The Epic West Our House
It occupied almost an entire block in San Marcos, a sprawling historical structure that my parents named Crookwood. And when I think of my hometown, it is this home—more than the town—that comes to mind.
A view of Crookwood from the backyard. Roses grow on the fence installed to keep the author’s little sister and blind terrier from falling into the pool.
When my father was told he was going to die soon, he declared he would not die in our house. It was the home where he and my mother had raised my brother and sister and me. “This has been a happy place,” he told us. “Your mother will probably live the rest of her life here. If I die here, then every time you go into the room where it happened, that’s what you’ll think about.” He made plans to move to Corpus Christi to a house my mother had recently inherited, and he and my mother walked out of their home together, knowing that she would come back and he wouldn’t.
The first time they had seen our house was in 1961, when I was two years old. My father had resigned as minister of the First Baptist Church in Nacogdoches to run for Congress on a civil rights agenda, and lost, and accepted the job of president of San Marcos Baptist Academy. He scouted out the house and took my mother to see it, a huge old structure that inhabits almost a whole block in the historic district of San Marcos, just down the hill from Wonder Cave. She sat in the car looking at it. “What do you think?” he asked her.
The exterior architecture was perfect Greek Revival copied from a house on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, but the interior was a Victorian horror. The rooms were dreary, the woodwork coated in dark-red varnish, the walls covered with garish wallpapers.
“Who would wash all the windows?” she wanted to know.
It’s a testament to my father’s infectious enthusiasm, his foresight, and general bullheadedness that they bought the house. It needed to be re-plumbed, re-wired, re-floored, and re-roofed. For a year I toddled along behind the work crews, inhaling fumes of varnish remover and playing in lead paint sanded off the exterior. The paint was so thick on the ground it looked like snow, and I have always wondered if my slow reading and poor math skills are because of this remodel. We moved into the house when I was three and my brother was six; my parents named it Crookwood, because the previous owners were the Woods. My sister was born a year later, and was brought home and laid on the blue vinyl window seat cushion that my brother and I called the “mile a minute” because we used it to sled down the stairs. I lived there for all of my childhood except for two years away, when my father was in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Now when I think of my hometown, it’s the home, more than the town, that comes to mind.
The house, and the yard too, have changed over the years. What was an open stretch of grass in the back now has hedgerows and patios, a flower garden, a fishpond blessed by a mossy old statue of Saint Francis feeding the birds. The pond sometimes has fish and sometimes doesn’t, depending on whether raccoons have raided. An area where my dad buried our dogs is marked with a stone: “Our Faithful Dogs.” Pecan and oak trees have grown taller and wider. My father wasn’t a gardener, but he loved to cook up plans and stroll around, chewing on his cigar and overseeing the progress. It took him nearly thirty years to talk Mrs. Denny next door into selling part of her lot so he could attach it to ours. He turned it into a garden of native shrubs and trees with a marker reading “Garden of the Grandchildren” as a monument, by then, to his.
By far the most alluring structure of the property, for children, was an old carriage house we called “the barn.” It had horse stalls and feed storage rooms and a hayloft upstairs with chutes down to the stalls and two large plank windows we could shove open to look out over the yard. There was a grain bin with doors that opened like laundry hampers. It was unattached from the wall, and once, when my sister and cousin and I climbed into the compartments and poked our heads out simultaneously, the shift in weight toppled the whole piece over and we were nearly decapitated. We pulled our heads in like turtles before the doors hit the ground.
Our neighborhood had more boys than girls, and the barn was their main hideout. I was a tagalong, and in order not to include me officially in their club they dubbed me a “mascot” and made up ways to keep me out of their hair. They left me once in a feed storage room hiding from “Indians” they said would scalp me, and then forgot I was there. The tin walls had been painted with skulls and crossbones by someone years before, and I was scared of these but terrified of alerting the Indians if I yelled for help. I can still conjure up the silence, the dusty smell of that place, the exact shape of the painted skulls.
Later we kept some animals in the barn. I had a goat named Bilbo Baggins that lived in a pen at the back until he developed a taste for the poisonous oleander leaves. After rushing him to the vet a couple times to have his stomach pumped, we drove him out to my grandparents’ property near Kerrville. When he was gone, the barn seemed empty, so we got a pony named Banjo. But he turned crazy and mean, as horses will do when isolated from other horses, and chased me around the yard one day trying to trample me. We turned him loose at the Laity Lodge Youth Camp that my grandparents owned on the Frio River, and he lived the rest of his life wandering with a band of other retired, ornery horses.
Next my father decided we should raise chickens. He acquired a couple of nesting hens through a friend named Pete Owen, and we awoke one morning to the magic of eight little chicks running around the stalls. I claimed the only brown one and named him Lancelot. We petted and loved the chicks, but as they grew they became aggressive, and Pete Owen confessed he had gotten the hens from a man who raised fighting cocks. My parents were puzzling over how to get rid of them when our silky terrier, Hobie, pushed through the gate behind my sister and me one day and killed them all. We chased after him with sticks, screaming, but he was faster than we were. We had nightmares about that slaughter for years.
My dad’s next project was the construction of a swimming pool beside the barn, under a huge Spanish oak tree. We perched in the limbs of the oak as the hole was being dug, looking down at the excavation, the smell of raw dirt giving us the sense of uncovering a new world. Our old blind Boston terrier, Mrs. Micawber, fell into the hole sometimes when she was making her usual rounds, and had to be gotten out. After the bottom was cemented, the fire department brought a truck over to fill the pool with water. Neighborhood kids came, and we ran in circles inside the pool while the water tumbled out of a yellow hose and got higher and higher. Finally we were swimming.
My mother was worried about the risk to my sister and Mrs. Micawber, so she installed a device that set off a buzzer up at the house whenever an object fell into the pool. But it went off with every leaf and acorn that dropped out of the oak tree, and we became nervous wrecks, running out to the pool numerous times a day expecting to find my sister or Mrs. Micawber sunk to the bottom. Finally my mother unplugged the device and put in a wrought-iron fence with a gate between the house and the pool.
When my sister was slightly older, she almost did drown one time. She wedged herself, underwater, between the ladder steps and the side of the pool, the glass of her swimming mask pressed against the cement. I heard her screaming from underwater and saw bubbles coming up, and since no one else was out there, I ran from the far side to pull her out. When I saw how stuck she was, I tried to push her down and under, but she thought I was trying to drown her and clung to the arms of the ladder, screaming in bubbling bursts. Finally I shoved her hard enough and dragged her up on the right side, her bony chest skinned and bleeding. Since then, I’ve often reminded her that she owes me her life.
In summers, there were days when we woke up in the cotton gowns we called “nighties” and ran straight to the pool, swam all day in our nighties, dried in the sun, slept in the same nighties. We left little bloody toe prints up to the house from the abrasive cement of the pool rubbing the skin off.
My parents later remodeled the barn into an office and guesthouse. When I was twelve years old, the movie director Sam Peckinpah stayed there with his British girlfriend, Joie, while he was filming The Getaway. Initially Steve McQueen was supposed to be our guest. There weren’t a lot of hotels in San Marcos, and the scouting crew had approached my parents with the request. But then my mother was told that McQueen was in a relationship with his co-star Ali MacGraw, who was married to someone else, and she thought this would be a bad example for us to see. So we ended up with Peckinpah. My mother was led to believe he was married to Joie, but he wasn’t.
McQueen came over a couple of times and was friendly to us, warning my brother to stay away from drugs. Peckinpah, by contrast, was irritable and had a drinking problem. He wore a bandanna around his head, and reflective sunglasses, and my sister and I were scared of him. He threw knives at the walls in the barn and brought in a king-size bed. My parents invited him and Joie up to the house for meals a few times. They came for our family Sunday lunch of roast beef and mashed potatoes and peas. He told us our barn was haunted. He said he had seen the ghost. He also asked if any of us would like to be in the movie.
He and his retinue helped themselves to our pool. We liked Joie, who was young and pretty and always gracious. My sister and I ventured out to the pool once while Joie was doing pull-ups on the diving board, and noticed that she had hair growing under her arms. We had never seen hair like this on a woman and didn’t know hair even grew there.
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