Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Two: The Visit

4 Chapter Two: The Visit During the summer of 1966 I was in Austin, finishing up a few courses at the University of Texas so that I could graduate in August, and my thoughts had turned eastward. I had been accepted as a student at Harvard Divinity School and soon I would be moving to Cambridge, leaving Texas behind, perhaps forever. The thought of spending some time in Cambridge excited me. During the Kennedy administration, we had heard a great deal about Harvard University. President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, Defense Secretary McNamara, and other members of the administration had studied there. Could a kid from Perryton compete with the luminous beings who occupied such a place? I wasn’t sure, but I had a ticket for finding out. So why, in the midst of such heady speculations, did I write my grandmother in Seminole and ask if I could spend a weekend with her? Apparently four years of university education had failed to do what I had hoped it would do, erase all memory of my background in rural West Texas. I had wanted to vault into a more important world that didn’t include cowboys, cotton gins, grain elevators, or tumbleweeds, but by the summer of 1966 I had begun to feel a stirring of curiosity about my forebears. The stories I had grown up with had begun to murmur in the back of my mind. In my youth, Grandmother Curry had seemed a kind but rather distant figure, stern and dignified. She had raised five daughters and 5 The Visit buried one husband, and now she occupied the old Curry house in an orderly solitude that seemed to suit her very well. When I was young, even my mother felt some uneasiness about visiting her, as our visits brought the shouts of grandchildren and the constant threat of broken lamps and vases. Grandmother never made us feel unwelcome, but Mother always suspected that she heaved a sigh of relief when she saw us backing out of her driveway, waving goodbye. I typed my letter on good stationery and took special care to make it neat and proper. I had exchanged enough letters with Grandmother to know that she wrote near-flawless English and would think less of me if my letter revealed a lower standard. The irony of this didn’t occur to me until years later: that I, a senior at the University of Texas, feared the scrutiny of a woman who gotten an eighth grade education in the one-room school for ranch children. Grandmother’s reply came a week later, saying that she would be delighted for me to visit and that she had instructed Mrs. Tinnell, her housekeeper, to make a special trip to the Piggly Wiggly to stock up on groceries, especially beef. She ended by saying that my great-uncle Roy Sherman had reported that the grass at the ranch needed a rain. This hardly came as a surprise. The grass in Gaines County, Texas, always needed a rain. I didn’t require much in the way of clothing for the trip, but decided to take my five-string banjo. Grandmother and I had never spent two days together, just the two of us, and I had reason to suppose that I might need to entertain myself at least part of the time. Actually, I didn’t know what to expect. I was twenty-two and she was seventy-eight, and it occurred to me that Mable Curry and I were separated by an enormous gulf of time and experience. As a girl in the little Quaker community of Estacado, Texas, she had watched freight wagons pulled by spans of oxen arriving from Colorado City, loaded with lumber, cloth, flour, and sugar that had come by rail from Fort Worth. She had spent her entire childhood without ever seeing an automobile, airplane, electric light, indoor toilet, or telephone. What would we talk about? What did we have in common, really, other than pleasant memories and the tug of 6 Chapter Two genetics? Two days in that big echoing house in Seminole might turn into an eternity of minutes and hours, and I might spend a lot of time on the front porch, playing my banjo for the mesquite trees in the vacant lot across the street. Leaving Austin in the cool of morning, I drove west on Highway 290...