Waylon (3 page)

My dad was a good man, and he didn’t need the Church of Christ to tell him to do right. He was solid as a rock. He just tried
to live the best he could, the way a Christian should, and I never knew him to get really mad. He was a disciplinarian, but
he was kindhearted. He’d sooner give you the back of his hand than grab a belt if you pushed the wrong button. I’d be in the
back seat fussing with my younger brother Tommy, and he’d say “I’m going to slap the slobbers out of you, boy,” and we knew
to duck ’cause that hand would be swatting back at us. We’d hit the floor and keep quiet for the rest of the trip.

About the maddest I ever saw him get was one evening when I went to the movies on Sunday afternoon, and we were supposed to
go to church that night. It was a double feature, and Wendell and I watched it twice. Walking home, my dad pulled alongside
us in the car. “You shain’t go to the movies anymore on Sunday” was all he said. Anytime he said “shain’t” you could tell
he was angry.

I always knew he would protect me. One time I saw something nobody ever gets to see out of their dad. This kid, Billy Stewart,
was a little younger than my brother Tommy, and they’d gotten into it. Tommy was maybe ten, and Billy had run home crying.
He was a little crybaby anyway. So here comes Strawberry, his older brother, who was about twenty-two years old and a Golden
Gloves boxer, a big guy standing at least six foot two. He grabbed my little brother, and Tommy’s screaming bloody murder,
and Strawberry said he was going to give him a whipping.

My dad was chopping weeds in the garden, about two fences away, with an empty lot in between, and after that stretched the
grass and wildflowers of the prairie. Daddy said, “What are you doing with him? You turn that boy loose.”

“Well,” answered Strawberry, “he hurt my little brother and I’m fixing to kick his little ass.”

“No, you’re not,” Daddy replied in a low, even voice.

“Old man, stay out of this.”

Daddy dropped the hoe down, didn’t even take it with him, and he climbed over the first fence. He was pale as a sheet. “You
touch that boy and I’ll break your back.”

Strawberry said, “Old man, I make my living fighting. I whip people twice the size of you every night. You better stay away.
I’ll hurt you if you come over here.”

All Daddy would say is “You touch that boy and I’ll break your back.” He went over the next fence.

“You come here and I’m going to kill you,” Strawberry shouted. My dad didn’t even slow up. Finally Strawberry looked at him
and turned Tommy loose. “Aw, old man, you’re crazy,” he said, and backed off.

I knew right there what my daddy was all about. I was twelve years old, and I knew he would shield me from harm, would walk
through fire if he had to, and that he was a brave man. A hero. He wouldn’t let anything stand in the way of him and his child.
He never even stopped to think twice; he just kept on going, one foot after the other, telling Strawberry all the time he
would break his back. And I believe he would’ve.

Momma was, and always will be, restless. She has a lot of energy, and like me, that’s worked both for and against her in a
lot of ways. I feed that urge for going by traveling on the road. Momma gets high-strung and flighty, and sometimes I think
she doesn’t allow herself to be happy.

I got my determination from her, and maybe my sense of perfection. Momma doesn’t bend, and she would always know when I wasn’t
telling the truth. “You’re lying and I can see it written all over your face,” she’d say. My cheeks would be turning all sorts
of colors.

When I was little, it seemed like we moved every three or four months. Momma had pneumonia once, and we relocated to the Rio
Grande valley in South Texas, but Littlefield had a hold on us. We lived at the corner of Austin Avenue and Reed Street, a
long shotgun house with no bathroom, and then settled across from the high school on North Lake. By the time I was in grammar
school, we were back on Austin, at number 123, in the heart of town, in a twenty-four-by-twenty-four house that my daddy built.

It was the first house we ever owned, and our first inside bathroom. Previously, we had taken our baths in galvanized washtubs.
The back bedroom was mine and Tommy’s, Daddy and Momma had a room, and we had a living room and a kitchen. That was it, and
when years later the family moved to Sixth Street, they just took the house with them and built onto it.

Momma worshipped her boys, and after Tommy and me—quite some time after—along came James D., who was eight years younger,
and then Bo, who was born when I was sixteen. His name was Phillip Doyle, but Daddy started calling him Bimbo because of a
song Jim Reeves had out at the time, and he was Bo forevermore.

Brothers do work at being as different from each other as possible, and I guess our family was no exception. Tommy’s more
outgoing than me, at least when we were growing up. He’d talk the wheels off a Volkswagen. He wanted to be an entertainer,
and he’s a pretty good songwriter; he played bass with me for a while in the sixties. James D. is a lot like my daddy, honest
and upfront as the day is long, running a Conoco station diagonally across from where Daddy had his service station for a
time; but he was the gripiest kid. Lord, he didn’t let any of us off easy. I remember the first time I ever brought my first
wife home. Daddy let me use the car, and James D. was just sitting there, pouting. It was a Saturday night, and as I started
out the door, he come right behind me hollering “Dadblame you, and that dadburned girl. It’s because of you we gotta stay
home on dadblamed Saturday night because you want to go somewhere with that dadburned girl.” He followed me all the way to
the car, just chewing my ass out. What a character.

There was a big gap between James and Bo. Me and Tommy were practically all gone and grown when Bo grew up, so he was really
like an only child.

Littlefield can be a tough town, and I was a grown man before I left. I guess if you went back with anybody and traced where
they came from, you’d figure out a whole lot about them. I spent all my early life there, and there’s a lot of me still walking
those streets.

Once only inhabited by buffalo herds and Indians, West Texas was thought “unfit for cultivation” as late as the 1830s. What
would become the town of Littlefield grew from one of the largest ranches in the world, the XIT, which covered over three
million acres across nine panhandle counties and had been given to the Chicago financial syndicate that had built the state
capitol in Austin. Texas had more land than cash in those days.

When the XIT spread finally went under at the turn of the century, the first tract—the southern Yellowhouse Division—was sold
to Major George Washington Littlefield, an Austin banker and cattleman, who paid two dollars an acre in 1901. The town, laid
out by Arthur P. Duggan, officially opened on July 4, 1913, and was given a commercial shot in the arm when the Panhandle
and Santa Fe Railroad made it an official station. Today it’s the seat of Lamb County, named after a Lieutenant George A.
Lamb, who was killed at the Battle of San Jacinto, and contains almost eight thousand persons, about double that of when I
was born.

It’s never been easy to make a living in Littlefield, and we had it harder than most. I don’t think anybody had anything in
reserve for a rainy day. Even the more well-to-do farmers lived from one harvest to another. When we got up in the morning,
all we had was the daily prospect of hitting the cotton patch, or getting in a truck, or going down to the warehouse.

You’d make fifty, sixty cents an hour. That’s all the money you had to look forward to. You might be dreaming about going
away to some far-off land of opportunity, but you also might be building hen houses for Buck Ross, or doing something for
one of the local contractors, Carlisle Russell or Bob Jennings (no relation). You could be working down at the local service
station, six weeks there, six weeks across town hauling trash. Next month you might not have anything to go to. You lived
for that day, and that day only.

Saturday night was when you let it all out. Whatever little money we had, we put it in a box for groceries and rent, and then
took a couple of dollars out for Saturday night. That was the entire life of Littlefield. There was none of this long-range
planning, stock markets, investments, retirement benefits. We never put away money for vacations because there wouldn’t be
any vacations. You never even thought in those terms. My folks needed to get the house paid for, have a car that would run,
and try to keep everybody healthy. They were just making it from one Saturday to another.

When you thought success, it was to show people in Little-field. We didn’t know any better. We’d go to the store on Saturday
(Sunday was for church only) and put a pair of boots on layaway; buy a jacket or a belt buckle, put it on layaway. A dollar
down, a dollar a week, and when you got it all paid off, you’d pick it up. That was the little rewards in life. Get a little
carry-out barbecue, a stick of baloney, a few groceries. Next week there would hopefully be work that’d last until the weekend.
Nothing beyond that.

We didn’t know any better. There’s a charm about Littlefield, and there’s a lot of things we would laugh about when we were
growing up. Most of the time we tried to be happy with what little we had. We never begrudged anyone anything. We had a good
time, but we didn’t know what was out there.

Home improvements? In those days, a house was just a place to keep you warm and dry. I remember the first time I ever saw
linoleum. I thought it was the slickest stuff; we still lived in a place that had a dirt floor.

Sometimes I don’t know how those houses would stand up to the changes in weather. It could get above a hundred in the summer
and below zero in the winter. It might rain two inches in the morning, and then a sandstorm would blow in the afternoon, and
sometimes last for days at a time. In the winter, the wind changed direction; we called them blue northers, and they’d carry
blizzards.

In the late summer and fall, we’d have tornadoes. They’re the weirdest storms imaginable. If a tornado struck a house, it
would look like somebody had taken a fist and crushed it right on top. It always seemed like tornadoes had a thing for cotton
gins and trailer parks. Once a tornado hit these caged chicken coops, and they found chickens for miles. The force of those
things would put a straw through a telephone pole, all the way through, or an egg through a two-by-four. It would take a tractor
and put it on top of a barn. You’d hear that it blew a baby out of a woman’s arms, or a woman’s arm off and left her standing
there. We had six touch down one night, all around the county.

And yet, people loved living there. It’s a rough place to be, if you want to know the truth, but if you can survive Littlefield,
then you can pretty well handle the rest of the world. I have to go back every once in a while, just to see where I’ve been
and who I am. I don’t know why that is. Daddy never wanted to leave there, and Momma’s never wanted to leave. People who live
there bitch about it all the time, but they don’t want to go anywhere else. Home is home no matter where it is.

Littlefield gets in your soul, in your blood, in the same way sand gets in your craw. I think that’s part of my sound. All
the damn sand I swallowed is in my singing.

Did you ever parch peanuts? I would sit around an old potbellied stove with my dad, putting peanuts in a pan and roasting
them a little bit. We’d eat those peanuts listening to the Grand Ole Opry, and when Bill Monroe would sing, Daddy would look
at me and grin.

He loved Bill Monroe. He was my dad’s favorite singer; I think he liked that high voice. We would park the pickup outside
the house and stick some booster cables through the window and attach one end to the truck’s battery and the other to the
radio. We were able to pull in the Louisiana Hayride, and on Saturday nights the Opry came through loud and clear over WSM.

Daddy never played out much after I was born, but since nobody had televisions or record players, the only entertainment was
going over to people’s houses and singing to each other. He’d sing “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and “Old Zebra Dunn,” and a cowboy
song about some old boy who had a girl he was going to wed. He took her out on a cattle drive with him and the Indians attacked
and an arrow come and “dashed out her brains.” Those were the actual lyrics.

He used a thumb-and-finger plucking style, and I later found out that Jimmie Rodgers and Mother Maybelle Carter did that a
lot. My dad taught Momma a few songs, and when I learned to play, me and her would sing together, “Maple on the Hill” and
“The Girl in the Blue Velvet Band.” She put all her soul into her singing; she could be so moved by it. Whenever she heard
Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway,” she had to go outside and cry.

I was fascinated with the guitar from when I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the strings. It was Momma who showed me how
to shape my first chords. She was real patient, sitting on the couch and humming “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” placing my fingers
so I could change keys. She liked C and D. I was guitar crazy by then. They had a drive-in theater about a mile behind the
house, and one week they had an Ernest Tubb movie. For the next month, I’d sit out with a broomstick behind the cafe my Grandpa
Shipley had for a time, listening to the jukebox, trying to get my little squeaky voice down there low enough to sing like
Ernest Tubb: “Yes I know I’ve been untrue / And I’ve hurt you through and through / Take me back and try me one more time—”

The first guitar I ever touched was my uncle Pat’s. It was more like a bow and arrow than a guitar, and I tried my damnedest
to play that. Next door to us were some boys that moved in from Arkansas: snuff-dipping, guitar-playing, way-back-in-the-hills
Arkansawyers. They had a Gibson, and their real names were Rastus and Sambo. There wasn’t anything black about them, and they
let me bang on their guitar every once in a while. My uncle Jabbo also had one, a Kalamazoo with a hole in it. It had a good
tone. That’s where I learned to play “Kentucky.”