The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
(Page 7 of 9)
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
As January slogged on and the welfare check still hadn’t arrived, Henry had a bad case of the ol’ hook ’em blues. In his depression, he had almost forgotten the claw. This was worse, much worse. The cash from Kathy’s December SSI check had completely run out. So had the food stamps. “I can just feel it running all the way through me,” he said. “I’m gonna have to make a move. I’m gonna have to do something.” Cynthia was unequivocally in favor of hooking ’em back to Lipan, money or not. Kathy’s condition appeared to be deteriorating: all day Kathy would sleep in her mother’s lap, and all night she would cry. Cynthia had it in her mind that the girl would do better in the country. Cynthia purely hated Austin by now. “The only people I know here are Henry’s relatives,” she complained. “And the prices here—they’d stop anything. Eggs, ninety cents a dozen. Back home in Lipan you can go to Chicken City and buy a dozen cracked eggs for forty cents. You can get bacon on sale, fifteen pounds for $11.50.” Cynthia had a hankering to see her sister, who was consoling the grief of her husband’s death by dating a nineteen-year-old neighbor. She even missed her old daddy, who by now had married her mother’s sister’s oldest daughter.
There were several problems with hooking ’em, aside from the fact they didn’t have enough gas to get to Lipan. They worried they might never receive their welfare check if they moved again. But the main consideration was little Kathy. “If that’s what’s best for the baby,” Henry swore, “that’s what I’ll do. They can keep their checks. They can keep their house. They can sue us. I never asked nobody when and where to go. I’m not gonna start now.” To keep up their spirits—particularly Henry’s—the nine Polks would lie for hours jammed together on the king-size bed, trading ideas about what might be done with the welfare money. Cynthia wanted a washing machine. The kids wanted a drive-in movie and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Billie Jean wanted something special, but she wouldn’t say what, Henry mentioned buying an old pickup truck to haul rocks, or maybe a chain saw, but you knew his heart wasn’t in it. On second thought, Henry might buy an old school bus. “I’ll fix her up and make us a home,” he said. “We’re gonna travel. If they got no rock to lay one place, we’ll go where they is. If there’s no wood to cut, we’ll go find some. We’ll see how it goes. Nobody’s gonna live forever.”
There was one day of total panic when Kathy’s phenobarbital and Dilantin ran out. Without the medicine she would lapse into a coma. A refill cost $27, and they didn’t have anywhere near that amount. Besides, the prescription was written on a drugstore in Lipan. Late that afternoon, when the little girl could no longer keep her eyes open, they rushed her to Brackenridge emergency room where a social worker reminded them that Kathy already had a Medicaid card—it comes automatically with SSI, or “Sissy” as they say in the business. A doctor checked Kathy—she had “acute coryza,” also known as a common cold—then he wrote a new prescription for her medicine, which Kathy’s Medicaid card would pay for. “I had it right there in my purse and didn’t know it was any good,” Cynthia laughed as she carried her baby back to the car. She kissed Henry on the cheek and laughed again. “I told you it was still good only you wouldn’t listen to me.” Henry smiled, tugging on the beak of his grimy, red “Bowes Seal Fast” mechanic’s cap.
On January 20, the day Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, Herny was in the front yard attempting to fix a broken water pump on his ’67 Buick. His wife and all seven kids bustled around him, climbing on fenders to watch him work, asking endless questions about when they could go to the drive-in movie and have some fried chicken. Henry’s only tools were a borrowed wrench and a piece of scrap metal he used as a screwdriver, but the work itself was obviously a therapy and Henry seemed as calm and patient as a hound dog with ten pounds of kittens crawling over his back. In the living room a silent television screen showed Jimmy Carter walking up Pennsylvania Avenue, waving, and promising, “No new dream . . . but rather . . . a fresh faith in the old dream.” Suddenly, Debby Sue screamed: “It’s the mailman, it’s the mailman!” Henry kept on working and Cynthia placed his cup of fresh coffee on the fender, pushed through the yammering children, and threatened to “slap that silly off y’all’s face if you don’t behave.” The letter looked official, though it didn’t look like the welfare checks they had received in the past. It wasn’t. It was a letter from the Texas Rehabilitation Commission (TRC), informing Henry that an appointment had been set for him at the regional headquarters the following Monday. The letter said something about “evaluation, counseling and guidance, training, job training . . .” “What does it mean daddy?” Debby Sue asked. Henry just looked puzzled.
I timed it so that I would arrive at the Polks’ home about an hour before Henry’s Monday appointment with the TRC. The front door was open. The thermostat was turned to 90º and it was hot enough to bake biscuits in the living room. Henry was lying on the couch with his head in his wife’s lap. All the children were sitting around looking at him. “The claw,” he told me. “Tell him the truth,” Cynthia said. “Over the weekend he climbed up to fix the carport roof and like a fool he jumped off and that’s when it got him.” After awhile Henry said he was feeling better. Billie Jean brought us two cups of strong black coffee and Henry sat up, adjusting his cap. I noticed that the dogs were gone; Henry said he had taken them to the country and dumped them because his sister told him dogs weren’t allowed in welfare houses. It turned out the sister was wrong: all he needed was a letter of permission from the landlord, which the landlord was willing to supply. Later that afternoon, when it was too late for the appointment, we all drove out to look for the dogs, but there was no trace of them.
That night I brought over some meat that was wasting in my own refrigerator and we watched the second episode of Roots. Cynthia said: “It makes you want to get mad at the white people.” Henry retold the story of the old slave lady and the parrot, only this time there were tears in his eyes. I could tell something else was bothering him, and while Cynthia was putting the little girls to bed, Henry offered me some Bull Durham and said: “I’ll tell you the truth about that appointment. I was just plain scared.” Scared of what? “Superstition,” he said. “I ain’t even told my old lady this, but Sunday when we was out driving I saw a roadrunner. Ain’t that foolish?” I told Henry I’d heard about black cats, but roadrunners being bad luck was news to me. “That’s what I’m talking about. I was a fool. Roadrunners is bad luck for some. I got to remembering later, after it was too late to keep that appointment, that the last time I seen one I got a check for $1100 in back payments on Kathy’s SSI. Don’t that beat all?” I agreed that it did. “But I’ll do it yet,” he promised. “I’ll have my old lady make me a new appointment. I don’t know from A to B what they’re talking about, but if they’ll help me get some tools . . . or a job I can cope with . . . they can keep their damn check.”
But Henry Polk wasn’t about to report to the TRC. When a man is hanging by his fingernails, it takes a mighty promise for him to lift a hand.
THE CIRCLE IS UNBROKEN
This may be difficult to believe, but Department of Public Welfare Commisioner Raymond Vowell’s habitual tie clasp is a silver and turquoise roadrunner. Vowell is a sturdy, balding man with quick-study eyes and the practiced poise of a man accustomed to making large decisions. He might be a retired Air Force colonel, or the president of a small college, which he did once aspire to be. In fact, Vowell is a professional administrator, the presiding officer of a public-owned industry that employs 14,000 people and operates with a biennial budget of $2.3 billion. If you thought of DPW’s budget as “industrial sales” it would rank among the nation’s 100 largest industrial corporations; it would also rank among the top 300 in employees. Of all the state agencies, his is the least popular and the first to feel the heat when something goes wrong. It’s also the first to duck when it is politically expedient.
“The Commissioner,” as he is always called around DPW, is admired among rank-and-file welfare workers, particularly those who worked for DPW before his appointment in 1971. They feel that he has streamlined procedures, improved welfare’s public image, and reordered priorities where they rightly belong—in favor of the welfare recipient, or the “client” as they say. “You feel that he really cares about the clients,” says a social worker. The commissioner’s passion for bettering the lot of his fellow man does not automatically extend to his own employees. “The commissioner will bust his ass for recipient benefits, but not for his own staff,” says a DPW executive.
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