Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (18 page)

LOVE AND A BRIGHT MORNING

“The past is always edited by memory”

—
Jim W. Corder

In spite of the archetypal analogue, the words, “We’re going over to Eldorado,” always sent a shaft of dread into my pre-adolescent heart. They meant that my kid brother and I were in for an afternoon and most of an evening’s misery. Not only were we going to be bored beyond youthful distraction, but we also were going to have to spend time in Oklahoma visiting my mother’s great aunt. To my young mind, going to Oklahoma was a lot like going to Hell. I had not read Dante or Milton then, knew nothing of the fall of angels or lakes of fire. But we were hard-shell Baptists, and I had a pretty good notion of what Hell was like. I mean, hell, we heard about it for a solid hour every Sunday morning, which was kind of a Hell all by itself. But insofar as I was concerned, Hell—even Baptist Hell—had nothing on Eldorado, Oklahoma.

The trip over the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River took less than thirty minutes, but in those days—especially those summer days in our un-air-conditioned Ford—it seemed to last an eternity. The only landmark of interest was “Trash Hill,” a collection of ramshackle beer joints perched uncertainly on the Oklahoma side of the river where thirsty Texans from dry counties could wet their collective whistles in one of the derelict buildings. Mountains of cans cascaded from the shacks’ back doors down to the red sand dunes of the river’s perpetually dry bed, and I always looked for drunks stumbling around as we passed, a sight my mother swore she had seen a hundred times before.

I never saw any drunks, but Trash Hill and its neon beer signs welcomed us to Oklahoma, which my father was fond of pointing out, “was just OK.” From there on into the state, there was nothing but narrow, cracked highways, weed-choked bar-ditches, and salt-sandy fields of cotton and wheat. Even by the standards of West Texas, Oklahoma was poor; there, the Great Depression never really ended. The state bird was a pest, the state flower a parasite. I learned to hate Oklahoma early in life. The only other point of interest on the trip was a small, picket-fenced gravesite, a baby’s grave, I was told. Years before when there were no towns, a baby died on a train trip; they just stopped and buried it right by the railbed. I imagined it would be my fate someday to be lain beside this nameless child’s grave, for I was sure I would die during one of my visits to Oklahoma.

Once we arrived in Eldorado—pronounced El-Doe-
Ray
-Doe, a tiny place marked by a series of rusting grain elevators next to a crumbling depot—the ordeal began, and whether it lasted a few hours or all day, I never failed to be glad when it was over. Even though Eldorado was a mere twenty-some-odd miles from my home in Texas, it seemed to be another planet, another world. And it was. It was in Oklahoma. And it was totally dominated by my great-great-aunt Minnie.

Minnie Render was my mother’s father’s mother’s sister. By the time I came of sufficient age to recognize her, she was an old, old woman. Bent and with a hump, she was an elfin figure with snuff-stained gums, false teeth, and claw-like hands. Skin draped off her frail bones, and she never wore anything but loose-fitting dusters and terry cloth house shoes. She had a typical “old person” odor about her—that slightly medicinal smell of camphor combined with a certain sourness and stale mustiness—although my mother always remarked on how clean she kept herself, how proud of her she was, and how active she remained even into her eighties. She wore her iron-gray hair close-cropped, and the liver spots on her hands and wattles of her neck always made my skin tingle whenever she touched me.

And she loved to touch me.

She was always hugging and kissing me, looking into my face with her deep blue eyes, then smiling through those brown dentures and announcing that I was such a “pretty boy” that she was sure I would become President of the United States or whatever else I wanted to be. When she touched me, I cringed, especially when I saw the lone whisker trailing from her sunken cheek and the deep folds of useless skin hanging from her body. I fled outdoors as soon as I could and occupied myself exploring the sheds that stood idly behind her house, wondering what it was like down in the abandoned storm cellar, and explaining to my kid brother about the mysterious mound of earth my father had assured me used to be the “outside Johnnie” before the days of indoor plumbing. Neither of us could imagine such a thing.

Minnie Althea Annis came to Oklahoma from Butler County, Kentucky, in 1906 to marry a widower named Cleatus Josh Render, a farmer and businessman, but whether the marriage took place in Kentucky or Oklahoma I never knew. I did know that he ultimately died in an influenza epidemic and was buried at the Eldorado cemetery in one of those plots surrounded by an elaborate wrought-iron fence. I also knew that they had no children together, but he had children by a previous marriage. By the time I came along, they were old enough to be my grandparents. One, Cortez, visited once, but I don’t recollect meeting him.

Aunt Minnie knew children, understood them, loved them. The family saying was that she reared nineteen youngsters, although she never bore one of her own. One of those she reared was my grandfather, and eight of them were my mother and her siblings. My grandfather, Glen X. Faught (The X stood for nothing; it was a suggestion made by Aunt Minnie, who thought it sounded pretty) also came to Oklahoma from Kentucky to live with her as soon as he was old enough to make the trip. He was apparently something of a romantic dreamer whose main ambition in life was to own his own café. The only photograph I’ve ever seen of him shows a giant of a man standing beside a cotton wagon. He is wearing bib overalls and a big straw hat. Children surround him, tiny in his shadow. He was farming then, something that soon busted him, just as the restaurant business would bankrupt him once or twice, as well.

Eventually, his life took a path that would lead him to marry Bonnie Summar, a young, black-haired beauty, pretty enough to have been a Gibson Girl. She and her twin sister came with their widowed father, a druggist, to Eldorado, from Wise County, Texas. I suspect, though, the courtship and marriage was born of the same impulse that prompted him to try again and again to make his fortune, to borrow money from Aunt Minnie and anyone else who would finance his dreams. Once he went to Yseleta, a small town near El Paso, and set up his café on money Aunt Minnie provided. He lost it all. He came home and couldn’t even raise enough to go back and sell the ovens and cookware and other things he left behind.

In 1933, my grandmother died of uremic poisoning brought on by a fall during a late-term pregnancy, her tenth. One Christmas Eve a few years later, my grandfather came to tuck in my mother. He had brought her a piece of pie crust to sample, but keeled over her bed and was gone. Aunt Minnie never fully recovered from the loss, and his heart attack ruined my mother’s Christmas spirit forevermore.

Aunt Minnie took over rearing his children. It was a familiar chore: Her parents died when she was eight and she reared her brothers and sisters; she then reared her sister’s family; now she would rear her dead nephew’s boys and girls. The family legend also maintained that she and Josh were once people of property. Certainly, Josh’s brother, Doc, was a man of some wealth. They had come to Indian Territory early to homestead, and they’d made something of a go of it. The family held land, owned businesses and buildings, owned an automobile in a place where the chief means of transportation was a mule-drawn wagon, had money in the bank and nice homes to live in. I never heard anyone say that my grandfather frittered all the money away, but the implication was always there that a combination of his overly ambitious schemes and the depression took everything Aunt Minnie had. The implication also was that she was always happy to give it until it ran out.

Aunt Minnie supported the orphaned family by taking in washing and ironing, by mending and sewing for those who were better off, by taking in boarders. The family kept chickens and other livestock, and there was always plenty to eat. But there were times when there was no money for shoes or clothes. Once, the family lived in freezing, month-to-month terror that the general store would repossess the only stove in the house because of the lack of a two-dollar-a-month installment. My mother’s earliest memories of Aunt Minnie are of her standing on swollen ankles while she applied stove-heated flatirons to wealthy people’s clothing. The children hoed cotton in the spring and summer, pulled bolls in the fall. She sent them to school and church, kept their clothes clean, mended. She refused to allow them to feel the humility of their humble state, and preached daily that pride and decency grew out of faith and positive thinking.

These were the days of the “Dust Bowl,” hard times in a hard land, but Aunt Minnie was a hard woman, and she proved that love and work and nourishing food will keep people alive and well when money wasn’t even so much as a dream. Her penchant for quoting just the right Scripture was unfailingly applied to correct any mischief, inspire any hope, ward off any sense of despair.

The family home in Eldorado was very old, even then. Originally built as a farmhouse, it was what today is called “prairie style.” It was constructed without kitchen or bathroom. Josh had it moved into town for his bride and placed on a boulevard that once was tree-lined and graced by a fine, wide sidewalk. The elms were dying even in my youth, though; the sidewalk had buckled and cracked and was home to a million insects, the most sinister of which was the centipede, whose sting could kill, we believed. There was running water in the house, but Aunt Minnie never trusted it. She relied more on her cistern and a hand-pump—which, owing to an oddity of remodeling, were actually inside the house. There was a cold cellar there since the family could never afford ice for their icebox. She cooked on a primitive range in the tiny tip-out kitchen, crudely stuck onto it later. Electricity was also a late addition.

The front of the house was surrounded by a low, uneven, peeling veranda supported by rotting white columns and encircling a double-doored, multi-windowed enclosure known as the “South Bedroom.” There, countless male borders had resided, but none stayed for long. I only remember meeting one or two. Aunt Minnie tolerated no whiskey drinking or card throwing, so when these temporary residents were caught doing such—or worse, I suspect—they were invited to leave. The room eventually became a dusty storage chamber I don’t recall ever entering, but I did spend time looking at the trunks and cases that surrounded a heavy, counterpane-covered bed.

The rest of the house was in similar dusty disuse by the time I was nine or ten. Although she was still active, cooked her own meals, cleaned her own rooms, there were limits to what she could do. The two other bedrooms were crowded with four-poster beds, armoires, trunks, and overstuffed furniture of another era. The living room had the only carpet, but ancient red-and-white linoleum covered the bathroom and kitchen, and plaid oil cloth-covered tables had made heavy indentions in its pattern. Worn, irregular hardwood floors ran throughout, and there was an ancient hand-crank telephone that stood sentinel outside the bathroom. Faded, flowery wallpaper draped down from leak-stained twelve-foot ceilings, most of which supported a single light bulb.

Aunt Minnie lived in another addition to the main structure, a rectangular sleeping porch, now enclosed but still leaky where it was crudely attached to the house next to the add-on bathroom. It had its own entrance—her “front door”, as it was the only door visitors, including us, ever used—and the only one with a window-unit air conditioner. There were two beds, one huge white-painted metal stead with high thick feather mattresses for Aunt Minnie, and a smaller, firmer, single bed in the opposite corner for Mrs. Goolsby, the woman who was hired to live with her. There were several chairs, but I never saw Aunt Minnie use one. She was no invalid but preferred the bed. She sat on it, lay on it, held court on it. Mrs. Goolsby took the most comfortable chair, anyway.

My mother seemed to dislike Mrs. Goolsby, but I never could understand why. She always appeared agreeable to me. She usually left for a walk or to visit someone when we arrived, although I do remember a few occasions when my mother was nearly in angry tears on our return trip because the older woman wouldn’t absent herself so the family could talk privately. But Aunt Minnie always had a pleasant word about her paid companion, and the only complaint I ever heard her voice was when Mrs. Goolsby attached a multicolored plastic sheet to the black-and-white TV screen, something poor folks were trying when color TV first appeared. It made the shows impossible for my aunt to watch, and it was awkward asking Mrs. Goolsby to remove the offending piece of red, green, and blue polyethylene, which she ordered from some catalogue. My father finally solved the problem simply by taking it off in Mrs. Goolsby’s absence and cutting it in small pieces. If she noticed its removal, she never said anything to us.

While my parents spent time in that small room, I often grew tired of exploring the area around the house. Sometimes my brother and I would visit Streety—Mrs. Streetman—who lived in a front room of her equally ancient house next door. She kept three pug dogs with her at all times, and the room reeked like a kennel. She also kept a space heater lit year round, even on the hottest days. But she served delicious cookies and milk, and I was always intrigued because some of the neighboring children said she was a witch.

The truth, I think, was that she was a folk doctor. In the days when medical men were scarce, Streety’s cures and potions were much in demand. I believe she was also a midwife. Neither my mother or her siblings were born in a hospital, and home births were rarely attended by a physician. To my knowledge, Streety never delivered any one of my family, although she was on hand for my grandmother’s death and may well have delivered her stillborn infant. There was an aura of mystery about Streety, something a little scary. Yet I liked visiting her, and it wasn’t until she grew too old to clean sufficiently to keep the dogs’ stink at bay that I ceased spending time there.