Spoken from the Heart Page 3

  But it wasn't just the wind. There was an underlying sense of hardship, a sense that the land could quickly turn unforgiving. One of the earliest stagecoach riders, in the 1850s, recalled passing through the grasslands and seeing a vast expanse of the remains of animals and men. "For miles and miles," he wrote, "these bones strew the plain." They were the bones of would-be prospectors who had attempted to cut through Texas to reach the burgeoning California goldfields. Later, in the 1870s, when the Indians battled the buffalo hunters, who had come to shoot the herds for money and sport, they would not simply kill them. The far crueler punishment was to take all the hunters' supplies and leave them to wander the plains, until they collapsed and died of thirst or starvation.

  The first family to live in what would become Midland resided in a dugout: they dug a hole in the ground big enough for a room and strung a tent across for a roof. They burned mesquite roots for heat. Their daughter had no dolls; she tied strings to sticks to build a corral, collected rocks to serve as sheep, and played at ranching. One of Midland's oldest ranching families, the Cowdens, had a cow fall through the roof into their dugout room and land on a bed. They had to dig up their home to get the cow out.

  By the time I was born in Midland, in the mid-1940s, not all of the local ranchers lived on their ranchlands. Many whose properties encircled the town like a giant, grassy ring, starting at the very edge where the streets dead-ended into dust, had already moved their families into houses inside Midland, mostly for the schools. Each morning, the dads would hop in their cars and head out to their ranches just like other fathers heading into the office. Only the cowboys stayed out on the range full-time to work the cattle and keep up the land. But Midland itself was barely two generations removed from the raw, hard days of the frontier. My grandmother Welch had been eleven when Midland (it was called Midway back then, because it stood exactly midway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the railroad line) got its first official building, an old railroad mail car that was shunted onto a siding to make a post office. Our own street, Estes Avenue, was named for a cattleman who had boldly driven his herd out onto the drought-scorched plains in 1886.

  And living in town did not silence the wind.

  It helped to be fearless if you lived in Midland. It wasn't so much an insular world as an isolated one. Aside from neighboring Odessa, any town of consequence was at least a two-hour drive away. The city fathers like to call Midland "the Capital City of the Great Permian Basin Empire," and they put out a huge write-up on the town, detailing everything down to the neon lights at Agnes's Drive-In. Still, whatever human empire there was, was sparse. What Midland had by the early 1950s were oil storage tanks and junctions of vast pipelines that carried petroleum and natural gas miles away to more populous areas. Sometimes there would be fires at the storage tanks, explosions followed by big, rushing plumes of flame that turned the sky a smoky red. The incinerating heat would pour into the already scorched air and sky.

  Midland called itself a city although it remained very much a small town. There was still a blacksmith shop right at the edge of Main Street, its weathered wood siding emblazoned with the cattle brands of all the local ranches. Whenever the smithy designed a new brand, its mark was burned into a fresh section of dry wood.

  Midland was so small that Mother and Daddy allowed Bully, our rather daring dog, who had come with the house on North Loraine, to trot down the sidewalks alone every afternoon. At three o'clock, Bully would walk to Daddy's office, and one of the men who worked for Daddy would buy Bully an ice cream cone, which he would hold as Bully proceeded to lick with his bright pink tongue until all the ice cream was gone. Bully also had a habit of following my mother to Anthony's on Main Street. Bully would set off behind her, and she would ignore him. Once they reached the store, Mother would walk inside while Bully sat by the front door waiting until another customer came along to let him in.

  There were a lot of things about Anthony's that Bully liked, but he was particularly fond of the pneumatic tubes, which the checkers used to deposit cash and checks and then sent them flying with the push of a button to the cashier who sat high up on the mezzanine. Bully would hear those tubes take off, and he would take off too, chasing the tubes through the store. And Mother would pretend that she didn't know him. He was, she maintained, my father's dog, and everyone agreed that my father was a man who never met a dog that he didn't like.

  Bully was a wire-haired terrier mix, and he was quite simply incorrigible. He once bit a passerby on the seat of his pants. The man had kicked Bully's best friend, Happy, a yappy little dog who lived next door. Bully raced up behind the man and bit him. Incensed, the man banged on our door and promptly turned around to show Mother his backside, hollering, "Look what your dog did."

  Bully often ended up in the pound, which in Midland was a bleak fenced-in pen by a little shack, and each time Daddy would go to pick him up. Once when Daddy arrived, the gate was already open and all the dogs had bolted out except for one bitch, who was in heat and was locked up in her own little pen, and Bully, who sat waiting for her outside. The dogcatcher blamed Bully for opening the gate.

  Eventually, Bully was sent to live with my grandparents in the upper valley of the Rio Grande above El Paso, where he could have more space to roam. They drove him to Midland whenever they came to visit, and we saw him anytime we went to El Paso. The moment he caught sight of my father, Bully would cry and jump on Daddy, because he never forgot him. But Bully was only the first of our many colorful pets--dogs, cats, a box turtle, a parakeet who lived on the back porch, and horny toads out in the garden, which Mother would gently coax into the palm of her hand. We laughed over the antics of our animals, and they were our beloved companions. We were warmed by their unconditional love. I played with the dogs and dressed my cat in doll clothes. Time and again, our animals found us, arriving as if by canine or feline navigation at our front door.

  After Bully came Rusty, a cocker spaniel who was particularly close to my mother and was tragically run over on Big Spring Street. Then came sweet Roman, named because he roamed up to the house one day. Roman stayed with us for a few years and then roamed off again. In his lifetime, my father bought only one dog, Duke, a full-blooded boxer with papers, but Duke didn't last. He was a hyper barker who grew too big for our small backyard. Daddy finally sold him to another family in Midland. But for several years, he drove up and down the alley next to Duke's new home to make sure Duke was being treated well. After Duke came Freckles and then Bo, a beagle mix, who was remarkably dumb and was also dispatched to live out the remainder of his days in El Paso. Our last dog, Marty, came to us when I was in high school. He was a mutt, found in a litter of abandoned pups alongside a highway near Waco. One of my friends' sisters spotted them as she was driving home. He lived with Mother and Daddy until shortly before I married. When we left Estes Avenue, my mother adopted the first of several cats. The last cat actually belonged to the Robbins family, who lived across the street from Mother and Daddy on Humble Avenue, but when Daddy charmed him with cat chow, Henry moved in with my parents. After Daddy died, Henry stayed with Mother until she left for her retirement home. Only then did Henry pick up and return to his true owners across the street.

  Long before the war, Daddy was ambitious. He had done his two years at Texas Tech, the new college in Lubbock, before he dropped out to help support his mother. His brother, Mark, was in medical school, so taking care of her fell to Dad. He had started at the bottom and worked his way up at CIT. But in Midland, Daddy hoped for more.

  He had grown up in the Depression, in the Dust Bowl. His family and others had survived on backyard gardens and the fact that most people kept a cow tethered behind their homes. Otherwise, they had lost everything, so Daddy refused to waste anything. He did not buy fancy clothes, wouldn't spend the money to join a country club. He was generous, but he didn't give my mother Christmas presents. In his world, Christmas was for children. Adults had no need for frivolous gifts. If Mother gave something to Daddy,
it was likely socks or pajamas. A couple times before Christmas, Daddy gave me a dollar to spend on gifts at Woolworth's. I counted out my change to buy dish towels and other sensible things. Daddy sold credit, yet he didn't like to have too much owed to the bank, and he always walked around with a wad of cash. Some of it was for the gambling, mostly gin rummy games played around the desks in other people's offices, but some was for the security of knowing that he had several hundred dollars, enough for at least a month, right there in his pocket, should everything dry up and blow away again. Much later, when his brain began to betray him and he was no longer able to go to the bank and withdraw a stack of crisp, green bills, he would reach into his pocket and then forlornly look over to my mother and say, "We're busted, honey, we're busted." And she would smile and flash her eyes, and say, "Harold, you may be, but I'm not."

  In addition to working at CIT, Daddy soon began building houses on the side. After the big oil strike in the fall of 1946, landmen, engineers, geologists, roughnecks, and roustabouts began crowding into Midland and nearby Odessa, and there weren't enough new homes for all of them. Car financing was a good business. Home building might prove to be even better. And building a house was something that Daddy could make his own.

  When we went to Lubbock on the weekends, he loved to drive around and point out houses that his father had built. Daddy taught himself how to draw a floor plan and the basics of construction. By the late 1940s, about the time my baby brother was born and died, Daddy had begun buying small plots of land and putting up houses, starting with our own new block on Estes Avenue.

  Sometimes we lived in a house after Daddy built it. Once he sold it, we simply packed up and moved down the street into another house. It was like a game of leapfrog along the block. Daddy also built houses to rent. The house behind us was rented, and my second-grade teacher and her husband briefly rented a duplex that he built. Except for the paint, the houses were largely indistinguishable. Each had a little front door with a covered overhang and windows on either side, and they were all packed in tight, one right next to another. You could practically hand your neighbors a cup of sugar through the window. Or hear most everything that was being said.

  From the time of the first settlers, West Texas was a land of magnificent distances and empty range, and the promise and the risk that come with both. Even in the mid-twentieth century, many of the cities and towns that sprang up across its flatlands and ridgelines were unconsciously made to resemble the old stockade forts that were built to hold off Indian war parties or offset fears of a second Mexican invasion. People pulled together and looked inward, rather than out to the unknown. Shared experience was a powerful bond, and transplants and new arrivals created second families out of friends.

  That was how it was for Harold and Jenna Welch and Charlie and Mary White, who rented the tiny white house behind us on Estes Avenue. When I was three, I loved running over to Charlie and Mary's; I was forever rapping at their door. My mother told them they could just ignore me. But I was persistent. I'd knock on the front door, and if they didn't answer, I'd go around to the kitchen door in the back and catch them sitting at their table. And I'd say, "Oh, there you are." I never got the hint that they didn't answer the door on purpose.

  When I was five, Mary got pregnant, and the day Linda, their daughter, was born, Charlie came to tell me first. He walked in the front door early in the morning. No one ever thought about locking up in Midland. When I came out of my room, Mother was already heading for the kitchen to whip up a celebratory batch of pancakes. Charlie and Mary were so much like family that we had Christmas with them every year. At first, when I was little and they didn't have children, they would come and have Christmas with us. After Linda and then Larry were born, we alternated, one house hosted Christmas Eve, the other Christmas Day. Mary, Charlie, and my mother would cook Christmas Eve dinner, a huge production of intricately stuffed Hungarian cabbage rolls. Daddy provided the recipe, courtesy of one of his CIT employees who was Hungarian. Over time, the cabbage rolls gave way to bubbling platters of enchiladas or tamales. For Christmas Day, either Mary or my mother roasted a turkey. Long after we had moved from Estes Avenue, long after I was grown, we still celebrated Christmas with the Whites. For Mother and Daddy, those shared Christmases with a house full of eager children and paper and presents were the holidays that they had dreamed of but that had remained just beyond their grasp.

  When my own daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were born, Linda made them elaborate felt stockings to recall our Christmases together. The girls still hang them in front of the fireplace every December 24.

  All told, Estes Avenue had five houses crammed on one little block, with their bits of patchy front lawn and matching concrete front walks. Because it was right after the war and supplies were costly and scarce, the houses were built with the most basic materials--plain board siding, no shutters on the windows. Their walls couldn't go up fast enough. The oil companies were bringing people into Midland, and nearly everyone who arrived needed a house. At one point, during an earlier boom, the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which would later become Exxon, picked up over seventy houses, packed them onto trucks, and moved them from a temporary oil camp into Midland. They were deposited all over the city, where families added rooms and stuck brick veneers on the fronts. They became many of Midland's earliest homes.

  Indeed, for about a century, you can chart Midland's progress like the rings of a tree, the fat years of the oil or cattle booms, the thin years of the busts. From Hogan's Folly, the downtown expanded out into the steel office towers of the fifties, then the smoky glass high-rises of the late seventies and early eighties. The houses were the same, the early, wide-porch wooden ranch houses with lattice and gables and their own windmills to pump precious water, then the tiny 1930s and '40s ramblers, then the comfortable brick ranch houses of the 1950s, with their big picture windows and wood trim, then the slant-roofed, brown-brick town homes of the late 1970s and early '80s. Midland would build and then stop, wait years, and then begin the frenzy of building all over again.

  On Estes Avenue, parents could turn their children loose and let them roam. Mothers sent their kids outside every afternoon. We'd play kick the can, tag, Red Rover, and other games that were mostly excuses to run through the vacant lots nearby. The lots were scrubby little squares of land where no one had built anything yet, and they were covered with mesquite trees, which are considered trash trees in large parts of Texas. A few people darkly swear that horse thieves brought them up from Mexico and planted them to hide their stolen animals in. More likely, their seeds rode north on the flanks of longhorns during endless cattle drives. Some of the cattle also ate mesquite beans and dropped the pods back down to the ground in their manure. Whatever its origin, mesquite seemed to be the only tree that actually thrived in the arid Midland ground. "Thrived" may be too strong a word. Our mesquite trees were stunted little things, parched and dry like most everything around them, with fluttery leaves that looked like ferns. But when I was young, it seemed very exotic to race through the mesquite, following the narrow paths that other kids' feet had already worn. Because Midland was so new, there were kids all over the neighborhood, growing hot and restless in their tiny postwar homes.

  When the streets and lots were quiet, my mother would still turn me out, bundling me off on adventures of her own creation. One of her particular favorites was the solo picnic, where I ate lunch among the soft flurry of birds and leaves. I remember her carefully packing a sack, handing me a jug of milk, and sending me scampering off to the park over on the next street. It was hardly a park; it was little more than an oddly shaped triangle of leftover land where two streets intersected. Someone had planted a cluster of elms at each end. But there was a shiny metal swing, and to a small child, it was a big expanse, far larger than the few square feet of our own yard. I would sit under the rustling trees, unwrap my sandwich, open my milk jug, and eat my solo picnic.

  The last house that Daddy built on Estes Avenu
e sat on the corner of Estes and Big Spring. It was the only brick home on the whole block. We lived there until I was eight. When television came to Midland, Daddy had the garage bricked over and enclosed to make a den.

  By then, Daddy was building houses almost full-time. He had gone in with a partner, Lloyd Waynick. Lloyd didn't have children and he liked to sleep late, so Daddy would head to the house sites early and Lloyd would take the afternoon shift while Daddy slipped home for a quick nap. They were always looking for new sites. They bought land from ranchers or cotton farmers who wanted to get out of farming as well as empty tracts along the ever-expanding edges of Midland. Daddy's face was perpetually sunburned, his left arm twice as dark as his right from resting it on the open car window as he drove from job site to job site, from strip of land to strip of land.

  Daddy built houses for people moving in with the oil business, and in the boom years, the buyers just kept coming. He built only spec houses. No matter how many times someone asked, he refused to build a custom home. "Too expensive with people changing their minds," he maintained. Daddy had no interest in ripping out cabinets or carpeting or moving a den simply because someone had seen a picture in a furniture catalog or a magazine. Nearly all of Daddy's houses had the identical floor plan. The few times that he experimented and built a different plan, the house took months to sell. Buyers wanted their houses to have a living room at the front, a den behind it, and a hallway with three bedrooms, one hall bath, and one bath in the master bedroom, plus a kitchen and a utility room. They were sturdy, ranch-style houses, not very different from thousands of other homes all over the United States. By the time he had finished building, Daddy had put up dozens of homes in and around Midland.