I Lived to Tell It All Page 2

  There was a gate between the lane and the barn, and the mule ran toward it full-tilt. I don’t think it even slowed down before it went through. Dub said he could hear the barbed wire ping before it snapped on both sides of the gate.

  The gate and sled were little more than splinters. The tub that had contained the poison was reduced to dented sheet metal. The mule was bleeding from cuts from cotton bolls and the shattered gate.

  I started crying because of what I’d done and because Dub was screaming. I just knew he was going to be furious, and I ducked when he raised his arms. When they came down, they didn’t strike me. They wrapped around me. I could feel his heavy breathing inside his embrace. My tears ran into his sweat.

  “Ain’t no reason to cry, George,” Dub said. “We’re a lot better off than the grasshoppers.”

  We waited for the mule to cool off before Dub smeared something like lard on its scratches. We spent the rest of the day building another sled and hammering out the battered metal into another tub. At daylight the next morning we were out there again, Dab sloshing his killing paste and me driving the mule.

  I refused to turn loose of the mule the second day. Helen brought food at noon, and I ate with one hand. I wouldn’t take the other from the mule’s reins.

  I lived with Dub and Helen again the following summer and was joined by my sisters Ruth and Doris. We had no electricity, and no money for ice, so Doris did what a lot of folks did—she put milk and other perishables in the well to keep them cool.

  She tied a glass jug of cow’s milk to the water bucket and let both sink gently beneath the dark water ten feet below ground level. The next day Doris drew a bucket of water, forgetting about the milk jug. It banged against the side of the well, shattered, and the water filled with glass and unprocessed cow’s milk.

  Doris was always blaming me for what she did, so when I saw Dub walk his mules up to the gate after a day of plowing, I ran to him.

  “Doris is going to tell you I broke the milk in the well, but she did it.”

  She told him her story just as I had predicted. He didn’t believe her for an instant. Doris cried, but not as much as she did when Dub told her she’d have to drain the well—by hand.

  The nearest water was seven miles away in Mount Calm. Dub couldn’t afford to give up the use of his wagon and team for the day required to haul it. Besides, the small amount of water he could carry would not have lasted long. And we could never drink the new rainwater that would fall into the well until it was drained of the spoiled milk.

  “There is just no way around it, girls,” Dub told my sisters. “That well is going to have to be drained, bucket by bucket.”

  I think he would have made me help Doris if she hadn’t lied.

  When Dub arrived in the middle of the next morning, the girls were arguing about who had drawn the last bucket of water and crying and fighting. He had cut his plowing short because he knew those two could never finish such a big job.

  “Why are you drawing your well dry in the summertime?” an old man shouted from the dirt road in front of Dub’s place. He’d been watching the goings-on for some time before he spoke. He couldn’t understand why farm folks were pouring drinking water onto the ground in the sweltering summer heat.

  “Smell the well!” Dub answered. “These here silly girls broke a jug of cow’s milk in the water, and it’s not fit to drink.”

  The old man spit out tobacco, laughed, and approached the well.

  “You got a Mason jar?” he asked.

  “Why sure,” Dub said.

  “Go get ’er for me with some pounds of salt.”

  With the precision of an Indian medicine man, the old fella measured the salt into the jar and poured it into the bucket. He lowered the bucket into the well and told Doris to pull the rope up and down to churn the water.

  “That salt will dissolve, and what don’t dissolve will settle,” he said. “And when it does, your water won’t stink no more, and it will be fit for drinking after you boil out the salt.”

  Before the old man left, Dub paid him with all of his remaining salt. The old man argued about taking it. The next day, his prophecy came true.

  These stories about cotton-eating grasshoppers, a runaway mule, and spilled milk are among many warm memories of growing up during the Depression in the East Texas wilderness. Times were hard, and pleasures were few.

  In childhood I didn’t know I was poor. Years later I knew, but by then I had the riches of memories.

  My boyhood had another side. A dark side. My sister Ethel died at age seven, five years before I was born. That was the first time, my people say, that George Washington Jones, my daddy, ever took a drink.

  He died on September 7, 1967, at seventy-two, from a clogged artery in his neck. Doctors said the obstruction had been neglected for too long. It was difficult for them to operate because Daddy’s arteries had been affected by the miles of liquor that had run through them.

  Daddy moonlighted as a moonshiner. He made beer and whiskey and sold it to the rough loggers around the Big Thicket, the nickname for East Texas, where the green thickets are unlike the rest of the barren state. My daddy even sold, and sometimes gave, beer and whiskey to the lawmen who were supposed to arrest bootleggers like him. He used the money to provide for my five surviving sisters, my brother, and me, his youngest. He cared for, and he cared about, his family. Until he got drunk.

  By the time I was twelve my daddy was working at the shipyard in Beaumont for a steady wage. Nobody in the family was supposed to talk to Daddy when he came in drunk. That set him off.

  Sometimes my mother, Clara, couldn’t hold her tongue, and nagged him about drinking. He’d beat on the table for her to fix him some supper, no matter how late, and she’d cook and complain. Then the fight was on.

  “Be quiet, Mama,” Helen would whisper. “Don’t upset him, and he’ll just go to bed.”

  But if Mama had a mind to, she’d keep up her nagging, and finally Daddy would snap. He’d slap her around and maybe turn over the table she had set. Helen had to get between them more than once to keep him from beating Mama. Then he’d start on Helen. He’d go into a rampage and upset every piece of furniture in the house. Some of the kids would get under the bed until someone could get him into his own. Then my sisters would tiptoe around the house putting things back together until well into the night.

  He’d get up the next morning, sick, and everything would be in its place. He never knew that hours earlier it had all been a shambles.

  Sometimes he’d roar into the house in the middle of the night, stumbling from kerosene lamp to kerosene lamp, lighting them and cursing for everybody to get up and sing. My sleepy sisters and I would have to sing him to sleep. I’d strum my guitar, and they’d try to harmonize, singing gospel songs. Helen said that when he dozed off, I’d hear his snoring and shoot out the window, just as some of my sisters had done earlier. I was always the last one to go. I had to stay and strum because if I stopped, the absence of the guitar might awaken him and he’d go into another tirade.

  We were our daddy’s loved ones when he was sober, his prisoners when he was drunk.

  One of my daddy’s beatings of Helen made Dub furious. “And to save her life,” Dub said, “I married her three days later.”

  The marriage lasted fifty-four years, until Dub’s death in 1993. Death has also taken another sister, my brother, and both of my parents.

  I trusted Dub more than any other man on earth. In 1992 he recalled that in the early 1980s I was coming back from one of my many financially broke spells. I played various dance halls then for admissions money, paid at the door, or for a flat fee, paid in cash. I gave the money to Dub for safekeeping and to prevent me from blowing it. He said he once had $162,000 of my money in a brown paper bag hidden behind the seat of his pickup. The truck wasn’t worth much, and Dub said he never locked its doors. He eventually took the money into his house. But imagine if someone had stolen that junk truck. They never would have thou
ght to look behind the seat where the only other cargo was lint and debris.

  Helen has long since had children of her own and grandchildren who will soon be leaving home. They don’t fight the land anymore. The hardest thing they do today, thank God, is turn down the thermostat. Dub was still the softest-hearted but leather-tough man I ever knew when he died. He fell as I began to write this book, and Helen said she thought he suffered lingering pain but he wouldn’t talk about it. She forced him to go to the doctor, who told Dub he’d been carrying a broken shoulder for two weeks. When I called him, he never mentioned his injury. All he could talk about were the good times we had had when I was a boy.

  Dub began to deteriorate in 1979 after working for a cement company where he sprayed poisonous chemicals to maintain the grounds. His nerves began to die to the extent that he dropped things and didn’t know it. He frequently didn’t know where he was going. So he was forced to quit and lived mostly in retirement until his death.

  My wife, Nancy, and I flew to Woodville, Texas, in June of 1993 for Dub’s funeral. The service was held at the Raleigh Funeral Home, where the crowd of mourners spilled into the yard. One of Dub’s granddaughters read a poem about him, and a woman I’d never met sang “A Picture of Me (Without You),” one of my hit records from more than twenty years earlier:

  Imagine a world where no music is playing

  Or think of a church with nobody praying

  If you’ve ever looked up at a sky with no blue

  Then you’ve seen a picture of me without you.

  That’s how I felt for the longest time knowing Dub was gone. I hadn’t seen him regularly in years. But I had always known I could see him whenever I wanted to. His passing left me with a deep sense of personal loss.

  Some said the loss could be heard for days afterward in my music—music that has taken me a long way from my dusty Texas boyhood. I’ve traveled a roundabout way to the top. Sometimes my path has taken me back to the bottom. I’ve lived in mansions and been a prisoner in hotels where I couldn’t remember the name of the town.

  I’ve stood tall in the spotlight, I’ve lain drunk on the floor. I’ve lived more lives in mine than ten men do in theirs.

  Sometimes my problems have seemed unconquerable. Yet they were no greater than Dub’s when the grasshoppers were eating his summer cotton.

  He got through, and, somehow, so have I. Sometimes I’ve wished that I could have been content with less, like just laughing at life, grasshoppers and all, and settling for a cooling drink from Doris’s milk-water well.

  Chapter 2

  The Model-A Ford puttered along the darkened dirt road of the Big Thicket, an East Texas wilderness that was a logging haven during the Great Depression. The nine passengers couldn’t see the poor lumbermen’s shotgun houses sitting just inside the towering timber’s shadow.

  The car’s headlights reflected on the gravel ahead, flickered, and went out. The car was cast into total darkness inside the nighttime forest.

  My dad was driving. He struggled to keep our jalopy on what he guessed was the road. He turned the wheel hard into a curve, and that forced my mother, a short and large woman, firmly against the passenger door. Children screamed as it sprang open.

  Mama flew out of the car and into the cinders at perhaps thirty miles per hour. She tumbled through discarded railroad ties and spikes until a ditch stopped her momentum. She had turned over and over, and the next day she turned black-and-blue.

  But she never turned loose of her baby.

  I was three years old when that happened, and I’ll remember forever the kind of love it represents. Mama always put her children and their welfare first. She and Daddy raised a family that was as rich in love as it was poor in possessions.

  And we were rich in another way. The Jones children had a wonderful sense of values. They knew right from wrong thanks to the watchful teaching of their parents. This was driven home to me when I was seven and got the only real whipping Mama ever gave me. One was all it took.

  I had stopped by the house of Mr. and Mrs. Walton, our neighbors, and walked into their bedroom. There, I saw a pocketknife on the dresser. It shined and was the prettiest thing I thought I had ever seen. My young mind ran away imagining how sharp that knife was and all the things I could do with it.

  To this day I can say that I didn’t think I was stealing when I put that knife in my pocket. It just seemed to my innocent mind that something I liked so much ought to belong to me.

  Mama was sitting on the front porch shelling beans or peeling potatoes when I walked into our house. She stepped inside and said, “What’s Old Man Walton doing coming this way? He don’t never come this way.”

  Instantly, I knew I had done wrong. I shoved the knife under the mattress, jumped onto the bed, and pretended to be asleep.

  “Mrs. Jones,” I heard Mr. Walton say, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but your son Glenn [my middle name] came by the house a bit ago and I know my stuff was on the dresser. Nobody else has been in that house and I hate to say that he took my knife, but I wish you would ask him.”

  I could feel my heart pounding against the mattress as I tried to shrink under the covers.

  “I’ll do more than ask him if he’s got that knife,” Mama said.

  Mama seemed taller that day than she ever had as she hovered above me and asked if I had Mr. Walton’s knife. I was so scared that I would have sooner walked over hot coals than try to trick her.

  “Yes, Mama,” I said. “I do.” And I pulled the knife from under the mattress.

  Mr. Walton was given his knife, then Mama took me outside. She cut a switch and walked me to the garden, where she whipped me up one row and down another. I thought the corn would tassel and bear ears before she would ever quit.

  It would be a few years before I was old enough to appreciate that whipping and realize that it really did hurt my poor mama more than it hurt me and that it truly was given as an act of love.

  Mama and Daddy had real wisdom that went with their concern for their kids. We were forbidden from cussing. If my Pentecostal mother had ever heard us use profanity, a whipping would have been in store.

  Yet once my mama heard me say “son of a bitch.” I was a desperate little boy at his wit’s end who would achieve a part of his manhood in a matter of seconds, and perhaps she thought a child with a man’s job ahead of him might need to cuss in the situation.

  As a kid, I never liked to fight. But I was living in Beaumont, where another seventh-grader followed me home and taunted me with a gang of his friends. I was small and naturally afraid of all of those tough ole boys who came into town from farms where they had built up their bodies from hard work. This went on for days, maybe weeks.

  The meanest boy’s name was Dick, and one day he and his cronies followed me up to my back door. I guess Mama heard the commotion because she stepped onto the porch. Through the screen door, she saw me lose my temper and call Dick’s bluff. I might have figured she was going to whip me, but it would be after the fight.

  I called him a son of a bitch and lit into him with both fists. Once I got on him, I was obsessed with bringing him down. We lived in the Maritime housing project, and folks came pouring out of those houses from everywhere. They pulled me off of Dick, and he never bothered me again.

  I knew Mama had heard me swear, and I knew she knew what I had been going through with Dick. I looked her in the eye, ready for her wrath. She just looked away. She never mentioned Dick, cussing, or fighting again.

  Love and wisdom were about all Mama and Daddy sometimes had to give. We were heading somewhere on one Christmas Day when Daddy’s old truck broke down with yet another flat tire. The Texas heat made the old tires soft, and they were easily punctured by the gravel of the back roads. Each flat meant Daddy had to jack up the truck, remove the tire, pull out the inner tube, hot-patch it, put it back inside the tire, inflate it, put the tire on the truck, and lower the jack.

  All that was very time-consuming to a bunch of k
ids eager to celebrate Christmas. So Mama made our Christmas right there at the side of the road. She broke out apples, oranges, nuts, and other fruit that we never saw the rest of the year. Some of the girls got tiny dolls that were really no more than trinkets. Helen said she was almost grown before she got a doll big enough to resemble a baby.

  On one Christmas I got a guitar that was about six inches long. It wasn’t really a guitar at all, just an imitation. But we kids were as happy as larks. We didn’t know that there were children in the city getting bicycles and clothes and whatever else. No one we knew was that prosperous. We’d never had anything significant, and we never missed what we never had. And soon after the roadside Christmas, we were back inside Daddy’s rickety truck, puttering and singing along a path that was as rocky as our lives.

  The spirit of Christmas lived throughout the year among the Big Thicket poor who loved each other. Seven of us carved our names into a giant oak tree at our Kountze house. We wanted to see the names endure, and we wanted to see them together. We probably spent an entire day taking turns with the carving knife. Helen says she thinks someone carved my name for me because she thought I was too small to handle a knife.

  We loved mischief and played friendly tricks on each other. My late brother, Herman, had a wife who was afraid of the hobos who came to folks’ back doors during the Depression. She used to latch the screen door, but it still had play in it and would rattle if shaken. I sneaked up to that door many times pretending to be a bum, yelling and rattling the door of a scared woman who was home alone. She yelled, sometimes ran through the house, and once ran out the front door and down the road to get away. I loved that.

  During the changing of another of Daddy’s many flat tires we kids got to playing in the woods by the truck and I found a trash pile that contained an iron wagon. It had an iron tongue and wheels. It was covered with rust, but I thought it was the neatest thing I’d ever seen. When I asked Daddy if I could take it he said no because there was no room for both the wagon and his kids in his truck.