The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
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By then, Marie had enrolled Colann, Debby Sue, Buddy Boy, and J. J. in school. Billie Jean, who was almost sixteen and had never lived in one place long enough to get past the ninth grade, couldn’t be registered until March. Billie Jean wasn’t really interested in going back to school. Marie suggested several alternate programs through which Billie Jean could learn a trade. Billie Jean had bad memories of her last encounter with education. When they were living in Lipan, a small community north of Stephenville, she enrolled in a vocational agriculture course and they wanted her to castrate a calf. If that was education, they could have it. Henry and Cynthia Polk didn’t encourage Billie Jean. The parents shared an inborn distrust of education, maybe because they feared it would break up their tight family structure. To them children were assets, not too unlike horses and cows. This wasn’t cynical or cruel, merely practical: when their own time came years ago both Henry and Cynthia supported their dying parents; now the cycle was being repeated and it would be their children’s turn. There were also moral implications. It was Henry’s experience that “all schools are good for is sex and dope,” and that wasn’t what they wanted for their children. Although Billie Jean was already three years older than her mother had been when she married Henry, the girl had never been allowed to date or attend socials.
On January 6, Marie McAdoo filled out DPW Form 1-A, which in most cases goes straight to the computer keypunch operator. But in cases of “medical incapacity” the form must first be approved by the state office. Henry’s medical report confirmed his chest pains as angina and myocardial infarction, and indicated it might be necessary to implant a valve to control the flow of blood through the heart. A week after Marie McAdoo completed DPW Form 1-A, the application was approved and sent to the computer where, for reasons no human could explain, it “bounced.”
In mid-January, Marie McAdoo had been transferred from “financial needs” to “social services.” “I guess you could say that what I’m doing now is dealing with physical instead of financial needs,” she explained one afternoon when I dropped by the welfare office in South Austin. “Things like housing, health service—a lot of it is advice and counseling. A lot of it is just listening. The people I deal with have such tremendous problems they just need to talk to someone.” There were two phones in Marie’s tiny office, both ringing at once. Welfare workers joke that the only time the telephones are silent is when As the World Turns is on TV. There is a chaotic undercurrent in their work, a rumble like you feel in your legs when a subway train is approaching, an apprehension that an orderly world is only an illusion that protects our sanity. There is always a big rush on welfare after a holiday. One Social Security worker explained: “That’s when old-timers sit around the stove and talk about their Social Security checks.” It’s the same when the weather is bad and arthritis acts up, or when there is an unexpected freeze and thousands of migrant citrus pickers are suddenly out of work. I noticed a mysterious sack of canned goods on the floor by Marie McAdoo’s desk, but she didn’t volunteer to explain it and I didn’t ask.
Jean Bundrant, another social worker who had dropped by Marie’s office to deposit two cans of turnip greens in the sack, told me: “Basically, people on welfare do not handle routine things the way you and I do. They don’t think in terms of records or forms or programs. It doesn’t occur to them to telephone and say they are moving. Right now I’m waiting to interview a mildly retarded woman with two kids. This is the seventh appointment I’ve set up for her and she’s missed them all. Usually, after three times, the application is automatically denied.”
“They need an advocate, someone to hear their problems and help solve them,” Marie said. “If they can’t find their way to Section 8, you take them. If they have problems with the landlord, you try to work it out for them. There are some doctors and pharmacists who won’t accept Medicaid because of the red tape, so you help them find a doctor or pharmacist who will.”
Sometimes the good intentions backfire. Welfare is so complex and so over-weighted with conflicting rules and regulations that only a fool or a politician would pretend to understand it. Businessmen employ platoons of attorneys and accountants to deal with government red tape. Welfare recipients must face it essentially alone.
Jean Bundrant said that what really bothered her was people talking about welfare chiselers and Cadillacs and scrubby hippies on food stamps. Veda Douglas, a Medicaid worker who had come in to drop two cans of vegetable soup in the sack, offered a real case: “The husband had a job paying $600 a month. His wife had to go to a nursing home, which cost $650 a month. Welfare couldn’t pay for the nursing home because the income limit in this case is $557.80. This means any kind of income—salary, retirement, Social Security, VA, trust funds.”
“It gets very frustrating,” Veda Douglas continued. “Every day we see people who need help and can’t get it. If we’re in the business of helping, we ought to help.”
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked about the sack of canned goods. Marie McAdoo handed me a clipping from a local newspaper. It told the saga of Slim and Pearl, an elderly couple existing on $38 a month from veteran’s disability. Slim should have been eligible for Social Security, except his birth certificate was destroyed in a Colorado courthouse fire. Slim had mailed off $18 trying to get a duplicate, but for some reason it hadn’t arrived. The shack where they lived had just been condemned. They were hungry. “If I just had four dollars,” Slim said, “I could get me a fishing license and catch some fish.” The sack of goods was for Slim and Pearl. Marie McAdoo intended to pay for the fishing license herself. In the two months that I spent hanging around welfare, this went on all the time. People so sensitive somehow coped with human misery in a system so insensitive. And yet almost every social worker I spoke with defended DPW as doing the best it could with what it had. I wondered many times what would happen if you brought the governor and every member of the Legislature down here to the trenches. But that would never happen: political slogans can’t deal with specifics.
MANIFEST DESTINY
It’s hard to choose an exact date when Henry Polk became a social problem, but Henry would pick sometime about 1968, when he found the Lucifer bracelet. They were living out on Bluff Springs Road south of Austin, and things looked pretty good. They had collected two goats, three meat hogs, and 175 chickens, and there was plenty of work in the Hill Country cutting cedar or laying rocks. Cynthia, who was pregnant with Buddy Boy, still had an attractive figure. Life had hope and harmony.
Henry found the Lucifer bracelet while digging for worms in the backyard. As he recalls, the bracelet was a devil’s head of pure silver with black ruby eyes. A small wooden cross was bound by twine across the devil’s face. “I didn’t know it at the time, but the Spanish lady next door had tooken it away from her boy and buried it. She had bounded up the devil with that cross. Anyhow, the bracelet was pretty, so I took to wearing it.” Looking back on it now, Henry could see that God was punishing him for his backsliding ways. In those days, Jesus frequently spoke to Henry Polk. A few years earlier Henry had been “called” to preach in the Pentecostal church. When it came time to preach his first sermon, God told Henry to wing it. God’s exact message, as Henry recalled, was “open your mouth and I will put in the words.” As Henry approached the altar there was a great gust of wind from the north and the Bible pages blew open to Mathew 21:31. In a strange voice Henry read: “Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” What did that mean? Henry told his flock: “Harlots means whore, and publicans . . . that’s like ‘Publicans and Democrats. Like senators and governors and hypocrites.”
Later, Henry learned to speak in tongues. He took credit for a few modest miracles. The redemption of his nephew, for one. The boy was a disbeliever, so Henry asked the Lord to “not hurt him but scare him a little.” That night as the nephew was sleeping on mattress on the floor “a great ball of fire come rolling through the window” and there appeared Lucifer himself, fire in his eyes and carrying a pitchfork. The next day the boy joined the church. Not long after that, another nephew got in a bit of trouble—police arrested him for robbing a grocery store and shooting the owner. “They was asking the death penalty,” Cynthia Polk recalled, “but Henry and his sister got down on their knees and the Lord spared him.” His nephew is now doing five—to—ninety-nine.
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