spidery-looking. Each one had dozens of cotton bolls exploded in little clouds, each boll shot full of long skinny brown seeds. Grandma pulled one loose and expertly plucked out the seeds till she had a mass of pure fluff in her hand. She showed Lecia and me how to draw a thin thread out of it like spider silk by rolling the strand between thumb and forefinger and pulling just so.
Cotton was a mean crop, I recall her saying, like most money crops. It sucked a lot out of the ground and even more out ofthose who worked it. When I grew up and read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, much of the first volume was devoted to how hard life in that part of the country was on a woman in the Dust Bowl. Water was so scarce that the average thirty-year-old had a dowager’s hump from toting buckets up to the house several times a day. Their faces wrinkled from too much sun, and their hands grew hard as boot leather. Every family buried a couple of kids, too, and that made them hard inside. Thinking of Grandma’s picture in the gold oval frame above Mother’s bed, I tried to imagine someone choosing those girly white hands of hers to do field work, but never quite fathomed it.
We stood in this field in our Sunday visiting clothes, Grandma dabbing at her temples with a hankie. About a stone’s throw away, there stood a barn and tall silo aswarm with Mexican workers. At some point, Grandma announced that Dotty had sure made a good marriage, which judgment wasn’t lost on Mother, I guess. She got all quiet. Then she took her sketch pad and a stub of charcoal from the backseat and wandered off to the barn. When I tried to follow, she squatted down and said to stay with Grandma. This caused Lecia to mouth that I was a baby, and subsequently I tossed a pebble at her kneecap, so Grandma clamped her bony hand on my shoulder and made me go sit in the hot car by myself.
On the way home, we pulled up to the barn to pick up Mother. The door to Dotty’s Cadillac made a big impression on me: it must have weighed a hundred pounds, and also lit up like Broadway when I heaved it open. Mother was talking soft Spanish to two guys studying her sketch pad. One of them quickly tucked a pint bottle of clear liquid into his back pocket. You couldn’t smell liquor on her when she got in, but she had that clipped, Yankee way of talking she always got when she’d had a few. She must have done ten thousand such sketches in my childhood, but for some reason, that drawing stays with me: a hasty sketch of the older man in a sombrero, done in bold scrawls with few shadings, his face withered up. She pulled a can of Aqua Net hair spray out of her bag and sprayed the sketch to fix it, then snappedshut the pad. It bothered me that nobody else asked to look at it.
We stayed in Roundup a few days. The only outward sign of trouble in Dotty’s whole family during that time was that Robert had knocked up his high school girlfriend, who was Catholic and therefore needed marrying. The young wife lollygagged around the house in his football jersey, her belly so big she looked like a balloon from some parade. They were fifteen and slept in his room, on bunk beds. That sort of trouble happened often enough in those days. Robert was going to finish high school and eventually take over the cotton business.
He must have seen me as some sort of warm-up for being a daddy, because while Lecia was learning from Tess how to paint on eyeliner and tease her hair, he played tic-tac-toe with me on my magic slate. I remember he also drew me a Crayola picture of a train wreck he’d seen where people’s legs and heads were scattered every which way among the cotton plants. The cotton was amazingly detailed given how rough the rest of the drawing was. When he tucked me into bed he told me such a vivid (and grotesquely inaccurate) version of Rumpelstiltskin (where the mean troll forced the lady to spin straw into gold herself) that I can still recall my nightmares about it.
Cotton was a mean crop, I recall her saying, like most money crops. It sucked a lot out of the ground and even more out ofthose who worked it. When I grew up and read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, much of the first volume was devoted to how hard life in that part of the country was on a woman in the Dust Bowl. Water was so scarce that the average thirty-year-old had a dowager’s hump from toting buckets up to the house several times a day. Their faces wrinkled from too much sun, and their hands grew hard as boot leather. Every family buried a couple of kids, too, and that made them hard inside. Thinking of Grandma’s picture in the gold oval frame above Mother’s bed, I tried to imagine someone choosing those girly white hands of hers to do field work, but never quite fathomed it.
We stood in this field in our Sunday visiting clothes, Grandma dabbing at her temples with a hankie. About a stone’s throw away, there stood a barn and tall silo aswarm with Mexican workers. At some point, Grandma announced that Dotty had sure made a good marriage, which judgment wasn’t lost on Mother, I guess. She got all quiet. Then she took her sketch pad and a stub of charcoal from the backseat and wandered off to the barn. When I tried to follow, she squatted down and said to stay with Grandma. This caused Lecia to mouth that I was a baby, and subsequently I tossed a pebble at her kneecap, so Grandma clamped her bony hand on my shoulder and made me go sit in the hot car by myself.
On the way home, we pulled up to the barn to pick up Mother. The door to Dotty’s Cadillac made a big impression on me: it must have weighed a hundred pounds, and also lit up like Broadway when I heaved it open. Mother was talking soft Spanish to two guys studying her sketch pad. One of them quickly tucked a pint bottle of clear liquid into his back pocket. You couldn’t smell liquor on her when she got in, but she had that clipped, Yankee way of talking she always got when she’d had a few. She must have done ten thousand such sketches in my childhood, but for some reason, that drawing stays with me: a hasty sketch of the older man in a sombrero, done in bold scrawls with few shadings, his face withered up. She pulled a can of Aqua Net hair spray out of her bag and sprayed the sketch to fix it, then snappedshut the pad. It bothered me that nobody else asked to look at it.
We stayed in Roundup a few days. The only outward sign of trouble in Dotty’s whole family during that time was that Robert had knocked up his high school girlfriend, who was Catholic and therefore needed marrying. The young wife lollygagged around the house in his football jersey, her belly so big she looked like a balloon from some parade. They were fifteen and slept in his room, on bunk beds. That sort of trouble happened often enough in those days. Robert was going to finish high school and eventually take over the cotton business.
He must have seen me as some sort of warm-up for being a daddy, because while Lecia was learning from Tess how to paint on eyeliner and tease her hair, he played tic-tac-toe with me on my magic slate. I remember he also drew me a Crayola picture of a train wreck he’d seen where people’s legs and heads were scattered every which way among the cotton plants. The cotton was amazingly detailed given how rough the rest of the drawing was. When he tucked me into bed he told me such a vivid (and grotesquely inaccurate) version of Rumpelstiltskin (where the mean troll forced the lady to spin straw into gold herself) that I can still recall my nightmares about it.
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