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Leaving the Farm
Frank
(1900-1975) cherished no
pleasant
memories of farm work, which had not changed much since the family
settled in Tennessee. Plowing, hoeing and tending the stock
remained the first order of the
year in Texas, where school accommodated to
the planting, growing
and harvest seasons. Sunday was a day for the better families to dress
up
and socialize at church, but even on Saturdays
the men would
spend the morning "down at the place," doctoring the cattle, tending a
crop, pruning or budding fruit trees. Frank always remembered
how
the boys could not go to town until they had first collected a tow sack
full
of
Johnson grass roots, Johnson grass being the tall, sharp bladed grass
which
overgrew the cotton and corn fields. Of a Saturday
afternoon they could "go into town." The nearest
mercantile
community was Gorman. The general store here was more specialized
than that run by Thomas Francis in Flynn’s
Lick,
or by Willie Paulk in Fouke (see below). Here it was
Higginbotham’s,
which carried hardware and farm implements only. Grocers were
separate,
although still a credit business. Since the automobile had now
made
its appearance, groceries were often delivered. There was no pavement
yet,
but Frank put some of his first money into a Stuts Bearcat. His
older
brother sold Fords. There was a railroad depot and a post office,
farmers
and cattlemen stood around on the street exchanging news and views,
making deals.
Their wives might be in at the general store "making a trade." By
Frank's time there was even a corner drug store with
a
soda fountain and little metal chairs and tables with imitation marble
tops.
Going into town on Saturday was the family outing. There
might be a medicine show or a traveling carnival.
Frank started, but did not finish
the eighth grade.
That was already more schooling than enjoyed by anyone before him in
the family.
He had what was called "good business sense," a more comprehensive
understanding of law and accounting than most educated men of my own
more schooled
generation. Arithmetic culminated in the "rule of three," what my
school teacher knew as proportions, or ratios. Frank learned
it as a nifty way of solving al kinds of problems. The idea was
to arrange
any problem as a/b = c/x.
Being
good with figures, Frank took a job in his
grandfather's
bank while he was still
a teen-ager. Fifty or sixty years later, he was still
able (at
my request)
to sign his name with the beautiful scroll-work affected by such
responsible officers.
I have a picture of his
grandfather's banks in Duster and in
Desdemona. Today the former has been removed to a nearby park,
and Desdemona is reduced to just a few houses on the
east side of Hog Creek. In the
oil boom years 1918-1921, "Hogtown" was a fair sized
collection
of shanties on rutted streets populated by land speculators, oil rig
equipment vendors, ox train drivers, gamblers, prostitutes, and general
hell-raisers.
Among the
latter was Frank's maternal uncle and namesake, the highly successful
bully and
gambler Frank Kirk. Upscale
entertainment might be a traveling badger in a barrel, whose owner
offered a prize to any dog that could bring him out.
John Casper Kirk and Drusilla née
Thompson are
buried in Weaver Cemetery just west of Gorman. Their daughter
Laura Ann, and their son Frank married Haile siblings. Laura
named a son after her brother Frank. The
children were "double cousins," a frequent phenomenon in an unsettled
and
desolate territory, when large families sought association with others
of
a similar raising. I have no knowledge of the Kirks before
they came to Texas. Laura had two older brothers, Lee and
John. Quite unlike Frank, they were sober farmers
and ranchers. Lee and his wife, Aunt Ninny, lived "next door," at
about 100 yards from Laura. They had six sons and a
daughter. Two
of the sons became bank presidents, one a district judge, one an
admiral.
But of course I remember
best my father's Uncle Frank, who made his fortune in wildcat
oil
drilling. Frank Kirk's
enthusiastic followers included the
roustabouts, mule skinners and ox drivers dependent on him , but also
his teenaged son Arnold and his sister's boys Erin and Frank
Haile.
I
remember all of these men. Erin
( christened Aaron) probably most
favored the Haile line. He had thin auburn hair (which he dyed), was
clever, witty, a charmer and fancy dresser who boasted that he had
never done a day's work
in his life. He drove a Packard or a Lincoln Zephyr, had rings on
his
fingers and a lady at his side, was a blustering,
likable, dishonest ne'er do
well.
Arnold favored the Kirks. Huge, red-headed, freckle-faced, curly red
hair
all over his body, boisterously good-natured, he was a perfect
throwback
to the ancient Celts. A crisis I remember from my childhood was
when
Arnold was shot. The story was
that
he had accused a man, or had been accused, of irregularity in a card
game
and was advancing upon the adversary, knife in hand, refusing to stop
despite
being struck five times in the chest by bullets. Arnold survived. I do
not
know the fate of the shooter. Arnold followed his father’s
example of
wildcatting
for oil, and became the proverbial wealthy Texan. His wife made it
into
Time magazine as the owner of
a stunning diamond necklace which spelled
out
in precious stones a highly improper word across her décolletage.
It just may be that something of the
old cavalier is
still perceptible in such fellows. They were swashbucklers, carrying
and
carried by good nature and self confidence, always ready for a scrap,
however ill-prepared. Obviously, their line had by this time survived
some pretty tough transitions, yet they individually seem never quite
up to
it, holding to their cavalier
ways. My own father was one of those with whom the times had caught up.
He was an experienced cowhand, a good companion. He had a fancy
signature, a Stuts Bearcat Roadster, a fur coat, and a pin-stripe suit,
but no credentials beyond the rule of threes. Such were not really
needed in the
prosperous, expanding 1920s.
Perhaps having subsequently become more ambitious,
Frank joined his brother Rudolf at the Haile Airport
in Austin (you can still call it up on
the internet). There was money to be had "barnstorming,"
giving
instruction, or just taking sightseers up for a flight.
It was a
dangerous way to make money, and Nell put a quietus to it. Frank
returned
to traveling for finance companies, then for the farm implement
companies Oliver and John Deere. When I was a little boy he was
employed by Bull Stewart, the distributor of the new Ford Tractor,
which attempted to replace the traditional massive weight of the
tractor by use of a sophisticated hydraulic system. Frank worked
as jobber between distributor and dealer. As World War II approached,
Frank
opened an "aeronautical trade school" in Houston to place people in the
booming
aircraft plants in Dallas and Fort Worth. It taught simple skills
like
reading
blueprints and using electric drills and rivet guns. Soon he opened a
second
school for Negroes. Here is a photograph which may not appear
unusual
today,
but which was in fact quite remarkable during World War II.
After the war, demand for
aircraft workers white or black fell rapidly.
Frank had got enough ahead to buy into a Ford Tractor dealership in
Texarkana. Whether this move reflected the fertility of the Red and
Sulphur River bottoms, or Nell's fondness for "home" would be hard to
say. It offered the advantage of our moving into her girlhood home, the
old Tom and Molly Goodson house.
After I went off to college, my family moved back out to West Texas,
but
Frank's
attempt to establish a tractor dealership in his dusty home territory
was
foiled by the terrible drought of 1950-54. I inherited Frank's
sentimental
attachment to that rainless sand, but in the years after his death I
gradually
disposed of the peanut farm he had bought and finally even of the rocky
hill
he had inherited--but not for a while. One time, when I was buying
grass
seed for one of the places, my daughter and son-in-law were with me at
the
Turner Seed Company in Breckenridge, Texas. In discussing seeds with
Mr.
Turner, planting seasons and drought, West
Texas
conditions in general, I remarked that "You killed my old
daddy,
God damn you, kill me." I think Mr. Turner recognized the quotation
(from "Rye Whiskey"),
but
Constance and Richard naturally attributed it to my dotage, and still
do.
As for Texas, naked came we into
that world, and
naked came we hither. R.T. was able to salvage very little out of
post-war
Tennessee.
One might guess that any culture in his Duster, Texas household came
from the Richards family. About the best one can say of R.T. himself is
that he was enterprising and shrewd. He became a well-to-do
banker and land holder. The same goes for his son
Fate. Although I did attend a Kirk
reunion in a little town near
Eastland, I
know next to nothing about Drusilla Thompson and John Caspar Kirk
(buried at Weaver Cemetery near Gorman). Their daughter Laura Ann was
intelligent.
She was the
ideal of reticent feminine elegance, but she did have spunk.
I remember how she voted "dry" in the Eastland County election on
alcohol sales, in the
face of my mother's superior argument in favor of "wet." Laura
conceded that Nell's reasoning was correct, but stuck to her
own "dry" vote,
because "it is the right thing to do." Lest I depict her as too
retiring,
I record that she was an excellent marksman. I watched her in
her
sixties hit a feral cat in the head with a 22. caliber rifle at forty
yards.
Her
generation still deferred to
their
men, but sustained
them intellectually and whipped them at
dominoes.
Some of my earliest memories are
of my grandmother's
elegant parlor where she and her brothers Frank or John, or perhaps
her sister-in-law Pearl sat at the ivories, patiently clicking them
over and over.
"Six-five'l make fifteen, John." "Your down Laura." I was
given black wooden dominoes with which I built oil derricks beneath
their
table. On my horizon might be a red Folgers coffee can where
someone spit tobacco juice, or my Aunt Pearl's cloisonné
receptical for snuff juice. Sometimes Pearl (Fate's sister) had a pint fruit
jar of
prickly pear juice as well, which she regarded as very healthful.
Pearl had a kind of white parchment face, but was
ruddy, with thin auburn hair drawn so tightly back into a knot that it
made her squint. She spoke hard language ("Take a stick a stow
wood atter her." "Snatch that bitch bawld headed.") and was quick
to use her good natured but forceful husband to get her way in
Gorman. It was a contrast with my pious and proper
grandmother, a
studious Bible reader.
Unlike his own father, mine was gentle and
especially
protective
of his son. I suppose the best Frank did by me was to
marry
into literacy, and to revere it. He loved to read, but mostly
together
with
my mother. So far as I know, literacy is a quality which no
previous
generation of Hailes had shared. Might this history
have done
better
to pursue the literate Goodsons or the Cranks or the McClures a little
farther
back? By and large, they were less well to do, so that the record
is
more
obscure. --Why, you may ask, do I count literacy so important? I think
it
is to be seen that the Hailes did not really lack ambition. On the
contrary,
they are a hard-working, enterprising line. It is just a shame their
aspirations
were so limited. Yet how could they have aspired to more? What did they
know? Frank obviously
knew
that his was
a century of technology--he had his sports car and flew his
biplane. I would guess it never occurred to him that Werner
Heisenberg and Robert Oppenheimer were his
contemporaries.
Nicholas the Chapel builder in
Baltimore seems to have been
receptive to a
higher
calling. He lived at a time when popular evangelistic fervor had made
tthe riches of ancient Hebrew culture accessible, for a brief
moment. As to Nicholas's Dustbowl offspring--what did they know
to aspire
to?
To put it perhaps more harshly, what had they
to
say
to one another? Well, they could speak of everyday objects and
concepts,
after the fashion of Caliban. Language is a wonderful metaphor in
itself, but its ultimate transport is beyond the common and
the immediate into the
memorable metaphors of our three-thousand year written heritage.
Writing even permits us to probe beyond writing, into prehistory.
Without
our books we live
hand to
mouth, in the shallow day to day. Without books we are zombies.
Frank's family was the product of
four centuries assimilating the
vast American continent. The old cultural treasures had been too heavy
for the
oceangoing vessels of the day, and far too burdensome for a trek across
mountains and forests and deserts in the New World. Whereas a chimney
sweep
in London might still have had some inkling of a world of the
intellect,
be it only at a longing distance, the child of the dustbowl had only
his
Bible. Literacy was his sole window on a higher
calling. The
Hailes,
by the time they had made it out to Texas, and had made it in Texas,
found
themselves
among
a woefully narrow people. Yet about the same age as Frank
and his siblings were the sensitive writer
Katherine Ann Porter, born not
forty miles south of the Sabana, and the astute historian Walter
Prescott Webb, who grew up about twenty miles to the north. So a leaven
remained, and no doubt still
does today, in my own even less literate world.