M. Lee Locke

Luna, Texas

A short story

Swirling chocolate milk floods the Trinity River plain, dimpling upstream of a moss-stained tree. Why in the world does Grandma Billy insist on living in the middle of nowhere? It isn't an ancestral home, nor even one she owns. She leases the damned shack. Two years she's camped out in this black gumbo land; her only neighbors are hump-backed Brahman cattle munching their way through the river bottom.

She never answers a question directly, so I can only guess from her blind praise of this place that all she really wants is to get away from my mother. Uncle Billy moved to Nacogdoches so he's no bother. My brother and I used his name to differentiate our maternal grandmother from our paternal, whom we named Big Grandma because of her larger stature. Grandma Billy never objected to the linkage with her son, and it became a family tradition. But now she has distanced herself from everyone—except me.

She sways on the porch swing, with one emaciated sleeveless arm draped on the top wooden slat, the other crooked with a sweating glass of iced tea ready to meet her lips. Somehow she always keeps it full; I’ve never seen her drain it to empty. Even though the September humidity thickens the air about us, she wears a silk scarf like a babushka atop her white hair. The dilapidated shingled house sits upon a thick concrete slab that's listing, ever so slightly, toward the river. The cement porch is painted dusty white and throws up a painful glare as I approach, making Grandma Billy shimmer like a ghost.

“You got the crabs, William?” she calls.

She sips her tea then moves her other hand to her mouth, taking a drag from a Pall Mall. I see the red cigarette packet and her favorite ashtray on the swing. Groaning after making the last step to the porch, I set down the large, galvanized washtub full of live blue-shell crabs, sloshing amid the weight of gallons of iced water.

“You going to boil all these, Grandma Billy?”

“I'm not setting up an aquarium, William. Of course I'm cooking them. You can take some home if you stick around. Donna likes them, too. Yes?”

She knows my wife loves boiled crab. Just as much as my mother hates them. My indifference comes from years of eating Grandma Billy's seafood.

“You can help me clean them,” she says.

“Lucky me.”

She laughs while nodding her head toward the door. My signal to lift the tub and move the pungent catch into the house.

“Probably my last time to cook these critters,” she says as she walks behind me.

I shake my head.

“You've heard me predict that before?” she says. “I mean it this time. Let's get started, boy, before they start dying and stinking up the place. I've got things to do and things to say.”

Things to say?

She has me pull out her two biggest pots, her trembling arms too frail these days to lift such monsters.

Once the water's boiling and she puts in the bay leaves, salt and cracked pepper, I drop the lethargic crabs, on-at-a-time, filling both pots. Puckering my lips I make high pitched squealing noises, just as I've always done since I was a little kid, pretending the crabs are screaming for help. Grandam Billy cackles just as if it were the first time. It's probably funnier now that it comes from a middle-aged pudgy man.

“Now sit down, William boy. There's something you need to know. And the time it takes for the boiling is about all I can stand to talk about it.”

We sit at the small kitchen table. The only sounds are the rumbling pots and the rattling of the window air conditioner in the living room. I raise my eyebrows, but she won't look at me. She's concentrating on lighting another cigarette with a match she's pulled from a small matchbook.

“Hank wasn't your grandpa,” she says while shaking the match violently to extinguish it.

Before I can say anything, she looks at me with those wet blue eyes and points her finger upward to shush me.

“I'm going to tell you this once. Your momma doesn't know. Understand?”

So, I'll have to be the one to tell her, it's my job. This is our way of communicating since I got out of college. I never knew what went wrong with those two, but now I think it has something to do with what I'm about to hear. Something she has to get off her chest.

Morning sun shoots through the window over the sink and the glare causes me to squint. Smoke, her white skin, white hair, and the glare conspire into a veil over Grandma Billy. She becomes thin, two-dimensional, almost transparent. As is her quiet voice.

#

“Daddy worked on a ranch,” she starts. “You never knew that, did you, William? Leased the land when I was only two. Just outside Luna, Texas. He was still a preacher, of course. What some people would call a CC rider in the old days. But when he got a permanent church in Luna, he moved us onto the ranch so he could do both things. His dream. Times were bad in Texas, the drought up north, but there was still rain down here on the coast. The Harmons had ten thousand acres, from Bolivar to Galveston to Matagorda and then up into the river valleys—the Brazos, the Trinity. Rich people, even in the Depression. Daddy rented a hundred and fifty acres and bought some head from them on credit. Sort of tenant farming, I suppose.

“I learned ranching from the ground up. Daddy and Momma gave me chores. Eventually had my own animals to take care of. We had beef cattle, but also some pigs and sheep. Momma and I tried rabbits for a while. We grew vegetables, too. Never went hungry. I was Daddy's right-hand-man, even though I was a little good-for-nothing girl, as he used to say. Still he depended on me. I was small enough that when there was a difficult birth, I'd be the one to stick my arm right up the cow's innards to help turn the calf around. That's when I was only nine years old.

“And whenever we had one of our animals butchered, I was right in there with the whole process and also as eager as Daddy to eat the first grilled steak. Momma was always a bit squeamish about eating one of our own animals. To be kind of bratty I'd say something like: “Is this Wilma?” right after I took a big bite. We named some of the animals, you see. Momma would have to leave the room then. Daddy'd laugh but then punish me anyway.

“It's hard to make any money at ranching, especially back then. People needed to eat, but nobody had any money. We raised animals to show, too. That was a struggle, but the most fun. I did all the training and grooming, which doesn't take a lot of talent, just lots of time and boring routine. I got to show when I was a bit older. I'm sure you can't believe it, William, but I became a champion. Some of my animals did well, but also I was judged for my showmanship talent and won all the time. I learned all the tricks real fast. One time I showed a heifer that was in heat. They can be real crazy, but I knew where to touch and not touch her, how to calm her down. During a showmanship contest, though, you have to trade animals with the other contestants, and that heifer dragged a poor kid all the way across the show ground. Pretty funny. But all's fair in love and war, and competition, I guess.

“We did all the county fairs and the state competitions, too. Daddy almost made a living out of those bulls he showed. With all the traveling, he lost his post at the church. He tried to combine things a bit and held services at the fairgrounds, saving souls. He gave that up, too, when he thought he'd lost mine.

“From a very early age I partook in all that the fair had to offer—excluding Daddy's revivals. Beer, wine, homemade liquor. All us fair kids got a hold of the stuff. I could handle it; some couldn't. Amy Joslen and I were best friends. I'll never forget her with light brown eyes and blond hair. So different from my black hair and blue eyes. Boy, did she love to drink. People today would say she loved to “party”. Her brother Hank did all the showing, she just tagged along to the fairs, mostly to see me, to cheer me on.

“I was too poor to have any music at home. We had a piano, as you know, but no record player or even radio. If there was a party going on at the fair, you'd find it by listening for music or sniffing for the booze. Many of the counties were dry, so homemade booze was the normal thing. Fun right at first and then it made you sick as a dog!

“Now this is where things get touchy, William. I knew all about sex from a young age, with the ranch animals, of course. The first time I saw people doing it was when Amy got drunk one time and ended up with a rodeo cowboy in the back of his old Ford pickup truck. The odor is what I remember most. That mixture of sweat, pee, and ozone. Amy and I had a pact that we'd look out for each other. We were only thirteen and there she was totally naked with that cowboy's pants down. And she was on top of him. I think she'd done it before, maybe. But I knew what it was they were doing, so I wasn't really shocked. Except I knew she was drunk and wasn't making good decisions. I called her name and she shooed me away.

“Later I found out she had three boys that night. She was addicted. That was the last thing in the world I wanted for myself. I wanted to get out of that town, get away from the ranch, search for my own soul. I didn't want a man ruling my life the way Daddy did. I was so afraid that I'd find myself pregnant and married to a rancher or oilfield roustabout.

“I new that life would have few pleasures. The Depression had more than one meaning. Most people were out of work, and despair was as thick as the heat and humidity. Despite all good intentions, at sixteen I got drunk at the tri-county fair right here on the Trinity River. They don't do that one anymore. Turned the fairgrounds into the shopping mall Donna goes to.  I'd won a trophy that day as tall as me. Felt pretty good about it. Daddy and Momma were negotiating some breeding contract and off to dinner with the buyers, so I found a party and drank some awful home-brew. Amy wasn't around to stop me—or to save me.

“I wanted me a cowboy. A couple of the rodeo boys joined the party. They'd had a good day roping; won enough points to make some money. Both of them were as ugly as sin—beat up, hairy, stinking with horse shit and days of sweat. By then I didn't care. I picked the tall one.

“Roping is a talent and a sport. Takes some physical fitness, too. This lanky boy's hands gripped me with finesse, my little arms were like twisted hemp he worked however-the-hell he wanted. When we got alone I felt the firm strings of his muscles in his chest, his thighs, his back. I found myself judging his body like it was bull's flesh. He didn't quite have the equipment of a bull but good enough.

“The next morning I had a hangover and a zygote. Never saw that cowboy again, never wanted to. So then I found out how all the politics of pregnancy works. Daddy had to put Mamma in the little hospital in Luna for a couple of days. The nerves, they said. They sent me out to Del Rio to be with my grandma. You never knew her. She and my grandpa were Sooners in the Oklahoma panhandle. That's where my Daddy was born, but then they left that garden spot and moved down to Texas. So off to Del Rio for me. Walks along the Rio Grande to stare at the Mexican desert, venison haunches for dinner, venison sausages for breakfast. My grandma had herself a tough old Mexican hombre to take care of her house and do some cooking. If you ask me, I think they were an item that the family wasn't supposed to know about. Grandpa was dead by then. I like to think that she had a nice life, anyway.

“And then your momma was born. A month after that Amy's brother Hank hitchhiked out to Del Rio and asked me to marry him. The family had it all arranged and we came up with the story that your momma knows—it was a ‘have to get married’ situation, with Hank as the father. We always celebrated our wedding anniversary on an earlier date. Well, Hank wasn't the father, sorry to say. But he was a good substitute.”

#

Grandma Billy rises and I know I need to take care of the crabs before they're overdone. I pour the contents of each pot into the big sink then run water from the tap over the steaming red crabs—pinchers, legs, and feelers curled into every possible angle.

“I think you look like him,” she says, her voice distant, weak.

“Like—”

“Just not as ugly. Thank God.”

She grinds out her cigarette in the ashtray while leaning against the chair back.

Perhaps I'll not tell Momma this story. Probably not even true. Grandma Billy loves entertaining me. Because I'm silly enough to listen.

“I just love that river,” she says while staring out the window over the sink. “The smells of the mud and trees and flowers sort of remind me of cowboys.”

END

Author of THE NESTUCCA RETREAT, a novel, M. Lee Locke has lived in The Netherlands, Africa, and sailed a small boat around the world.