“We don’t often see people who wear animal hides instead of clothes,” she replied.
“Back in Tennessee buckskin is considered right smart fashion. You and your folks have been mighty kind. One day you can tell your grandchildren you fixed breakfast for Davy Crockett and his Tennessee volunteers on their way to San Antonio de Bexar to give ole Santa Anna the fight of his life.”
I loved my mother. She stuck up for poor whites and people of color, and was generous to a fault with the little money we had. But I avoided looking into her eyes and the memories from her own life that were buried there. The same with my father. He was an educated and genteel man from South Louisiana who went over the top five times in what he called the Great War. He was an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, and consequently doomed to a life of emotional and intellectual loneliness. Mother’s depression and frigidity did not help, and I thought it no wonder my father’s most loyal companions had become his beer at the icehouse and the whiskey he hid in the garage.
“What are you studying on?” Grandfather said.
“Why do you call the Mexicans wets?”
“Good question. You could walk across the Rio Grande on your hands. We’re going outside. Find you a hat in the hall. That wind has no mercy.”
He was right. It was dry and full of grit and as cold and mean and ugly as a witch’s broom. We ran for the barn. There must have been eight or nine Mexicans sitting in the straw, and maybe more back in the darkness. The chickens were trying to hide in the loft. I don’t think I ever saw people as hungry or lean. The baby I saw sucking at its mother’s breast looked made of sticks and a hank of skin and hair. Grandfather passed out the ham and biscuits and went out to the windmill and unhitched the chain and used a clean syrup can to catch the water under the pipe that fed the stock tank.
When he returned, he passed the syrup can among the Mexicans and told them he would get them more water when the can was done. The wind was puffing under the roof, straining the tin roof against the beams and storm latches. From outside I could hear the sound of a car engine and metal rattling and bouncing. Grandfather put his eye to a crack in the door. He spoke without taking his eye from the crack. “Aaron,” he said.
“Yes, sir?” I replied, aware of the change in his voice and the fact he had used my christened name.
“Keep these people inside. Don’t open the door. Not for any reason.”
“What’s wrong, Grandfather?”
He slipped a shovel loose from a barrel of tools. “I try to avoid confrontations with white trash, but sometimes they don’t give you no selection.”
He pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold. I felt a solitary raindrop strike my eyeball, as bright and hard as a chip of glass. Then Grandfather shut the door. I squinted through the crack and saw him approach a Model T Ford in the middle of a dry streambed that led down to the river. A tall man as thin as a lizard stepped out on the ground, his tie lifting in the wind, his suit flattening against his body. He had a long, unshaved face and tubular nose, shadowed by a John B. Stetson hat. He had to shout to be heard. “Fixing to take a shit in the woods, Mr. Holland?”
“I don’t abide profanity on my property, Mr. Watts.”
“I’m here out of respect. I’m also here to avoid trouble.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Watts. I’m sure the failing is mine.”
The man named Watts looked at Mother’s car and at the dust on the running boards and the swaths of it on the windshield. The wind flapped his coat back, exposing the brass star on his belt and the holster and sidearm on his hip. “Miss Wynona is visiting?”
“What’s the nature of your visit, Mr. Watts?”
“We think there’s infiltrators coming up from the border.”
“Infiltrators?”
“To be specific, Japs.”
“The Japs are fixing to bomb Yoakum, Texas?” Grandfather said. “That’s what you’re saying?”
Mr. Watts’s face made me think of soil erosion. His eyes were as flat and black as watermelon seeds under his hat brim. “I never spoke badly of you, Mr. Holland. I know what whiskey can do. There’s a seat in our church anytime you want it.”
“I know your preacher well. I saw him at a cross-burning once. He was setting fire to the cross. I was writing down license numbers.”
“Jesus didn’t choose to be born a colored man. There wasn’t any on the Ark, either.”
“I got a theory on some of that,” Grandfather said. “Know why God made certain kinds of white people?”
“No, and I’m not interested. I been sent out here by federal authorities.”
“He was sending a message to the nigras about the superiority of white intelligence.”
The wind gusted, rattling the blades on the windmill. Mr. Watts gazed at the barn door. “You calving early this year?”
“My cows were gone in ’31. My grandson and I were gathering up some eggs.”
“You wouldn’t go upside my head with that shovel if I looked inside your barn, would you?”
“No, sir. But I’d file charges against you if you did it without a warrant.”
“I see. Tell your daughter hello for me,” Mr. Watts said. He turned his face so it caught the light. He winked, a grin at the corner of his mouth.
I saw Grandfather’s right hand twitch, as though stung by a bee. “Come back here,” he said.
Mr. Watts drove back down the streambed, the tires of his Model T rolling over fat white rocks that were webbed with algae and that crackled loudly when they were heavily pressed one against the other.
We fed the Mexicans and went back in the house. It had a second story and dormers, but it was a tinderbox and creaked with the wind and had bat and squirrel pellets all over the attic. At one time Grandfather had owned five farms and ranches, one of them on the green waters of the Guadalupe River outside Victoria. But his love of cards and liquor and outlaw women created numerous graves that had no marker and children who had no father.
He never got religion, at least not in the ordinary sense. I also doubted if he dwelled long on the men he shot, since most of them were killers and not worth the dirt it took to bury them. The children he had abandoned were another matter. He could not ignore the despair in my mother’s face when the afternoon sun began to slip below the horizon and evening shadows dropped like wild animals from the trees and crept across the yard in order to devour her heart. In those moments there was no way to shake the terror from her face.
She found a substitute for her father when she was seventeen, but no one was ever sure who. There were many soldiers in town, and also traveling salesmen. Some said her lover died in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Whoever he was, he disappeared from her life and she quit high school and went to Houston. Three months later she returned and picked cotton with the darkies, and later went to night school and learned shorthand. For the rest of her life the one subject she would never discuss was abortion and would leave a room if anyone alluded to it.
After Mr. Watts had gone and Grandfather and I came back into the house, Mother kept staring at the barn and the trail of white rocks in the gulley that used to be a streambed. Her skin was still clear and youthful, her amber hair thick and full of lights, piled on her head like a 1920s woman would wear it. Her dress was paper-thin, printed with tiny red roses, and washed almost colorless. “What’s going to become of the Mexicans?” she said.
“I know a man in Victoria who’s hiring,” Grandfather said. “He can pick them up tonight.”