Spoken from the Heart (6 page)

In New Mexico, my parents liked to drive to a horse track with the fancy name of Ruidoso Downs. Although it officially opened in 1947, the owners must have had dreams of becoming the Churchill Downs of the West. Ruidoso was up in the mountains, about four or five hours away. Mother and Daddy would watch the quarter horse races, which had big purses, and gamble. They liked to splurge and buy a day pass to the Jockey Club, where the seats were shaded and the food was rich but not fancy. There were steaming bowls of hot New Mexican chili, and alcohol, of course, cold beers and mixed drinks. I might have had a Coke or a Shirley Temple with a fat, bright red cherry. We would sit in the club, and Mother and Daddy would lean in to see the races, their eyes riveted to the thundering hooves of the horses, the dirt track smarting as they barreled along in a full run.

I loved going to Ruidoso because it was cool up in the mountains and there was a hint of dampness to the air. It was the closest cool place to Midland. Occasionally, you could see snowcaps and, in summer, tall, heavy pines that pierced the sky. It was so very different from the long, flat land around Midland, where the roads stretched unchanged toward the oblivion of the horizon.

We made long drives every summer. We drove all the way to California, to Newport Beach and Balboa and Catalina Island, where the water was a deep turquoise blue, almost as mesmerizing as the Midland sky, and blubbery brown sea lions screeched and sunned themselves on the jagged rocks. We kayaked over the tops of silent kelp forests, and my mother stared in wonder at pelicans scanning for fish in the sea. We slept in a no-frills motel outside the newly opened Disneyland, with its horse-drawn streetcars and King Arthur Carrousel. A few years, we headed east to the swampy bayou port cities of New Orleans and Houston. We drove to San Antonio almost every summer, and each time we'd visit the Alamo. We'd stay at the old Menger Hotel, which kept alligators in a couple of planters on either side of the cavernous lobby fireplace. It had a swimming pool too, which to me was one of the best things about vacations.

Yet it was on those trips, when there were only the three of us, that I felt the overwhelming absence of a brother or sister. Mother and Daddy sat chatting in the front of the car, while I rode in the back alone. If we stopped at a motel with a pool, Daddy might swim a few laps with me, but there were no games of Marco Polo, no splashing races or dives to touch the bottom. Other times, Mother came down and sat by the pool to watch me while I went in by myself. I'm not sure what she would have done if I had suddenly started struggling in the chlorinated water. She had never learned to swim.

And there was the particular loneliness of being an only child among the throngs at a crowded amusement park. Once, in New Orleans, when we had stopped at the park next to Lake Pontchartrain, it was my mother who was drafted to ride behind me in the two-seater Wild Mouse roller-coaster car. She screamed the entire time.

As I grew older, when we went to Ruidoso, my parents would let me invite a friend. A few times, other families traveled with us on our summer jaunts, two cars setting off in a caravan to whatever destination the fathers had picked. When we drove to Newport Beach, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, it was with our next-door neighbors Ann and Joe Morse and their daughter, Laurie. After a few days in California, Mother and Daddy and Ann and Joe left Laurie and me with her grandparents while they got in the car and headed off across the desert to Vegas to gamble, and then drove all the way back to get us and head home.

By the time I was six, my parents decided that I was ready to travel on my own and sent me on the train to El Paso to visit my grandparents. They handed my ticket to the porter at the Midland station and waved me off. Mother had packed a lunch for me because she didn't think I was old enough to go into the dining car and write down what I wanted on the little pad of paper. It was a nearly six-hour train ride, through Pecos, Van Horn, and Sierra Blanca, across sparse, open land and long-vanished buffalo trails. My grandparents, Grammee and Papa, would meet me at the station in their old pickup truck and drive me out to Canutillo, in the upper Rio Grande Valley outside El Paso, where they had their home.

I loved my Grammee with a particular devotion. Jessie Laura Hawkins, my mother's mother, had been only twenty-one when Mother was born. She was nearly three decades younger than Grandma Welch and still quite young. And she loved to play. Not only did she make my clothes and doll clothes but she also built my doll furniture by hand, little couches covered in lush brown velvet with tiny navy velvet pillows edged in rich gold braid. I thought they were the most elegant things I had ever seen. Grammee, whose own childhood had been cut perilously short, lovingly created so much of my own.

Jessie and Hal had moved to El Paso in 1927; like the Welches, both had been born in Arkansas. But Grammee's mother's family had come from France. Grammee always thought that her mother, Eva Louise LaMaire, had been born in Paris, which no doubt sounded infinitely more glamorous, but in fact she was born in New York City not long after her own parents arrived on an immigrant ship and passed through the gates of Ellis Island. From the teeming crowds and clanking noise of New York, the LaMaires headed west to landlocked Arkansas. However it was spelled, they always pronounced their name "la mer," French for the sea. My great-grandmother was eighteen when she married Joseph Sherrard, who had been born in Mississippi in the middle of the Civil War. On the actual day of his birth, April 7, 1862, the Battle of Shiloh was raging 150 miles away. They settled on a small dairy farm beyond Little Rock, in a place so tucked away and destitute that no one bothered to paint the houses, they simply left the wood to gray, swell, and shrink under the cycle of rain and sun. My great-grandmother bore eight children, seven girls who lived, and one boy, Joseph Jr., who died. Then one morning when my great-grandmother was about forty-two, and newly pregnant with her last daughter, her husband headed out into the field where his cows grazed. He had his shotgun with him, loaded, and he held it up to his head and pulled the trigger. The family whispered that he did it because of all those girls. I sometimes wonder if any of those same girls were tasked that day with helping their mother carry in their father's corpse. Eva Louise buried her husband and kept on milking the cows, whose udders were full each morning whether someone had died or not. She ran the farm and raised her brood of girls for the rest of her days. I remember stopping to visit her a few times on those trips to Arkansas, when she was a shrunken old woman still living a hard, rural life.

My grandmother never told my mother about the suicide. Instead, Mother heard the story from Papa's side of the family, his two old-maid sisters, who lived with his bachelor brother in Little Rock. Jessie Sherrard was barely nine when her father marched out into that field. After he died, she drove the milk truck for the dairy farm. When she met my grandfather, he worked as a postman, driving a postal truck. He had barely any memories of his own father, who died when Papa was three.

Papa's health was what drove the Hawkinses to move west. He had asthma, and everyone believed that the dry desert air in the Southwest contained some kind of magical cure. Thousands of World War I veterans who had been gassed in the trenches across France had moved to New Mexico, Arizona, and the far reaches of West Texas, seeking a balm for their ravaged lungs. My grandparents settled in the upper valley, one block from the Rio Grande, which rolled and lapped in its riverbed before it turned narrow and sluggish alongside the city of El Paso itself. They chose a place right off Highway 80, the main road to California before the government put through the interstate. As late as the 1950s, it hummed with cars making their way west. Jessie and Hal built a small tourist court, a cluster of tiny one-room cottages with a single communal bathroom in the middle. During the Depression, carloads of people fleeing the devastation of the Dust Bowl and the complete collapse of life back east would stop at a tourist court to shower and sleep in the primitive cottages or doze in their cars or outside on the warm ground before moving on to California's promised land. To supplement what little they made from the tourist court, my grandparents opened a grocery, where they sold bologna, pickles, loaves of bread, and a few other staples that people might buy before they crossed the New Mexico line to traverse the desert beyond.

They also ran a lumberyard, and at one point Hal Hawkins had enough money to buy a small block off of Highway 80 and put up a few houses, just as my father later did in Midland. Grammee and Papa built their own house on that street. It was an orange house, covered in smooth, orange-glazed brick, surplus from the Army's rush to slap up vast new kitchens and dining halls for the freshly minted troops converging on Fort Bliss. My grandfather may have gotten it for free or talked his way into buying it at a cut rate. However he got it, every brick was a bright, shocking orange. One day in 1943, when Mother brought Daddy home to meet her parents, the first thing he saw was Jessie Hawkins down on her knees with a bucket of mortar that she had mixed herself and a trowel in her hand, laying brick. That was how Harold Welch met his future mother-in-law. My father always enjoyed telling that story, invariably adding his own punch line: that when he first saw Jessie, he thought, Great, I'm marrying into a family whose women can do anything.

I loved going to visit Grammee and Papa for those two or three weeks in the summer, to be enveloped by the desert heat and lulled by the simple repetition of Grammee's daily routine. It was, I suppose now, not so far removed from daily chores in Midland--cooking, watering the yard, doing the wash and the cleaning, and the endless sweeping out of the house. But the location was infinitely more interesting, with the Rio Grande on one side and the Franklin Mountains bumping up against us on the other. And Grammee was fascinating. Unlike most mothers I knew, who wore dresses and aprons, she wore pants, hats, gloves, and big, long-sleeved shirts to cover her skin because out in the valley the sun is especially bright and searing. The Texas poet Marian Haddad wrote once about El Paso, "The sun is different here." "Drastic and dense," she called it, and it truly is. There is something thick and liquid about the light, more than can be accounted for by the fact that El Paso sits up closer to the sun than Midland.

Grammee was a collector too, her house and garden an artful arrangement of what man and nature had left behind. She saved old Mexican coins, many of them gold, and smooth Indian grindstones that wandering or fleeing tribes had abandoned along the rough paths in the Franklin foothills. Tucked away in a wooden drawer was a little box of shells and the tiny, perfect skeleton of a sea horse, what remained of an all but forgotten, long-ago visit to the sea. She collected rocks, each with its own lengthy geological tale, and empty glass bottles that others casually tossed aside. Her bottles grew so numerous that she built a ring of shelves for them above the windows on her modest, window-covered porch. The less interesting and more ubiquitous beer bottles she dispatched to her garden, where she marked off her flower beds by planting their stubby necks deep in the ground until only the glinting round bottoms peeked up from the earth.

Most of Grammee's garden, aside from where she grew a patch of asparagus that reliably sprouted year after year, was a wonderful, vast rock garden. There was no trash collection out where she and Papa lived, hence the bottles, so whatever they couldn't reuse was recycled into that garden. She planted flowers inside the well of an enormous rubber tire that must have rolled off a truck plodding along the highway or gone flat and been left behind. In another corner, a faded wagon wheel stuck up from the sand. She took broken bits of pottery and cemented them onto urns that she placed along a wall constructed of her own homemade cinder block, which she made from a rectangular mold that she filled with concrete mix. She grew yuccas, ocotillos, magueys, and pomegranate trees, and a big, bright swath of daffodils. The bulbs had come from her mother's house in Arkansas. When my mother moved to Midland, Grammee divided up the bulbs and gave some to Mother, who planted them in her yard and lovingly dug them up and replanted them each time she moved to another house. When I married George and came back to Midland, Mother did the same for me, appearing on my doorstep with one hundred bulbs, the offspring of that long-fallow Arkansas yard, four generations removed.

Sometimes I would follow Grammee around, but mostly I played, staking out a corner of the garden. I built sprawling sand ranches that stretched across the ground and meticulously arranged the plump mesquite beans that I had chosen to be my cattle. But I was rarely alone. Nuway Drive, Grammee and Papa's block, was teeming with other children, and they became my friends all those summers. Mornings were spent outside in the baking heat. Then, once the blazing sun settled atop the sky, we retreated inside to eat our main meal and lie down for a siesta. Only in the late afternoon did we get up and bathe. My grandmother would put on a dress, and my grandfather would change his shirt and pants, and we'd all go for a ride in his pickup truck. If it was just the three of us, I sat wedged between them in the cab, but most of the time, I piled in the flatbed with an assortment of neighborhood kids and Bully, our old Midland dog. Then we'd be off, bumping along the levee road that edged right up against the Rio Grande.