What Difference Do It Make? (3 page)

Reta Barnes, meanwhile, observed her daughter's philanthropy with amazement. No one had suggested to Lucy that she do any of this fund-raising. She did it all on her own. Reta thought her little girl was setting a very grown-up example.

Between her family, neighbors, and lemonade customers, Lucy had raised a little under ninety dollars. At first, she wanted to take the whole sum and deliver it to one homeless person. But Reta suggested an alternative. Maybe they should take the money to the rescue mission in Mobile. “The people there will know how best to use the money to help the homeless.”

Lucy thought that was a good idea, so her mother called Carrie, the volunteer coordinator at the mission, and set a date to visit a couple of weeks in the future.

The day before the trip, the telephone rang at the Barnes home. It was Miss Lott, Lucy's second-grade teacher. “Reta, I just wanted you to know that Lucy has written a letter to her classmates saying she's going to the rescue mission,” Miss Lott said. “She told the other kids that if any of them have any money or clothes they want to donate, she'll be happy to take it to the rescue mission when she goes.”

Once again, Reta was astonished. She had thought Lucy's fund-raising drive was over. But then, without fanfare, Lucy just kept going. The morning of the mission trip, some of her classmates brought clothes from home, along with a few dollars, for Lucy to take to the mission. And so that all the children could participate in the giving, Miss Lott broke a twenty-dollar bill into singles and let each student contribute a dollar.

Reta was amazed at the chain reaction caused by her daughter's initiative. Lucy's small acts of determined kindness were like stones in a pond, the ripples spreading out to her family, neighbors, and classmates, even her teacher. By the day of the mission trip in May 2008, Lucy had raised $113 in coins and cash, including one very exciting twenty-dollar bill. She proudly tucked her treasure into a Ziploc bag. Until that day, she had never even seen a homeless person. But that day, she toured the mission and even helped serve a meal.

“I saw a lot of brown men, like Denver on the book cover,” she remembers. “It was really fun because I got to give them fruit!”

She also got to give Carrie, the volunteer coordinator, the Ziploc bag filled with money. Inside the bag, Lucy had tucked a note for the homeless:

I love you, and God does too.

3

Ron

Daddy started out a comical, fun-loving man who retired from Coca-Cola after forty-odd years of service. But somewhere during my childhood, he crawled into a whiskey bottle and didn't come out till I was grown.

M
y daddy, Earl, was raised by a single mother, Clarabell, and two old-maid aunts, Edna and Florence. None of them ever drove a car; they walked to their jobs as maids at the laundry for the Southern Hotel and the Texas State College for Women. Their little house never saw a coat of paint inside or out. They had no telephone, heated the place with a four-burner kitchen stove that I never in my life saw turned off, and considered air-conditioning a dream on par with someday owning an estate like John D. and Lupe Murchison, the richest people in Texas.

Mama Clara and Aunt Edna and Aunt Florence dipped Garrett snuff. Between the three sisters, they went through a whole jar of it every day. The smell was nauseating, and it ran down their chins and dried deep in the wrinkles. I would rather have had a leather belt whipping than kiss one of them. But once a month, when we visited the three sisters in their little shack across the tracks in Denton, Daddy made me say hello and goodbye with a kiss on the mouth. I squinched my eyes shut, made my lips as thin as I could, and endured it. Maybe Edna and Florence knew it was a trial for me because they always gave me a jar of pennies as a kind of reward.

But they were mighty sweet, and Son, as they called Daddy, was all they had.

My grandmother, Clarabell, wore the shame of being a single mother like a leper. She seldom made eye contact with anyone but her sisters. I recently read a book about single mothers,
Holding Her Head High
, by the actress Janine Turner. I wish Mama Clara could have read it and held hers high, but I don't believe she could read, and because of her shame, her chin always rested on her chest.

When he was seven years old, Daddy had to go to work to help make ends meet. He wound up washing bottles in a 7-Up plant. Mama Clara and the aunties strictly forbade him to ask for any information about his father. Later, when I came along, the don't-ask-don't-tell policy was still in force.

I remember sitting on the front stoop with Aunt Edna and Aunt Florence one day when I was about eight, each aunt with her little lump of Garrett causing her lower lip to poke out like a permanent pout. With the Texas sun heating up the porch and the seat of my dungarees, I was feeling a little brave.

“Tell me a story about my granddaddy,” I ventured.

The sisters barked in unison, “You don't have one!” Then Edna turned her head and spit in the yard.

As I got older, I realized it couldn't be true that my daddy didn't have a daddy, as there was only one virgin birth ever recorded. Once, my brother, John, told me he thought Aunt Edna was our grandfather.

In any case, all his life, when Daddy asked who his father was, the sisters gave him the same answer. Finally, when he shipped off to fight the war in the Pacific in 1942, he quit asking. He was seventy-five years old when his mother died. Florence, the oldest aunt, was on her deathbed when she told him his father was named Wanda and that he was from Stephenville, Texas. But it was too late to go looking for him, even though there could not have been another man named Wanda in all of Texas.

My mama raised us like a single mom with no help from Earl. As opposed to Mama Clara, she held her head high, leading by example. She taught us the Bible and dragged us off to Sunday school and church every week—no excuses, no absences unless one of us was broken out with chicken pox or measles.

Not even circumcision was an excuse. When my brother was five, he got circumcised on a Friday and bled like a stuck hog. On Sunday morning he was no better, so Mama wrapped his penis in a sock, looped Scotch tape around the package three or four times, and hauled us off to church. Sitting on the front pew, I was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom for fear of what other creative uses my mama could find for tape and a sock. So I just sat there and pooped in my pants.

I never remember my daddy ever setting foot in church, except once or twice on Easter when I was in junior high and high school. I don't have a clue what he did on Sundays when the Monkey was closed, but we never saw him. In fact, I can't remember him ever driving us anywhere, except when he moved us to the slums in the candy truck. Sometimes he would go with us when we went somewhere, but my mother was always the designated driver so he could be the designated drinker.

Mama taught us how to throw a baseball, and she also helped coach our games. We'd drop Daddy off at the Monkey before the games and pick him up after.

“Paste that ol' pill!” he'd command as the door slammed on our '49 Pontiac. What he really meant was, “Hit the ball.” Later he'd ask, “Did you paste that ol' pill for your daddy?”

That was Earl Hall's definition of involved fatherhood.

My mama, Tommye, was a farm girl from Barry, Texas, who sewed every stitch of clothing we wore, baked cookies, and cheered me on at Little League . . . Tommye, [her brother] Buddy, [and her sisters] Elvice and . . . Vida May . . . all picked cotton on the blackland farm owned by their daddy and my granddaddy, Mr. Jack Brooks.

We were poor but not the charity kind. My mama, Tommye, was a resourceful old farm gal who raised chickens in the backyard and sold the excess eggs and roosters to the neighbors. We always had plenty to eat, a rich diet of yard bird, fried Spam, and Van Camp's pork and beans. Mama bought those beans by the case and stored them in the garage like she was preparing for Y2K. Our daily dose of them produced indoor smells to rival those indigenous to the neighborhood. Daddy always tried to blame the smell of his farts on the neighbor's outhouse. But when I messed in my britches that time at church and tried the same thing, Mama said we were more than a mile away from there and not to be acting like my daddy.

My parents slept on a fold-out sofa in the living room of our tiny asphalt-shingled bungalow. Outside we had a dirt yard. The dirt was smooth and powder-fine, perfect for playing with a toy dump truck—except we didn't have one. Still, our little place looked downright fancy compared to the tar-paper shacks and unpainted lean-tos that perched precariously on bois d'arc stumps around the gravel pit nearby. The kids who lived in those sad-looking homes were even lower on the social totem pole than we were, dirty little ragamuffins who depended on handouts and sometimes had to scrounge in the trash. I heard their daddies were mostly former employees of the gravel company.

At least they have daddies,
I thought. John and I may have been living higher on the hog than the gravel-pit kids, but I would have traded places with them to have a real daddy.

Once, we took a vacation to Monterrey, Mexico, because Daddy had heard American tourists there could drink free Carta Blanca beer all day long. At Earl's insistence, my mother drove for two days straight through, across the Texas and Mexican deserts in a four-door '49 Pontiac sedan, so that he could drink free in the beer garden at the Carta Blanca Brewery. That was years before air-conditioning was an option.

We'd drop Daddy off at the brewery in the morning, and John and I would swim all day at a semipublic pool near our cheap tourist court. Mama didn't know how to swim, so she just sat in a chair, never taking her eyes off us and holding a life preserver just in case. Right at closing time, we'd pick Daddy up.

The whole “free Carta Blanca” thing was a real losing proposition for the company because Earl Hall never drank that brand at home. In fact, his buddies at the Monkey called him “Earl the Pearl” because he always had his fingers wrapped around a cold can of Pearl beer. He loved to show off how he could crush the cans with one bare hand. That was long before the days of aluminum, when Alcoa steel cans ruled.

Once when John was in the seventh grade, the junior high was having a donkey basketball game. In case you never saw one, the fathers rode donkeys and played against the sons. John was tall and had made the basketball team.

Somehow, he convinced our dad that all fathers were required to ride. Dad got home early that day, and with the help of a pint of his buddy Jim Beam, he mustered up the courage to crawl up on a donkey.

Things went pretty well the first few times the donkeys ran back and forth down the court in a smooth gait like a Tennessee walking horse. Dad made a pass or two and attempted to block John's shot. Then something went terribly wrong. Dad's donkey got a burr under its saddle and launched him like an astronaut. After a back flip with a double twist, he landed on his elbow, crushing it like an empty Pearl can. I'm sure it was painful because I think Dad was crying, but John and I laughed our butts off. That was the most fun we ever had with him.

I can't remember whether he came to any of my high school or college graduations . . . but probably not. By then, I was glad he didn't show up because he was a stranger whose only purpose, as far as I was concerned, was to embarrass me.

But other folks didn't feel that way about Earl at all. He was well liked by his employer and associates, who appreciated his wit and his don't-give-a-crap attitude. His buddies said he was as funny as Jackie Gleason and laughed from the gut every time he started spinning a tall tale. They guffawed especially loud went Earl went on a tear about the Republicans.

“Them damn Republicans are responsible for everything bad in the whole world,” Daddy'd holler like he was speaking through a bullhorn from the back of a rail car on a whistle-stop campaigntour. He blamed the GOP for everything from communism to arthritis. And if he temporarily ran out of things to blame them for, he might throw in acne and ingrown toenails.

The whole time Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House, Daddy thought Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson was a sterling hero who could save America and ought to kick Ike out on his can. When John F. Kennedy ran in 1960, Daddy didn't much like him. But Earl was a yellow-dog Democrat who would vote for a four-legged canine of any color before he would vote for a Republican. So when November came, he held his nose and voted for JFK, even if the man was a Catholic and a Yankee.

4

Denver

Ever Sunday, a field hand drivin a mule wagon wound down the dirt plantation road gatherin up colored folks to haul em off to praise the Lord . . . The preacher, Brother Eustis Brown, was just another field hand. But he was the onlyest man I knowed besides [my] Uncle James that could read the Bible . . .

“Brother Brown, we done heard that message about a hun'erd times,” one of the older women would say, somebody with gumption like my auntie, Big Mama's sister. “When you gon' change the sermon?”