Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

12. Gerald Thurmond, “Faith’s Place” from Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual

151 Chapter 12 Gerald Thurmond Faith’s Place Gerald Thurmond grew up in San Antonio, Texas. He attended Baylor University and the University of Georgia and is a sociologist at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He has a fascination with all kinds of critters. He is an avid birder, he keeps snakes, and, as a sociologist, he is a professional people watcher. His essay “Midnight with Elvis” won the Hub City Hardegree Creative Writing Contest for non-fiction and was published in Hub City Anthology II. He edited, with John Lane, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South published by the University of Georgia Press. “Faith’s Place” was previously published in Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual from Mercer University Press. The white-frame house seemed much the same, but the little town around it was slowly dying.Old Calvert Street was mostly empty of traffic, and several of the stores along it were boarded up or had that hopeless look that empty, dust streaked windows give. I had traveled over 1100 miles to be here. For twenty years I had come, but now it was different. Now it was time to finish things, to fulfill a final obligation. I hesitated at the door, took a deep breath and knocked. A small, pleasant looking, gray-haired woman opened it. “How are you,Velma?” I said. “Well Gerald,”(she pronounced it“Jurl”),“it’s been quite a spell since I’ve laid eyes on you, come on in.” 152 We sat in the small kitchen catching up, talking about the weather and drinking iced tea. Finally she said, “I guess you come to see Buck. He’s in the back room.” I didn’t need to be shown where. I had had a small part in the remodeling of this house, this second home that was meant to be a place of retirement from the country. But now it seemed wrong to me, its residents misplaced. I worked up my courage and walked into the room. Buck lay in bed, bloated and white, unconscious as far as I could tell, but tended and kept alive. This big man, hands twice the size of mine. He had once knocked down a cow with his bare fist when his anger got the best of him. Now those hands lay beside him unmoving, or trembled and shifted aimlessly. I remembered how Buck and his generation once seemed to me as solid and substantial as the earth itself, as something I could push against.As I looked down at him the ground crumbled under my feet. He was my South Texas farmer/rancher father-in-law and I was his city-raised and mostly useless son-in-law. I suppose my being part of Buck’s life was as unexpected to him as it was to me. I met his daughter at the Baptist college we both attended, and after an on-again, off-again romance, when she was 19 and I just one year older, we married. She was blonde and pretty, and emotionally fragile like the smartest girl in high school often is,but also practical and down to earth too from her farming roots. Buck never said anything to me about our sudden marriage. I figured that he viewed me as one of those things you had to live with in a fallen world, a world where sinful desire often overtakes good sense. Buck’s wife Leora spoke for the whole family, as she often did, when she told my young bride,“Well, I wouldn’t have chosen him.”I may have been legally part of the family, but I would have to earn my way into it. Gerald Thurmond 153 To do that, whenever my wife and I would visit, I made a special effort to go with Buck to tend cattle, cut brush, repair or build fence, on what Buck called his “places.” These places—no one but city people or locals with pretensions called them farms or ranches—were parcels of land that he either owned, like his Home Place, Fashing, and Choate, or properties he leased, such as McCoy’s, Scott’s, and the land that would become so important to me, Faith’s. Some of the places got their names from the best remembered family that had once worked them—McCoy’s, Scott’s and...