Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (19 page)

If my parents were in a generous mood, I was sometimes given a quarter or fifty cents to take “downtown,” a two-block long strip of crumbling fieldstone and adobe-brick buildings. There was a drug and dime store among other dying businesses situated a bare three blocks from Aunt Minnie’s house. The walk was intriguing, since we could watch red ants making their beds in the cracked sidewalks and since the town was so small that we were allowed to roam freely. Once there, my kid brother and I could sip ice cream sodas made up by pharmacist Bill Hutchinson, a childhood friend of my mother’s and trusted medical minister to my aunt in doctorless Eldorado. We would wander the dusty sundries counter and try to figure out how to stretch our change into some toy or other. The store had a special significance to me. I’d always heard the story that my mother was in the corner telephone booth one night when the sheriff confronted a suspect there. She was on the phone at the moment the criminal pulled a gun and shot the sheriff’s ear off. I never learned if the sheriff shot back.

There was
The Courier
newspaper office where one of my mother’s brothers had worked, and an abandoned picture show—the Bijou—the deserted Beach Hotel, which Aunt Minnie and my grandfather once managed—another failed venture—the summer before he married. There was a hardware store and one of the last “mom and pop” groceries that still delivered goods in boxes. The grocery smelled different from stores I knew back in Texas. It was always alive with rich aromas of fruits, vegetables, grains, and fresh cuts of meat in an antique glass-fronted cooler. I was always fascinated by the sight of Mr. Foley in his blood-splattered apron, moving around his huge butcher block and handling gleaming cleavers and large knives.

Trips downtown were not that frequent, though. Mostly during those visits, my brother and I just sat around on the veranda on rusting porch furniture, wished for our bicycles, and waited impatiently to go home. We sometimes explored the cotton fields behind the house, searched for snakes and horned toads, or chased Streety’s chickens. Principally, we just wandered around in the heat and prayed for departure. To go inside was to be kissed and fondled and yelled at for leaving the door open and letting the air conditioning out. I learned early that cool air was nothing to be wasted in Oklahoma.

If the visit stretched beyond sundown and it was summer, we could beg a Mason jar and collect lightning bugs; later, I discovered children living down the street in a genuine apartment house—one of those old, three-story frame structures with gables and a towering roof, where ten or a dozen families lived. That was a wonder to me, because except for Lucy and Desi, no respectable person I’d ever heard of lived in an apartment. We made friends with some of the neighborhood kids, played hide-and-seek and kick-the-can in the Oklahoma twilight, and we would stare through patched screens into houses and wonder about people’s doings. Homes in Eldorado seemed old, with high roofs, big porches, large sash windows and rusty, fly-specked screens; almost all were lighted inside by single, naked bulbs suspended from the center of their ceilings. Now, whenever I see such a thing, I always think of Eldorado.

In time, we could hear radio—and later TV—programs through the open windows, see people reclining on sofas and heavy chairs, and occasionally families would come outside and sit on their porches in the evening’s cool. Those were the most tolerable visits, although they were poor substitutes for what I imagined myself doing back home in Texas, where everyone I knew had air conditioning.

Winter visits, however, were another matter. Housebound by sleet or chilling rain or snow, my kid brother and I played through our limit of mutual endurance in about ten minutes; we were soon squabbling, something that drove my father to madness, my mother to uncharacteristic anger, and Aunt Minnie to heights of compassion and amused understanding that frustrated them both. One cold night when Mrs. Goolsby had gone into the hospital and we slept over, my brother and I bathed in a rust-lined, claw-footed tub, then shared Mrs. Goolsby’s narrow bed. I remember listening to a wind-up alarm ticking loudly in my ear all night while I stared through the dusty screen at a stark street lamp filtering down through the chinaberry tree next to the house. The smells of the room seemed to lie on me like a blanket; and the sheets, though clean, were heavily starched; they kept me itching and thrashing around until dawn.

Except for one Christmas Eve when I received a stocking filled with fruit, nuts, and hard candy—a complete reversal of my usual anticipations which would be fulfilled by Santa Claus in my own Texas home the next morning—I don’t recall ever enjoying myself “over to Eldorado.” At best, I endured, as I had no choice. Even that one visit did little more than convince me that Oklahomans were naturally fated to be deprived of the better things in life; I fervently hoped that they would never come to Texas and bring their meager expectations with them. I longed to leave from the moment we arrived, lived for the moment when my father would announce, “Well, it’s time to pull up our britches and go home,” an expression that never failed to draw a frown from my mother. I never felt completely relaxed until I peered over the front seat of our old Ford and saw the beer-can-lined bridge back across the Red River and the familiar broken granite monument that announced we were, as my father was fond of saying, “back in the United States.”

As I grew older, I came to accept the trips to Eldorado as an unavoidable misery, even so. My mother’s ongoing lectures on her great aunt’s virtues were discomforting and somewhat boring, and they made me feel guilty for at least not liking the old lady a little bit. After all, she always provisioned me and my brother with generous supplies of Dr. Pepper and cookies. But her words finally began to penetrate my hostility and to soothe me with a jealously guarded notion that I was related to this remarkable woman. This idea was reinforced by our visit to Bowling Green, Kentucky. There, I discovered I was related to almost everyone we met, and all the relations were through Aunt Minnie. I also found that, to their way of thinking, she was nothing less than divine.

“You’re Aunt Minnie’s great-grandnephew,” some uncle or cousin would exclaim. “She’s an angel, an absolute angel.” It gave me a sense of special importance, a kind of warm glow of propriety, but it didn’t carry well back to Oklahoma.

My mother’s claim that “everyone in Eldorado knows Aunt Minnie, calls her Aunt (pronounced
ain’t)
Minnie,” didn’t stand up very well when I grew enough to realize how very small and unimportant Eldorado was. It wasn’t even the county seat, and the depot—a standard measure of comparison for any son of a railroad man—was pitifully tiny. Still, her stories of Aunt Minnie’s former wealth and familial sacrifices also seemed too incredible to swallow—even in light of her Kentucky fame—at least for the cynicism of adolescence that was already developing inside me. I immediately discounted them against the isolation and civic misery that was Eldorado and its hapless residents. The choice of angels, I thought, might be to serve in Heaven, but my aunt had elected to rule in Hell. One Sunday afternoon, though, I received an education in my mother’s veracity.

It was raining and cold, and as always during inclement weather, my brother and I were installed on the edge of Mrs. Goolsby’s bed where we were expected to stay quiet and keep our feet off the covers for the duration of the visit. After what felt like several hours, the ancient phone jangled twice, and I leaped up. I had wanted to talk on that telephone forever, and here was my chance. My mother allowed me to answer it, but all I was able to do was pick up the earpiece, say “Hello” and then pass it to her. Her face blanched as she listened, nodded, and said, “In a few minutes, then. Of course.”

I was shooed away, and my mother dramatically began wailing that a certain woman was coming by. She kept fluffing at her hair and tugging on her dress, and my father was brushing at his trousers and straightening his clothes. As he pulled a comb from his pocket and began to work painfully on my brother’s hair, I noticed that Aunt Minnie was utterly unperturbed. If anything, she was beaming. My mother was out of the room now, lighting the space heater in the living room, pulling out dusting cloths and running them over the furniture. My father was dispatched to make coffee and to see if any sweets could be found.

Their panic trebled in a few moments when a knock came at my aunt’s bedroom door, and an old black woman appeared with several jars of preserves she had brought as a present. My aunt greeted her, invited her to sit down in one of the chairs, and they chatted pleasantly while my mother fretted and peered out into the rain with a nervous, tortured expression on her face. No amount of hinting could move the elderly visitor to leave. My mother’s increasingly tactless suggestions were derailed by my aunt, who insisted the old woman stay and visit “for a spell” and asked if the coffee was ready.

In a few minutes, a large, black Cadillac pulled up in front of the dying elms, and a chauffeur emerged to hold an umbrella over the head of a young woman who stepped out and walked deliberately past the front entrance of the house and around to the door of my aunt’s bedroom, as if she’d done it a thousand times. When she was admitted, she spoke to my mother briefly, nodded toward my father who shook her gloved hand, and then stepped up to Aunt Minnie’s bed.

Aunt Minnie, propped up on her pillows as always, smiled in greeting. She introduced her to the other woman as if they were old acquaintances. The old woman nodded, smiled, and kept her chair. My aunt wore one of her usual dusters—a faded blue print that barely concealed her emaciated chest. She had coated her gums with snuff only moments before, so she spat discreetly into a glass kept on her nightstand, and then reached out and hugged the new visitor.

The woman was very pretty. She was wearing high heels and seamed stockings under a blue suit wrapped in a fur cape. She wore a small hat and veil, and when she removed her blue leather gloves, bright gems ringed her fingers. A gold bracelet encircled her right wrist, and a diamond studded watch matched it on her left. She wore lots of makeup and her perfume was pleasant and drove away all the other odors in the room. She looked like a fashion model or a television star, and my brother and I stood in silent awe. But I could sense my mother’s agony.

My father offered a chair, but she shook her head and sat on the bed next to my aunt, who held her hands and laughed and talked with her two guests. While my mother served coffee and stale Fig Newtons, the only pastry available, and my father escaped to pace the hallway and smoke, my brother and I were banished to the living room where we squatted by the sputtering space heater and tried to stay warm. I spied on the chauffeur. He stood shivering on the porch until my mother came out and brought him a steaming cup, for which he gave her a bright smile before resuming his watch.

The woman didn’t stay long, but her goodbye was full of sadness. When she left dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, I heard her say to my mother, “I thought I’d never see her again.”

“Who was that?” I asked my father when the chauffeured Caddy drove away, but it was my mother who answered as we stood on the frigid, gray boards of the veranda and watched them leave.

“That was the governor’s daughter,” she said. “The daughter of the governor of Oklahoma. She was passing through and wanted to stop and see Aunt Minnie.”

“Why?” I asked. “Did she know her?”

My mother smiled. “She practically raised her.”

Years later, I learned that Aunt Minnie “practically raised” dozens and dozens of children who went on to become special people. Her home was always open to any child. Presidents of universities, state senators, newspaper editors, and wealthy ranchers, farmers, and business people of every stripe had a special place in their childhood memories for this old woman who now seemed so frail and helpless. Some of them, of course, went on to become unremarkable folks, but all of them shared a loving memory of Aunt Minnie and swore that they were what they were and no worse because of her.

When they thought of it, they would stop by, and she treated each with the same familiar hospitality, same homespun grace, a cup of coffee and a cookie or two. Whether it was a poor farm laborer who had known her for years or the richest woman in the region, all were invited into the smelly old back bedroom to sit on the big mattresses next to my aunt, always without deference to their social status, wealth, color, or age. They would hold hands with her, watch her dip snuff and smile and listen to her tell them how pretty they were, how good God was to them, how proud she was to see them doing so well, how all they could ever hope for was good health, a clear mind, and a bright morning.

For some, I heard, she would break out a dusty bottle of Mogen David which she kept beneath the sink, but I never saw that happen.

Aunt Minnie was a pure democrat. She treated everyone the same: family or strangers, enemies and beloved friends. No one left her house wanting for food, love, or understanding. Although by the time I was born and long before, she had less in a year than most people throw away in a day, her generosity was unbridled. There was no hypocrisy in it, no seeking for self. She took people as she found them, discovered what good there might be in them, and loved them for it. She offered no apology, no rationalization, no excuses. In her mind, all were no more or less than what God gave them to be, and what more could anyone hope for? What she received in return was only their love and respect, but that was more than enough.

I didn’t love her, though. Not yet. It would take years for that emotion to come on me. I regarded her as an unnecessary and even painful duty in my life. Visits to her interrupted plans with my playmates, required me to bathe and put on good clothes, to ride in a hot car over to the dreaded state of Oklahoma only to stay clean, quiet, and out of trouble for endless hours of boredom while the visits went on and on. I endured her kisses, her platitudes, her patronizing compliments, her Bible quotes. I never saw how genuinely she meant all of it.