Mother telephoned just as I finished washing the supper dishes. From the moment she told me the sad news, my heart and the little voice inside my head insisted there was no way around it. I had to go to the Panhandle to my grandmother's funeral even if it meant driving the five hundred some-odd miles by myself in a car that was probably predestined by God to break down on a deserted one-lane highway in the middle of the night just to test my faith. There was no way around it: I had to go, because it was the right thing to do and proof of the way I was raised. I had to do it because I am my dead father's daughter, and she, my dead grandmother, was his mother. I had to do it because my own mother was not able to, and I didn't want my father's family bad-mouthing all of us until the end of time. I knew in the pit of my stomach that no college-educated excuses about speaking engagements would ever be adequate explanation of my mother's absence from the funeral. My mind was made up before I even hung up the phone that I would just prepare myself to go.
Once I had decided I was really going, that my going was decent and called-for and inevitable, I began to get a little excited. Adrenaline started to rise up in my blood and I could feel the pulse beating in my throat like Danger. Car trips on the highway in the Panhandle always equal Death to me. From that original car wreck, my father's, when I was a little girl, through overheard whispered stories of horrible ironic car wrecks in which dutiful family members are slaughtered on the way to funerals of distant relatives, from epic myths of trips in school buses to church camps turned maimed and tragic, to my childhood memories of huge truck rigs flipped over in ditches, their metal sides ripped open like cans of sardines and terrible puddles of blood visible on the highway as I glided by, safe in the back seat of my parents' car, trying not to follow my unholy impulse to search for a glimpse of the mangled body of the truck driver in the wreckage, car trips mean Death to me.
I called my sister in Houston to find out if she could feel it, too, that we had to go. She said when Mother telephoned her, Mother hinted that I wouldn't want to make the trip, that it was too far and my obligations to my own husband and children and work would make the trip impossible for me. I told my sister my mind was made up, that I had to go whether she went with me or not. It was easy to talk about blood ties and obligation until my sister was convinced we had to make the trip together. She was just a baby when our father was killed in the car wreck, and our father's family, our uncles and aunts and cousins, are virtual strangers to her as a grownup woman. She was easily convinced to share the long drive in shifts and so we made plans to rent a car rather than drive either hers or mine. It felt like an unsaid promise between us, like a magic charm to ward off evil, that, if we drove to the Panhandle in a rental car, we might get to our grandmother's funeral and back to our respective homes alive. I let my sister be the one to call Mother to tell her our plans. I knew Mother would complain she would not have a single moment's peace until both of us returned home safely from the Panhandle.
+ + + + + + +
I packed the few things I would need for the trip and redyed my hair red that night. My sister picked me up at noon the next day and we drove an hour through stoplights and road construction before we were actually clear of Austin and making real progress down the highway. The next three hundred miles were marked only by speed zones and Dairy Queens, social hubs of small town life and guaranteed site of clean restrooms for female motorists. My sister and I passed the time with idle chit-chat. If we had wanted to, we would have ample opportunity to play the road-kill game: armadillo, coyote, deer, deer, deer, dog, raccoon, opossum, wolf. We speeded past fenced-in emus, black-faced sheep, longhorns and a runaway goat trotting down the shoulder of the road. As we drove farther and farther north I felt a compelling desire to turn on the radio and fiddle with the dial until I could bring in a crackly, distant station that played old-time, whiny country music and agricultural reports on the hour. I resisted, since I knew my sister would object, preferring the rock and roll music of her childhood, or even silence, to that.
It was dark when we hit Post and got out of the car to stretch our legs and pee at a roadside convenience store. By then I needed a cigarette bad to cure the ache in my skull brought on by nicotine withdrawal. I bought a cup of coffee, and when the clerk handed me my change, I recognized from the lovely soft cadence of his accent that I was getting closer to my home. I stood outside the convenience store's door, leaning up against the plate glass window like a bad girl in jeans, smoking my cigarette while my sister gassed up the car. An old gentleman drove up in a battered farm pickup and tipped his cowboy hat to me as he entered the store.
We got back on the road and the moon, like a blood orange, rose low on the flat horizon. Past Lubbock we believed for a few moments that we were driving through fog until we remembered it was just the indigenous blowing dirt in the atmosphere shimmering in the headlights. There were hardly any other cars on the road. About this time I saw the first silhouette of a pump jack working, working in the darkness all night long like an unrelenting rocking horse ridden back and forth by the ghost of a beloved, dead child.
In Amarillo at midnight, driving down what was once Route 66, we decided to stop to eat something at an all-night chain restaurant. When I got out of the car the wind, a Blue Norther, licked the nape of my neck and bit at my ankles. As I slipped on my jacket I inhaled the blessed cold air deeply and recognized the familiar perfume of cow manure and diesel exhaust. We went inside the restaurant with its steamed-up windows and ordered eggs and hot coffee. While we waited for the food to come, my sister called her husband from the pay phone. We ate quickly and got back in the car, continuing down old Route 66 past the sad strip joints, past the wrecks of bungalow motel courts with their now unlighted neon signs, past vacant lots which, in my childhood, were the sites of grand drive-in movie theaters, past the lifeless shell of the once vibrant Aviatrix Lounge. An enigmatic road sign warned against picking up hitchhikers.
We found our junction and headed off in the darkness down a two-lane asphalt road on the final leg of our journey. Train tracks then ran parallel to the highway and over and over again we heard the sad sound of a train calling off in the distance. As we glided through the tiny town of White Deer in the middle of the night, not even bothering to slow down for the blinking yellow traffic light, I turned my head to catch a glimpse of the statue on the town's main street. Once again I saw the beloved deer from my childhood frozen silently in time up on its pedestal, bathed in a white spotlight, its lovely head alert, as if forever transfixed in the headlights of an oncoming car.
I knew we were getting close once we smelled the fumes from the Celanese plant before we even saw it, illuminated with golden lights in the distance like a Christmas window display. We rolled silently on into Pampa, navigating only from the road map of my childhood memory. We stopped at the Coronado Motel. By then it was the middle of the night and I explained to the desk clerk that we were exhausted and needed a room because we had driven five hundred miles for the funeral of our grandmother. He regarded us with sad eyes, then gravely handed me registration forms to fill out and the keys to a room.
We drove the car around back of the motel, searching for our room number amid parked truck rigs. We found it, and struggled in the dark with the lock until we managed to force open the stiff door. I felt for the light switch in the dark, and when I found it, we were startled to find the room was a suite, probably given to us by the desk clerk for a good price out of sympathy. The front room, not redecorated since about 1967, displayed a strange mixture of styles: lime green wrought iron competed with sky-blue shag carpeting, a burgundy couch and hanging lamps with green pom-pom trim. A big television sat atop a Spanish Inquisition credenza next to a caramel-colored mini-refrigerator. Two king-size beds with baroque red velvet bedspreads and wrought iron headboards nailed to the wall shared the second room. The rooms smelled stale; they probably hadn't been used since last summer's rodeo. I imagined this suite was mainly rented to cowboys and buckle bunnies for celebrating their bone-jarring victories or to poor juvenile honeymooners who crossed state lines and had to settle for what little they could get.
We called our husbands to let them know we had arrived safely. I set my travel alarm clock for dawn, and then we slept, exhausted, on the threadbare sheets of the two big lonely hotel beds. I was too tired from all the driving to dream.
+ + + + + + +
The noise of big truck engines firing up in the motel parking lot woke us before the alarm had a chance to go off. We took baths in the hard water-stained tub and got dressed in the black clothes we'd brought with us in our overnight bags. I took special care putting on my makeup and fixing my hair because I knew I would soon be seeing my relatives. I wanted to look presentable, because my sister and I are all that is left of our father. Then we opened the motel room door and stepped out into the blinding white light of a cold Panhandle morning.
We drove around front to the motel lobby and went inside to find the coffee shop. It was deserted except for two old men in jeans and farm jackets drinking coffee and watching a morning news show on a television mounted high up on the wall. A young waitress brought me coffee and I smoked a couple of cigarettes while my sister ate her toast. We asked the waitress for directions to the funeral home and she told us we were lucky because a tornado cutting its way through town the previous morning flattened the adjacent building. I thought to myself, If Nanny was lying in state at that time, her presence alone must have been strong enough to convince that tornado to divert its course by a few yards and not spoil her funeral. Next to her wedding day, this is her big day.
The funeral home was located on a road that transformed itself from a highway into the main street in town and then back into a highway again once it got safely outside the city limits and back onto the High Plains. There was no way to miss it, even if we had wanted to, for some reason, after making the long journey. As soon as we pulled up in front and found a place to park, I recognized with a sharp intake of breath, as if I had seen a ghost, one of my three surviving uncles hiding behind the hearse, guiltily sneaking a cigarette. His hair had gone snow white because all of us are now so many years older, and, for a moment, I thought he was his own father, my grandfather, dead all these many years. I got out of the rental car and approached him; my sister lagged behind me a few steps, uncertain. My uncle's expression, at first quizzical, changed as I approached him and he recognized me. I fell into his arms for the first hug, and, after that, introduced my baby sister to him because it was clear neither recognized the other. From that first hug, my heart began to hurt -- I felt it all the way through to my spine -- and a balled-up fist of tears rose up into my throat.
My uncle escorted us into the parlor of the funeral home and announced to the relatives gathered there that we, Jim's girls, had arrived. Then it was like what I have always imagined heaven to be like from images in old church songs. One by one, my uncles and aunts and cousins came forward from their places in the shadows into the white light with their hands extended. They welcomed us with warm embraces and tears and introductions for the benefit of my poor baby sister who was unable to remember her own dead father's family. The way they talked to us, the words they chose, their soft, sweet Panhandle accents, were like the voices of angels to me. I felt like a prisoner falsely accused of a crime, who, at last, is released from her long jail term, vindicated. I felt like a traveler who loses her identity documents and is held for decades against her will in some foreign land where she is unable to speak or understand the language and then is finally returned to her own people.
Each of the many embraces given to me by my three uncles was an unbearable mixture of pleasure and pain. Their enfolding arms gave me the comfort and relief I sorely needed and had wished for all these many years, but each embrace also intensified the deep purple ache of loss I felt through and through my heart. I saw my sister's large blue eyes, the eyes she inherited from our father, swimming in tears and teardrops flowed down her face and off her chin like raindrops roll off tree leaves. I found a box of Kleenex and tore off a few tissues for each of us.
Then our eldest cousin told us it was time to view our grandmother's body. She took our hands and led us to the open casket. I had not seen my dead grandmother for a decade; not, in fact, since the last funeral in the Panhandle. My childhood memory of her, the constant, moving image of my grandmother that I preserve in my memory conflicted sharply with the still body I saw before me. Her hair had turned wintry as snow, and she was tiny, smaller and more fragile than my own adolescent daughter. I was surprised to see mauve nail polish on my grandmother's bird-like nails and funeral home makeup applied to her beaky face, the face which had lacked even a trace of lipstick for a lifetime. Most startling of all to me was the fact that my grandmother's old-lady mustache was missing. I knew the funeral home cosmetologist had probably removed it so that my grandmother would look her best for her own funeral, but still, I was shocked. Our cousin told us that the dress our grandmother wore was her favorite, one she sewed herself specially for the wedding of one of our younger cousins years ago, rose-colored, with rows of dime store lace and little heart-shaped buttons marching down its front. A teddy bear was tucked in beside her in the coffin, as if she were once again someone's little girl, deeply, peacefully asleep and dreaming in her own little bed, not the ancient matriarch, the mother of five grown men, that she became later in life.
I felt something giddy in me urging me to take her hand one last time, to kiss her cheek, but I knew from experience it is better to overcome that impulse. You see, the Dead are very, very hard to the touch. The feeling of touching Death is something that lingers on in the sensors of your own body's physical memory. The hardness of that contact with Death lingers on your lips, in your fingertips, for a long, long time. Maybe forever.
The funeral service itself was brief. The preacher based the memorial service on his own recollections of my grandmother's plain spoken virtues, the clothesline flapping with clean laundry, her good kitchen, the faith she somehow found to survive even after she buried two sons and her husband. In my own head, I turned over memories of her often cantankerous and sometimes manipulative ways. I remembered again with a shock how she'd once called the black meter reader from City utilities a "nigra boy," then invited him inside for cake. I remembered again, that Mother, suddenly strangely sharp and critical, told us our grandmother again and again favored one of her sons, not our father, over all the others. Still, I regretted that I had found time to make the long journey to her funeral, yet had not made the time during the last decade to bring my two children to her so that they might have known her.
But then, Reason reminded me, the Nanny I loved in childhood had already been gone for years. My children never could have known her, could never have heard my grandparents sing duets of hymns in the kitchen, could never have heard the heart-rending combination of my grandmother's thin, Appalachian treble and my grandfather's manly, booming bass. The ball of tears rose up from my throat to my eyes again as the funeral ended with the old, old church songs about precious memories of mother and father, about the heavenly mansion our Father has prepared for us with its many rooms like a huge motel on some endless Interstate highway and never a "No Vacancy" sign, about the land that is fairer than day, about the beautiful shore on which, someday, all of us will be reunited, about the place where age and illness do not corrupt. If we only have Faith. If we only have Faith.
+ + + + + + +
After the funeral service, all of us piled into cars and drove to the cemetery. It was finally time for my grandmother to be laid to rest beside her beloved husband and her eldest son, killed during World War II in a bus accident. I saw the heavy metal vault standing by, ready to receive my grandmother's body. My father's people, raised on farms, insist on spending eternity encased in a thick, protective layer of iron. They fear nocturnal animals who dig up graves, as if all of them heard about or were witness to some gruesome episode of disinterment in the childhoods.
One of my grandmother's elderly relatives pulled up to the grave site in an ancient pickup. He wore overalls and a red-and-black checked ranch coat, in sharp contrast to the Sunday suits of the other mourners. He told one of my uncles he had driven all the way in from the country and was sorry to have arrived too late for my grandmother's service. My uncle asked him how things were out on the farm. The old man pushed his straw cowboy hat back on his head, squinted at the white mid-morning sky and replied in his beautiful, laconic Panhandle accent, "Well, we just got the sorghum harvested and now we are laying in the winter wheat." A smile creased his weathered face then, thinking as he was, I guess, of how the cycles of labor and the soil and plants go on and on and on, of all the seasons and years he had toiled through and of how many more he probably had left to go before he, too, would rest.
The preacher beckoned for the women of the family to come and sit down in stiff-backed folding chairs while he said one last prayer. Then all of us filed by and laid our hands on my grandmother's coffin. By then, the wind was beginning to whip up blowing dirt. The somber-suited funeral home man told us it was fine for us to go on to the church for lunch, that they would take care of everything. As we left my grandmother's grave site, my sister and I passed a tombstone engraved with a strangely beautiful scene of a lonesome covered wagon coming West to the High Plains a hundred years ago, as if the artist had somehow viewed the whole scene from high up on a windy bluff, like an Indian look-out.
My sister and I ate the funeral lunch of covered dishes provided for us by sweet old church ladies in Fellowship Hall. Our uncle who used to look like Hud in the movie, but who is now as old as Paul Newman himself, sat beside us and told us a story, a new story we never heard before, about how Italian and German prisoners of war were housed in a building right across the street from the funeral home when our father and he were children. He said as boys they used to hang on the fence and try to speak English with the foreign prisoners of war when they were let out into the exercise yard to pace and smoke cigarettes. My uncle squeezed my hand in his roughened one and told me, in his strangely poetic manner, that when he finally owned up to defeat and left Hollywood to come back home to the Panhandle to settle down and be a mechanic, his return felt like a tiny postage stamp on a big, big letter. As I listened to my uncle speak I felt some kind of recognition, some sweet and moving sense of kinship with him. He was the only one of my grandmother's five sons to move away from the Panhandle and really make a mess of his life with drinking and women and a chequered work history. I am the only female member of the family ever to have become a divorcee. I am certain both of us were frequently mentioned in my dead grandmother's prayers.
Then it was time for my sister and me to get going because we still needed to vist the other cemetery across town, the cemetery were our father and our mother's parents are buried, before we started our long journey back to our own homes. Our oldest cousin gave us an ancient, fragile candy box full of snapshots our grandmother had saved for remembrance. Our second cousin invited us to come back up next summer for rodeo. We changed into our jeans in the church's ladies room and received tearful, goodbye-for-a-long-time hugs from our uncles and their wives before we got back into the rental car.
+ + + + + + +
Again, we navigated solely on my memory and arrived at our father's cemetery. It had not changed since my last visit there, except that our grandfather had joined our grandmother there. My remarried mother's name and birthdate inscribed on my father's tombstone thirty-odd years ago still bothered me; if I had had the right tools with me I would have been sorely tempted, once and for all, to pry her name off the marker now that my father's mother was dead and couldn't see me do it.
The cemetery was deserted except for my sister and me, so I lay on my back for a while on each of my family members' graves, shielding my eyes from the bright afternoon sun, prickled by blades of white, dried-up grass. Then I sat up, balancing on my elbows, and surveyed the view from there. It is simple: across the one-lane asphalt road lies a rectangular ochre field bounded on all sides by barbed wire; it its center sits a two-story white farmhouse, so pure in its architecture it seems like a stick-figure symbol for "house" drawn by a child. When I was a teenager I wanted to be cremated when I died and my ashes scattered to the wind in Paris. Now, at forty, I think the asphalt road, the flat, windswept vista, the poor yellow field and white archetype of House I see from the gravesite of my people is peaceful, even comforting. I think, Even if I am not buried here when the time comes, someday when I come back to visit these graves I am going to use my fingernails and claw out a Mason jar full of this hard Panhandle dirt. Then, no matter how far I travel, no matter how my family decides to deal with my deserted body when I die, like a vampire I'll have my own native soil with me always.
When we finished paying our respects to the Dead I talked my sister into driving twenty-seven miles out of our way to Borger, my childhood home and her birthplace. After we passed the fields still full of pump jacks, the landscape speeding by my passenger window began a subtle transformation. I nearly cried over the familiar red dirt and rocky outcropppings, the spiky yucca and purple scrub in the flat distance. We thought we were only imagining the delicious smell of something burning, and then we drove past a fire in a field of bleached out grazing grass. This stretch of road never changes, I thought to myself. Everything else in the world may change, but not this stretch of road. We rolled past the cut-off to the City Dump, and then we were back in our home town.
Borger itself was all gone down. All the friendly and familiar shop signs of the Saturday morning Main Street of my childhood had disappeared. No more red and gilded signs marking dime store paradise at M.E. Moses and Woolworth's and Sprouse-Ritz, no more gussied-up lady mannequins in the windows of Penney's or Dunlap's or Levine's, no more kind Mr. Smithy and his tidy hardware store full of treasures. What businesses there were left still trying to eke out an existence among the abandoned ghost town storefronts on Main Street were only pitiful attempts: just junk stores, hardly less depressing than garage sales. Even the Spudnut Shop had closed down. Western Auto was gone and hand-written signs on cardboard salvaged from a carton in its windows indicated some crazy evangelical church congregation was using the storefront for its Sunday services. They probably even speak in tongues in there these days.
We found our old childhood house and saw that more recent tenants (surely they were mad!) had chopped down the few trees our family planted decades ago and managed to nurse, somehow, past tornadoes and driving dirt storms and frigid winters, to maturity. The house itself displayed a new veneer of plastic siding, hiding the plain, sensible wooden slats I knew lay beneath. We drove down the alley to my dead and deserted elementary school and then on past our grandmother's house. The state of her home was nearly more than we could bear. Her beloved mimosa tree had been chopped down and building materials and broken-down cars and motorcycles littered the front lawn and driveway. Paint peeled from the house, revealing evidence of green or pink incarnations I remembered from various decades past. It looked like poor white trash were living there now, unaware of the graves in the back yard of half a dozen of my grandmother's beloved lap dogs.
That was about all I could stand. I didn't even have the heart left to drive by our old church. It was apparent our hometown was dying, drying up and wasting away with the oil and gas that had given it life in the first place back in the first part of the twentieth century. My poor hometown was probably at the prime of its life during my own childhood, when all our fathers had jobs in the oil fields and things were going so well that the gasoline was just run off and burned in the field, as if it weren't worth the bother. Then everything changed. The Government began to talk about air quality and non-renewable resources, and, of course, the oil field workers hoped for something better for their children than the hard lives they had lived themselves.
I guess my generation was the next problem. Our parents somehow found a way to send us off to college and then we began to dream of clean office jobs in distant skyscrapers, far away from our people, their graveyard shifts in the refineries and their church singing. We got college degrees and set about ridding ourselves of our Panhandle accents like housewives routing out bad spots as they peel potatoes for Sunday dinner. Now, in towering vertical cities we are destined to be renters forever because we can't afford to buy the very space we inhabit. Meanwhile, the homes of our childhood in the Panhandle sit empty and when someone attempts to sell one of them, it brings a price that is little better than giving it away. Not only are the little oil field boom towns dying, even grand old Route 66 itself is only vaguely recognizable in certain spots, buried beneath the new super-fast Interstate highways, chopped up like a rattlesnake by a hoe.
My sister and I decided it was getting late, that it was time to connect back up to the main highway and head home. On our way out of town, we drove past the refinery, splayed out black and menacing on the horizon. Both of us fell silent. Neither of us felt much like talking. I had to fight the urge to turn around for one last look. I thought to myself, The only time I make the long, long drive and come back to this place is when someone dies. Finally everyone who belongs to this land is finally returned to the earth. There will never be any reason for me to return here again.
Suddenly I felt tired. I thought about how old I am getting, about the white beginning to appear at the roots of my dyed red hair, about the way my muscles seem to be falling away from my bones. A sense of doubt swept over me, and for the very first time in my life a nagging little voice in my head questioned the ease with which I had left the Panhandle forever. How had it seemed so simple? Did I truly realize I had made a profound decision when I left so thoroughly in my youth? How was it that I experienced no conflict? How was I able to pack all my belongings into the trunk of a car and depart so quickly, so completely, once I made up my mind? I thought of my children nearly grown up now with no trace of the accent or language of the Panhandle, their speech as neutral in color as the newscasters' voices they grew up hearing on cable television. I wondered if I had been right not to have taken them to church, where they would have learned to sing the old hymns and witnessed the startling, archaic Baptist ritual of full-body water immersion. Was I right to have raised my children in a land where I am a stranger myself, far away from the decent people they are related to by blood, all because I had big dreams of becoming an artist and living in Paris someday? And, of course, that never happened. I moved to the city and ended up working a series of bad jobs every day of my life just like everyone else. I spent my life at a desk or behind the steering wheel of a car, stuck in traffic out on some interminable loop, returing at night to a rent house, like a squatter.
+ + + + + + +
My sister and I again took turns driving and soon turned South. In a couple of hours we were completely out of the Panhandle and able to make good time on the Interstate. Late that night we arrived at our mother's house. She was waiting up for us just like we were her teenage girls again. We told her about our grandmother's funeral and the news about how all our father's folks were doing. She saw the trip had taken a toll on me when I spoke about the regrets I felt rising inside me on the way home. She hugged me, her eyes wet with tears, and said, "Well, maybe you will finally have some closure now. Maybe it is finally all over." Like a good daughter I agreed with her, but something angry inside me rose up and yelled, It will never be over. Scratch the surface of my heart and you touch the hurt spot of grief and loss that never heals properly. I will always be the little orphaned daughter of my dead father, killed in a car wreck on a Texas highway. You can't miss what you never had, so maybe my baby sister can make a happy life for herself in Houston, fighting bumper-to-bumper traffic and the high cost of living. I may live another forty years, but nothing will ever change the fact that the Panhandle is the standard to which I compare everything on earth. When I drive on a highway I want to get to some other town and I want to see few other cars on the road as I travel there. I want to see the flat, pure horizon and the huge sky, unobscured by trees or tall buildings. All the green vegetation, all the trees in Austin, make me claustrophobic. They seem to be bending over, accentuating the roundness of the earth, sucking up all the air.
We woke up early the next morning, said our goodbyes to Mother and started on the final leg of the journey home. My sister dropped me off at my house at noon and got right back on the road to Houston so that she'd be there when her husband got home from work. I made her promise to telephone me as soon as she arrived home so that I could stop worrying about her being killed in a car wreck.
I had a while to nap before mid-afternoon when my children would get home from school. I lay down on my own familiar bed and soon dozed off to the radio. I dreamed of traveling in a car down a one-lane asphalt road and suddenly driving up behind a cowboy on a horse. He wore chaps and shaded his eyes with a black hat. He rode solemnly down the shoulder of the road on his russet. In my dream, inexplicably, this cowboy was burdened by a rough timber cross, big enough to crucify Jesus on, lashed on with rope to the back of his saddle.
