Chapter 1: Gene Pools

All things I’m acquainted with originated through the first love of my life. Mom. That’s not to say we haven’t had our struggles with one another. She’s a lioness when it comes to her cubs, so she’s been there, like a skin, good or bad.

I’m the eldest of Mom’s three living children. Lisa and Gary followed me, Gary followed a child my parents had buried two years prior.

The buried child, we call Zane. William Zane Grigsby, a proud and proper name. A still name. Mom understood she was to deliver her son in a death of life four days prior. Induced labor, and my brother entered the world as a stillborn infant on March 11, 1960. Hard work for known tragedy.

Today’s date is March 7, 2008—the forty-eighth anniversary of his death. Forty-eight years ago, Zane’s connection to an earthly life ended when his mother fell into shock and died herself. Without life for more than a few minutes, the doctor revived Mom, but of course, proved too late for Zane. As it turned out, at over eight pounds, he was the fattest child of the four she’d birth.

Mom has mentioned light and a peace with passing for herself, but she’s rarely discussed her son’s death. Most of what I know, I’ve plied from my grandmothers, though Mom did say Zane favored Gary, who has proven to be the last to bear our Grigsby name.

A bit nosy and absorbed with death at age five, I wheedled nectar from our ancestral nest when any such conversation permitted. The fact Zane lived in that shadowy place called heaven only increased my fascination with the subject of death and family—in that order. I barraged my grandmothers with questions, then extracted liberties, combed through old pictures or letters when I could. I even managed to view photographs of my brother in his miniature casket. I can’t remember if he looked like Gary or not. I just remember the “after” photo with blue carnations and his name framed in miniscule, its metal pushed down into red clay. Cemetery clay.

And I remember how much I’d wanted him.

Dad had called me at his mother’s home to break the news. The date I’m not sure of, but my repetitive responses, “I want my brother. I just want my baby brother,” surely did little to console the broken voice at the other end of the phone. I sat next to my grandmother on that day, upon her blue couch, its two cushions and hard back designed with silvery threads. Much effort transformed the couch into a double bed, if a granddaughter deemed it necessary. Next to its right arm stood a vase with twin plastic roses, red and unfurled atop a small wooden table and its Siamese chair. Not a chair to sit in, though impetuous granddaughters were prone to do just that. Next to the flower arrangement, a relic of the Bell system rested. One of those old black phones from the forties with a slow metal dial. Its receiver, heavy. Lines, multiple. Party lines were a common thing back then in our small rural communities.

I was born in Amherst. The small town was born in Texas this way: Amherst, on U.S. Highway 84 and the Santa Fe tracks in west central Lamb County, began in 1913 as a Pecos and Northern Texas Railway station for William E. Halsell's Mashed O Ranch. A townsite was platted a mile from the Santa Fe depot in 1923 and named for Amherst College by a railroad official. The post office opened in 1924. By 1930, thirty-five businesses and 964 people constituted a lively trade center, and amenities included a newspaper, the Amherst Argus. The population in Amherst was 749 in 1940.

The first co-op hospital in Texas found itself there in the small town, known as South Plains Co-op. My parents, co-op members, paid eighty dollars for my birth in 1955. The hospital’s incorporation came in 1970, when the population was 825. In 1980, the population of Amherst was 971, and businesses included five cotton gins and two grain elevators.

For many years, the Amherst Hotel, the town's first permanent building, was the most popular stopping place between Clovis, New Mexico and Lubbock, Texas. The hotel’s popularity, missing for as long as I can remember, didn’t keep Amherst from holding on well enough when Aaron was born at the incorporated co-op in 1982, but more than a few of its residents held on in the nursing home just across Main.

This small town in Texas—the birthplace of my parents, their four kids, Lisa’s son, Zach, and my second son. Aaron was the last of our family born there just ten days before the old hospital shut its doors and moved into a modern home. Aaron may very well have been the last child delivered there—I’m not sure.

My paternal grandparents farmed a labor of land. Labor is a Portuguese land measurement for approximately 177.1 acres. Their quarter-section-plus was about two miles northwest of Amherst. I’m not sure how many party lines hung within the farming community, but nobody complained if abrupt news, emergencies, or ramblings of another party member created the need to interrupt a casual conversation. Understood: Listen for a short second or two, make sure the ongoing conversation wasn’t more important than your need to use the phone, then politely interrupt. Excuse me, Golda, I need to use the phone to call home and see if I can stay with MaMa longer. I’m fine. She’s fine too. Thank you. I’ll be off in a little bit and you can have the phone back.

Well respected in their community for good reason, my grandparents, MaMa and PaPa (pronounced Maw Maw and Paw Paw), farmed there for decades, but first survived the Dust Bowl and Great Depression in another location. They married November 9, 1924 in Clarendon, Texas.

A big and good group of Grigsby’s raised PaPa around Quail, Texas. MaMa’s parents married in 1904 in Canyon, Texas (a town now remembered by me for another reason). MaMa was born three years later in Carter, Oklahoma, so it’s doubtful MaMa’s parents traveled far from their Texas and Oklahoma roots.

PaPa helped build a school near Earth, Texas. I think he made fifty cents a day or something like that under one of the New Deal programs. This job lasted just a short time because for the most part, PaPa was a dairy and cotton farmer.

To buy and keep their farm and three-bedroom home (a “space” requirement), they accounted to Farmers Home Administration. Three bedrooms were required because they had a son and daughter. Had their children been two boys or two girls, they could’ve had a two-bedroom home.

They counted livestock, canned goods, and cotton bolls in good times. I don’t know what they counted in bad. They did something though because Dad purchased the farm from MaMa in the seventies.

They raised one daughter who outlived only one of them. Frances Lee, or Eee, as they called her, succumbed to a genetic and debilitating death at age fifty-three, but truly, she outlived them both. One in body, the other in spirit.

William Harvey Grigsby, Sr. and his wife, Una Mae Coulson Grigsby, also raised one son nine years younger than Eee. They’d carried him as a child to these plains in a backboard buggy. They called my dad Junior. His mother called him Jun-Jun, but not so much so in front of his friends, though the pet name often slipped.

For most of my childhood, we lived only a few miles from my grandparents, so visits there were frequent. Most things were tended to in town, and I loved the trips. The locals fed me candy when I visited Wagner’s Grocery or we filled up with gas at the “filling station”—the one with a large Texaco sign. It stood in mid-town vicinity, well kept I think, but it’s the other gas station on the right-hand side of Main, near the edge of town I’ve remembered most. The sign on top of this worn-out red and brick building read Conoco: Hottest Brand Going. In all my visits, I only remember filling up there once. As an impressionable child, I understood the one visit as unfaithful, but the reason for the treason, never told—to me anyway.

MaMa’s mother, Sarah Emma Williams Coulson, was strict Church of Christ. Though she lived within the city limits of Amherst, we never visited her much. When we did, it was just MaMa and me. While there, I’d sit in a hemp-cushioned chair with a seat about the size of mine. I had to sit straight because the chair did. We never stayed long and my grandmothers never invited me into their short conversations, so I read from a Little Golden Book and waited for departure. So just MaMa and I could talk.

Grandpa Coulson was as mean as Grandma Coulson was churched. My memories of him consist of a hushed phone call and a drive to the bus stop to pick up the cranky old man. I’d overheard talk. Someone said he’d pulled the toilet right out of the floor of the nursing home he’d lived in. I guess it made the nurses mad, because we had to go get him. After that, he stayed in an older house, one near the barn whose room housed only hay and tin cans before he moved in with his beat-up old suitcase and a few cigar boxes. Truthfully, I don’t think he stayed long, but my impression then was that he did.

Back then, everybody said he’d lost his mind. Today we’d probably call it Alzheimer’s. According to MaMa’s records, he died in San Antonio on October 24, 1962 and was buried three days later in Quail.

It’s been said that farmers, during the days of New Deal programs and Farmers Home Administration loans, grew to be excellent bookkeepers. In MaMa’s case, this proved true. She documented births, deaths, and marriages. Illnesses too. After Aunt Frances became ill with heart disease, ballpoint and well-lined notes blocked MaMa’s medical books. She’d already lost one brother, and later, her husband, both to heart disease.

Medical books of hers reveal pages of the heart’s division. Her notes on my family’s diverse diagnoses (three unique diseases for three distinct hearts) aren’t divided, labeled and named with a proper noun in her records. This creates a spirit of confusion for her granddaughter. I can’t tell where one heart begins and another’s beat ends. Clear though are her studies on Shane, my elder son, MaMa’s first great-grandson. His brain was too small and transmitted multiple tribulations with it.

Grandma Coulson was a short round woman. Born in 1885, she died in 1960. She looked like some of the grandmothers in the stories I used to read. Mom told me my great-grandmother made her living ironing. Reminiscent, Mom smiled and said she also made the best rhubarb pie ever. Mom knows her pies I guess.

My great-grandmother wore glasses and maybe even served me cookies a time or two. MaMa recorded her mother’s birth and death dates, and a metal marker I found near a marble one when Dad and I visited his grandmother’s grave on December 14, 2000 confirmed these records. Dad and I carted the metal marker home. I know it was this date because it’s the same day I scooped some dirt two miles northwest of Amherst.

Sentimental, I wanted soil from where MaMa and PaPa’s mailbox had stood. I’d circled that mailbox a million times in their Chevrolet. They drove nothing but Chevys.

Practice behind the wheel of their car started for me at age thirteen, so before I got my driver’s license at fifteen, maneuvers around the mailbox and turn-rows of cotton provided me with quite a love for the drive and the land. Music piped through their car by way of an AM station. I shared names and songs with Dionne Warwick as we sang our way to San Jose through the turn-rows of cotton. Lulu and I declared our assurances to “Sir”—he’d always be loved—then we circled the mailbox one more time.

My sand is in a half-pint and wide-mouth canning jar. A label is gummed to two sides. One label was copied from Luke 8:15. The Parable of the Soils reads: “But the ones that fell on the good ground are those who, having heard the word with a noble and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with patience.”
The other label reads: OUR GOOD GROUND. This soil was taken on December 14, 2000 from the very spot that supported the mailbox of MaMa and PaPa in Amherst, Texas.

It was after I had scraped sand from my grandparents’ land that Dad mentioned he’d like to visit his grandmother’s grave. It’s while we were there I picked up Emma Coulson’s metal marker, then buried it in my flowerbed later. A peculiar thing I guess, but I say hi to her when I’m watering my Never Die plants right next to her name. Too, I’m all smiling up at heaven when the wind chimes from my porch or some momma’s baby pecks nearby in a red-breasted blazer.

Emma Coulson eventually divorced her husband, maybe even before I was born. Divorce was unheard of back then. A code of silence, somehow kept, keeps me uncertain as to our exact connection (or rather, disconnection) with the Abbott’s and their grocery market I never saw the inside of. The Abbott’s: relatives of Emma’s. Everyday, I look at a photo of the old market, and everyday I wonder what juicy tidbit escaped my knowledge then and now. The story’s foundation captures my curiosity. An unrequited pursuit, its mystery eludes me still.

MaMa and PaPa didn’t trade at Abbott’s Grocery and Market. Mom has remarked she never stepped foot in the store and knows not why. Some relative must have at one time, because I have that old photo of the place. I’ve even sold one from a collectibles shop Greg and I once owned. My love of history didn’t serve us too well during that time.

An advertisement of the store in The 1949 Growl, a yearbook of Dad’s, reveals their phone number was 2121. (Too, they had the lowest prices in town.) The photograph I’m fond of hangs over my kitchen counter. It’s my peek into a secret store. The man behind the glass counter wears a dark shirt and tie. His apron is white and he leans from his left. His elbow rests upon the counter and he looks happy enough with or without the Grigsby’s trade. Boxes of candy hide behind the glass. One carton boasts Baby Ruth’s, others are a blurred guess.

The date of the photo is unclear, but I’d guess the thirties. A wooden pallet holds no more than eleven fifty-pound sacks of flour or maybe pintos. The store’s only visible customer sits in the rear, near a few cartons of cleaners and other goods and cans of quantitative size and limited quantity. He’s as minimal as the eight brooms adjacent him. Upside down on a high shelf, the brooms appear as if they stand skinny in their straw hats, ready to sweep the moulding of a high paneled ceiling.

A scale of fair and accurate measure assumes a credible position near a cash register big enough to break the table propped behind the proprietor who wears the white apron. A sign hangs above him from a length of cord. Tied to a heavy and still ceiling fan, the cardboard’s message is clear. IF YOU SPIT ON THE FLOOR AT HOME, GO HOME TO SPIT.

Maybe it was the sign that annoyed my grandparents. I never saw them spit.

The life of my grandparents, and it truly was that, not separate lives, but two joined as one, consisted mostly of redundant duties. I know this now, but MaMa and PaPa never let on they were weary of it and for a young granddaughter, it was a stirring life. It reminds me of embroidered tea towels, antiques nearly, the kind Mom, Lisa, and I still use. Each day of the week, stitched into a dutiful Momma Cat or some other busy mistress. Monday, wash; Tuesday, iron; Saturday, bake. But for my grandparents: Wednesday, groceries (double-stamp day); Tuesday, the Laundromat (which I detested); and Thursday (my favorite day of their week), was the day MaMa got her hair done.

Helen’s Beauty Shop. To my young mind, little rivaled the smell of Aqua Net Hair Spray in a small room full of ladies. Ruddy-faced beauties sitting under dryers in pink perm rods and cotton gauzes, flipping the pages of Redbook or Family Circle. Others, perching on pedestals, their hair dripping wet with water or blue hair dye. Each wearing funny capes and waiting their turn for the next step in splendor.

I stared at pictures of the World’s Fattest Man in the National Enquirer and pretended indifference toward the day’s current gossip. My grandmother never said much about anyone while she was in there, but she wasn’t above sticking her head out from under the dryer now and then, catching a tidbit or two. Later that night at the supper table, I’d try to fill my grandparents in on the day’s gleanings. MaMa attempted to make me think she had no interest in what I’d heard, but I was born old, so I knew better, and continued on with my child’s chant. It was, after all, the elder in me who took note of MaMa’s occasional glance toward PaPa. MaMa's eyebrows rose with interest as if to say, Aaahhah, it’s just as I thought!

There must’ve been times MaMa didn’t desire my company at Helen’s Beauty Shop. Often enough, PaPa walked me to the drug store. Odors of Ben-Gay and other camphor filled the air while burgers sizzled on a grill next to the owner who cooked and kept a flyswatter handy, occasionally smacked a slow fly. The drug store wasn’t a bad second.

There, large and heavy circles of red hung on walls the color of faded spearmint. The metal signs resembled a meltdown of sorts and reminded us to drink Coca-Cola. These things and others invited the thirst of farmers, a half dozen or so, about the same time each afternoon. I listened to news about the weather and crops while I worked on my banana split. The leathered men smoked pipes filled with Prince Albert tobacco or they rolled cigarettes in an effortless fashion with the same. There was one man who always sat up at the counter. When he talked, he stuck a metal tube to his neck, then spoke with a canned voice. He sometimes spun halfway around on the high padded stool and addressed the farmers. I tried not to stare.

PaPa and I sat across from each other in a booth of our own. Reflected rays of sunlight often shone on the warbled wood and Formica dinettes. Some green, others red, washed time and time again, they sparkled like mirrors. Always the farmers called out to us. They said things like, “How you doing, Harvey? Who’s that you’ve got with you today?” They’d been acquainted with me as long as PaPa had, just as they’d known my parents before me. We all understood this, but these were things to be counted on. Things as much a part of our lives as the red dirt plowed since FDR and before.

My grandparents were deeply in love. I didn’t realize how much until after PaPa died and MaMa mourned until the day she joined him. True, I’d read the love letters my grandmother had tucked into her deep freezer. It was there she stored wills, birth certificates, and two stacks of love letters, one stack tied together with a pink ribbon, the other bound with blue. Their love first kindled at a picnic and for a long time, letters were the only way in which their love expressed itself, until at last, each defied their divergent Protestant parents. These rips remained concrete, though I rarely heard the cracks discussed.

PaPa grew from a long line of Hard-shell Primitive Baptists, the same religious indoctrination of Abraham Lincoln as a youth. PaPa’s father, a man I’ve never forgotten, once dismissed a daughter of his from the church he’d pastored long ago. She’d been playing the piano at a party, thereby triggering some of the youngsters into dancing. Atonement for this sin was restriction from church, as well as the loss of other perks of youth—for a full two months.

Grandpa Grigsby, like the cranky one, also lived near MaMa and Papa’s barn at one time, in the little room with a concrete floor. But at the end of his life, the primitive preacher lived in a small house a few feet from MaMa and PaPa. Families back then called such homes “weaning shacks” and in most cases, it was true. This same stucco was the location of my parents’ weaning. It’s the house they brought me home to after I was born and it’s the house my dad lived in when PaPa died at age sixty-two.

Parted down the middle of his resolute head, the preacher’s hair was as thick and white as the cream and cotton his son sold. After I walked from my grandparent’s house to his, he removed wire-rimmed glasses and greeted me as if it’d been years since he’d seen me instead of days or hours. He used to serve me frozen cherry pie until Mom came over one day when we were just about to dive into the half-frozen fruit. The preacher pointed to our near-thawed slices and said to her, “Daughter, Una Mae told me these new pies tasted as good as homemade, but I don’t think so.”

Mom ruined future frozen pie picnics for me when she told my great-grandfather to bake the pies first. Then she motioned him over to another chair and said, “I’ll share a cigar with you if you get me a cup of coffee, and don’t give me any of your sermons. You know this family wasn’t worth anything until I came along.”

Through the marriages of the Grigsby family, I’m eligible for membership in Daughters of the American Revolution. This family and its hardboiled history—each added name more political or biblical than the last—was the clan Mom found for herself.