A Boy from Upton County

In a simple picture frame propped on the lid of a piano sitting in a row house in Philadelphia, there’s a brittle photograph of six faded men in cowboy hats and boots, white shirts, and chaps sitting astride five faded chestnut horses and one faded mule. All in a line, reins in hand, they’re turned toward the cameraman standing behind what must have been one cumbersome contraption, especially there in the hot and dusty desolation of West Texas more than a hundred years ago. One of these cowboys is my grandfather, the third from the left. Four of the five are his brothers and the fifth is his father, who’s holding a bundle of rags that is actually an infant, his only sister, who would live to be 103. Under the wide brim of my grandfather’s hat, his face is an impassive stone in shadow, as are the faces of his father and his four brothers. He’s seventeen years old.

Next to this photo on the piano is a second framed photo of my grandfather. He’s standing alone beneath a tree. He’s older here, though he looks much less stoic and sure of himself. His cowboy hat and chaps have been replaced by a flat-brimmed campaign hat, jodhpurs, and puttees. He’s far from the only place he’s ever known, Upton County, Texas, where fewer than five hundred people live scattered across more than a thousand square miles of dry land. It’s June at Camp Mabry, in Austin. The olive wool of his Doughboy uniform must be almost too hot and itchy to stand, but more importantly, he’s posing for mementos which will be sent three hundred miles to the west, back home to his family and his girlfriend, Velma. In letters to Mama, he asks after his siblings, Papa’s cattle, and the rain, because Upton County is one of the driest places in the state, and rain is needed to grow the cattle’s feed for the winter. He begs Mama to come see him, but he always adds that he understands if she can’t. He’s only going to be training there for a few more weeks, though, so she’ll need to hurry if she wants to see him before he ships out with the rest of Company E of the 36th Division. He doesn’t think they’re heading to France, but France is where they’re headed the following month on the USS Orizaba, which will be set upon by a dozen submarines. “I wasn’t scared the least bit,” he’ll write Mama after the war is over and the censorship of correspondence has been lifted. “Of course a fellow that has never been in a battle couldnt realize the danger he was in.” But for now he’s still at Camp Mabry. He misses home. “I never wanted to get out and ride a horse as bad in my life,” he writes, and then he closes, as always, with “love to you all.”

On the keys of this piano, my children play Chopin and Satie while my grandfather stares at them from under the brims of two different hats, unsure of who they are. My daughter and her younger brother have been told who this man is and what he meant to me, but they’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever told them about him, just as I forgot, immediately, everything my parents said when they would show me similarly ancient photographs of their own grandparents when I was young. The dead and the never-met (but especially the dead, the never-to-be-met) mean so little—nothing, in truth—to the young. But, to be honest, I didn’t know the man in these photographs, either. Not really. The man I knew was sixty years older than this kid who always asked Mama in his letters home to kiss the family’s two littlest, Nina and Buddy, “the brats,” for him.

In 1973, when I was four years old and my grandfather was seventy-seven, he helped me tie yellow ribbons around trees because I liked a song by Tony Orlando and Dawn, which was popular at the time, though I knew nothing of its relevance to soldiers coming home from the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, my mother, his youngest daughter (who was born when he was forty-seven), gave birth to my sister and then nearly bled to death. This was in a small town in Arkansas. His wife, my mother’s mother, had died six years earlier, so he had driven the nine hours from San Angelo alone to take care of me while my father stayed at the hospital.

Because I remember none of this, I’m relying on the memory of others here, just as we all have to do for stories from our oldest days. But I do remember two horses there in Arkansas, a chestnut and a gray, that he would take me to see in a nearby field. We would bring carrots and sometimes sugar cubes for them to snuffle from our palms. The gray’s name was Polly. Her lip dangled ragged and loose on one side of her muzzle. I’d been told she’d caught it on a nail while being unloaded from a trailer, tearing the nerves. My mother called her an ugly nag, but I loved her more than the chestnut. My grandfather said that he could tell they’d both been worked hard all their lives. He never called Polly an ugly nag. The chestnut’s name I don’t remember. 

Six years later, in Dallas, he moved in with us, which meant we no longer had to drive hours and hours to see him. I would miss the tiny flowers on the Abelia bush by his porch and the taste of his tap water and the giant muffler man statue that leaned toward the street in front of Fillup Automotive, but now I got to see him every day. During the summer, we watched The Price Is Right every morning while he drank coffee. He was really good at guessing close to the actual retail price. I told him he should be a contestant. In the fall, we watched the World Series. We rooted for the Baltimore Orioles, even though we wished they were the Texas Rangers instead. Nevertheless, I liked Jim Palmer because he did ads for underwear. I also liked Earl Weaver because he yelled at umpires and kicked dirt at them. I liked Willie Stargell, too, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ captain, but not enough to root for them. Regardless, they won. Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was their theme song, and it played over and over while they celebrated. I sang along even though I had wanted them to lose. 

Before he died of brain cancer in 1981, my grandfather lived at Silver Leaves Nursing Home, which I didn’t like. It smelled bad, and the old people who lived there scared me. Sometimes they made weird noises and smacked their toothless mouths at me as I walked by.  Not long before my parents decided to move him there because he needed more help than they could give him, he and I were at the house alone one Saturday. We were in the living room watching TV. He was sitting on the couch and I was sitting on the carpet. He stood to go somewhere else in the house—the kitchen, the bathroom—and when he did, he banged his shin against the edge of our coffee table and immediately began crying. I remember being frightened in a way that I’d never been frightened before because I had never seen a man cry. I didn’t know what to do. How could this be happening to a man so strong he could crack pecans with his bare hands? He had been a cowboy. He had fought in a war. He was crying so hard that he didn’t notice when I ran to my room.

He’s been dead for forty years now, and I still miss him. But because of the effect this moment had on me at the time, I sometimes have to make an effort not to think about it first when he comes to mind. Not because I’m ashamed (though I’m sure my confused eleven-year-old self was) but because I know that he would’ve been. Though he was a tender, loving man who wrapped me in wonderful hugs that smelled of cedar and Old Spice, he was also a man of the nineteenth century and the rugged wasteland of West Texas. He was stoic. Quiet. Strong. For his sake and mine, I move on to other memories.

Here is my favorite memory: he’s still living in his house in San Angelo, and we’re in town from Dallas for a summer visit. It’s probably 1975 or 1976, so I’m six or seven years old. Once again, this memory concerns only us; my parents and sister aren’t there. Maybe they’re at Aunt Nodie’s house. In the corner of his living room, he’s leaning back in his recliner and listening to a Texas Rangers baseball game on the transistor radio sitting beneath the milk-glass lamp beside him. He’s drinking coffee, the only thing I ever remember drinking. Above his head is a framed print of a rodeo cowboy that now hangs in our guest room next to an antique type tray filled with tiny mementos—old matchbooks, old coins, old beer-bottle caps. A few feet away, I’m standing in front of his swamp cooler, breathing in big lungfuls of the chilly dampness that it pumps against the hot dry air of a West Texas summer until the whole room smells like rain. I’m listening to the game, too, probably waiting to hear the name of my favorite player, Jim Sundberg. And that’s it—that’s all I remember. Nothing more happens. Neither of us even says anything. It’s just us two, together, years before he got sick and weak, listening to the broadcast of a bad baseball team’s game in the middle of a July or August day, a long time ago.