The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
(Page 6 of 9)
Anyway, at the time of the Lucifer bracelet, Henry hadn’t exactly turned his back on the Lord, but he was standing sideways. Then bad things started happening. His dog jumped through a plate glass window. The son of the Spanish lady next door ran away, then her house burned down. There were weevils in the cornmeal. Henry got another cross and buried the bracelet where he found it, but the bad luck didn’t stop. Henry wrecked his car and almost killed himself. One night the Polks came home and found seventeen chickens dead. “We thought the dogs done it,” Cynthia said. “We put the dogs in a sack and took ’em out to the country and dumped ’em, and when we come back more chickens was kilt. We discovered it was a polecat done it. We shoulda knowed by the way the chickens was scalped.”
Buddy Boy was born healthy, but in 1970 Cynthia gave birth to another boy who was named Oral Roberts Polk. The baby had a bad color and his head seemed too small for his body. He had trouble breathing. Cynthia recalled, “Henry told me right from the start, ‘Don’t get attached to that ’un, ’cause God never meant him to be raised.’ I couldn’t believe God just let me borrow him. But one morning when he was a few months old I woke up, saw blood coming from the baby’s nose. When I felt him, he was cold as a bucket of ice. We was living then with Henry’s cousin Jake and his wife Dora and I screamed, but it weren’t no use. I knowed there was a Jonah where we was, and there wasn’t nothing nobody could do.”
Shortly after they buried the baby, the Polks got together with two of Henry’s cousins and their families and reached a decision to move to California. Jake Polk, who was ten years older than Henry, had heard there were millions of acres of wood to be cut in the Sierra Madres west of Bakersfield. Jake and Dora Polk had saved a little money. Their kids were all grown and Jake had bought an Army surplus truck large enough to carry their belongings. Henry bought a 1955 green-and-white Olds from a used car lot on East Second. Cousin Woodrow Polk, along with his wife Betty Frank and their four kids, had an old Ford Ranch Wagon that the men put in shape. Everything they couldn’t carry they sold.
In the spring of 1970, while the bodies of Vietnamese civilians were floating down the Mekong and Richard Nixon was pushing for the confirmation of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, the Polk clan set out on a migration that could have happened during the Great Depression. U.S. troops would invade Cambodia and four students would be shot to death at Kent State, but the Polks didn’t know it. H. Ross Perot, who had accumulated a fortune of $1.5 billion selling computer time, had chartered a 707 which would fly halfway around the world without reaching its destination in Hanoi, and Woodrow Polk, who had won a Purple Heart in Korea, would sell his broken-down Ford wagon for $50 in Cordes, Arizona. Henry Polk’s Olds used half a tank of gas getting up one side of Salt River Canyon, and on the down side the brakes failed. Henry saved the family by bumping against the rear of Jake’s truck until they could grind down the canyon to safety. Dandelion soup and organic brown rice were big among movie stars and wealthy faddists in Southern California, and that wasn’t too different from what the Polks ate.
Like thousands of migrants before them, the Polks soon experienced the nightmare of California. “You couldn’t buy a job,” Henry Polk recalled. “The unions had everything locked up.” A procurer who worked for a collective of growers still holding out against Ceaser Chavez’ United Farm Workers union found the Polks destitute in Delano and gave them enough money to reach the fields. For the next three months the Polks picked tomatoes, strawberries, grapefruit, grapes, peaches. “It was like a concentration camp, only it wasn’t,” Henry recalled. “But you had to do what they said. We lived in little cabins right by the orchards. They’d shake us out at 3:30 in the morning so we could get in eight hours before noon when it got too hot to work.” They were paid 22 cents a box for strawberries and 30 cents a box for peaches. The Polks had no way of knowing that Cesar Chavez had just negotiated a contract that would pay farm workers $1.80 an hour, plus 20 cents a box, plus medical benefits. “We’d take the kids out to the orchards with us,” Cynthia recalled. “They’d play under the trees while we picked fruit. When it was dinner time we’d build a fire and cook what we had. The grape people was the best. They give us all the free grapes we wanted,” Henry said. “We had a hell of a time just keeping from starving that summer. Don’t let nobody tell you that money grows on trees in California.”
In the late fall of 1970, cold and broke and dispirited, the Polks headed home to Texas. Henry’s Olds broke down and had to be abandoned near White Mountain, New Mexico. For the remainder of the trip all fourteen members of the Polk clan rode in Jake’s truck. Colann and Debby Sue got whooping cough. When their food supply was down to a few overripe grapes and a little oatmeal, they sold their fishing poles and mattresses. “I happened to tell this woman in New Mexico about the baby dying and she give us a tank of gas and $135 in groceries,” Cynthia remembered. “Otherwise, I don’t know how we woulda made it home.”
Over the next several years the Polks spent a good deal of time moving, looking for wood to cut or rocks to lay. J.J. was born, then Lanette, then Kathy. Lanette got lead poisoning from eating paint. Kathy was born with a heart murmur caused by a defective valve. Fluid had to be pumped from her chest every six months. Jesus still talked to Henry from time to time. “Sometimes He just told me to hook ’em,” Henry said. It was Jesus who finally pointed the way to welfare.
Periodic entries in the Polks’ thick dossier at the Department of Public Welfare describe what happened after that:
GRANBURY, May 1972—This was the Polks first encounter with welfare. A DPW caseworker wrote: “Mrs. Polk says that she has been separated four months from her husband Henry. States she doesn’t know where he lives. He comes around about once a month to see the seven children and leave $10.” Mrs. Polk’s application for AFDC in the amount of $146 is approved. She is also granted “commodities.” Food stamps weren’t available in Texas until the fall of 1973. When her case was next reexamined, additional AFDC payments were denied. The record does not reflect the reason for the denial.
GRANBURY, September 1973—Henry has obviously returned to the fold because this time he is the one who has applied for AFDC, claiming disability because of a bad knee resulting from his car wreck in 1968. The doctor who examined Henry wrote: “This patient’s environmental background is poor and he has adapted inadequately to society and is very poorly motivated to improve.” The doctor recommended x-rays to the right knee. The heart is listed as “normal.” On September 9, the caseworker reported that “this applicant is healthy. He does not appear to meet the agency definition of AFDC incapacity.” Application denied.
ROCKWALL, December 1973—Cynthia Polk has applied for welfare. Henry is hospitalized in Dallas with bleeding hemorrhoids. The hemorrhoid operation proves satisfactory, but doctors then discover “a mass in the left testicle.” It is diagnosed as “a benign retention cyst.” Polk also complains of chest pains. The report states that in the last five months Polk has earned only $278, and that his medical bills are enormous. (The law allows payment of medical bills back to ninety days from the date of the application.) AFDC payments of $245 and food stamps are approved, subject to reexamination on March 1. In another month the federal government will take over all cash assistance programs except AFDC: the baby, Kathy, who is permanently disabled because of her heart condition, will be eligible for Supplementary Security Income (SSI) checks of $167.80 per month. The Polks don’t yet know this, but little Kathy’s SSI checks will keep the family going for the next three years.
GRANBURY, May 1974—Polk still complains of chest pains. An appointment is made with a Granbury doctor who will do “an EKG, chest x-ray, and upper G.I.” The record shows that Polk never showed up for the appointment.
GRANBURY, July 1974—Cynthia Polk reports that her husband is working again and requests that they be dropped from AFDC rolls. Request approved.
SAN ANTONIO, May 1975—Polk is receiving out-patient care at the Audie Murphy Veterans Hospital. Cancer cells have been found in his testicles.
STEPHENVILLE, August 1976—Mrs. Polk has again applied for AFDC and food stamps. She complains that her husband has “heart trouble” and is hospitalized. The actual medical report is sketchy. A doctor wrote: “Patient complains that he needs to go home and take care of his daughter, Kathy. He seems more concerned with his daughter than his own condition.” The doctor suggests heart surgery may be required.
AUSTIN, December 1976—A medical report states: “Chest pains are not brought on by anything in particular but exertion definite problem.” The diagnosis is “Angina and recent inferior M.I.” Application approved.
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