Chinaberry Sidewalks (5 page)

Huddled in the chalky glow of a kerosene lamp, both families observe a moment of silence for our fallen newsman. Connection to the outside world has been downsized to the scratchy, on-again, off-again reception of a transistor radio.

“It’s sure good to know somebody out there’s still alive,” Mr. Miller says.

“Hellfire, Floyd,” my father snorts, “they could’ve tape-recorded what we’re hearin’ on that radio.”

Outside, Carla’s pounding the house with what sounds like a custom-made battering ram, and she’s still thirteen hours from reaching her peak. Inside, the party has hit the skids. My father and Mr. Miller take this personally. They’re not the kind of men content to sit idly by while a storm kicks the living daylights—and all the electric ones, too—out of their neck of the woods, but their only recourse is to take yet another swig of whiskey.

“Boys, y’all need to go on and get some sleep, this storm’s a long ways from bein’ over,” says a tipsy Mrs. Miller. In anticipation of our fathers’ further deterioration, she and my mother are herding us down the hallway with our path lit by a lone flickering candle.

Count on bedtime to bring the end of the world into focus. In the far corner of the room, Andy and Mike’s bunk beds are stacked against the wall between bare windows. I’m sure neither walls nor windows will save us from the howling winds and driving rain, and say so aloud. The Miller boys pick up on this thread and make short work of turning a long day’s end into a whimpering quagmire. Their mother’s too drunk to know she’s being had, and mine’s too preoccupied with my father’s liquor intake to offer any real reassurances.

Worse than any vision of collapsing walls is being stuck in the bottom bunk with Andy, who thinks trying to stick his pecker in my butt is funny. I put a stop to this by crawling under the bed with the Lincoln Logs and army figures. In spite of my worries about attacks from various directions, I drift off to sleep comfortably with an old baseball glove and a dirty towel for pillow and blanket.

“Come on, son, wake up, we goin’ to the house.”

I recognize the words, and the voice, but what I don’t recognize is where they’re coming from and why they’re so gruff. Even with a blistering, nicotine-scorched hangover, my father’s voice usually has a lyrical quality that’s totally absent in its present condition.

Finally awake, I’m staring at his upside-down face, his blue bloodshot eyes searching my crawl space for life. His crimson cheeks and ears put me on notice that any questions will only make matters worse. Whatever it is that made him fish me out from under these bunk beds at this unknowable hour is serious enough to drain his voice of its musicality. That’s all I need to know.

Going home is fine by me, and anything would beat Andy pointing his pecker at me. And I’d learned long ago that when my father makes his mind up, there’s no reason strong enough to alter his course. Besides, my mother seems equally determined to clear the hell out.

The first obstacle we encounter is the six inches of water standing between the Millers’ back door and our car parked twenty yards away. Second is how formidable a threat the copperheads and water moccasins treading water and searching for an entrance to the house pose to our getting in the car alive. I’m thinking of myself as a cross between Jesse Owens and Jesus Christ as I sprint out there across the water. My mother matches me stride for stride, her crippled leg not the slightest hindrance. My father’s already firing up the engine.

The trip home takes over an hour, but it seems more like an eternity. Whatever pissed my father off has caused him to severely underestimate the intensity of the storm he’s steering us into.

Raindrops pelt the windows like liquid lug nuts. Low-lying intersections are flooded halfway up the side doors. In a stalled Studebaker, we stand a better than even chance of getting washed down some raging bayou. It’s more likely, however, that a power line will simply blow over and decapitate all three of us.

On the verge of panic, my mother breaks out speaking in tongues six decibels above the roaring hurricane. “Praise God, praise Him, the Devil is a liar. Jesus, come to us now in our time of need. Deliver us from the darkness that has descended upon this Earth.”

The agitation is almost unbearable.

My father delivers his rebuttal with controlled meanness, his quiet seething the opposite of her shrill hysterics. “Got-dammit, Cauzette, if you don’t shut that shit up I’m gonna put your ass out in the storm.”

“J. W. Crowell, you’ll do no such of a thing. And you’ll not take the Lord’s name in vain, neither, not in front of me and your son.”

I lie low in the backseat. “Ya’ll leave me out of this.”

Then she’s off praying again, louder. “Our Father who art in heaven and on this Earth, deliver us from the evil that is upon us!”

In the middle of her tirade my father snaps, slapping her hard with the back of his hand and driving the car into an intersection that’s under three feet of water. The Studebaker stalls. That he’d just hit his wife is instantly relegated to back-burner status, since getting the car started again is now a matter of desperate importance.

“You steer!” he yells, motioning for me to climb over the seat and take the wheel. When he opens his door, a rush of water floods the floorboards, and the wind nearly rips the door from its hinges. In the driver’s seat I’m thinking of World War II submarine movies: the walls sweating and the air stale as we take on massive amounts of water.

In the rearview mirror my father reminds me of Gregory Peck as Ahab in the part of that black-and-white movie where he’s finally hooked Moby-Dick with his harpoon but has gotten tangled in the rope and is about to be drowned. He starts to push the car, little by little, out of the intersection, though with no chance of ultimate success. Sobered by the slap in the face, my mother calmly lights a Viceroy and acts as if her husband’s just run into the 7-11 for a loaf of bread. I can’t tell if she’s convinced her prayers will be answered or else is just ready to drown.

Scrambling to her side of the car, motioning for her to roll the window down, my father poses the question I know he’s been dying to ask since he climbed out: “Are you gonna do something to help or not?”

My mother’s reply? “Yeah, I’ll smoke my cigarette.”

Considering what happens next, I have to think my mother’s prayers, off-putting as they are, might well have been answered. From out of nowhere, yellow and white flashing lights appear in the fogged-up rear window, and three blasts from an air horn signal my father to get in the car and steer.

The tow truck pushes our drowned Studebaker for over three miles as my father pumps the accelerator and sweet-talks the engine nonstop. “Come on, now, you little red hotrod,” he’s cooing. “Turn on over and fire up for ole J-Bo”—his self-appointed nickname.

In the middle of all this, my mother lights a fresh Viceroy and scoffs, “The Lord’s done answered my prayers, J.W. If you had any sense, you’d just let him push us on in.”

But my father won’t be denied the right to zoom off in a huff. He flatters and begs and threatens to sell the flooded car for junk metal until it coughs and spits, a string of backfires announcing his triumph.

Despite hating it when he hits my mother, I love seeing my father enjoy this victory and think to myself that for someone who craves winning as much as he does, it’s a shame it happens so infrequently.

“You tell the Lord he can kiss my ass,” he gloats, refusing to acknowledge that her prayers might have been instrumental in the Studebaker’s finally cranking up. Similarly, his dismissal of Mr. Miller, our true benefactor, had been comical in its arrogance. He simply rolled down the window, flipped him the bird, and roared off into Carla. When the tow-truck lights disappear, I ask out loud what it was that happened back at the Millers’ house, but my parents, out of either exhaustion or relief, have withdrawn into themselves and aren’t taking any questions.

When we arrived unscathed, my father’s overly careful about lining up the tires on the concrete driveway strips, barely visible under a half foot of water, and this seems peculiar given what our expedition’s been like so far. With a hurricane blowing full-tilt all around us, sliding to a sideways halt would seem a more fitting conclusion to this wild ride. But then I’m not the one driving.

My mother gets out of the car, wades into the house, picks up a broom, and starts sweeping floodwater out the back door. Then she pops the refrigerator door open with a screwdriver—my father’s solution to its broken handle—and grabs a can of lukewarm Jax, drains half of it in one
glug
, wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist, burps loudly and, pointing the can at my father, says, “J. W. Crowell, next time you lay a hand on me, you better make sure you kill me, ’cause if you don’t I’ll kill you. I don’t care if I have to wait till you fall asleep to do it.”

How quickly my mother switches from Pentecostal purist to beer-guzzling shrew is one of life’s deepest mysteries.

My father pushes his luck lightly. “Aw, hell, Cauzette, I didn’t hurt you. If I meant to—”

“You better be listenin’ to me, J.W. I swear on the Bible I mean ev’ry word I said. I’ll kill you deader’n a doornail.”

My parents chain-smoked while the house went toe-to-toe with Carla, my mother singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and sweeping out floodwater. Meanwhile I slept fourteen hours in the comfort of my own bed.

When Carla finished, she’d converted our little house with a leaky roof into an indoor swimming pool. Outside, it looks to have survived the ordeal with little more than a black eye; inside, it’s more like a fatal brain hemorrhage. The final collapse won’t come for three and a half years, but when it does, there can be little doubt that Hurricane Carla delivered the blow that brought on the beginning of the end.

In 1965 my parents threw in the towel. By the time the bank got around to repossessing the property, they’d long since quit Jacinto City and the house had collapsed. Later that year, whatever was left got bulldozed to the ground.

The lot then remained vacant for thirty-three years. As an adult, I often had the urge and enough money to buy the property, with a vision of constructing a monument of some kind and dedicating it to my parents. But for reasons I could never explain, I balked at reclaiming the site of my childhood home.

In 1998, near the small town of Highlands, Texas, less than a mile from the San Jacinto Monument itself, my mother will be buried next to my father, who died nine years before. During the funeral service, I’ll be overwhelmed by the desire to drive the fifteen or so miles into Jacinto City and buy the vacant lot at 10418 Norvic Street. Why, I’ll wonder, had I waited so long?

With my heart racing ahead in anticipation, my wife and daughters will show their concern with soothing words and gentle reminders for me to breathe. The journey will seem to last another thirty-three years. When we arrive, a newly constructed home is proudly positioned where my parents’ little white house had stood so tentatively. All that remains of the lives gone before will be in the northeast corner of the front yard: a chinaberry tree that once bore my name.

J.W.

D
im among the glimmerings of long ago there is a light. In its presence—the only source of light in a vast hall of darkness—there are countless people, absorbed and adoring, my father and me among them. It is old and otherworldly now, this light, and it fades a little with each year, a hint that perhaps it will soon be gone forever. But it is proof, for now, that I once saw the light.

Not long after my second birthday, Hank Williams made his next-to-last public appearance at Cook’s Hoedown, East Houston’s premier hillbilly nightspot. Rejecting the notion that I was too young to enjoy the experience, my father appointed me his preferred companion for the evening. Hoisted high on his shoulders, my legs straddling his neck, I felt my senses dawning in this new world like the first few pieces being fitted into a puzzle. The eddy of cool air wafting down from overhead awakened the feeling I was somewhere very different from my usual surroundings, the hush of anticipation in the audience stirring the suspicion that I was part of something incomprehensibly great. A thunderous man-made roar tested the building’s rafters for structural weakness and overwhelmed my fledgling sensory receptors even further, but somehow I was made to understand that this kaleidoscope of sound, color, and chaos was nothing I need fear. And then there was the light. Two weeks shy of fading away forever in the backseat of a powder-blue Cadillac convertible, Hank Williams was suddenly spotlit and burning on center stage, the embodiment of a lone flaming star. Visions of a distant paradise bobbed in the wake of his brilliance. I’d have joined the light then and there were it not for the scent of hair tonic and Old Spice aftershave that tethered me to my father’s shoulders.

The pulse of the music matched my beating heart perfectly, and I took comfort in this. And yet it’s the memory of my father that holds in place the memory of seeing and feeling a Hank Williams performance.

My father idolized him, and reminding me I once saw “ole Hank” sing was something he never tired of. It was the part of his legacy he savored the most. Knowing he’d exposed his only son to the greatness in another man that he imagined in himself served to soften the hard fact that his own dreams would never materialize. Hank Williams
was
what my father wanted to be—a Grand Ole Opry singing star. Taking me to see him perform was his way of saying,
Look at me up there on that stage, son, that’s who I really am
. This is the truest picture of my father that I own, though at times I strain to see it.

James Walter Crowell was born in 1923—the same year as his idol—to Iola Wilson of Cherry Corner, Kentucky, and Samuel Martin Crowell of McEwen, Tennessee. At the time of their oldest child’s birth, the newlywed Crowells lived on the outskirts of Blytheville, Arkansas. Martin worked splitting railroad crossties, ten for a penny, but his official occupation was sharecrop farmer. After the crash of ’29, Iola, Martin, and their four children found shelter in a canvas-covered sheep shed in the Blood River bottoms of Calloway County, Kentucky. Despite a nearly fatal bout with scarlet fever, my father subsisted, along with the rest of his family, on squirrel, rabbit, and the occasional plate of white-flour biscuits. In the peak years of the Great Depression it took Martin two full growing seasons to move his family from the sheep shed to a dirt-floor cabin on a nine-acre sharecrop tobacco farm. I once heard my father say, “I was born in nineteen and twenty-three, and I never slept on nothin’ but straw till nineteen and forty-one, when Daddy took over Old Man Hoot Paxton’s place down on the Tennessee border. It’s a wonder I don’t crow like a rooster.”

By my mother’s estimation, the Wilsons of Cherry Corner were the meanest, most racist white trash in all of western Kentucky. My great-grandfather, known as Lyin’ Jim Wilson, was recognized as the unofficial mayor of Cherry Corner. When he died in 1960, late into his eighties, it was accepted as fact that he hadn’t answered a direct question truthfully since his twelfth birthday and hadn’t taken a bath since he accidentally fell in the Blood River in 1936.

Again according to my mother, Jim Wilson was even meaner than he was dishonest. His sexual preferences included daughters, sisters, granddaughters, neighbors’ wives, and the odd farm animal. Lyin’ Jim’s notoriety wasn’t so much a source of family shame as a line drawn in the sand: Step across at your own risk; we Wilsons are crazy as shit-house rats and would just as soon kill you as look at you.

The “Paw Jim” I remember was a baldheaded old coot with stubbly chin whiskers. Clothed in a filthy undershirt and Dee Cee overalls, he sat idly by the kitchen fireplace chewing a cud of tobacco. That he kept his arm down the front of his pants and grunted like a hog drew little notice in Iola’s kitchen. She might have bopped him upside the head and barked, “Paw Jim, get yer meat hooks outta them drawers and let that damn ole pecker alone,” but that clearly wasn’t going to change his behavior. Once, when Iola smacked the back of his head, I saw him swallow a wad of chewing tobacco without even blinking.

Iola Crowell was her father’s daughter, perverse and mean. On the subject of her oldest boy, J.W., she was a shameless braggart. Proclaiming him her favorite, she made it known to anyone willing to listen that she didn’t give two shits about her daughters, Nadine and Lurleen, or her youngest son, Red. Nevertheless, and for no good reason, she was fond of whacking my father across the side of his head whenever he passed within reach. When he’d ask her why she’d done it, her smug reply was always the same: “You needed it or else you wouldn’t of dodged.”

My grandmother excelled in four areas: beating her children, fighting with her husband, baking biscuits, and breaking wind, the latter being her greatest passion. She meditated on and honed the craft of farting, always striving for greater heights in artistic expression. As a composer of farts, Iola could have been likened to a backwoods Beethoven—sometimes bombastic and overdriven, sometimes light and whimsical, and a touch of the maniacal, at once blatant and subdued, was the hallmark of her best work.

As you might expect, she loved beans and served three or four kinds at every meal. Pinto beans, butter beans, navy beans, green beans, pork and beans, pole beans, jumping beans, it didn’t matter. She referred to them all as forty-fours.

“Pass me the forty-fours, Martin.”

“Which ones?”

“Why, all of ’em. You know that.”

A gassed-up Iola required everyone present to admire her works great and small. Only my father had the courage to challenge her farting supremacy, which he did as an aside to his brother. “Shit, Red, cain’t nobody get a poot in sideways ’round here when Momma gets ’em goin’.”

Martin Crowell was a product of hard times and hard work. He was rail thin and had the largest pair of ears ever attached to a human head. Dee Cee overalls and a clean white shirt, the sleeves rolled up two turns, were the mainstay of his wardrobe. He kept a small round mirror on the mantel above the kitchen fireplace and rarely sat down to eat without combing his already perfectly groomed hair. My grandfather was a creature of small habits. I loved him, and so did my mother. My father kept a respectful distance.

Grandpa Crowell played old-time flailing banjo. The three songs from his repertoire I remember most vividly were “The Great California Earthquake,” “Old Shep,” and “Rabbit in the Graveyard.” The ironic glint in the old man’s eye when he sang about dogs jumping into rivers to save drowning boys was for me the distillation of musical joy and front-porch storytelling, and images of rabbits running across the freshly dug graves of the dearly departed kept me awake many nights.

Although he was sweet and shy and stubbornly quiet, under the influence of corn liquor Martin was nearly a match for Iola in pure meanness. But she had a killer instinct that he lacked, so when it came to familial dysfunction and domestic violence she had the edge. It’s due to his physical strength alone—Iola outweighed him by a good forty-five pounds—that Martin was able to post a breakeven record over the course of their long-running series of knockdown-drag-outs. Eventually, this classic rivalry mellowed into something resembling a draw.

Their oldest child loved school, and his aptitude for mathematics was a source of great schoolboy pride. His claim that he was once the undisputed math champion of Kentucky, though never validated or even explained, sat well with me. I was four and a half years old when I decided that if my father believed he possessed a near-genius faculty for math and “sinus”—his pronunciation of “science”—then so would I. For my amusement, he enjoyed staging acts of mathematical wizardry and, like a boy doing magic tricks, displayed the same ones over and over, all of them problems he’d shamelessly worked out a thousand times already. “Seven hundred and sixteen plus six hundred and five take away thirteen hundred and twenty-one leaves nought” thrilled me to no end, as did “Five tums sixty-two hundred divided by eight is thirty-eight hundred and seventy-five.”

And so on. Thus my father allowed me to observe the Swiss-watch quality of his mind. He craved attention and preened after every ooh and aah he ever got.

The official cause of his death at age sixty-five was heart failure. This diagnosis was accurate; his heart did fail. Perhaps the brilliant cardiologist who made it was right to blame two packs a day for forty-six years and a serious bout with rheumatic fever, but I tend not to agree. Considering the delicate balance between the irrepressible spark propelling my father’s lust for living and the brutal downside of his posturing, it’s my opinion that a steady stream of disappointments, self-inflicted and otherwise, the first coming in 1934 when he was forced to leave school after seventh grade, did more to bring on his early death than all the nicotine, whiskey, and butter-soaked biscuits combined. Call it maudlin, manipulative, or simpleminded, but as I see it he died of a broken heart.

“I had to quit school and go to work,” he said. “If I coulda got me an education I’d be a civil engineer over at Brown and Root right now.” Alongside being a performing member of the Grand Ole Opry, the absolute pinnacle of success for my father would’ve been the words “Civil Engineer” capitalized on a college degree. Through hard work and commonsense experience, he was named superintendent at the Mid-Gulf Construction Company of Houston, and his level of expertise in the construction business made him equal to any civil engineer coming out of Texas A&M or the Rice Institute. But that was never good enough. The lack of a formal education and a degree was a source of constant shame that my father was never able to overcome.

The Great Depression had far-reaching effects on his life. Not only was it the main reason he had to quit school, it also instilled in him the notion that the number one priority in a man’s life was keeping a steady job. And if it happened to be low-paying, common-labor drudgery that was subject to rainouts and unexpected shutdowns, “well, by God, those are the breaks.”

Not going to Nashville to try to make it as a country singer was a by-product of this mind-set. Of course the argument could be made that if this were truly his destiny then nothing could’ve stopped him, and I believe that’s true. This is where my father was both an enigma and savant. His passion for music was as insatiable as his need for attention, and he knew more songs than anyone I’ve ever met. His repertoire numbered literally in the hundreds, songs by Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Gid Tanner, the Louvin Brothers, Jim Reeves, Ernest Tubb, Johnny Horton, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, Harlan Howard, Dock Boggs, Bashful Brother Oswald, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Family, Grandpa Jones, Little Jimmy Dickens, Buck Owens, Woody Guthrie, Appalachian dead-baby songs, folk songs, cowboy ballads, Negro blues, gospel songs, talkin’ songs, train songs, songs about cocaine and murder, jailhouses, froggies that went a-courtin’, rosewood caskets, holes in the bottom of the sea, and love letters in the sand.

The Saturday night
Grand Ole Opry
on a neighbor’s dry-cell radio, local barn dances, his own father’s front-porch performances—that was the extent of his access to popular music. But lack of exposure to the outside world did nothing to hamper his ability to accrue words and music. He possessed an ability to absorb songs from the atmosphere. If he heard a song once, he knew it forever. Such was his gift.

My parents met at a Roy Acuff concert held in the Buchanan High School gymnasium in the fall of 1941. According to my mother, some ill-mannered farm boy had placed a grimy paw in the vicinity of no-man’s-land. Worse yet, his slobbering advances were ruining her concentration on the show. In perhaps his first act of chivalry ever, my father came to Cauzette’s rescue, challenging the boy to a wrestling match after the show.

With a showdown looming in his near future, the offender of my mother’s virtue turned his attention to a consideration more important than the harassment of innocent girls: liquid courage. A challenge to his manhood warranted some serious drinking in order to ensure a victory come wrestling time, so the boy disappeared into the woods with a quart jar of homemade liquor.

Free to enjoy the show, my mother was faced with an even bigger distraction. “It was like nothin’ else was in the world but your daddy,” she told me. “I knew it right then and there he was the boy I was gonna marry. I went home and told Momma I was. I loved Roy Acuff, but I couldn’t hear a word he was singin’ after your daddy showed up. Your daddy was good-lookin’, and he stood right up to that other boy. Turned out he didn’t have to go wrassle after all. That other boy got so sot-drunk he was off pukin’ in the woods when it come time to face the music. I got walked home that night by the sweetest boy in the world, and I ain’t even thought about another man since.”