My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (6 page)

Mother told me that when she went through Big Mama’s things after she died, she found lacey handkerchiefs and other precious gifts that she’d saved but never used. My mother encouraged me to enjoy the beautiful things that surround me, not just put them up on a shelf to admire or hide them away in a drawer. And that’s just what I do. I use things up, wear my favorite clothes until they have holes, put the good rugs on the floor in the hallway, and stir my coffee with Big Mama’s silver spoons.

Sometimes I hear myself repeating my mother’s favorite sayings. She seemed to have something to fit every occasion. Some were rather pointed (“Pretty is as pretty does,” and when she caught me chomping my chewing gum: “That’s cute now, Sissy, but pretty soon it won’t be very cute....”). Whenever I wished I was taller or didn’t have freckles, I was likely to hear “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” But my favorite was: “Don’t kick against the pricks.” Anyone who has grown up in cactus country will instantly understand the meaning of this advice. But I have found myself repeating it often in New York and Hollywood, and it seems wiser all the time.

And now I know that everything we tell our children probably doesn’t go in one ear and out the other; it really does stick somewhere inside those little heads of theirs. If you ask me to list all the wonderful things my mother told me, I couldn’t. But they always seem to come to me when I need them most.

… 3 …

My mother was not a stay-at-home housewife; she took a part-time job typing up documents for Don Roberts’s abstract company. Those were the days before Xerox machines, and all the property deeds and liens had to be copied by hand. Her office was in the county courthouse, and she was proud to be one of the fastest typists around. I loved visiting her at work. She was a modern woman and very stylish. She often had her clothes made from Vogue patterns and wore high-heeled shoes that would click on the marble floors when she carried those heavy, leather-bound deed books across the hallway to her desk. Then I’d watch her red-painted fingernails fly across the keys.

Her office was located on the south side of the first floor, across from the little booth where Jewel Thomas—we all called her Sister—operated a snack concession. Sister had some sort of affliction, probably cerebral palsy, that twisted her up and made it hard for her to get around. But she was sharp as a tack, and everyone loved her. I used to save my nickels to buy a Coca-Cola from her, sometimes with a bag of peanuts. I’d drop as many of the peanuts as I could into the thick glass bottle and let it fizz up a little, then suck down the salty soda and the deliciously soggy peanuts. I thought I’d invented something new until I learned that kids all over the South were doing the same thing in their small towns in the 1950s.

Mother worked with five others in the typing pool, but the most memorable was Claude Bruce. He was a little different, a nervous man who wore his shirts buttoned at the neck and wrists and who jumped back whenever he was spoken to. He was so terrified of dirt and germs that he scrubbed his hands raw. This was a problem for a typist, because the ribbon ink would get all over his fingers and Claude would have to run to the sink every few minutes.

“Claude, don’t wash your hands again,” my mother would call after him. “Just do like this!” she’d say, licking her fingertips to wipe off the smudges. But somehow that didn’t work with Claude. Luckily he was a good typist, and he had other amazing skills. He remembered the name of everybody he ever met, along with each person’s birthday. And if you told Claude what day you were born and which year, he could tell you what day of the week it was in the blink of an eye. I’ve heard it told that when he was in the service, he could recite the dog tag numbers of every man in his battalion. I guess today we’d call him a savant. But to us he was just a real good guy with chapped hands and a great memory.

Their boss, Don Roberts, was also unusual. He walked with a wooden leg and wore a patch over one eye, just like Long John Silver. He had a big voice that echoed up and down the corridors when he was visiting the courthouse. He’d had lockjaw when he was younger, and that caused all of his physical problems. “That’s what can happen if you don’t get a tetanus shot,” my parents warned us.

One day my mother showed me a broken office chair that she had been trying to fix and asked me if I could give it a try. I was just a little bit of a girl then, probably about six, but I was famous in our family for fixing things. Toys, roller skates, oscillating fans, alarm clocks—I somehow knew how to put them all back together again. So I had gotten down on the floor and started fiddling with the wheels when I heard a booming male voice—it may have been Don Roberts himself.

“Sissy, you get away from that chair!”

I left the room long enough for everyone to go back to typing, then crawled back through the door and slunk along the floor underneath the desks until I reached that old chair and fixed it. I was good at sneaking around, too. In fact, my dad gave me a nickname, Snooter, which was some sort of variation on “snooper.”

Nobody ever found out, but when I was five or six years old I used to slip into our neighbor Edna Lipscomb’s house when she wasn’t home. I’d watch until her car pulled out of the driveway, then look all around and let myself in the front door, which was always unlocked. Once I was inside I would walk quietly through the darkened rooms, just looking at things. I was curious to see how she lived. The only time I touched anything was when I took one piece of candy from her candy dish. I figured that was for visitors anyway. Although probably invited ones.

But my favorite place to explore was the courthouse. With the summer days long and the adults all focused on their grown-up jobs, a clever enough child could become almost invisible in its nooks and crannies. I would sneak into the courtroom and sit in the judge’s swivel chair when nobody was looking. There was a balcony overlooking the main chamber, and I would take the side stairway up there and root around in the boxes of odds and ends that were stored up behind the highest seats. I’m sure the county records have never been the same. My favorite of all was the spiral staircase behind a heavy door next to the judge’s bench. That was where deputies would take the prisoners up and down from the holding cell on the top floor of the courthouse. Most days there were no trials and no prisoners, so I could play on the metal steps in that spooky old stairwell.

My dad’s office was in the courthouse basement, so I could go down there and visit him when I got tired of snooping around the building. His main job was advising farmers about which varieties of seeds to plant, how to get the best yields, and how to control weeds and pests. In those days, that meant massive applications of fertilizers, DDT, and dioxin-based herbicides. Years later Daddy agonized about the environmental damage and the health risks caused by all those chemicals. But then it was standard practice, and nobody questioned the chemical companies or the recommendations of Texas A&M. My dad told me about an herbicide that the state and county suggested for lawns, to make them beautiful and weed-free. People would spray their yards, and then before long a school bus might come by and let off a group of children who would run through the sprayed lawn and then track it into their own homes, where their little brothers and sisters crawled around on the floor putting things in their mouths. The chemical was called 2,4,5 T—better known as Agent Orange. Sometimes when my dad went out to the field to work with farmers and ranchers, he noticed that an awful lot of them seemed to be getting sick, and he wondered if there might be some connection. But nobody was keeping those kinds of records back then.

And nobody thought twice when a city truck rolled through the streets of Quitman at dusk, exhaling a cloud of DDT that was supposed to keep down the mosquitoes. My brothers would run or ride their bikes behind the fogger with the other neighborhood kids, all of them dancing and squealing in the sweet, acrid mist that was so thick they could hardly see their hands in front of their faces.

A county agent was responsible for a lot of things, including handing out bounties on coyotes. The old-timers called them “wolves,” even though the last big lobos had been exterminated decades before. To them it was all the same. If it had four legs and a bushy tail and it preyed on livestock, if was a wolf. The county paid $10 per animal, so the farmers and ranchers went out of their way to kill them. Everybody knew where Daddy lived, so sometimes they’d ring the doorbell, or sometimes we’d just open the front door in the morning and find Mason jars stuffed with “wolf” ears. Later, the rules changed and the bounty hunters had to bring the whole carcass to collect the money. That was exciting, because there’d be pickups filled with dead coyotes in the open beds, and my brothers and I would run outside to see them. Eventually the county ran out of money—and “wolves”—and the program ended.

Sometimes we’d find less gruesome offerings at our door. Farmers were grateful for all the help and advice my dad would give them, and they showed their appreciation at harvest time. There’d be bushel baskets of fresh vegetables on the front steps, jugs of honey or tubs of pecans. Daddy could have done a lot of other things, taken a big job with the state or gone to Washington, but he loved our little town and the life we made there together.

Once, when Daddy was offered a huge job as an agricultural consultant in Saudi Arabia, he called a family council. We had held family councils all our lives, whenever there were major decisions to be made. Each of us got an equal vote. Our parents had always listened to us, and they took our opinions seriously. Except when it came to picking motels; after that one fiasco our parents held veto power in that department. But this time the subject was more serious.

“It will mean a lot more money than working for the county, and it would be an adventure,” Daddy told us. “But we’d have to leave Quitman and move to Saudi Arabia.”

At first we were excited. Daddy was asked to be the king’s county agent! We’d go to a new school. Saudi Arabia had camels! And sand dunes! We all wanted to go.

Then we went to bed. I spent the night tossing and turning, and so did everybody else. The next morning we filed into the kitchen one by one and changed our votes. By the end of breakfast it was unanimous. We would stay in Texas.

Most days, Daddy worked behind his desk in his office in the courthouse basement. The city library was in a large room just down the hall, and when I was finished visiting him, I could while away the hours looking at picture books. When I got a little older, I devoured all the biographies, particularly of strong women: Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc. I may have picked up my reading habits from my dad, a history buff who loved books. In fact, he was the one who saved the Quitman library.

One day when he was leaving work for his lunch break he saw the courthouse janitors throwing books into the hallway. The county apparently needed the space and was evicting the city library. The books were going to be tossed on the burn pile because there was no place to store them. My dad couldn’t stand to see perfectly good books wasted like that, so he got together with some friends in town and rented a house up on Billy Goat Hill to start a new library. Eventually the city moved the library into the old bank building, where it still is today.

Daddy loved everything about history, and he was responsible for having historical markers placed all over East Texas. He also helped save the Stinson House, family home of the great Texas philanthropist Ima Hogg and one of the most important buildings in Wood County. It was built in 1859 out of virgin pine and oak, with clapboard siding, wide porches, and bay windows, but by the 1960s, it had been abandoned and was targeted by vandals. My dad arranged to have it moved to the state park in Quitman, where it could be protected. The house was cut into three sections and jacked up onto huge dollies, while crews took down power lines along the route. Onlookers lined up for miles to watch as heavy trucks slowly pulled each piece along the two-lane highway into town. It was the biggest parade the county had ever seen, and even more entertaining than when the circus elephants walked through town. My dad spent years restoring that house, piece by piece, and it became a museum and a place for the community to hold functions. Although he never asked for any recognition, the Stinson House stands as a monument to his love for the community and its history.