Dancing with Lyndon

By Donley Watt

Chapter 1

On a Saturday late in May of 1948 Thomas Patterson sat stiffly at the dining table in his house, sipping his cup of black coffee. He rapidly scanned the morning paper from front to back, then frowned and went through it once again, more slowly this time, from back to front. From the dining table he could hear his wife Mary Lee as she prepared breakfast a half-dozen steps away in the adjacent kitchen. But Thomas did not look up to watch her. As he did every morning of his life, he waited for Mary Lee to scramble his eggs and fry his bacon and butter his toast. He preferred his eggs soft-scrambled, his bacon crisp with no rubbery, fatty edges, and his toast lightly browned.

But while he waited, he could not help but hear Mary Lee struggling in the kitchen—the way she rushed frantically from stove to toaster, her slight but fervent incantations and protestations. Finally, Thomas smelled the unmistakable mingling of blackened toast and charred bacon, quickly followed by the scrape of knife on toast, and he could visualize the blackened crumbs as they scattered like burnt-out stars into the white porcelain sink.

Thomas sighed. You would think she could get it right after sixteen years. He lifted his eyes over the top of the paper, still avoiding the frantic scene in the kitchen, but hoping to find his own exasperation mirrored in the face of their son who sat across the table from him. But Tommy was lost in the comics, a bemused grin fixed on his face, Mary Lee’s stewing and stirring and scraping no more an intrusion into his life than Blondie’s fussing at Dagwood Bumstead.

Thomas withdrew even deeper into the paper, refusing to give in to his impatience, while he waited for his breakfast. He waited, also, for the black telephone in the hallway to ring. A phone call that would, he believed, change the direction of his life. Thomas Patterson’s intuition as a lawyer hardly ever failed him, and it was right on target in this instance, but not at all in the way he expected.

While he waited, he hid behind the Tyler Morning Telegraph, concealing as best he could his pride. Even though Tyler was thirty-six miles to the east, the paper covered the events in the surrounding communities—including Cottonwood, where Thomas and Mary Lee and their son Tommy lived—and this day surely was significant enough for some small mention. Perhaps Thomas Patterson would find his name in an article. But so far he had come upon nothing.

It may have been early and a Saturday, but Thomas Patterson wore his best summer suit, the seersucker suit coat hanging from the curve of a hall tree in the entry of the house, along with an assortment of his summer straw hats. To protect his shirt and trousers, he had tucked into his collar a giant dishtowel that now draped his shirt and tie and lap.

The windows along the back of the house let in a light spring breeze that fluttered and then lifted the half-curtains that Mary Lee had sewn herself. Their next-door-neighbor Odie Mae Harwood was feeding a gathering of feral cats again in her backyard, and Thomas told himself to ignore the high-pitched yowling and Odie Mae’s ceaseless calling. A chorus of yelps from farther down the street answered the cats, and Thomas steeled himself trying to keep his focus on the newspaper. This too shall pass, he thought. And it would, for the sun would soon send Odie Mae back indoors where she would seclude herself behind tightly drawn curtains, only to emerge with her cans of cat food early the next morning.

But a catfight broke out just then, and Odie Mae began banging on a tin dish, trying to break it up. “Can’t you do something about that?” Thomas said, raising his voice so that Mary Lee, even in the kitchen, would have to hear him. “Do we have to put up with this every morning of our lives?”

Tommy turned from the comics and stared out the window. Mary Lee ignored her husband.

Oh, well, he thought, regaining his composure. It will be a lovely day, it appears, the morning temperate and then the afternoon hot. But what else could one expect in East Texas? At least there would be no rain to spoil what promised to be the most significant day of Thomas Patterson’s life.

Across from Thomas, fourteen-year-old Tommy—who for his own reasons was impatient to start this day—lightly tapped a fork on the oak tabletop.

The fork was silver—not silver plate—with ornate leaves running down the handle, the silverware passed on to Mary Lee in a mahogany velvet-lined chest from her paternal grandmother, who had died some years back. The silverware fit into Mary Lee’s grand plan, her strategy for the Pattersons to rise above the ordinary residents of Cottonwood, Texas. So silverware graced the table at every meal, even breakfast, and always cloth napkins, soft cotton napkins with crocheted trim, folded in curved triangles that stood up on the smooth table. And Honey Lee china, with a bouquet of pink, purple, and blue flowers in the center of each swirl-edged plate. That was Mary Lee’s wedding china. The matching sugar bowl and salt and pepper shakers stayed on the table all the time. The sideboard held small china bowls for the condiments—the ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise. The bottom of a ketchup bottle had never touched the top of her table. A matter of principle, she maintained. In Mary Lee’s mind these little touches added up.

Of course, the silver had to be polished, and the napkins had to be washed and then ironed, but that was Elberta’s chore—Mary Lee drove north across the tracks every Thursday to pick the woman up. An extra household expense that she insisted was worth every penny, and Thomas had grudgingly agreed.

* * *

Some Thursdays, now that it was summer, Tommy drove his mother to get Elberta, the Ford rattling across the Cotton Belt railroad tracks, turning left at the “Quick-Toe Step Way” corner store. They followed the narrow dirt streets past the Negro high school, until they pulled to a stop and honked the horn for their maid.

Her house was a box of unpainted wood planks; a few old cans and pots—empty one gallon paint cans and broken-handled stew pots and a rusty bucket or two—held zinnias and marigolds and petunias on the front porch. A ramshackle outhouse leaned to one side out back, past the hand-dug well. Even in the summer Elberta brought into the car an intense aroma of wood smoke and fried pork. She was a large woman and grunted and sighed as she worked her way into the back seat of the two-door sedan. The car rocked on its springs when finally she settled in. As they drove off, the last wisps of smoke from her kitchen woodstove curled above a pipe that stuck out of the tin roof.

Elberta had cleaned on Thursdays as long as Tommy could remember, and he welcomed the calm that seemed to pervade their house when Elberta was around. For that one day a week, his mother seemed to set aside her impatience with his father.

* * *

While Tommy tapped the fork, he stared through the doorway and on into the living room where the big Philco radio dominated one wall. Tommy was lost, back reliving the night before when the three of them had spent most of the evening listening to “Fibber McGee and Molly” and “The Adventures of Sam Spade.” When the “Green Hornet” came on, his father terminated the evening’s entertainment with a click of the knob. “Ridiculous,” he had muttered.

Tommy had asked his father when they could get a television set—there was one in the window of Farley’s Furniture Store just off the downtown square. The snowy picture rolled and zigzagged, but Tommy could stand and watch for hours. “When they show ‘Father Knows Best’ on the television,” Thomas had answered, “then I will consider it. But not before.”

“Son.” His father’s stern voice suddenly jarred Tommy back to the breakfast table where he still idly tapped his fork. “Please. That tapping will drive me batty.” He peered over the newspaper and over the half-glasses that hung on the end of his nose. He gave his head an almost indiscernible wag accompanied by a frown. Tommy stopped.

As he went back to his newspaper, Thomas announced, loudly enough for Mary Lee to hear, “Governor Jester will be here, you know. He will be speaking at one this afternoon. A fine way to start off the festivities, I would say.” His voice was animated, because Beauford Jester, a native of nearby Corsicana, would show up to kick off Cottonwood’s annual Old Fiddlers’ Contest with a speech. Thomas, the up-and-coming candidate for state district judge and perhaps Shawnee County’s next Democratic chairman—if old Robert Newsome, the county attorney, would ever call it quits—would introduce the governor.

Governor Jester’s endorsement of Thomas’ candidacy was probable, an endorsement that would all but assure the judgeship for Thomas in July’s Democratic primary. There would be no opposition after that—oh, perhaps a sore-headed independent or a few write-in ballots—but in 1948 in Texas there would be no Republican opposition.

Thomas Patterson announced Governor Jester’s visit as if it had not been known for weeks, announced it in a general sort of way, although the only ones to hear it in the modest white frame house on South Prairieville Street were his wife and son.

Tommy sighed impatiently. He already knew that the governor would be there and that his father would make some kind of appearance, and he figured that it would be boring. But he would go—he knew that he should go—so that he could tell his father later, without lying, that he had observed the ceremony and heard his introduction.

“And Lyndon Johnson,” Thomas said, then cleared his throat of some morning congestion. Once more he raised his voice for Mary Lee’s benefit. “Yes, Congressman Johnson, the Senate candidate, is scheduled to show up later in the day. A reception will be held this evening, out at the country club.” When neither his wife nor son responded, Thomas peered over his newspaper once again. His combed-straight-back hair gleamed in the morning light. He smelled of Vitalis hair tonic mixed with a splash of Old Spice aftershave. “That Johnson should never have run against Coke Stevenson,” he went on. “Why he did that, I will never know. He doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance.”

“Are you for Lyndon Johnson, anyway?” Tommy asked. “I mean officially?”

“Officially neutral. For now.” Thomas folded the newspaper and set it aside. “I plan to discuss the congressman’s candidacy with the governor, if I get the chance. I feel that Coke Stevenson might be the strongest candidate. He knows his way around. But sometimes it’s best to wait and see.”

Mary Lee hurried into the room just then, carrying a plate of burned and scraped toast and a percolator of coffee. She stopped and released an audible sigh, one that Thomas ignored. From the kitchen she had heard her husband’s every word. “Coke Stevenson is fine,” she said at last, sliding the plate of toast across to Tommy and finding a hot pad for the percolator. She felt herself becoming too busy, too hurried, unsure of what she wanted to say. “Yes, he is fine, if you want a horse-and-buggy senator.”

Thomas slowly refilled his coffee cup and reached for a piece of toast. He noticed the charred edges and shook his head.

Back in the kitchen, Mary Lee furiously stirred a skillet of eggs, then moved back towards the dining room shaking an egg-coated spatula while she spoke. “Times are changing, Thomas. This is not 1930. It is 1948. The war is over, and we need to look to the future. We need young men to lead us.”

She retreated to the stove but before long bounced back into the dining room with a platter of eggs and bacon. “We need young men. Like you, dear,” she said, but didn’t look at her husband.

Thomas glanced at his son, a boy that he hoped shared his own disposition, his careful and almost always accurate assessment of the facts. If only the boy could ward off the influence of his mother, he thought. He approved of Tommy, the way he always wore crisply starched shirts (thanks to Elberta), with his jeans’ legs rolled two turns. And Thomas had not allowed his son to get a “burr cut,” which all of the boys seemed to be getting, influenced by the return from the war of their GI fathers and uncles and older cousins.

Because of his age—when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Thomas had already turned thirty—he had not been called up and he had escaped the troop mentality that so many of the veterans brought back home. No, Tommy wore his dark brown hair neatly trimmed, a precise part running down the left side. Tommy would develop into a gentleman, like his father.

Having grown up in Dallas put Thomas at an advantage in Cottonwood. He would see that Tommy didn’t backslide into the ubiquitous country ways. He spread some plum jelly on a triangle of toast, carefully covering the edges. “Sometimes on these issues it is best to wait and see,” he finally said, glancing up at his wife. “Until you have all the facts, all the information.”

“Or wait and see which way the wind is blowing,” Mary Lee said. She bent to spoon hard clumps of eggs onto three plates and passed them around. Her robe opened slightly, and Thomas caught a glimpse of her nightgown, the beginning of the curve of her breast. He quickly looked away.

“Oh, Thomas,” she said, lightly touching his arm, the slightest gesture of affection possible. “Sometimes your caution drives me crazy!”

Then the phone rang, and Thomas carefully pulled the dishtowel from his collar. He folded it precisely and placed it beside his plate, next to the still-folded cloth napkin and, with obvious relief, he slid his chair back and stood.

“That,” he said, “may well be the governor of Texas.” Before he hurried to the living room, he gave Tommy a quick glance, hoping that his son would see from this exchange with his wife that reason always prevails.

Under the table Mary Lee made a fist, her nails cut into her palms. She rolled her eyes at Tommy, but the effects were wasted on her son, who refused to look up. He was taking forever to scrape the last drop of wild plum jelly from a serving bowl. Please don’t let him grow up to be like his father, she prayed to no one in particular. And then she caught herself. It wasn’t right to draw Tommy in; she didn’t want—or need—for him to take sides. He would soon see—anyone would see—that Thomas behaved unreasonably in his reasonableness. No, that was not quite it. But she couldn’t make sense of her feelings of anger at her husband.

* * *

Three weeks before, an aide to Governor Jester had called. Would Thomas introduce the governor when he came to Cottonwood? “An honor,” Thomas had said. Then he hesitated. “Does this indicate the governor’s endorsement of my candidacy?” he asked. The phone had gone silent. Then Thomas heard a muffled exchange in the background.

Finally the aide came back on the line. “The governor’s visit is not of a political nature, therefore an endorsement at that time would be inappropriate. But at a future date an endorsement is a reasonable possibility.” Horsefeathers, Thomas had thought. He was no fool. He knew behind the scenes maneuvering when he saw it.

* * *

Well, I’ll show them, he thought now as he answered the phone.

Mary Lee hoped the call was not for her, not while Thomas was still at home. Just last week she had talked to Byron Bostick after church and casually mentioned her interest in the real estate business. Bostick Real Estate was the number one real estate enterprise in the county, and Byron had said he would call her in a week or so. “Maybe we can get together for coffee,” he said. His voice, as Mary Lee remembered it, came across as a little too conspiratorial, and his eyes moved up and down Mary Lee’s blouse a little too freely. She had had second thoughts and wondered if her boldness might have been misconstrued.

But it was not Byron Bostick on the phone. She could tell by the formal intensity of Thomas’ measured words.

Then from the living room Thomas’ voice rose. “No!” he said. “I don’t believe it!” His voice quivered despite his attempts to stay in control. “Oh, Lord help us.”

Now Tommy did meet his mother’s eyes, and they shared that moment, and he would remember it forever.

Later, when Tommy was older, he would confirm in photographs that Mary Lee Patterson was attractive then, in her late thirties. Slender and tall—as tall as her husband—with pronounced cheekbones that gave her face a layered, shadowed look. But her eyes set her apart. Not their color, an ordinary green-grey, but their spark, their promise of liveliness that reflected some inner condition that Tommy could not for a long time quite place. Optimism, he thought then, or hopefulness, maybe. And undoubtedly both were there, for optimism and hopefulness are what later disappeared and could be more deeply noted by their absence.

But what Tommy saw then that he could not name, the undeniable presence that he would see in his mother’s eyes later that same night in very different circumstances (but still could not know or name), was sensuousness. Not an easy trait for a teenage boy to identify, and even harder for a son to acknowledge in his mother.

Mary Lee Patterson now sat stiffly upright, bracing herself for what might come next. She wore her hair pulled back into a tight bun and she tilted her head to one side, better to hear Thomas in the hallway. She stretched her hands flat, palms down on the oak table before her in order to absorb its coolness, as if by that gesture she might steady herself while she waited for Thomas’ obviously bad news. Then she stuck out her bottom lip just a bit and gave a little upward puff of breath in an attempt to blow a loose strand of honey-colored hair back from her eyes. She took a deep breath, suddenly smothered by the heaviness of blackened bacon that hung in the air.

Tommy was out of the house in a moment, not wanting to hang around for the inevitable drama and conflict of whatever this problem might be. For he had never—or hardly ever—heard his father react that way, “Lord help us,” being unacceptable language in a moment of stress. For his father, times of stress were simply times of problem solving. His father’s words ‘Keep a clear head, gather the facts, and act prudently’ slowed Tommy down just a little as he hurried to the car.

Tommy was determined to remain neutral, not for any reasons of loyalty to one or the other of his parents or for deeply held values of right and wrong. He was determined, however, to do anything, agree to anything not to jeopardize his tenuous and always retractable right to drive the Ford sedan that at that moment was parked in its usual place on the street in front of their house. For he drove that car, he knew, by the luck of living in a small East Texas town. There, the blessing of having a “hardship” driver’s license was not hard to come by at fourteen unless you were a known hellion, which Tommy wasn’t, but made even easier if you had a father, as he did, who was the most prominent lawyer in town.

The car started on the third try, and Tommy sat there pumping the accelerator enough to feed the sluggish engine without, he hoped, flooding it. He stared straight ahead, down the street of small, mostly frame houses, not daring to turn towards his own house. He was afraid that his mother might have escaped to the wraparound front porch, her bathrobe clutched tight at her throat, and would be frantically trying to wave him down, trying to draw him back into the turmoil of whatever events might be unfolding.

He squinted into the sun, already working its way up and through the pecan trees that lined the street, and eased the car away from the curb. He did catch a glimpse of Odie Mae Harwood rocking on her front porch and he felt vaguely guilty, as if she were passing judgment on him for leaving the turbulence of his house.

By the time he hit second gear Tommy felt buoyant, the confines and subtle battles of family fading quickly behind him. He had escaped their churn and roil, and for the morning, at least, he was on his own.

The car, a 1939 Ford, was the Pattersons’ second and not-too-reliable car (a brass-handled set of jumper cables had become a part of the Ford’s permanent equipment). But, when the car started, it ran fine, certainly fine enough to carry Tommy the six blocks from the Patterson house into the center of Cottonwood, where today on the courthouse square the Old Fiddlers’ Contest would be held.

Tommy washed the car almost every Saturday, dragging a hose from the side of the house. He scrubbed the white walls with soap and a stiff bristle brush and later wiped the car down with a soft chamois. Despite a few nicks here and there, the black sedan looked sharp.

The night before, Tommy’s mother had cautioned him. “Now, Tommy,” she had whispered as if her words carried unusual and dramatic import, “don’t park on the courthouse square in the morning. I know it will be early, and things won’t have started then, but when the crowds pour in you will never get out of there. And I will need the Ford in the afternoon for some errands—some important errands.” Then she went on to what was really on her mind. “And it’s fine to help Gene and his dad set up their stand, but, you know, your father wants you to be careful who your friends are. Sometimes those we spend too much time with will pull us down.”

“But Mr. Holley’s okay,” Tommy had answered. “He’s a lot of fun, and Gene’s my best friend.”

“Just be open to all possibilities,” Mary Lee cautioned. “Your father and I want you to lead a rich and full life. We may live in this insignificant town in Texas—that is my cross to bear—but we all can rise above our surroundings. Just look at what your father has done.”

She just doesn’t understand, Tommy thought as he pulled around the downtown square and parked nose-in out front of the Farmers & Merchants Bank. But she was right about one thing, he couldn’t park here too long; before noon the country folks would come flocking in for the festivities, staking out their places on the courthouse lawn with quilts and folding chairs. The women would pass around platters of fried chicken and enameled bowls of black-eyed peas and paper cups of sweet iced tea. And not long after that the fiddlers and pickers and singers and yodelers would take over the stage that was at this very moment being built on a section of the smooth, worn, red brick street. Now the stage appeared to be only a skeleton of yellow pine planks, but before long the half-dozen men who clambered around it would have the flooring in place, and long stretches of corrugated tin would shade the stage before the sun was high. The workers’ hammering and sawing and wisecracks already filled the morning air.

Tommy wandered the sidewalk, which was a couple of steps higher than the street, and kept his eye out for his friend Gene Holley. Tommy had agreed to help Gene and his dad unload their portable grill, a giant contraption that Oran Holley had designed and built. He fired the grill with hickory limbs and charcoal, and an ingenious series of belts and gears kept the wieners and hamburger patties moving in a circular pattern that assured even cooking. It was a wonder to Tommy, the way it could handle hundreds of hot dogs and hamburgers a day.

At the time, Tommy thought Gene’s dad was terrific, a quick and wiry fellow who had picked up a ton of smarts traveling as a young man with the Al G. Barnes Circus. Rumor had it that when he was a boy he had jumped from the top of a barn with a Rhode Island Red hen under each arm, convinced that together the three of them could fly.

The glamour of the circus wore off for Oran Holley years before when he had witnessed a renegade elephant named Black Diamond kill a woman during a downtown parade over in Corsicana.

But Oran Holley could still walk on his hands and might do so today if he thought it would attract a crowd of hot dog customers.

Tommy glanced at the clock on the brick-and-sandstone courthouse. Eight-thirty. He wandered back east, shielding his eyes from the rising sun, thinking he would stand on the corner and watch for Mr. Holley’s pickup and trailer.

As he passed the B & B Café, a group of three men pushed their way out of the grease-smeared plate glass door and onto the sidewalk. “Not as damned smart as he thinks,” one of the men said. Tommy recognized them; he knew almost everyone in town—at least all of the white folks who lived south of the railroad tracks that divided Cottonwood. The one who had just spoken was Vernon Paroline, the only car dealer in Cottonwood, who always cruised around town showing off the latest model Fords. He had sold Thomas Patterson the used Ford that Tommy drove.

Tommy knew the second man only as the owner of the tomato shed over next to the railroad tracks, which, before long, would be packing tomatoes and peas twenty-four hours a day. The third man, Joe Mack Green, towered over both of the others. He was Cottonwood High School’s head football coach, a man with a reputation for running his players through a belt line every time they lost a game. The words the three men bandied around ran together and made no sense to Tommy.

“What’ll they do now?”

“Aw, it would have been double jeopardy, anyway.”

“Scot free and guilty as sin.”

“The hell, I say. The hell with the law. The hell with lawyers.”

“Right is right, and wrong is wrong.”

“Yeah, the damned lawyers are the problem.”

All of this floated around Tommy nonsensically, until Joe Mack Green cursed. “Damn him,” the big man said. “Damn that Patterson!” Those words jarred Tommy alert.

Then the car dealer spotted Tommy and nudged Joe Mack Green. Coach Green glanced at Tommy. “I don’t give a flying fart,” he said. Coach Green had guided the Cottonwood Cougars to the regional football playoffs the year before and now was fearless, a town hero who could do no wrong.

The three men eyed Tommy until he had made his way past the café and on to the corner where he waited, watching for his friend, not daring to look back.

Reprinted with permission.