The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
(Page 9 of 9)
The mood of the current Legislature is to raise penalties for welfare fraud. Senator Bill Meier of Euless introduced legislation to make welfare fraud of more than $200 a felony (it is now a misdemeanor) punishable by up to ten years in prison. Meier’s proposal originated at DPW, which claims that the bill is not designed to slap welfare mothers in jail but to prosecute major offenders, such as the Houston nursing home that collected $120,000 from phony billings, or the DPW worker in Dallas who made off with $14,000 in food stamps. Senator Carlos Truan of Corpus Christi views the bill as a method for legislators to score political points by punishing the poor. Says Truan, “This is a class of people that doesn’t have an understanding of the law and its consequences. These are the most illiterate, most ill-educated, most ill-prepared people in our society. I’m sure that it is politically expedient to vote for this bill. Members of the Legislature are fearful that the folks back home wouldn’t understand a vote against it. There is no concern for the effects of this legislation. The only concern is to demagogue.”
Another “reform” bill that the demagogues can write home about is a piece of legislation that would prevent elderly persons from giving away property in order to get into a nursing home. An individual who owns at least $1500 in assets is not eligible for nursing home assistance. The maximum for a couple is $2250. Social workers cite numerous cases in which elderly couples have been forced to divorce in order for one of them to qualify for nursing home assistance.
BURIED TREASURE
Henry Polk and his brood were watching As the World Turns when the mailman finally arrived. They had returned the night before from a quick trip to Lipan with an old treadle sewing machine and a dog in the trunk of the Buick. Henry had insisted on doing the driving, and now the claw had him again. His spirits were at rock bottom. “I’m just a backsliding Christian, banged up, beat up, wore out,” he moaned to the children, who stayed home from school out of sympathy for his condition. “Just a ol’ holer roller. In my soul I don’t believe I’m gonna prosper til I get down to the very bottom where I started.”
But on January 26, the welfare checks arrived, two at once. The computer finally spit out both December and January. Combined with Kathy’s $167 SSI check, the Polks suddenly found $617 in their pockets, though they had already spent about $50 of it on the trip to Lipan.
Thirty minutes after the checks arrived the entire family was at Pay-Less Shoes, purchasing tiny cowboy boots ($12 a pair) for the little girls, Kathy and Lanette. It had been almost two weeks since they had eaten meat, so the next stop was the supermarket where they got five dollars’ worth of round steak, some cigarettes and candy, and a stack of Let’s Go to the Races cards. Debby Sue was still bellowing for some Kentucky Fried Chicken, so that was their next stop. Billie Jean now admitted a hankering for some peach-scented stationery at the drugstore. Henry gave her a dollar, then peeled off a dollar for each one of the kids. While Cynthia was purchasing some thread, Henry and I admired what had to be the world’s largest American flag across the street in front of the American Dream Mobile Home Center.
The following day the Polks bought a used washing machine ($35), a new water pump for the Buick ($27), and paid $92.82 to the gas company and $65.80 for water and electricity. They ordered a telephone, which cost $45 for deposit and installation, plus an extra $5 for the privilege of having their number unlisted. They spent $108 for a new supply of food stamps. Cable TV installation cost $4.95. They selected a used 25-inch color TV in a dark oak Mediterranean-style cabinet, paying $55 down and signing a lease-purchase agreement to pay $59 a month for 18 months (or a total of $1117). Then they bought another bucket of chicken, filled the Buick with gasoline, and went to see The Town that Dreaded Sundown at the drive-in. Two days after the arrival of the welfare checks, the $617 had been reduced to $60. It would be even tighter in future months when the combined AFDC and SSI checks would amount to only $392. Meeting payments on the car, TV, and utilities would eat up $300. There was definitely going to be a problem figuring out how to find $108 for the purchase of food stamps. When Cynthia mentioned this, Obie Polk, Henry’s older brother, said: “Do what ol’ Granny Tate used to do. She always carried a six-foot coil of barbwire in her apron. She be out gatherin’ wild onions or poke salad, she’d come across a holler log and figure there’s gotta be a rabbit in there. She’d just throw that barbwire in the holler and twist that little dickens out and have him for supper.”
“Yeah,” Henry said glumly. “Only I ’member one time it wasn’t no rabbit, it was a ol’ rooter polecat. She musta used a gallon of tomato juice and cedar oil getting that stink off her and the dogs.”
“Some days it don’t hardly pay to try,” Obie admitted. Obie had more or less moved in with his brother’s family. It had occurred to Cynthia that her brother-in-law’s residency might qualify them for extra food stamps, but it had also occurred to her that an extra boarder might disqualify the family for the Section 8 rent program; she decided to let it go. It was never clear where Obie got his money, but he always had a few bucks in the pockets of the green twills that he always wore. One day in early February, Obie came home with something he called a “dowsing instrument.” He had paid $25 for it. It looked like a cheap, finger-size piece of hollow aluminum dangling from a cheap chain, but Obie believed it could be used to detect the presence of water, oil, and precious metals. He opened a badly soiled copy of a magazine called Treasure Hunting Unlimited and pointed to a diagram for aligning dowsing instruments with the shadows and the rays of the sun. “Exactly halfway between the marks is where the treasure is buried,” Obie read.
“What treasure?” Henry asked.
“Them nine jackloads of Meskin silver buried by the Old Confederates Home,” Obie told him. All the kids started yammering at once, but Henry told them to shut up. “Obie,” he said, “You’re touched is what you are.” Obie looked hurt. He took his dowsing instrument to his cot in the dining room and stashed it under a pillow. “Don’t pay no ’tention to Obie,” Henry told me. “He’s a little touched is all.” Henry took his Bible from the top of the new color TV and walked to the bedroom.
One warm day in late February, Henry loaded his two boys in the Buick and we started out to visit his old friend, Troy Tucker. Troy, who is 72 and nearly blind, lives with his wife Sara in a picture-perfect one-bedroom fieldstone house they built themselves. The house sits on a ridge of cedars and boulders, hidden from the neighboring $100,000 homes and the highway that connects Westlake Hills with South Austin. Three dogs and about two dozen brightly plumed red-and-black chickens scrabble about the carcass of an ancient Dodge truck on blocks. Next to the house is the Tucker family cemetery, where four generations of Troy’s people are buried. Years ago Grandma Tucker, who was born just below the ridge on Barton Creek, owned more than 1000 acres around here, but the family had sold it off a little at a time to stay alive and now all that remains is the cemetery and the three acres where Troy and Sara live. The most Grandma Tucker ever got for her land was $20 an acre; now it sells for up to $12,000 an acre. Troy had been one of the best rock masons around until failing eyesight and various other infirmities forced his retirement. “My wind’s gone,” he told Henry, who out of respect for the old man insisted on hunkering on the floor by Troy’s rocking chair. “When your wind’s gone, that’s it.” Troy had worked hard all his life. He remembered working a full year cutting wood along the Blanco River, and when the boss had subtracted his food and shelter only $394 remained. “That was for a full year’s work, mind you,” Sara said. Troy had never paid any Social Security. He had no savings, no retirement. He and Sara lived on two $125.90 SSI checks a month, plus $92 worth of food stamps which cost them $62.
They talked about welfare, and about how bad it was to lose your health, and about the rock they had worked, then Henry got around to what was really on his mind. He asked Troy: “You ’member that big ol’ cave we found that time when we was building that wellhouse across the river from Deep Eddy? Big sucker . . . with that big boulder in the middle of it mostly covering up that ol’ Indian well?”
Troy said he remembered it.
“You’d drop a rock down that well, you couldn’t even hear it hit bottom it was so deep,” Henry went on. “It was lined with cedar posts, like maybe it had been a ladder at one time?”
Troy said that was as he recalled.
“Well, me and the boys gonna go look for it,” Henry said. “I been telling this man here about it, by golly I’m gonna find it for him.”
“It’s still there,” Troy said. “I don’t ’spect anybody come and moved it.”
It was almost dark when we stopped searching for the cave. For the better part of three hours we had climbed steep bluffs and bellied along the edges of sheer limestone cliffs with nothing but air at our backs, through cactus and dense underbrush, climbing and dropping back and climbing again until we had covered every inch of the cliff as carefully as a hungry man might eat an ear of corn. We located several smaller caves with blackened ceilings and strange isinglass formations, and we happened across some rich man’s trolley tracks used no doubt to transport family and guests from the hilltop mansion to the lake below, but we didn’t find anything like the cave that Henry Polk had described. “Let’s go back and look again,” Buddy Boy suggested as we rested and picked stickers from our hands near the wellhouse that Henry and Troy Tucker had built years ago. Henry’s face was beet red and he was blowing hard. As a matter of fact, so was I. He swallowed some nitroglycerin tablets.
“It’s gotta be there,” he kept repeating. “They couldn’t just come and move it. I know it’s there. We’ll come back some other day. We’ll find her yet.”
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