The Assignment

Texas. Spring. 1964. I guess you could designate any time a momentous point in human history, but for me Texas in the spring of 1964 is one of those instances where you can almost hear huge, shifting tectonic plates—geologic structures crushing as they slide by one another—or the Titanic making contact with that first iceberg or the first plane crashing into the twin towers. You wonder how people could know just then that they've wandered into a whirlwind, especially when it just sounds like a spring breeze. I wish I understood then what I think I know now. But in spring semester 1964, I was like most nineteen-year-olds—looking at the world through a narrow prism, while around me, the world flamed. Kennedy had been assassinated that fall in Dallas, near my hometown, Mariposa. Then, the world began to look upon us as crazed hatemongers. I started telling people who asked where I was from that I came from a small town a hundred and ninety miles north of Houston instead of twenty miles south of Dallas. I wish I could say it was out of an inner outrage at the horror, but mainly it was just reactive and self-protective. The long view comes late, if it comes at all.

I had things to do, deadlines, assignments. I was in college and already thinking about finishing this just-beginning spring semester, which actually started in late January and deep in winter. That's why I was driving east from Mariposa to Kaufman, crossing the Trinity River, marking the end of the West, and traveling back into East Texas, more primordial, lush, and ancient than the spare, dry edge of the Texas plains west of Mariposa. Mariposa was a railroad town just east of where the Chisholm Trail passed, headed north. Kaufman was the county seat of the county with the same name, taken from an early settler and Indian fighter, a place that billed itself as the gateway to East Texas's Piney Woods. Around downtown Mariposa, you saw a mix of jeans and overalls, since the West and the South had equal claim, but around the Kaufman County courthouse, it was mainly overalls and brogans as the South still held sway.

That little trip wrapped up a lot about me, my family, and my view of the world then too. I was going to Kaufman to talk to my maternal grandfather for a classroom assignment for school. At eighty years old, Pampaw Scott was still doing some barbering in Kaufman—the life he'd led there forever, as far as I knew. To the west of Mariposa was where my other grandfather, the one for whom I had been named, lived. The first Jefferson Bowie Adams wasn't really a cowboy rancher. Granddad had actually worked most of his life for the Southern Pacific Railroad up and down the line from Dallas to Houston, over to San Antonio and beyond. But after he retired, he became the rancher he'd always thought himself to be, and he lived the life of a small rancher. He had enough land for about fifty head of rangy cattle that he'd pick up at auctions in town and try to fatten and unload. He also had room out there for his old horse Chief Bowles. Over the years, I guess he'd had several Chief Bowleses, but he didn't name them anew, like Chief Bowles II, like I was Jefferson Bowie Adams II. Each one became Chief Bowles. So it was probably Chief Bowles V by then. I spent most of my time with Granddad, even though mother was naturally inclined for me to spend the time with her family. But I was drawn to the rancher side and the West more than to the farmer/shopkeeper Scotts and the East. Mother's people were quiet, religious. They went to church, went to work, paid the bills, rarely left home, were staid.

So if I'd had a choice, I'm sure I would have been interviewing Granddad instead of Pampaw for this assignment—an oral history from a specific family member about the most memorable event in the person's life. My teacher had handed out little slips of paper with the assignment, and mine read "maternal grandmother, grandfather, aunt." I think he was some kind of control freak, but that meant I went east to talk to Pampaw instead of west to talk to Granddad.

I liked Pampaw, but not in the same way I was drawn to Granddad. Partially it was that Granddad was there after my father died, while Pampaw was thirty miles away. And Pampaw always seemed too quiet for me—quiet and bald and always having to take care of Mammaw—while Granddad, burly and compact with a full head of steel-gray hair, always had a big grin and a slap on the back.

My grandmother, Mammaw, was the explosive one. She'd had a stroke in the 1950s and now talked with a strange, drawn-out, flattened screech. She kept her hair in tight curls, dyed that color everyone ascribed to blue-haired old ladies. She wore the same blue housecoat and fluffy slippers all the time except for church when she changed into a flowered dress with a belt, flat black shoes, and a tight black hat that sat on the back of her head—a look that emphasized the fact that she had no waist. She looked like a short, belted rain barrel with canes. I don't know if walkers were available then. If they were, she didn't use them, but when she walked (which was rare since she usually sat and got Pampaw to fetch what she wanted), she always tottered on two sturdy wooden canes with thick black rubber tips. I always thought of her as a tyrant. Perhaps because she'd been sick so long, she had to be demanding. Pampaw was her constant helper, and she seemed to screech at him continuously. It made him seem weak to me, and I was at an age where weakness in men was an abominable sin.

Pampaw's only indulgence was a cigar after a meal. But Mammaw hated cigars, hated Pampaw's smoking, so he had to sneak off and sit in a little chair just inside the garage to smoke his cigar. I knew that was where we'd have our talk today, as soon as the Sunday dinner after church was finished.

Dinners then were the noon meal, not in the evening when we'd have supper. Sunday dinner was always roast beef, green beans, spinach, and cornbread, and a few other things from Mammaw's garden. It wasn't really Mammaw's garden, because Pampaw did all the work, but he did it exactly as she told him to, following her instructions based on those years when she was young and capable and knew how to do the garden, I guess.

They were expecting me because I'd called to talk to Pampaw about the assignment and asked him if there were some special event that he could remember to talk to me about. Long pause. That wasn't unusual, really, because Pampaw was this quiet man. But it seemed longer than usual before he answered: "Yes, I think there's something I could maybe tell you about."

"That's good," I said, "because my prof says it's really important for us to...