One Ranger

By H. Joaquin Jackson with David Marion Wilkinson

Chapter One

Ice in August

life in the time it never rained—
in three parts

1935–1953

My dad, a farmer by trade, devoured the Sunday sports section of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche. When football season rolled around, he kept an eye peeled for any articles about the University of Texas Longhorns. In the fall of 1935 the Avalanche allegedly ran a stirring feature about one particular contest. I don’t know which team UT played that weekend, but the journalist’s gripping description of the gridiron battle inspired my father during one of his hopeless vigils for rain to name his firstborn son after the game’s standout player.

In those days, football was a far more brutal game. Collegiate rivalries adopted the fervor of a blood feud. The stakes were always high, because in Texas bragging rights were everything. UT’s lettermen were lionized throughout the state. Many athletes were endowed with entertaining nicknames, like “Potsy” Allen, “No-No” Reese, “Bully” Gilstrap, “Snaky” Jones, “Hook” McCullough, “Mogul” Robinson, “Big-Un” Rose, “Ox” Higgins, “Stud” Wright, and, my absolute all-time favorite, the University of Oklahoma’s “Cactus Face” Duggan. Old Cactus Face must have been quite a looker.

For modern eyes, looking at the 1935 Alcalde, the University of Texas yearbook, is a sobering experience. So many of these ambitious, smooth-chinned faces graduated out of the deprivations of the Great Depression and were hurled into the meat grinder of the Second World War. The Korean conflict soon followed. Survivors lived under the perpetual threat of the Cold War, the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, social upheavals of the 1960s, and on through the second half of America’s most chaotic century. Only the strongest could have mustered enough enthusiasm and faith to sustain them through all that.

As I flipped through the pages in search of my namesake, I wondered which among the best and brightest of my parents’ generation went on to live contented lives. Seventy years have passed since the senior class of 1935 competed for life’s glories. The youngest would now be in their late eighties. Whether the individual players of the 1935 Longhorn football team went on to fulfill their greatest ambitions or failed at every turn, they are either gone from this world or nearly so.

I was also bothered by what you don’t see in the 1920s and 1930s Alcalde. There are few Hispanic surnames and not one mention of an African American underclassman. The football program did not appear to have a single Mexican American on the squad, a reminder that higher education was once a pursuit limited to the Anglo population of Texas.

But, by God, somebody nicknamed “Joaquin” played one hell of a game sometime in the fall of 1935. He impressed the Lubbock Avalanche sportswriter, who unilaterally branded him with All-American potential in his Sunday morning recap. At least that’s what my dad always said.

The facts say otherwise. The University of Texas at Austin would not boast of an All-American until the 1940s, long after I was born. No player named Joaquin ever lettered in the sport.

There were, however, two great players from that era named Jack. Back in the days when most of these boys literally came off the ranch, one of these fellows probably hung around the vaqueros enough to be nicknamed Joaquin. My dad loved the Texas Longhorns. Once he read the name of the promising player, it stuck in his head like another molar. I’m just grateful that he wasn’t a fan of the fashion pages.

So, why am I named Joaquin? I’ve always told everyone who asked—and so many did—what my father told me. During the writing of and research for this book, I’ve followed my father’s lead until the trail went cold. I tracked down a squad of young ghosts leering back at me. I thumbed through a decade of yearbook mug shots and I couldn’t find my man.

I’m more confused than disappointed. As far as I’m concerned, the name worked out just fine for a Texas Ranger and was suited to a time when the racial barriers in Texas were tumbling down. I’ve always had an affinity for the Mexican American culture even if I didn’t have any Mexican American blood. If the arbitrary name that my father picked for me encouraged the Mexican American community to risk a tidbit of faith in the Texas Rangers at a time when they had little or none, it served a far grander purpose than my poor father could have ever imagined. I have always been Joaquin. I have always been proud of the name. The true story of how I came by it, however, was buried with my father.

I came by the knowledge of my ancestry and earliest years by the same flawed oral tradition. My family talked on those rare occasions when there was no work to do. Even though we were assigned chores of our own, my sisters and I listened as best we could. What we were told will have to do.

Part I

The snow piled close to six inches in the winter fields and up to a man’s knee in the drifts beside the house, barn, and outbuildings. On a gray, darkening afternoon, my daddy reeled on the telephone crank to ring the family doctor. “We need you out here, Doc,” he said. “Baby’s coming; and my wife’s hurtin’ awful bad.”

The old man cared enough about his patients’ welfare to make the drive through flurries of snow and sleet from Littlefield, Texas, out to the little farming community of Anton. And then he drove three miles more until he coasted to one mailbox nearly swallowed up by drifts of early winter South Plains snow. He read “Jackson” in black, hand-scrawled letters.

James Holcomb Jackson was a lean, tall, twenty-three-year-old man, dressed in starched khaki from his neck to his lace-up brogans, his shining blue eyes shaded by a short-brimmed, sweat-stained felt fedora. He watched his young wife endure the agony of labor, but he didn’t show any worse for his worries.

James Jackson was a farmer, the same as his father before him, and on back as far as anyone could remember. Farmers learn early not to fret over what they can’t control, which included nature in all of her manifestations except rain. On the High Plains dry farmers prayed for rain ahead of salvation. Other than that, they let nature ride on as she would, in birth as in all other things. For James’s kind there weren’t too many to cry for him if he couldn’t bear the agony of a farmer’s life. You bucked up, got through another day, and went on. He expected the same of his young bride.

Virah Jones was sixteen when she married James Jackson. Now barely eighteen, she was about to give birth to the first son of the handsomest young farmer in Lamb County. The old doctor arrived to examine his patient, clearly in the advanced stages of labor. Small woman, big baby. Nothing about this cold night would come easy.

The Jacksons were Scotch-Irish and English by blood. They came to America hungry like most of their kind, poured through the Virginia settlements like somebody’s dishwater in search of cheap land. Each generation migrated farther west until they numbered seven—and none of them to my knowledge escaped the poverty that drove them deeper still. The Jackson clan eventually spilled into Texas, and there, east of the Colorado River, some of them dug in to stay.

James Austin “Jim” Jackson was born in Marble Falls, Texas, in 1878. My sisters and I called him “Papa Jackson.” His daddy dragged him back down to a farm near Granger, Texas, near the junction of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, where he spent much of his life. His wife bore him four daughters and one son before she was burned alive in a house fire. Papa Jackson’s second wife, Mississippi-bred Zelma Dean Holcomb, married him because his sister told her she ought to—to care for the motherless children if nothing else. The mercenary marriage worked out anyway. Zelma soon brought two boys of her own into this world. The oldest was my father, James Holcomb Jackson, born in 1912.

Folks around Granger said that the tall, thin, serious-faced boy was born to go places in this world. Turns out Papa Jackson had other plans. The Southern Plains of Texas were opening up farms of virgin soil far to the north of any country Papa Jackson had known. He could cash out his place in Williamson County for a larger spread on the prairie and have plenty of money on hand to endure the lean years. The old man didn’t have to ask James to go with him.

Not that Papa Jackson was much on asking. When he needed help getting the crop in he ordered James to quit his senior year. If there was no crop, there was no money, and what good was his schooling unless they were teaching him how to make a stew out of them books? After that, James Jackson was destined to be a farmer whether he liked it or not. As things turned out, he didn’t like it at all.

James’s bitterness ate at him long before his father dragged him off to Lamb County to dry farm a half-section of land carved out of the Old Spade Ranch, sandy loam pasture that had never been scratched by a plow. Papa Jackson reaped bushels of hope from new country, believed in the promise of abundance to come. He strapped on his Dickie overalls, hitched up his Georgia mules, and led his boys James and Clarence into the fields.

James Jackson inherited his father’s willingness to gamble everything on one good year—and he’d see it happen, too, in the early 1950s. But by then his bitterness and temper had consumed him and his marriage. He didn’t know that he was already alone in the world, with his hip fat with cash money he’d gleaned from the dirt and his labors. But we’ll get to that in its time.

If Papa Jackson was a severe man, I didn’t see it. He may have thwarted my father’s ambitions, but he always encouraged mine. I never understood how such a large, tough man as big as a barn could have been so tender with his grandchildren. Maybe seeing his daddy give what James never got ate at my father, too.

By that early November snow, father and son were both in Anton, working on land my grandfather owned, butchering hogs for winter lard and smoked bacon and Christmas hams. The house was no place for them once the doctor arrived. They probably didn’t say much of anything as they stood under the dim, golden light of the coal oil lantern. The barn and outbuildings were still new enough that they smelled of pine sap on humid nights. The men were busy making quick strokes with skinning knifes, hanging bloody quarters from rafters in the smokehouse, listening to the wind to see if it carried a baby’s cry.

Inside the clapboard house, labor pains wracked the body of a brown-haired, small-boned woman, born Virah Alice Jones in Pioneer, Texas, in 1917 and raised in the town of Comanche. Her parents, Ruby and Homer Jones, had divorced back when the act was akin in the social conscience to a bank robbery. Ruby took up with a wonderful concrete and masonry contractor named Haynie Lollis. She got around to marrying him in 1950, which speaks for itself when it comes to how my mother’s side of the family cared for social conventions.

Daddy Haynie, as we called him, always turned over our dinner plates just before it was time to eat. When we set them right, there’d be a buffalo nickel or a mercury dime shining back at us. Sometimes he left a Peace silver dollar even though he’d worked half a day to earn it. I carry his name, just as my maternal grandmother wished—Haynie Joaquin Jackson.

Grandmother Ruby knew how to make much out of little, and there was always plenty to eat when she was around. Helping Virah with my birth detracted from her work as an Avon lady and a Stayform lady’s undergarments agent. But with her first grandbaby coming, she didn’t mind. She dipped Garrett snuff between sales calls, careful to pick the little particles out of her teeth with an elm twig. She sipped a little Mogen David wine when the mood caught her. She had Cherokee blood, too. She was as full of life as my daddy was taciturn.

This diverse and volatile group huddled together to await my birth. Some called them wanderers, dreamers, rebels, misfits, clodhoppers, dirt-farming folks born with more stubbornness than good sense. I called them my family. I first laid eyes on them on November 12, 1935.

Whatever the differences between my various kin, they were all astonished by my size. Father and son Jackson took one look at the long, fat baby and hauled their firstborn out to the cotton scale. When the needle passed ten pounds and rising, the doctor said, “That’s enough! Take ’im off. She don’t want to know!”

Papa Jackson slapped James on the back and said, “Look at the size of ’em, son! He’ll tote a bale by himself ’fore he’s twelve.”

I can imagine my father’s pride at holding me—the first thing that belonged only to him. The relief on his face that I was born big, strong, and healthy. I can see Virah, exhausted and pale, reaching for me with her twiglike arms. Grandmother Lollis snatching me away from my father, telling him he’s a fool to weigh a newborn on a cotton scale in the cold, and handing me to my mother to cradle at her breast.

I wish I had a photograph of the moment when my mother and father stared into each other’s eyes and understood that they had a baby to bind them when they were just a step or two beyond childhood themselves. I’d like to carry the image of my parents when they were young, healthy, fearless, and, with their arms wrapped around their firstborn child, hopelessly in love. I know there was a time when it was true.

Instead, other images come to mind—some warm and comforting, and others I wish that I’d never seen.

Part II

See a boy of three or four bouncing beside his grandfather on a cotton wagon pulled by two black Missouri draft mules. The stout, square-headed old man holds the reins, the skin of his fist rough and dry like an August dirt clod. They ride down the graded dirt roads that cut through country where you can see farther than you could afford to go, to Anton or maybe Littlefield. In the winter, after a crisp blue norther wipes the skies clean, you can see almost to the mountains of New Mexico.

The man loads the month’s sugar, coffee, beans, lard, and salt when he notices the boy standing there in his Sunday shorts and tie, staring at the jar of rock candy. The old man flips a Mercury dime on the worn counter of the Mercantile.

“Well, go on,” he says to the boy. “And get yourself a Nehi, too. But don’t you tell nobody, ’specially your ma.” The boy claps his hands together before he runs his index finger through the loop of string and pulls the candy out of the jar. His grandfather pops the cap on an orange soda and hands it to him. They walk out and climb back onto the wagon.

A boy about the same age and his blonde-haired sister board a train. She looks like a little angel in the dress her mama sewed out of a Gladiola flour sack. He looks like any other big-eyed, scuff-kneed boy. They sleep in the same bed, inseparable both night and day. They tickle each other as the green rows fly by on their way from Littlefield to Amherst.

See James Jackson telling his daddy that it’s time to farm his own place. He’s waited so long that the words choke in his throat. The old man has seen this day coming, his son now with a pretty wife and two young children and dreams of his own. They shake hands—big men locked in an awkward moment. James turns away. His father, a little shorter than his son but twice his breadth, shoves his hands in his pockets and paws at the dirt with the toe of his boot. He’s not sure how well things’ll turn out for young farmers, what with money as scarce as rain on the Southern Plains and James renting his land to boot.

Picture James and Virah as they pack everything they own into one borrowed wagon. It’s just another chore for James, and he goes at it like hell bent in a fury. Virah doesn’t like the way he’s handling the furniture and she tells him so. He snaps at her to either load it herself or shut up about it. He climbs up beside her and snaps the reins on his daddy’s mules.

The family of four creak along until they reach Whitharral and a Spanish labor of leased land—a little over 177 acres. The house looks more like a barn. Virah doesn’t smile until James shows her the electric icebox in the hard-used kitchen. Virah lets her kids stick their heads in the freezer to feel the cold and scrape off frost with their fingernails. “Ain’t that something?” she says. “We can make ice in August.”

A brother and sister ride the top of the ice-cream maker, a tow sack for their saddle, their skinny butts ballast to keep the whole operation from tumbling over. Papa Jackson works the crank, fairly stiff now that the ice cream starts to set up. Joaquin and Dorothy Gail slide off to let their mother toss in some diced peaches and then climb back on with a giggle. Their daddy takes a turn on the crank until it’s done. He yanks out the dasher and hands it to the kids to lick off the fresh ice cream.

After supper, Virah dishes ice cream into cereal bowls that ain’t near big enough for two skinny kids. The ice cream melts fast in the summer air. Joaquin drinks the last of his. Dorothy Gail copies her brother. Virah kisses off the white cream mustaches.

James and Virah Jackson sit down for Sunday dinner at Papa Jackson’s house with all their other kin. Mounds of fried chicken crowd an oblong dish with bowls of green beans and potatoes all adorned with corn and tomato relishes canned the year before. Joaquin tugs at the tie around his neck, standing back from the table as his father, uncle, their wives, and his grandparents hold hands as Papa Jackson speaks the blessing. When the old man’s done, he looks around at his grandkids to make sure they chime in with a hearty amen.

Joaquin’s old enough to know that the grown-ups eat first in a working-man’s house. It’s like this every Sunday.

Virah blows a strand of errant hair out of her face as she works the iron back and forth over khakis and denim overalls. She sprinkles water out of a corked Dr. Pepper bottle. The boy hears the sizzle as the iron rides over the new drops. When Dorothy is a few years older, she’ll iron, too. James expects everything he wears to be clean, starched, and creased, even when he’s going to hoe a few rows of cotton or maize.

The entire James Jackson family pulls up in a tractor and cotton trailer to the new project farm near Ropesville. Part of Roosevelt’s controversial New Deal, the house and outbuildings are brand-new. The farm is James’s first opportunity to own his own land. There are plenty of young families around and a community center where they gather. Churches, homes, and a school pop up like Johnson grass. Barefoot kids run everywhere. Hear Virah’s steps echo through the house’s four hollow rooms. “All right,” she says. “So this is it. I’ll make do.” It belongs to her and James both, at least as long as they can make the payments.

Dorothy and Joaquin scramble up the windmill, in lieu of a climbing tree, and holler to children on neighboring farms. “Y’all come play!” A pack of them come running across the edge of a field. Their footsteps leave a little cloud of dust behind them.

It’s ninety-eight degrees in the shade if you can find any, which on the Southern Plains you can’t. Virah watches her husband’s Adam’s apple bounce as he downs a Dell Dixie pickle jar full of lemonade she brings to him in the field. The sweat on his neck and brow is matted with grit. He hands the empty jar to her, tips the brim of his dirty straw hat, and walks back to the tractor without a word. He’s got his job. Her job is to help him do it.

Papa Jackson times Joaquin and Dorothy as they race around the peach orchard. The second heat is between the telephone poles that stud the Jackson farm. While they’re running, Papa Jackson pulls a contraption out of the back of his Ford pickup. The kids walk back sweating and winded, eyes wide open at the sight of a crabapple red Western Flyer. “Take her for a spin, Joaquin,” the old man says, “it’s supposed to be able to fly.”

James walks spryly to the dirt road where his friend is waiting. He comes home alone in a used 1939 Chevrolet sedan. The dents and dings don’t bother him at all. It’s got tires and the motor runs strong and it’s his. Virah walks out when he honks the horn. James grins big and says, “Well, round up them kids and let’s go for a ride.” They drive off. She worries about how James spends money. Cash is a long way from easy come around here. James thinks that no matter what he does it ain’t good enough for her.

James sees what the Chevy will do in third gear. The transmission hangs a little when he shifts out of second. He’s drawn to a baby blue skirt flapping in the wind. A young wife hangs out her laundry. He slows a little to study the smooth cut of her legs. When he glances back at Virah, she glares at him. It ain’t the first time James has eyed the pretty young ladies. Virah knows that they come looking for her handsome husband, too. She’s got enough on her plate without worrying about that. Her spite festers like a splinter stuck deep in the heel of her hand.

Joaquin and Dorothy wrestle in the backseat of the Chevy, parked with a hundred other black cars and pickups outside of the Cotton Club in Lubbock. They spot other bored kids sitting in cars, but they know better than to disobey their parents and play with them. They hear fiddles hanging Western swing in the dry air, a wall of human voices interrupted only by shouting or cackling or by the crowd clapping hands at the end of a fast number.

The kids are asleep when the car door pops open. The image is fuzzy, but Virah spits out words as soon as James slides behind the wheel. The kids smell bootleg liquor on their parents’ breath, sort of like the smell at a doctor’s office or in the fertilizer section of the feed store. James jerks the car into gear. The kids are tossed against the door as he accelerates onto the blacktop, and he burns rubber he can’t afford to replace. Virah shakes her head and makes a show of checking the kids for bruises and bumps. She looks anywhere but at James.

Virah’s jaw keeps working. She grows angrier as he continues to ignore her. Joaquin looks in the mirror as the headlights of passing cars illuminate his father’s narrow eyes in dying rectangles. He knows better than to fool with his dad when he looks like that.

Virah shrieks when James hauls off and slaps her, more out of outrage than pain. The blow knocks her head against the glass. In an instant, Joaquin shoots out of the backseat and wallops his dad with his fists. Dorothy stares at her brother, her eyes like big blue marbles.

Everyone except James is sobbing. Virah’s horrified that her argument has now embroiled the kids. James thinks that he ought to pull over and blister the boy’s backside, and maybe Virah’s, too—and anyone else who crosses him tonight—but he can wait. Nobody says another word.

The lights of Lubbock fade behind them. Virah herds her children into the house. James slides out his skinny belt as he follows behind them. Dorothy winces at every stroke. Virah’s face flushes bright red, and she pulls her daughter to her chest to wait it out. She makes room for Joaquin when it’s over. “I’m sorry, baby,” she whispers over and over into Joaquin’s ear.

The dust swirls around the farm under a sky the color of tanned leather. Stunted crops wither in the fields. James hands the keys of the Chevy to a stranger in exchange for a few worn-out bills. Every day after school Virah and Dorothy sweep up the day’s dirt. Virah’s deaf to all complaints about the grit in the potatoes and peas.

Virah and James dance at the community center now. Joaquin and Dorothy Gail run wild with the other children, but they can’t ignore the squabbling couples. There isn’t as much food at the potluck suppers as there used to be. Fewer people laugh. Men draw hard on quarts of clear liquor and stare long at empty fields. They have that doctor’s office smell when they stagger by. James stares hard at strange women, and Joaquin feels certain that his daddy knows those ladies. Every now and then, a dark-eyed woman whispers in James’s ear. He gives her a tight-lipped smile.

Virah rides to town on the family tractor now. Her kids ride on either side of her. They come back the same way, only the kids hang on to sacks of groceries. Virah’s little arms shimmy as she fights the steering wheel, but she can drive with one hand long enough to slap Joaquin’s hand out of the sugar sack. Every now and then they pass a project farm with new boards across the windows.

The seasons drag by, a slow passing of long, dusty years. Joaquin and Dorothy grow strong on hard work and farm-fresh food. They’re fast, too, and athletic. Every sport they play comes so easy. Papa Jackson plods along now when his family gathers. “I’d come see you play ball,” he tells Joaquin, “if y’all didn’t play on Sunday.”

James packs the last load—they’ve accumulated so many more possessions and pieces of farm equipment than before. Husband and wife don’t say a word, with the baby Jimmie Sue squeezed between them. Driving past the sign that reads “Welcome to Smyer,” Virah pales at first sight of what’s supposed to pass as a farmhouse. “I’ve seen chickenhouses fancier than that,” she says. James doesn’t pay her any mind. It’s the best farm he’s ever owned, and the house is a woman’s problem anyway.

With a grain scoop, Dorothy and Virah shovel the field dirt blown into the house. Sandstorms loom on the horizon like spring thunderheads. They hit hard enough to scour the hide off a hog. Dust blows in through every crack and cranny, and the kids hold a wet dishrag to their faces. Virah fetches the broom as often as she yanks the pull chain on the bare bulb lights. She hates the house. She hates the weather. She thinks she ought to shoot the man who brought her here.

James kicks the butane fuel open and cranks the motor that drives the rusty irrigation pump. What the farmers call butane is really liquefied natural gas, but they don’t care about proper terminology. They care about the goddamn taxes on gasoline. The engine turns over in a puff of black smoke, but soon it hits its singing stride. Six-inch irrigation pipes tremble with the flow of well water. James looks up at a fuzzy horizon thick with brown dust. He doesn’t care if it never rains again.

Let the summer pass. James pays a few of his less fortunate neighbors cash money by the day to haul cotton trailers to the gin. He made a quarter to a half bale of cotton to the acre in his best year on that sorry dry farm. He reaps close to two bales an acre on the new place by running the noisy, rusty irrigation pump in the long hazy days between rains. He struts through the squeaky door wearing his hat with a gangster’s tilt. Pops a check in front of Virah’s face. He’s all winks and white teeth. “Your man can grow cotton out of a rock,” he says.

Frost coats the stalks on a clear winter’s morning. Virah’s breath vaporizes inside the house. She snatches a wool blanket that she warmed on the space heater and wraps it around her children’s feet. The kids moan at how good it feels and roll over to go back to sleep. James, arms and neck dark with dirt and grit, a clear white line where his hat rests on his forehead that never sees the sun, waits for his turn in the galvanized tub. The kids and Virah bathe first. He smacks the youngest, Jimmie Sue, on her butt with a wet towel as she goes running by, then climbs into the tub while the water is still warm.

Joaquin, an eighth grader, steps up to bat against the twelfth-grade pitcher. The high school doesn’t have enough players to fill out the team, so Joaquin steps up to the plate looking like a scarecrow he’s so damn skinny. He raps a pretty good shot deep into left field. Coach strokes his chin and nods to himself.

The confidence grows in James’s face at the same time the crop money burns a hole in his khakis. He signs a deed to his 177–acre irrigated farm in exchange for a big bank check. The buyer pays for that well water, boy. James struts up to the bank teller and slides the check under the bars. “Lay that green across my palm, pretty girl,” he says.

The Jacksons roll up to a brand-new home right across from the school in Smyer. A new 1951 four-row John Deere Model-G tractor parked under a shed and no water pump to fool with, either. James is back to dry farming now. With his luck he’s not worried one lick. He buys Virah a green 1951 Fleetline Chevy sedan to shut her up and a new red Ford pickup for him. Joaquin gets a palomino gelding named Shine. Soon Joaquin’s out riding just like the cowboys he watches on Saturday nights at the Wallace Theater in Levelland or the State or Clifton in Lubbock. When he’s not working or in school, he saddles Shine and rides, free from the drought and an unhappy home.

Virah lies in bed in the dark with her eyes wide open. Even in a new house she isn’t happy. She doesn’t believe that James is the farmer that his daddy was, especially when it comes to managing money. He shouldn’t have sold that irrigated farm to lease another that depends on regular rain and God’s mercy. He shouldn’t have bought this fancy house, the tractor, and two new cars. She doesn’t know how much money they have left, only that James spent most of it without one word to her. He ain’t exactly deacon material like his daddy, either, not with that hot temper and a quick hand. She’s up most the night hearing the same words over and over in her head: “I’m gonna leave him when my kids are grown.”

The sun beats down on the Southern Plains for the next seven straight years of well below average rainfall. Daily sandstorms engulf whole counties. The Lubbock Morning Avalanche runs a picture of a cotton plant no taller than a pack of cigarettes. James curses the stars in the cloudless sky. You can cram a sharpshooter shovel four feet into the ground and never touch moist dirt. He’s broke until the next harvest, when he sinks even deeper in bank debt.

A man in a black suit apologizes for finally having to take the tractor. They’re looking uphill at the worst drought of the twentieth century—longer than the Dust Bowl, meaner than the crippling drought of 1918. A registered letter waits in the Jackson mail slot, a picture of Lubbock National Bank etched into the corner. Joaquin, Dorothy Gail, and young Jimmie Sue listen to their parents bicker in the next room. They argue over how much she spends for groceries or a light left burning. “The kids gotta eat, James Jackson! They gotta see to read!” Virah shouts at him. Does James think Virah can squeeze the mortgage payments out of the grocery budget? James is a fool. They both know it, but only Virah speaks the words.

The kids hear the usual dull thud when James slaps Virah. Sometimes everything gets quiet. More times than not all hell breaks loose. Virah’s half his size, but she’s not afraid of him. He’s tough; she’s tougher. The next day, Virah stays inside. James wears his fedora cocked to cover his bruised eye.

Same thing goes on in other farmhouses across the plains. The drought’s buried them all under deep drifts of dust and debt and self-doubt. They don’t know it, but like the cowboy in the 1890s, they’re witnessing the death rattle of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian society, the last nail in the coffin of the small family farm in Texas. One by one, the drought breaks most of them.

Sharecroppers working marginal land are the first to fall. Leased dry land farmers like James Jackson follow close on their heels as they migrate toward the big cities in search of work. James’s friends wander off to Dallas or Denver or Oklahoma City or anywhere that sounds better than Smyer, and almost everywhere does. They leave the doors to their rented houses wide open to the winds, and they don’t come back.

James stands in line to work at the cotton gin. Virah commutes to Lubbock each day to work at Skibell’s Dress Shop. She pays what bills she can, but James Jackson doesn’t get a hand on her paycheck. That money’s hers. James swallows his pride and moonlights to help make ends meet. He paints the school, roofs a house. Anything. Joaquin and Dorothy start high school in Smyer. They excel at every sport, but are especially talented at basketball. The coach tells Joaquin he’s good enough to play college ball. All the farm boys bounce back from a knock or two, but Joaquin plays with aggressive abandon. Suddenly, the orange ball looks more like a one-way train ticket. He wants it like the cotton fields want rain. The coach thinks of it as desire. He’s not even close. Hit a boy with a belt and the back of your hand and see what he’s willing to do to get shed of his father and that dying farm.

The college coaches and recruiters eye Joaquin at the regional finals in Canyon in 1954. Polk Robinson, coach of Texas Tech, shows up at the Smyer gym to watch him work out. Joaquin feels like the ticket off that farm is already between his fingers.

Joaquin stands an inch or two over six feet. He’s tough as a fence post and just as thin. Sheets of gristly muscle stretched over long, limber bones. It’s after school. He was up early doing his chores, and then had practice to handle after classes. They ran extra laps for missing too many foul shots in the last game. James motions for Joaquin to join him in the back yard. James crams a shovel in his son’s chest and tells him to fill in the sewer ditch that James has fooled with for the better part of a hot day. Joaquin starts to toss the soil onto the new line. He thinks he’ll be a pilot or a cowboy, he’s not sure. He only knows that he’ll never be a farmer, never end up like James.

His daddy sees him leaning on a shovel like some sorry county road worker. “I said get that goddamn ditch filled in,” he barks. Joaquin throws the shovel aside and says, “Fill it in yourself.” He stomps off. He gets maybe three steps away when he gets slammed to the ground. He can’t breathe. He feels the heat, the swelling, and the deep ache. James stands over him with a crowbar. “You’ll do what I tell you, boy, and you’ll do it now!” Joaquin’s shoulders throb from the blow, but he stands up and reaches for his shovel. He feels like crying but he’d never give that son of a bitch the satisfaction. He can’t get away fast enough from that goddamn farm.

Virah buys little things for her home with her own money. She feels good about what she’s created for her kids until her husband walks through the door. Can’t paint over James Jackson. Dorothy Gail takes up house chores now that both parents work outside of the home. Joaquin cooks a little, but he’s a bit of a slob. He’s restless, too. Joaquin and Dorothy Gail see how James dotes over Jimmie Sue. The older kids are up before daylight and after their chores, or else. But James beams at Jimmie Sue curled up in her bed. “Let that baby girl sleep,” he says. Joaquin and Dorothy resent it, but don’t dare speak the words.

Joaquin practices his quick draw with the .38-40 Colt single-action revolver. He mimics the same action favored by his childhood heroes Gene Autry, Wild Bill Elliot, or Red Ryder and his redman sidekick, Little Beaver, whom he watched on the Saturday matinee at the State Theatre in Lubbock. These days he and his friends sit up in the balcony and puff on ten-cent cigars like some black-hatted villains and think maybe they were born eighty years too late. “Quicker than you can blink an eye,” he brags to himself, the leather rig riding low on his hip as he squares off with a Green Giant bean can. His thumb slips off the hammer as he draws. The pistol goes off a little quick, Joaquin notices. He feels first the burn of the bullet against his skin, and then the warmth of the blood as it soaks his jeans. Little Beaver has just shot himself through the meat of his thigh.

Virah sobs against the front door after she sends Joaquin to sit for his senior picture in a simple dress shirt and tie. She can’t afford a new jacket.

Joaquin runs to the mailbox every day. Finally he sees what he’s been waiting for—a letter from West Texas State in Canyon. He shucks the envelope and lets it blow in the hot wind. He’s got himself a scholarship. Suddenly the road in front of his house leads almost anywhere except to another farm.

When Virah comes home from work, Joaquin picks her up and twirls her around. He sets her down and shows her the letter, and she throws her arms around his neck. In a flood of tears, she tells him she always knew that he could do it. It’s a different story with James. Joaquin drops the letter in his daddy’s lap while James waits for Dorothy to serve smothered steak with biscuits and gravy. “Looks like I’ll be heading to Canyon this fall,” Joaquin says.

“I expect so,” the old man says. He hands the letter back to Joaquin, pulls a pack of Camels out of his breast pocket, and cups his fist around a cigarette as he lights it.

Joaquin takes the letter back and, face beaming, walks to his room. That’s the most anyone would ever get out of James Jackson after the drought was through with him.

Part III

What is there left to tell about these people, my family? My sisters and I left for lives of our own. Dorothy Gail married a classmate of mine, Jim Moring, the son of our school superintendent. Jim became a petroleum engineer. He and Dorothy eventually settled in Midland, where they raised a family and prospered. Dorothy earned her real estate license and later helped Shirley and me buy our home in Alpine. She’ll skin you good on the golf course, too.

Jimmie Sue was left behind during the bitter years. James and Virah were too embroiled in their wars to be parents to her. She quit school, married, and moved away, only to lose her husband and daughter in a tragic automobile accident. True to the Jackson name, she picked herself up and went on. She married two more times, both marriages ending in divorce. She works for a chip manufacturer in the Dallas area. We don’t see Jimmie Sue nearly often enough. She reminds me so much of my mother.

My father continued to struggle with his farm. To make ends meet, he worked a succession of jobs. He went on the wheat harvest one year, migrating from field to field, state to state. He “measured cotton” to check that farmers didn’t abuse government subsidy programs. He worked at the local gin, was a janitor at the local school, drove a school bus. In 1958, he finally gave up farming and moved to Levelland in 1959. The next year, my long-suffering mother kicked him out of the house.

James’s divorce depleted what little initiative the drought had left him. He never thought Virah would go through with it. Stunned, he staggered off to Lubbock and worked at a Humble gas station. He later ended up in his brother’s house, married to another woman, and ran a used car lot in New Deal, Texas. All three of these projects failed. He moved on to Pampa, where he worked as a school janitor until retirement age.

Always game for the ladies, James married once or twice more. One of these unions lasted only a day. In the early 1980s, he moved to Midland to be closer to Dorothy Gail’s family. Even though he suffered from emphysema and arthritis, among other ailments, he continued to attend senior citizen dances in his shiny “slippers” until dementia sentenced him to a nursing home. He died in 1993. To the end, James always loved to dance.

In 1987, James made his only visit to my home in Alpine. The first thing he did was walk around with his hands behind his back, staring at the soil. He stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me.

“I’m gonna tell you something, son,” he said. “This place ain’t worth a damn.”

“What are you talking about, Dad?” I said.

“Got too many rocks.”

I reckon James Jackson died a farmer.

Virah also struggled after the divorce. Her experience in women’s fashion retail got her hired on to manage the Franklin Ladies Dress Shop in Levelland, the high-water mark of her career. She married an alcoholic cook and became an alcoholic waitress. Together they served chicken fried steaks and hamburgers in broken-down greasy spoons all over West Texas, leaving a swath of broken bottles, unpaid bills, and shattered dreams behind. She cut loose one cook only to take up with another, and the next drank even more.

In 1980, after two decades of alcoholism, Virah Alice Jackson sobered up and joined AA and never touched another drop. Gradually the light returned to her eyes. She rekindled a relationship with all of her children, especially Dorothy Gail, over the next ten years. Virah died in 1990. In 1987 she gave me a schnoodle pup (half schnauzer and half poodle). We named her Alice after my mother. We buried Alice in 2003. They both died of bone cancer.

No matter where any of us failed, regardless of how they disappointed me or I them, these people are my family. I think better of them now that I’m older. Their times were so much harder than mine, their choices fewer. Their flaws were given every opportunity to take root and, in some cases, overwhelmed my loved ones until they wrought their own destruction. My sisters and I turned away from my parents’ ruin until it had run its bitter course.

No one gave my parents anything. They, in turn, gave everything they had to my sisters and me. Time has washed away the anger and the hurt. After it was all said and done and so much time has passed since those drought years tainted by tears and dust, only love remains.

Love and a few sad photographs.

Reprinted with permission.

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