Telephone Blitz
THE TELEPHONE HAS TRIPPED ME UP.
I occupied a pay phone on the psychiatric wing of Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio and called an old Scouts buddy who was now a general in the Air Force. How I saluted him I do not know. Whatever it was, it was not conducive to conversation, at least not memorable. I remember him flashing his most compassionate and authoritative voice and saying, "God Bless You," before hanging up.
Outside mania, he rarely surfaced, so it wasn't obsession. But if not on this occasion, then on others, when a jet was overhead, I imagined him in it, protecting me.
Before this admission, the buildings all around me were juxtaposed by a nearby ranch owner who could rearrange them with a toy laser.
And then I slept in a muddy field.
Deputies found me.
It is possible that in this series of delusions I flew from Austin with Chica in a first-class seat so that I could make a Harris County hearing. I called from the air that I would be late. I know that Harris County deputies drove down to San Antonio later to retrieve me.
I must say here that all officers, including those in Houston, Harris County, San Antonio and Bexar County, have provided exceptional treatment in seeing to my welfare. I am indebted.
THE GENERAL WAS IN GOOD COMPANY getting a call from me when mania struck. But how I do the hat trick of producing his and others numbers I do not know. In the hospital I did not have pen and paper to write what the operators gave out. My goodness, at home I couldn't punch the buttons without looking at the number two or three times.
My ability, too, to find numbers when I am sick has been uncanny. Once, at my parents' home for a Thanksgiving dinner, I got notion to call a person whom I met a score of years earlier on a 1963 fishing trip to the Middle Fork of the Salmon River with Uncle Ed Thomasson. The girl was fourteen when we talked about integration in her dad's cafe, the Pheasant Cafe, in Richfield, Idaho.
She wrote a reply to my letter on stationary emblazoned with her name, Billie, in blue in the shape of a skirt, smart teen writing material. I kept it, and that is what set off my search for her during the holiday. It was postmarked at her mother's home in a small town near Boise. Low and behold, by checking directory assistance, I learned that her mother still lived there. Excited, I called in the middle of their dinner. Billie was there.
I called back, but small wonder, she didn't seem to remember me. I told her about the letter. She wanted a copy. So I tried to send it to her home in rural Idaho by fax, on her phone line. Further communications did not patch the blunder in mania.
Another call was to Queen Julianne at The Hague. It was made from a pay phone at a restaurant on the spur of the moment to wish her happy birthday around May Day. I recalled the piece of trivia from my visit there ten or fifteen years earlier, in 1974. When I called, I woke somebody in the middle of night with my greeting. It could have been the queen herself, since my touch becomes magical in illness.
The calls have been costly in terms of the closest relationships.
There was an especially supportive friend in Boston whom I had known ever since she and her family trailed me in a raft on a later Middle Fork journey. I visited them, and they rode in my van on the first Other Side of Texas tour, bringing their friends for my interpretation of the state.
She was an authority on Indians, having sent me the last set of her early books, and she encouraged me as a writer.
Then her husband languished with cancer, eventually dying. He was a pioneer in computers for the Navy.
His death changed her. We rarely wrote.
I called during an episode. The only words I remember, that I thought were said, were hers: "You should be in the street." I can't imagine what provoked that, or the return of an unopened letter I wrote from Rusk.
It was a tremendous loss to sever communications after twenty years. Why these people had driven me to Walden Pond and invited me to Beaver Creek, Colorado, to ski with them and their daughter. They had hosted dinners for me and their local friends. Some in our party had skinny-dipped on a hike up the Presidential Range in New Hampshire. We were personal.
My feeding frenzies with a telephone have cast a net of uncertainty over others as well.
I was never sure if I got through to Jackie (not her real name) at The New York Times more than once. She worked on the copy desk at The Post circa '70 and made us proud with her rise at The Times, as an editor listed in the mast. But I didn't contact her now except when manic.
That was the pattern with Eileen (not her real name), too. She was the one girl friend that my parents thought I should marry. We skied and played tennis evenly matched, but passion was absent. We went our separate ways—until I started phoning her during episodes. She took the calls good-naturedly, and in our last conversation said she was selling rings, not that I would be a good customer.
A royal telephone blitz focused on international operators. Never before having called abroad from home, I seemed to have a battalion of operators at my command. I fantasized that a newspaper office friend was herself Princess Di and I Prince Charles. We were a big society item on both sides of the Atlantic and at the same time wore reporters' hats as we covered a story breaking world-wide. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and never did. But the waking dream cost me a $650 phone bill.
AT&T wanted its money when I came back to earth.
Chapter 16
In Death's Shadow
IT WAS NEAR TWO Y E A R S that I watched life slip away from the homestead like dying embers in the night. My father was first to go, at eighty-five, from complications of Parkinson's disease. We moved him to a nursing home after many restless nights, and in October 1997 we buried him in his hometown, among the pink granite and limestone of the Hill Country.
My mother's time for interment in the family plot was months later. She too spent her last days in a Beaumont nursing home, suffering the pain of ovarian cancer, and was eighty-five.
As AN ONLY CHILD, I called her Mama. She had not wanted the end for either to come like this, in a nursing home. She fretted when my dad was admitted ahead of her and when he asked, "Is this our home now?" But then, as in her own case, she relied on the wisdom of doctors, who said good care would be difficult at home. Oh, she didn't let go. She drove to his "home" each morning and stayed the whole day, straightening over him the sheets he tossed off and feeding him. It was the type of care a thin staff could not devote much time to. And she would faithfully ask that the attendants put my dad in a wheelchair for a daily push through the halls, and when I was along, to the patient garden. This care for her husband of sixty-one years was a proud achievement. "I'm glad I lived long enough," she said.
This is not to say she lived in a serene state. When her memory faltered after Daddy's funeral, I took her to a geriatric psychiatrist who, based on a brief examination, said she had dementia, a deterioration of the brain. He recommended assisted living. She balked. Seeking further guidance, I wrote details of her conduct to my psychiatrist, asking what to do. He urged a locked-up unit for life, saying I could find a judge to order it. I balked. There was plenty of light in her yet.
Yes, there was the verbal abuse. She would, for example, thrash me daily for not using the car visor that blocked my vision. No amount of explaining quieted her. But to the doctor and a friend who associated this with dementia I replied, "If that's dementia, she's had it all her life."
In August 1998 her primary physician gave me a choice to make for my mother, chemotherapy or a hysterectomy with chemotherapy. I elected the operation, but local surgeons would not perform it because of the high risk. So I took her to Houston to see an acclaimed doctor who examined her and said he would operate. However, her doctor back home researched things further and said the operation would "destroy" her. I took that to mean insurmountable pain.
Chemotherapy was started on the glowing recommendation of a specialist, and it left her so dazed with nausea and temperature fluctuations that the primary physician stopped the treatment immediately. There were these irrefutable aftershocks: She was permanently weakened, and death was imminent.
Thus began her nursing home residency. She was free to come and go as she pleased, although we never tried an overnight excursion after the trip to Houston, where pampered care in a luxury hotel with gourmet room service was lost to the occasion. We instead made short forays, not all pleasant. When lunch was Italian, and I ordered Italian soup, she reprimanded me repeatedly. "But I wanted soup," I protested. Warmer like the fall afternoon was the kind suggestion of a nurse that I take her for ice cream. We both enjoyed the soft cones.
We watched the Astros playoffs in her room long after others were asleep. I made a point of it, and she maintained interest despite knowing her time at the plate was about up. She had asked, "How long do I have to live?"
"About six months," I said.
"You shouldn't have told me," she said.
We celebrated Christmas as she weakened. The Novaks, her best friends, brought a ham dinner and we took her home for the final time. It was a traditional setting, except I took her in the bedroom to see a snow scene on the computer, and she couldn't see. She would soon close her eyes to her failing sight.
There were tears. One of the nurses reported she had them all crying when she expressed sadness that she had but me to be with her in death. "Some don't have one," the nurse told her. The only tears I saw were the last time I brought her pal Chica, a Boston terrier, to the nursing home. The little dog jumped on her bed. I thought she was hurting her legs. But my mother shook me off, and she was crying. She hadn't had a pet as a child, and Chica in a string of dogs I owned came closest to being hers.
One day Barbara McNeill, who was a Gordon when I knew her growing up in First Christian Church, invited me out for a welcome break A registered nurse, she had labored to abort her mother's fatal complication in a hospital room across the hall from my mother's.
Barbara and her husband Alan, a lawyer, took coffee drinking as seriously as I did, and on a sunny and mild January day, we sipped away in their home. Shortly a phone call came for help in driving a herd of cattle from one pasture to another. I asked Barbara why the move. She explained, "It's a male thing."
The task was done, and shortly thereafter Alan ventured that they should name the newborn in the herd, a rambunctious red male, Carlton, after me. With a namesake I recommended they run a tab at the feed store on me.
Soon after, my mother perked up a bit when told about the calf, having been a farm girl. Successive days later she would ask, "How's the little calf?"
Death came in the night when I wasn't there. The nurse said her blue feet forecast her end, but at 10 p.m. I went for sleep, leaving a sitter on watch. At 2 a.m. I got a call reporting her heavy breathing, a sign before she would go. I hurried. "She's gone," the nurse said as I entered. The sitter volunteered that "she went in her sleep."
My mother had worried that no one would come to her services. She was a homemaker and sparingly a community volunteer. Most of her friends were dead. Yet fifty showed up at her visitation, and another twenty at a graveside rite in a remote corner of the state. A casket spray with eight dozen red roses was placed by her son.
Chapter 17
Home
"AND NOW HE is HOME, "I intoned over the freshly dug grave of my father.
"To this favored place where he swam as a boy, planting bare feet and swinging out into natural pools of spring-fed creeks and rivers.
"To the live oaks and cedar breaks he tramped for deer.
"He is home in late October when there is a hard clarity to the air, a softer glow of the sun on pink Texas granite of a billion years, and limestone ledges.
"He is back home with family, in their spiritual home of Lampasas. His brothers are or will be buried here, and his parents and grandparents."
AND THEN MY WORDS gave way to his words in a memoir he wrote, The Little Red Flag, about his first job in this community he loved, a rite of passage into adulthood.
"When in a group of people and the conversation was about sports, I have attempted to tell about the little red flag. I only wanted to tell about its usage in golf in the middle and late years of the twenties. These persons would only look at me in disbelief or make some remark to cause me to feel that I wasn't telling a true story.
"The golf course consisted of nine holes built about two miles from town on the rolling grass plains dotted here and there with live oak trees and some brush thickets. The drainage of this course was in the middle, which we called washed out gullies. Most of the land of this nature around Lampasas was used to graze sheep because native grass and weeds grew abundantly.
"After thirty-five years each hole is a distinct picture in my mind. As the saying goes, 'I ran my legs off on this golf course for about three years using the little red flag. I was only a boy on his first job
and was closely associated with men for the first time, most of whom operated businesses in this small town of a population of 2,000. By this close association I knew how each would play each hole.
"The first hole was a par four, about 315 yards. The fairways on this hole and all other holes were mowed with a weed sowing machine which left about four to six inches of grass and weeds. The rough was sometimes mowed to about eight or twelve inches, but most of the time was higher than that. A short slice to the right on this first hole would mean a lost ball in a thicket of grass and bushes. The approach shot to the green could easily go outside by rolling under a barbed wire fence just back of the green. All greens were made out of sand and treated with oil. All were enclosed with a mound of dirt about ten inches high.
"The number two hole was about 535 yards and par five. There was a barbed wire fence all the way down the right hand side and was out of bounds when you hit the ball over it. The number three hole was about 170 yards and par three, but in order to make a correct shot you had to shoot over a corner that consisted of two barbed wire fences coming together and forming a space to hit across of about 50 yards, which was out of bounds.
"All caddies hated the barbed wire because that meant torn cloths and flesh, lost balls, and an unhappy golfer.
"The number six hole was about 440 yards and par four. On the left hand side of the fairway about 150 yards out were very tall live oak trees. It was reported that a golfer hit a ball that knocked a crow out of the very top and killed it. On the right of this hole was a very thick thicket of oak trees of all sizes. Back of the green was a very large mesquite tree.
"The number seven hole was about 350 yards and par four. On the right side of the fairway it was very rocky and there was an oak thicket. This fairway and the number eight fairway joined each other and the gullies and drainage I spoke of a while ago was part of these two fairways. The number nine hole was about 390 yards and par four. There was a row of large oak trees that crossed nearly all of this fairway about 175 yards away and most all of the golfers tried to shoot to the left because the number two fairway joined the number nine. But there was a lot of balls that hit in the top of the large oak.
"I know you are wondering how a little red flag could cause me to remember each of these holes. I was told one day that I could make some money if I went out to the golf course and learned how to caddie. This I did but it was a very hard and trying experience. The definition in Webster's dictionary of a caddie is, 'a lad who carries golf clubs.' This definition is incorrect as far as this golf course in its use of a caddie. First I learned that every caddie had about fifteen little red flags of his own. Next I learned that every twosome, threesome, or foursome had a preference for a certain caddie. Since I was only fourteen, most of the caddies were older and more experienced. I then learned that there were a lot more caddies than needed.
"No one wanted a beginner because a beginner lost balls, since there was definitely an art in seeing balls in the air, listening for them to hit the ground, and seeing them on their first bounce before the weeds and grass could hide them from sight. Furthermore, it appeared, to succeed one had to conquer competition and personalities. As I learned later, this was done by patience, mastery, and determination to be good at your first job.
"So I went home and told my mother I needed fifteen little red flags. I had seen flags of different sizes and attached to the wire of a clothes hanger in some crude fashion. I told her that some of the boys had cut strips of red cheese cloth and attached them to the wire by bending it close together. I know now what was going through her mind. If you are going to have a flag, make it look like one. She bought enough red cotton cloth to make fifteen red flags of a size of three by four inches. She hemmed them all the way around but left a wider hem to slide the wire through on one end. Then I bent a small loop at the top of the flag and closed it tight with part of the flag covering the loop. Then to make sure it wouldn't slip off, she sewed it some more with needle and red thread around this loop. Then I took them down to Payne's Bicycle Shop and they made a sharp point on the other end so that it would stick in the ground easy.
"The next day I left for the golf course a proud little boy. Our pastor and neighbor, the Rev. Lawrence Williams, gave me a ride, as would become his custom, and that put me one up on many other caddies. But I was later disappointed on that and many days to come for I couldn't land a job.
"Finally, I caught on. I paired up with an older, more experienced caddie to learn the basic steps. Such was the practice that most foursomes had two caddies if they were not good players or if they did not have enough confidence in just one caddie.
"But here is the part no one believes and which proves Webster wrong.
"You would stand out in front of a twosome, threesome, or foursome about 175 yards on all holes of par four and par five for the first shot. As each one would hit their ball you were supposed to watch it and run stick a flag by it The player could seldom see the ball in the fairway and never could see it or seldom find it in the rough if the red flag wasn't by the ball. If it was a par three hole you stood close to the green. On the second shot of a par four and par five hole you stood within twenty-five yards of the green. You were supposed to flag every ball before the next golfer shot and retrieve if at all possible all balls over the barbed-wire fence. This was quite a task and was done by only the best of caddies.
"As I got better and more confidence in myself, I would go down and ask Dr. Fariss, a dentist, for a job that day so I would at least have one to caddie for and most of the time he would tell the others he had a caddie already hired for them also. This is the way I got ahead of the other caddies before the players reached the golf course.
"Dr. Fariss usually played with Dr. Dickinson, another dentist, and Dr. Willerson, an MD. Their average score for nine holes was between forty-three and fifty, but sometimes Dr. Fariss would break forty since his drives were pretty accurate and went about 225 yards.
"The more you caddied for the same players the easier it was, because you knew just about how high the ball would get off of the ground and which way it would go. I practiced running by a ball, and holding the flag on the end of the small loop, I could stick it close to the ball by throwing it instead of stooping down. Of course, I would miss quite often and then have to return and stick the flag up.
"Wooden tees were used in the fairways since the ground and grass were not in condition to hit from. These tees were usually pushed in a small slit in a piece of rubber cut from a tire inner tube so that you could retrieve them easily and not lose them.
"Thanks, however, to the little red flag, I earned 25 cents a player and a lesson about determination."
Chapter 18
The Storyteller
MY GRANDFATHER, MY FATHER'S FATHER,was a wellspring of storytelling. He visited from his San Angelo home by train in my last years at home in the '50s, and my dad had the foresight to record these true tales from a life that stretched from 1873 to 1969, or ninety-five years.
In these reminiscences, Granddaddy (P. E. Leatherwood—he. went by his initials) told of "the best sport I ever enjoyed" He said:
WE MOVED OUT ON PATTERSON CREEK, thirteen miles north of Lampasas. The country was open, didn't have many wire fences. And let it come a rainy time or a time we couldn't work, we'd get out on the horses with a greyhound. It would take right in after a jackrabbit, and all the other dogs in the community would join in, too. And these common dogs acted as shortstop. They'd see the greyhound bringing the rabbit around in a circle and cut across and confuse the rabbit. Then the greyhound would pick him up.
"So one day I was out hunting with my uncles, and we jumped a rabbit and took after it. Their horses ran away with them and went over the hill, and the greyhound routed the rabbit back toward me. So I got right in behind them and rode standing up in my stirrups whipping the horse on both shoulders with my old hat and yelling at the top of my voice.
"And the greyhound was just nipping at that rabbit at every jump, and finally it caught it.
"We couldn't catch more than two, and we would catch the second one and quit because the greyhound was run down."
Had I been keen on genealogy in my youth, I would have appreciated more, and harvested more, from this fertile mind.
Said he, "My grandmother and grandfather Leatherwood came from South Carolina. My mother's mother was Grandma Jones. She was a school girl with my grandmother Leatherwood—my two grandmothers were schoolchildren together. They came from South Carolina to Alabama, and then the Leatherwoods lived over in Mississippi awhile and went back to Alabama. Then they came to Texas.
"My grandfather moved up near Liberty Hill and bought a tract of land to farm. My father had just become of age and helped him grub out the farm, then he went back to marry my mother. When he got back to Alabama, my grandmother Jones felt like it was a breaking up of them for mother to leave them. So he said, 'All of you get ready and go to Texas with us.' They came to Texas and settled in Bastrop County, where I was born August 21,1873."
His father died when he was six months old, and his mother, grandmother and two uncles moved up near Liberty Hill near his grandfather Leatherwood before all moved to Lampasas. His mother died when he was eight, leaving him an orphan in the care of his maternal grandmother.
He attended boarding school at sixteen.
"It was a co-ed school and the boys had a long row of rooms called the Sheep Shed, and the girls had a dormitory, a two-story building with a big dining room. The boys and girls got their meals together. And we had a teacher at each long table.
"One morning for breakfast we were served oatmeal. One of the boys kept picking at the bowl of oatmeal, and the teacher said, 'Is something the matter with your oatmeal?' And the boy said, 'Look here what it is.'
"It was a whole mouse cooked in it."
The patriarch of the Leatherwoods told of his personal work history, which spanned the Depression. He began work at seventeen and before long, after returning from a fishing trip, landed his job for the next twenty-five years, which was bookkeeper at Barnes and Manuel, a hardware store in Lampasas.
"I resigned to take the postmastership of Lampasas," he said.
He held the postmaster position from 1920-1922. There are family accounts that this job ended with difficulties. But a combing of newspapers and postal records do not support this.
Maybe my mother knew something more. She and her father-in-law indulged in the social grace of coffee in the kitchen long after my dad, an early riser, and I had gone to bed. With each visit she ushered him into our household with much honor and special thanksgiving.
He eventually worked for Standard Hide and Fur Co. in Dallas, leaving his wife Lou and five children in Lampasas for another ten years, a place they recalled with fondness. However, "The Depression came on, and the fur and wool business closed up, so we went to San Angelo to live in 1932 and I had a hard time getting started again. I took most any little job I could get."
Finally drifting into stability, he retired at eighty-one after eleven years at Findlater Hardware Co. in San Angelo. His good health and nimbleness of mind permitted him to do income tax returns for clients into his 90s. How alert was he at the end? He could recite in order of service the full names of all the presidents of the United States.
It was not until his death bed that I learned of our kindred spirit. Granddaddy told of turn-of-the-century camping trips by wagon to Fall Creek Falls on the Colorado River of Texas. The campers included school teachers and other professionals from Lampasas; a cook tent separated the tents of men and women.
It was obvious he had a vision for me. His gifts included a leather briefcase and a handsomely bound world atlas, both of which I held onto despite the coming of attaché cases and changes in national boundaries.
The Leatherwoods were united through marriage with the George W. Porters of Troy, Texas, when my parents exchanged vows on September 5, 1936. The honeymooners spent that Labor Day weekend at the Hotel Wooten in Abilene.
My mother kept the menu for their Sunday dinner. I don't know the choices made, but whatever they were, it was a splendid feast that might have included fresh Galveston shrimp, chicken okra soup (my mother loved okra), broiled fresh Alaskan salmon with cucumber slaw, three vegetables, lettuce and tomato salad, fresh Elberta peach tart and buttermilk—all for 75 cents.
There were also five children in the Porter family. All the children in both families would marry, but eight would have an only child. The generation of my aunts and uncles experienced both the Depression and World War II—and beget three more generations.
The patriarch of the Porter family, George, was diagnosed with heart disease in 1928, and the farm chores fell to Mida, the wife, and the children. None of the offspring stayed to tend the land when they became adults, moving into teaching, oil, and homemaking.
Of this family's genealogy, there is this proud belief that Mida Nelson was descended from Thomas Nelson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
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