Dear reader, you usually hear from me on Fridays but I finished this one over the weekend and it’s burning a hole in a my britches. For those of you not from the south, what I mean is, it’s been tucked into my pocket far too long, like a shiny copper penny, and I can’t wait to set it loose.
Grandma and grandpa were dust bowl babies. They grew up dirt poor in the back country just one county apart with only a single four-way stop between them. No one knows exactly how they met, but grandpa's story was that from the time they took to that one-room schoolhouse, grandma chased him all over the tri-county area until one day he decided to stop running. He’d been running since he was ten years old, when out of the clear blue one afternoon his mother dropped from the kitchen sink to the floor, suds settling around broken porcelain like confusion. He ran like lightening through a thunderous screen door slam, tearing across tall grass and gravel like a red-tinged dust devil, running for his mama, running for his life.
The dust eventually settled on that dark day, long before the truth ever could, with the kind of heavy only red clay can carry even as it blows in the wind, scours the skin like sandpaper, and threatens to cut to the bone. On a day like this one, you might even wish it would.
If grandpa’s father had ever looked his three boys in the eye on any given day before, he never did again after this one. When he returned home from the hospital, a straight line of paved prairie two towns away, he said “Your mother isn’t coming home.” And that’s the last grandpa ever heard of her. And nearly the last he ever saw of his daddy, the town blacksmith who died a little that day, too. Grandpa spent the remainder of his boyhood on the run being fed by the women in the neighborhood (when they could catch him long enough to make him eat something) and later running on fumes of stolen drip gas siphoned from rusty oil wells in wheat fields after nightfall.
Grandma told another version of their courtship. The cinematic critical juncture of which is this: The summer he turned sixteen, grandpa set his sights on the High Plains of Wyoming and wouldn’t be swayed; he hitchhiked the entire 750-mile stretch through the tallgrass prairie of Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska to get himself there. After so long spent being sweet on that blue-eyed Oklahoma-boy-turned-Cheyenne-farmhand, Grandma told herself “it didn’t make no difference, one way or another.” She learned a long time ago from her daddy that men were made for leaving.
By the time the dust settled on the long stretch of silence her first and only love left in his wake, grandma’d grown keen on someone else. Who it was I wish I knew. Wish I’d have asked his name and what it was about him that made her forget. Or not. Who knows now how much time passed or what news may have traveled in that great span of time and prairie but, as grandma might’ve put it, one day when she was out cruisin’ with her steady, I’ll be damned if that ornery Oran didn’t pull up in a beat-up farm truck and steal her away for good. I don’t imagine she gave him the satisfaction of more than a stiff grin as she climbed into the cab and straightened her calico dress on the threadbare bench seat - she might’ve even socked him a time or two - but if I know my grandma, I’d say that’s the day hope made its way into her heart again, or maybe for the first time, crowding out all the other four-letter words she’d hollered in his absence.
However it happened, I suppose there was something about that no-bullshit, brown-eyed beauty that felt like home. Grandpa got his GED, took his girl down to the Justice of the Peace, enlisted in the military and didn’t go back ‘til he was buried. He always said, “there wasn’t nothin’ left for us in that town.” Grandma never looked back either, kept her eyes fixed on that green-lined horizon, and let the sun set, pink and bittersweet, on that dusty town and the only life she’d ever known, for better or worse.
There’s nowhere a red dirt road can’t take you as long as you’ve got a few wild hairs, a little bit of lifted drip gas and a dream.
Here’s a photo of Oran, one I had printed from a dusty negative that sat tucked into his dresser mirror for decades. His smile upon seeing it was rich reward. I felt his heart swell and fill the silence as he stared so long into what must’ve felt like a rear-view mirror on the road of life. Finally, he laughed and said it looked like a mugshot.
If I was grandma, I’d have probably jumped cars, too.
I'm running out of reasons
I've lost that restless feeling
Slowly I'm believing
I'm where I'm supposed to be
Rick Trevino
My heart aches in best way reading this! I don’t know how you do it, but just keep doing it!!