grass, brittle from the sun. Frances hoisted it upright and rolled it home. In the kitchen, she used her butcher knife to carve the tire into strips, lengthwise along the rim. She sang while she worked:

  If you go to Jones Valley, keep your money in your shoes

  ’Cause the women in Jones Valley got them Jones Valley blues

  She stuffed the firebox with rubber and doused it with coal oil from the lamp. Within minutes the stove was kicking off heat, so much that Flossie gasped and said, “Look!” and pointed to the ceiling, where the stove pipe glowed red. Luckily, blown-out truck tires were a common fixture along the oil field highway, and for the rest of the winter, the children never lacked for fuel.

  But at night when the stove turned cold, the children froze. There was only one real blanket in the house, and whenever Bertha slept at home she took it and put it on her bed. The children were left with their cloth scraps, which were thin and misshapen and always found their way to the floor. One night as ice frosted over the windows, Frances awoke and heard little Jimmie whimpering in his crib. He’d wet his flimsy covers and now shivered in the dark room. Frances changed his diaper and took the dry scraps from the bed where she and Flossie and Leamon slept, then wrapped them around Jimmie until he fell back asleep. Then she placed his wet covers over her siblings and herself. They pressed their bodies together and waited for daylight.

  * * *

  In the new year, Frances was determined to return to school with the other students. The morning classes began, she left the house early without telling her mother and made her way down to the junior high. Scores of kids were already filing through the double doors and congregating along the sidewalk. Frances got as far as the front steps, then froze.

  It suddenly dawned on her that she didn’t know what to do once she entered the building. How would she find her class? How would she tell them who she was, and what if they inquired about her mother, or asked where she lived or why she hadn’t been in school?

  She
became aware of the slouchy coat and the dress she wore, then looked down at her shoes, which were lined with cardboard. Worse, her toes poked through the ends where she’d cut them with a knife so they would fit. She sat down on the steps and stayed there until she was alone and the morning bell had rung. Then she stood up and hurried home, praying that no one had seen her chicken out.

  After that morning, she began to feel herself getting smaller and smaller each day, as if the wind were slowly wearing her down like a coat of bright paint on a pasture house. Each week more of her seemed to vanish, and when she wondered, Why won’t anyone help us? Why won’t they come? she knew the answer. Because they could not see her. She was not there.

  One afternoon she needed some water to boil Jimmie’s diapers, so she took her bucket down to the tourist court to fill it. As she lugged home the sloshing pail, the handle dug into her hands, so she set it down to rest. When she looked up, there stood her cousin Earl, plus another cousin—one of Clarence’s boys—whom they called Junior.

  They must have hitchhiked into town.

  “Hiya,” she said, surprised.

  The boys waved back, then began to giggle. Frances wondered if they’d been drinking. She was about to crack a joke when Earl leaned in and said, “Hey Murl Dean, Junior here says he’ll pay you a quarter for a poke.”

  “For a what?” she said, her lips slightly upturned.

  “He’ll give you a quarter if you’ll … you know.”

  She saw they weren’t laughing anymore. In fact, Junior was staring at her in a way that frightened her. She quickly looked down, and when she did, her eyes landed on her bare feet, which were filthy and cracked from the road. She became aware of the welfare dress and saw the dirt beneath her nails. She could feel their eyes moving over her breasts through the cheap fabric. A quarter for a poke.

  Frances picked up her bucket and, without saying a word, walked back to the house. Once she was safely inside, she sat on the floor and began to cry. Smaller and smaller, as small as a single grain of sand. She felt, at last, like the silent dust itself.

  * * *

  But alas, she was not invisible. They knew about her—the school and city officials—and they knew about her brothers and sister. They knew about her mother and how she’d left them like animals to survive on their own. Miss Cronck at the relief office had probably told them that much. The officials of the city then informed the officials of the state. In March 1939, when Frances was thirteen, nearly three years after her father’s death, they finally came after Bertha. They found her coming out of the post office downtown, and there on the sidewalk, informed her they were taking away her kids.

  Just sign these papers, they said. Bertha took the pen and did it.

  Back at home, she gathered the children and told them they were going away to Abilene. “To a nice place, where I can visit you whenever I want.” But neither of those things were true, since Bertha had waived her rights to ever see them again. The children—except for John, who was signed over to Fannie and Abe—were now wards of the state, handed over to an adoption agency called the West Texas Children’s Aid and Welfare Association.

  The very next morning, a thin, grandfatherly man appeared at the door dressed in a white suit and instructed them to pack their things. At eighty-four years old, Reverend W. A. Nicholas had been running the agency for nearly thirty years and had placed hundreds of unwanted and orphaned children. In his pocket were calling cards printed with the agency’s mission: “To seek homeless, neglected, and destitute children and become their friend and protector. To find homes for them in intelligent Christian families.”

  Frances cannot recall her mother’s response that morning. The only indication that Bertha was even present is a photo that survived among her things, taken in the moments before the children were whisked away. Bertha must have been the photographer, Frances guessed. But in the photo, the children appear to be smiling. Bertha had told them to smile, and they obeyed.

  The children were put into the car and taken to the station, where a train sat waiting. The old man herded them into a compartment and sat in the opposite seat.

  “You can call me Father Nicholas,” he said, but Frances refused to look at him.

  “Our father is dead,” she replied. As the locomotive lurched forward, the kids clung to each other like castaways flung into orbit, then cried themselves all the way to Abilene.

  Three separate vehicles awaited them at the station, each going to a different place. “We’ve found good homes for you,” Reverend Nicholas assured them, and before Frances realized what was happening, she was sitting in a backseat alone. She cried out for Flossie and Leamon, but they were gone, and that sudden, unfamiliar silence burrowed a hole in her brain and never stopped ringing. Two years would pass before they found each other.

  As for little Jimmie, no one heard from him again.

  * * *

  Two years. In that time, she lived with two different families in Abilene, first the Jacksons, and then, when they had to leave town, the Allens. In her case, Reverend Nicholas had been right. Both homes were good, and the families decent Christian people. For the first time in years, Frances had nice clothes to wear and regular meals. Sunday dinners at the Jacksons were formal, white-tablecloth affairs. Her first morning there, she awoke to birds singing through an open window. The bedroom smelled of rosebushes.

  And she was finally able to return to school, even though the first day back was dreadful. The teacher called her to the front to solve an equation. As she stared dumbly at the chalkboard, completely frozen, she heard a girl say aloud, “If you don’t know the answer, just sit down.” And so she sat back down, mortified.

  But school got better, becoming the only tangible thing to which she could cling, the only place where she had some answers to the given questions. The other questions, the Big Ones—why her family hadn’t come to their rescue, why she and her siblings had been separated to be raised by strangers, what had happened to her brothers and sister—those remained unanswered.

  During her second summer in Abilene, 1940, a tiny life raft arrived in the form of a telegram. It was sent in care of Reverend Nicholas from Bertha’s little sister Ruby.

  “Come home quick,” she wrote, “your mother is very sick.”

  Reverend Nicholas bought Frances a round-trip bus ticket to Big Spring, on the condition she return at once. But when Frances arrived, she discovered Ruby’s telegram had been a lie. Bertha’s sister had written not because Bertha was sick, but because she was packing to leave for San Francisco without telling her kids.

  Frances’s surprise appearance startled her mother. Sensing her freedom was suddenly in jeopardy, Bertha lashed out at her daughter. “Nobody wants you here, Murl Dean. Nobody wants another mouth to feed, and certainly not yours.”

  Bertha then made Frances sit down and write to Reverend Nicholas saying she was coming back. Frances wrote the letter, her whole body quivering, and then bid her mother good-bye. When she got outside she tore it to pieces. She never went back to Abilene.

  She bounced around Big Spring for another year. Ruby had married a guy named Joe and given birth to a little girl. Together they lived in a big army tent near One Mile Lake in Jones Valley. They gave Frances a cot in the corner and the four of them got along like regular Indians, bathing and washing their clothes in the lake, and sitting up at night playing music. Joe kept a fiddle in the tent and Ruby a guitar, and together they sang the old Irish reels that Frances remembered hearing her grandfather John Lewis sing, in addition to old standards such as “Banks of the Ohio,” “Barbara Allen,” and “Little Rosewood Casket.” Those sad and woeful ballads washed through Frances like medicine. Joe wasn’t even eighteen, but he was good—a kind and thoughtful man who reminded Frances of her father.

  On Christmas Eve, Joe said, “What do you think, Murl Dean, will Santa Claus come to a tent?” And even though Frances knew better, Joe made her go to bed early, then hung her a stocking stuffed with nuts and fresh
fruit.

  But the arrangement was temporary, and soon Frances found herself staying with her grandparents—Bertha’s mother and father. The McCormicks had moved to Big Spring, where her grandpa worked with the WPA building roads. In a crowd, he told jokes and funny stories and could play the guitar as good as anyone.

  But alone, he remained the predator who’d ruined his own daughters. Alone with Frances, his eyes would move up and down her developing body. Finally one morning, he grabbed her.

  “Dance with me,” he demanded, pulling her in.

  He shouted to his wife in the next room, “Old lady! Go out and get us some food!” then spun back to Frances, his eyes cloudy with lust.

  “Dance with me,” he whispered, then moved his hips up and down.

  Frances pleaded with her grandpa to let her go, but he held her tight. When her grandmother walked into the room, she broke free and ran for the door.

  * * *

  She ran to the only friend she had. Howard Dodd was a former classmate from Forsan whom Frances had started dating—dating in that way kids do at fourteen or fifteen. Howard was three years older, and like Frances he’d recently lost his father. He now lived in Big Spring with his mother and sister, whom he supported. Howard’s mother took Frances in and gave her a room. Not long after, she received wonderful news. Her aunt Velva, Bud’s sister, happened to be in downtown Eastland one afternoon when she saw two children she recognized. It was Flossie and Leamon. They told her they were living on a peanut farm not far away, in a town called Rising Star. Both appeared healthy and happy but were desperate for information about their siblings, who’d remained lost to them.

  The next week, Frances got a ride out to the farm and reunited with her brother and sister. They sat for hours in a hayloft shelling peanuts and catching up. Flossie and Leamon went to school in Rising Star, and like Frances, had started from the bottom. Flossie was twelve years old and only in the third grade, while Leamon, at age eight, was just starting his second year. The couple who’d adopted them, the Atkinsons, worked them like mules every minute they were home.