Spoken from the Heart (2 page)

He would never come home from the Western Clinic. He would never have his intended name. My parents had planned on naming him Hal, after both my father and my grandfather. But no one wanted to bury Hal Welch, three days old. So his official name was John Edward. Hal or Harold was a name they would save for another boy.

John Edward lived only for those few days and then he died. He had a birth certificate, but I never heard him spoken of as a live birth. A "late miscarriage" was how it was euphemistically put. Newnie Ellis, the city undertaker, tended to his lifeless body. He was buried in a tiny box coffin in an unmarked grave alongside other Midland babies who had, over the years and decades, come ever so briefly into the world and then passed on.

There were two more lost babies, a girl, Sarah Elizabeth, when I was eight and another boy when I was thirteen. The doctors called them late miscarriages too. I remember when I was eight that my mother had a blue and white polka dot maternity dress and I had a little navy blue and white polka dot dress. They weren't really matching, but they were the same polka dot, and I loved that we almost matched when we wore them. But by midsummer, her dress and the baby, who would have been my sister, were gone.

I don't know if my mother cried for these babies when I was out playing in the yard, or rapping on the door of our back-door neighbors over the fence, or darting with the other kids between the gangly, dark limbs and feathery, green leaves of the mesquite bushes that grew over the vacant lot down the street. I don't know if the tears came when she smoothed sheets in the linen closet or hung wash on the clothesline to grow stiff and dry in the hot Midland wind. Or if she trained her eyes to look away whenever she caught sight of a baby carriage or glimpsed a big, boisterous family being herded into a wood-paneled station wagon. In those times, in West Texas, in the 1950s, we did not talk about those things.

The mother I knew laughed and loved. But there remained a corner of her heart that longed for those vanished babies, a corner that dreamed of a big family of her own. Now, at ninety, when she cannot recall someone she met the day before, she remembers those babies. She sits in her green chair in her plain Midland living room and says, "We would have had two boys and two girls if they had all lived. It would have been quite a family, wouldn't it? I sure wish one of those little boys could have lived at least, because my husband wanted a boy so bad."

But even back when nothing was said, I knew how much both my parents wanted those other children. I wanted them too. I remember as a small girl looking up at the darkening night sky, waiting for the stars to pop out one by one. I would watch for that first star, for its faint glow, because then I could make my wish. And my wish on a star any time that I wished on a star was that I would have brothers and sisters.

But year after year, the sound of feet darting down the sidewalk, and up over the front porch, and through the screen door was always mine and mine alone.

Dreams and Dust

On the porch in Canutillo with our dog Bully. Grammee laid the orange brick by hand.

When my dad was fighting in Europe in the war, he made a bargain with God. He promised God that if he got home alive, he'd never own another gun. And he never did. There was never any kind of a gun in our house, although most boys in Midland by the time they were fourteen could knock off a row of cans with a .22. My father did not go hunting for dove or quail or geese or shoot for sport, like a lot of other Texans do. He drank and he gambled, he bet on football games. He played cards and rolled dice. But he never had a gun. Ever.

He and his friends were passionate gamblers, especially on football. They used to meet on Sunday afternoons at Johnny's Bar-B-Q on Big Spring Street, right at the edge of downtown Midland, when the tables were empty and the restaurant was closed to huddle over pro games. They bet on pro games, on college games, even on the high school games that packed the stadium in Midland every Friday night. They played cards, especially gin rummy, rolled dice, and a few of them, including Daddy, occasionally packed up and flew to Vegas. Once, I came home from college with a boy I wanted my parents to meet, and my dad was squatting down on the kitchen floor, shooting craps with his buddies, the dice skidding across the flat tile and bouncing against the cabinets. The lot of them barely looked up. I was mortified, but I think my college boy loved it.

The gambling part was a West Texas thing. People who live in this place where the desert meets the tip of the plains, where the soil fractures and cracks and blows up against you with the wind, are risk takers, and my dad had grown up in the heart of West Texas, in Lubbock, which is about 120 miles or two hours north of Midland. My mother told me that he had learned to shoot craps in the basement of Lubbock High when he was sixteen or seventeen. He shot a lot of craps in the Army in World War II. But unlike some of the men in Midland, and a few women too, there was never, ever an occasion when he gambled what he didn't have, or if he did, I certainly never knew of it. We never wanted because of his gambling.

My dad always considered himself lucky, and he was. He carried himself with a confidence that made it impossible to believe he could lose. Even his meeting my mother was luck. Or so the story went. She spotted him on the street in El Paso when she was looking out a second-floor window of the Popular Dry Goods Company, where she worked in the advertising department. Of course, it helped that one of her friends in the department was married to a man who knew Harold Welch. She remembers her friend saying, "Look, there's Hal," which was what they called him then. But the fact is that my mom went over and looked out the window at that exact moment, and there he was.

They had their first date at the Tivoli nightclub in Ciudad Ju'rez, directly across the border from El Paso. My mother remembers how everyone parked in El Paso and then, all dressed up, paid six cents to walk across the footbridge into Mexico. Ju'rez was a glamorous place. When I was little and we went to visit my grandparents, I remember Mother and Daddy getting ready to go over into Ju'rez for the evening, Mother in a big circle dress, Daddy fussing with the knot on his tie to get it just so. I begged to go with them.

The first club, right at the base of the bridge, was the Tivoli, and then a little farther down was another place, called Lobby Number Two, and other clubs fanned out from that. The "braver people" ventured farther out into the city, where at one time there was a jockey club and bullfights staged for the Americans, but my mother says that she and Harold never did any of that. The clubs had exotic--exotic at least for West Texas--floor shows and orchestras for dancing, and that first night over in Ju'rez, my mother and father ordered Boquilla black bass for dinner. The next morning, a little item ran in the gossip column of the El Paso paper noting that "Jenna Hawkins had been seen dancing with a handsome stranger at the Tivoli."

More than sixty-five years later, my mother still claims that she didn't want to be written up in the newspaper. But the Popular Dry Goods Company was the biggest advertiser in the local paper, and Jenna Hawkins worked in the advertising department. And making the news didn't seem to deter Harold Welch.

My parents started dating, and they were smitten fast. It was wartime. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was also at war with the Germans. My father was nearly thirty years old, but he enlisted. His assignment was an antiaircraft brigade attached to the 104th Infantry Division, known as the Timberwolves. His unit trained in Florida, Louisiana, and outside of El Paso at Fort Bliss, the Army's massive military installation in the West. When he was on leave, he courted my mother. Once she invited him on a picnic up in the El Paso foothills. She carefully packed a basket and a blanket, but Daddy, who was spending his days mired in the dirt of basic training, declined to eat on the ground. They balanced their plates on their laps and ate sitting inside the car with the windows rolled down.

My father was seven years older than my mother, but both of them had left school after two years of college to make their own way. In Daddy's case, it was because his own father had died and he needed to support his mother. My father's parents, Mark and Lula Lane Welch, were truly Victorians, born in 1870, five years after the Civil War had ended and while Queen Victoria was still on the throne. My grandmother even had a biography of Queen Victoria with a big oval picture on the cover and heavy embossing. My paternal grandparents were both from Arkansas, but they met in Ada, Oklahoma, and married when they were forty years old. My uncle Mark was born when they were forty-one and Daddy when they were forty-two. They moved to Fort Worth for a while and then ended up in Lubbock, where my grandfather built homes. He was, I think, a jack-of-all-trades, a carpenter who could put up a frame, lay pipe, shingle a roof, and run some rudimentary wires as well. I never knew him. My mother never met him either. By the time my parents met, only my grandmother was left. I remember her as a big, sturdy, but very elderly woman with heavy, black lace-up shoes. For years she had belonged to the Methodist Church and the Temperance Society, which apparently did nothing to stop her son from driving over to the county line to buy his liquor at Pinkie's package store. Midland was a dry county back then, so people simply drove out along the highway to the next county to buy their alcohol. When Grandma Welch came to visit, Daddy would still drink, but out of deference to his mother, he poured his bourbon into a Coca-Cola bottle.

When I was little, we drove to Lubbock every other weekend to visit my grandmother so that Daddy could check on her, make sure her house was tended to and her bills were paid. She came to our house for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My parents would go up and get her, and she would bring a bag of her pickled peaches that she put up each summer in heavy glass jars. Each Christmas she would make her famous coconut cake. Santa would leave a big, fresh coconut in my stocking, and then Daddy, with great ceremony, would crack the coconut with a hammer. My grandmother carefully drained the clear, sweet milk and grated the coconut meat with a hard box grater, which if you weren't careful, would cut your fingers raw. Then she sprinkled the tender curls over the frosting like a fine, white snow. She would spend Christmas Day making the cake for Christmas dinner. I'm not sure if she had a recipe or if she merely mixed the proportions in her mind, but every bite was delicious.

The Christmas after I turned eight, she carefully wrapped two pieces of jewelry, a pretty gold bracelet and a gold pin that my grandfather had given her, and put them under the Christmas tree for me. She sent my little cousin Mary Mark two other pieces of jewelry, including her opal ring. Those were the only four pieces of jewelry she owned. She must have known that this was going to be her last Christmas. She died right after that. My mother was with her. When Grandma Welch was sick and needed tending, it was my mother who drove to Lubbock to look after her. I was asleep in my parents' bed when the phone rang deep in the night. Daddy woke me and said simply, "Your grandmother died." That was all. My grandmother, his mother, was eighty-four.

Afterward, Mother discovered that Grandma Welch had taken her few nice things--a couple of cut glass vases, platters, a sugar bowl--and had carefully marked each possession with a strip of masking tape on the bottom, writing "Jenna" or "Catherine," and dividing what little she had between her two daughters-in-law.

My parents were married in a chapel at Fort Bliss in January of 1944, right before Daddy was to be shipped off to Europe. He wore his Army dress uniform. Mother followed him briefly to his next base, in Alexandria, Louisiana, but within a week my father was sent east. A hasty good-bye and he was gone. Whirlwind romances with GIs were common back then, but this wedding was no whim for my mother and certainly not for my father. One of his first letters to his new bride before he boarded the ship for England was a detailed accounting of their finances--he began by telling her that he didn't want her to be worried about money and proceeded to explain how much they had if Jenna ever needed to turn in their war bonds for cash.

With nothing to do except wait, Mother went back to El Paso and the Popular Dry Goods advertising department, got a roommate, and hung on every letter. One weekend, Mother and another of her married friends took turns snapping photos of each other immersed in fluffy bubble baths inside an old-fashioned claw-foot tub, flashing Kewpie doll smiles, and mailed the pictures over to their husbands. Daddy carried Mother's photo across northern Europe. He wrote to her from France, from Belgium, from Aachen, the ancient medieval town on the German border where Emperor Charlemagne once lived. It was the first German city to be captured by the Americans. His battalion, the 555th, was an antiaircraft battalion. My dad was a master gunner. His primary mission was to keep the unit's gun batteries in working order and to train new gunners, who arrived wide-eyed and green. He drew maps for the soldiers, and when U.S. forces entered Germany's fourth largest city, Cologne, under a hail of bullets, it would have been the guns under Daddy's command firing. After Germany surrendered, Daddy stayed on in Europe because the plan was that the troops would then be shipped over to Japan. By the time he was released to go home, it was nearly December of 1945, and the seas were too stormy to cross. He wrote to Mother from Paris and Dieppe on thin sheets of USO airmail paper. In one letter, he told her that he didn't like to go to a club and have too many beers with his friends, "because then I get to missing you so much that I can't stand it."