Spoken from the Heart (5 page)

When we went to Lubbock on the weekends, he loved to drive around and point out houses that his father had built. Daddy taught himself how to draw a floor plan and the basics of construction. By the late 1940s, about the time my baby brother was born and died, Daddy had begun buying small plots of land and putting up houses, starting with our own new block on Estes Avenue.

Sometimes we lived in a house after Daddy built it. Once he sold it, we simply packed up and moved down the street into another house. It was like a game of leapfrog along the block. Daddy also built houses to rent. The house behind us was rented, and my second-grade teacher and her husband briefly rented a duplex that he built. Except for the paint, the houses were largely indistinguishable. Each had a little front door with a covered overhang and windows on either side, and they were all packed in tight, one right next to another. You could practically hand your neighbors a cup of sugar through the window. Or hear most everything that was being said.

From the time of the first settlers, West Texas was a land of magnificent distances and empty range, and the promise and the risk that come with both. Even in the mid-twentieth century, many of the cities and towns that sprang up across its flatlands and ridgelines were unconsciously made to resemble the old stockade forts that were built to hold off Indian war parties or offset fears of a second Mexican invasion. People pulled together and looked inward, rather than out to the unknown. Shared experience was a powerful bond, and transplants and new arrivals created second families out of friends.

That was how it was for Harold and Jenna Welch and Charlie and Mary White, who rented the tiny white house behind us on Estes Avenue. When I was three, I loved running over to Charlie and Mary's; I was forever rapping at their door. My mother told them they could just ignore me. But I was persistent. I'd knock on the front door, and if they didn't answer, I'd go around to the kitchen door in the back and catch them sitting at their table. And I'd say, "Oh, there you are." I never got the hint that they didn't answer the door on purpose.

When I was five, Mary got pregnant, and the day Linda, their daughter, was born, Charlie came to tell me first. He walked in the front door early in the morning. No one ever thought about locking up in Midland. When I came out of my room, Mother was already heading for the kitchen to whip up a celebratory batch of pancakes. Charlie and Mary were so much like family that we had Christmas with them every year. At first, when I was little and they didn't have children, they would come and have Christmas with us. After Linda and then Larry were born, we alternated, one house hosted Christmas Eve, the other Christmas Day. Mary, Charlie, and my mother would cook Christmas Eve dinner, a huge production of intricately stuffed Hungarian cabbage rolls. Daddy provided the recipe, courtesy of one of his CIT employees who was Hungarian. Over time, the cabbage rolls gave way to bubbling platters of enchiladas or tamales. For Christmas Day, either Mary or my mother roasted a turkey. Long after we had moved from Estes Avenue, long after I was grown, we still celebrated Christmas with the Whites. For Mother and Daddy, those shared Christmases with a house full of eager children and paper and presents were the holidays that they had dreamed of but that had remained just beyond their grasp.

When my own daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were born, Linda made them elaborate felt stockings to recall our Christmases together. The girls still hang them in front of the fireplace every December 24.

All told, Estes Avenue had five houses crammed on one little block, with their bits of patchy front lawn and matching concrete front walks. Because it was right after the war and supplies were costly and scarce, the houses were built with the most basic materials--plain board siding, no shutters on the windows. Their walls couldn't go up fast enough. The oil companies were bringing people into Midland, and nearly everyone who arrived needed a house. At one point, during an earlier boom, the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which would later become Exxon, picked up over seventy houses, packed them onto trucks, and moved them from a temporary oil camp into Midland. They were deposited all over the city, where families added rooms and stuck brick veneers on the fronts. They became many of Midland's earliest homes.

Indeed, for about a century, you can chart Midland's progress like the rings of a tree, the fat years of the oil or cattle booms, the thin years of the busts. From Hogan's Folly, the downtown expanded out into the steel office towers of the fifties, then the smoky glass high-rises of the late seventies and early eighties. The houses were the same, the early, wide-porch wooden ranch houses with lattice and gables and their own windmills to pump precious water, then the tiny 1930s and '40s ramblers, then the comfortable brick ranch houses of the 1950s, with their big picture windows and wood trim, then the slant-roofed, brown-brick town homes of the late 1970s and early '80s. Midland would build and then stop, wait years, and then begin the frenzy of building all over again.

On Estes Avenue, parents could turn their children loose and let them roam. Mothers sent their kids outside every afternoon. We'd play kick the can, tag, Red Rover, and other games that were mostly excuses to run through the vacant lots nearby. The lots were scrubby little squares of land where no one had built anything yet, and they were covered with mesquite trees, which are considered trash trees in large parts of Texas. A few people darkly swear that horse thieves brought them up from Mexico and planted them to hide their stolen animals in. More likely, their seeds rode north on the flanks of longhorns during endless cattle drives. Some of the cattle also ate mesquite beans and dropped the pods back down to the ground in their manure. Whatever its origin, mesquite seemed to be the only tree that actually thrived in the arid Midland ground. "Thrived" may be too strong a word. Our mesquite trees were stunted little things, parched and dry like most everything around them, with fluttery leaves that looked like ferns. But when I was young, it seemed very exotic to race through the mesquite, following the narrow paths that other kids' feet had already worn. Because Midland was so new, there were kids all over the neighborhood, growing hot and restless in their tiny postwar homes.

When the streets and lots were quiet, my mother would still turn me out, bundling me off on adventures of her own creation. One of her particular favorites was the solo picnic, where I ate lunch among the soft flurry of birds and leaves. I remember her carefully packing a sack, handing me a jug of milk, and sending me scampering off to the park over on the next street. It was hardly a park; it was little more than an oddly shaped triangle of leftover land where two streets intersected. Someone had planted a cluster of elms at each end. But there was a shiny metal swing, and to a small child, it was a big expanse, far larger than the few square feet of our own yard. I would sit under the rustling trees, unwrap my sandwich, open my milk jug, and eat my solo picnic.

The last house that Daddy built on Estes Avenue sat on the corner of Estes and Big Spring. It was the only brick home on the whole block. We lived there until I was eight. When television came to Midland, Daddy had the garage bricked over and enclosed to make a den.

By then, Daddy was building houses almost full-time. He had gone in with a partner, Lloyd Waynick. Lloyd didn't have children and he liked to sleep late, so Daddy would head to the house sites early and Lloyd would take the afternoon shift while Daddy slipped home for a quick nap. They were always looking for new sites. They bought land from ranchers or cotton farmers who wanted to get out of farming as well as empty tracts along the ever-expanding edges of Midland. Daddy's face was perpetually sunburned, his left arm twice as dark as his right from resting it on the open car window as he drove from job site to job site, from strip of land to strip of land.

Daddy built houses for people moving in with the oil business, and in the boom years, the buyers just kept coming. He built only spec houses. No matter how many times someone asked, he refused to build a custom home. "Too expensive with people changing their minds," he maintained. Daddy had no interest in ripping out cabinets or carpeting or moving a den simply because someone had seen a picture in a furniture catalog or a magazine. Nearly all of Daddy's houses had the identical floor plan. The few times that he experimented and built a different plan, the house took months to sell. Buyers wanted their houses to have a living room at the front, a den behind it, and a hallway with three bedrooms, one hall bath, and one bath in the master bedroom, plus a kitchen and a utility room. They were sturdy, ranch-style houses, not very different from thousands of other homes all over the United States. By the time he had finished building, Daddy had put up dozens of homes in and around Midland.

Yet if anything ever needed fixing in our house, that was purely my mother's domain. Daddy wasn't handy at all. He didn't even change lightbulbs. My mother did those things and repaired what she could or had a serviceman or one of Daddy's men do it. He could oversee construction and draw floor plans, but he wasn't much good with an actual hammer or wrench in his hands.

Now on the weekends, instead of going to Lubbock, we would drive around Midland. We'd ride slowly up and down the streets, and Daddy would point and say, "I built that house. I built that house. That's one of my houses."

But mostly we drove just to drive. It was how we got out of the house. People in Midland didn't walk, they drove everywhere. Kids rode their bikes until they turned fourteen and could get behind the wheel of a car on their own. On restless days, we merely drove longer and farther. Daddy could drive from Midland to Dallas in six hours and from Midland to El Paso in another six. And those were the drives we did. After he got home from work on a Friday night, we'd head for the car and drive six hours to my grandparents in El Paso or my uncle Mark in Dallas. Occasionally, when I was little, we would drive into Arkansas to visit my mother's grandmother, who lived on a small slip of a dairy farm right near my grandfather's two old-maid sisters and bachelor brother. Each time we crossed the border, my father would joke about all the trees in Arkansas, making it sound as if we were people who had never seen a tree.

The Texas roads of my memory, seen from the backs of our roomy Fords, were wide, flat, and smooth, in part because it was an energy-producing state but also because Texas was so very big and everything was so far away. You could drive for an entire day and still be inside Texas. A hundred years before, men had set out in wagons and on horseback to follow trampled grass trails; today it was gas-powered engines from Detroit humming over million-dollar roads. Modern-day Texas was designed around driving, and vast sums were spent on the state's highways. I remember the minute we drove across the state line into New Mexico, the roads became pitted and rutted and I would rattle and bump around on the long bench seat, pressing my legs down and digging in with my knees. No one ever thought of using seat belts; there weren't any in the car. Sometimes in the heat my skin stuck to the upholstery until I would have to peel it off like a thick roll of sticky tape.