04
From chapter: ‘Empire of Sand’
Written in a ‘novelistic’ style.
My father never finished third grade. Couldn’t read or write. The deal for the land, with a man called Richards, was thus strictly a handshake agreement, with nothing down on paper. All I knew for certain was that our tenure ran from 1944 to 1953, but what I suspected was that my father’s brother had pulled a few strings around West Texas to get us the place. (He was doing well as a farmer at this point, having previously taught school at Kermit, near Odessa.)
And what a place it was. The land came with a frame house, our home. Sand was always coming in through the walls, under the baseboards, and my mother would have to sweep the place after sandstorms. The sand was blown on top of fences, too, gathering on a skeleton of trapped tumbleweeds. Cattle would use these sand mounds as bridges to wander from ranch to ranch. The house had no plumbing and no electricity, so if we wanted light after sunset, we’d light coal oil lamps. Soot would build up on the chimneys, and I’d clean them; my mother’s hand wouldn’t fit. We had a windmill to pump water, thirty yards from the house, along with a two-hole outhouse. There was a shed, too, where we bathed every Saturday. Mother would heat a pot of water to take the chill off, when it was cold, but the bath was never warm. Not even when it was 120 degrees out.
There was no kindergarten, no pre-school, so my mother taught me colors, letters, and reading by the light of those oil lamps. My main entertainment was putting pennies on the railroad track across the highway, which would be pressed flat by the passing trains. Occasionally we’d go into town, which was pretty exciting. I remember going into Odessa in the car one time, with all of us sat in the front. The cloth top of the car was torn open, and I put my head through it, holding on to the windshield.
My father had more fun than us, going on fishing trips across the border with his brothers in what they called ‘Old Mexico’. I remember one time he took off for one of these trips, leaving my mother in charge of us kids and the livestock and neglecting to provide her with any spending money. She cried most of that week. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that the money he spent on the trip was enough to pipe water into the kitchen from the windmill.
I started hating him that week.