1
Bill Arrives
Sometimes Babe awoke in the middle of the night, not so much with a scream as with a cry of shock and pain, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt when it came to her eccentricities. In my imagination, Babe was a princess without portfolio, exiled to the strange, high domain where we lived surrounded by the unconquerable West Texas landscape. And although I was not of her blood, she had chosen me as an heir and would tell me why when the time was right.
That was what I liked to imagine.
Most of the time, I worried that I was expendable. And I worried that the other children might be right when they peppered me with insults they overheard from their parents, the citizens of Wendellton who called Babe a whore. ‘Whoreboy’ was the battle cry the Fowler brothers used. They beat the crap out of me after school if they caught me before I could reach Lonechap Hill. Darryl, the elder, pushed me while Cameron, who was my age, ducked behind me so I would trip over him if I tried to scramble away. In the mayhem, I took ten blows for every one I gave. As a result, I became a skilled liar, learning first of all to deny that it hurt and secondly never to reveal to Babe that she was the cause, although she knew without asking.
Babe turned her substantial reserve of energy into gardening. That was how she built her fortress, buried her secrets, and remembered a man she could not acknowledge, not even to me. Suffice it to say that she was for many reasons adamant in refusing to abandon even the most hostile environment. Through the unfriendly cycles of nature and opinion where we now found ourselves, Babe’s gardens were in a real sense an exercise in sustaining life and beauty—and ownership.
In the summer, she rose early because by mid-morning it was too hot to do much outdoor work. She returned to her flowers in the evening after dinner, sometimes as late as 8:30. “The casual gardener doesn’t survive in these parts,” she said if I complained about the hours she worked. “Especially not on this hill.”
We lived at the top of Lonechap Hill in a ranch-style house with red cedar board-and-batten siding and a front porch made of sturdy oak planks. Buddy built it after the original house, near the bottom of the lower southeast slope, burned down, leaving only its stone shell. “This is the place, yes, sir,” he often said emphatically. “The chimney draws so much better up high.” Babe was Buddy’s widow. They had adopted me.
Our front porch faced the sunsets. Babe’s gardens surrounded the house on all sides, taking advantage of the water that ran off the roof each time it rained. Her memories were aroused, especially, by the roses she grew at the front of the house and by the four o’clocks, multi-colored plants with oboe-shaped blooms and the sweet smell of citrus, a scent she once enjoyed in Shanghai. The four o’clocks helped measure the summer days by living up to their name, unfurling in late afternoon and remaining open well past nightfall.
Even things as small as the varieties of basil she grew in pots that hung over our front porch seemed to soothe and reassure Babe. Her favorite was known as ‘Tulsi,’ or ‘Holy Basil.’ She bowed toward the plant, lifted the leaves with her forefinger, brushed them with her thumb, and inhaled their spicy, sweet smell. Her mood always seemed to improve, and she made me go through the same routine. “These plants want to be spoken to, and they want to be spoken to with your hand,” she said. “This is something precious and ancient that you’re holding.” If I made a face, as I sometimes could not help doing, she whacked me on the back of my head and threatened that gods I had never heard of would know my name and be offended.
I suspect they were merely amused.
I am growing old now and trying to think again like the 12-year-old I was, atop my sanctuary on Lonechap Hill. It’s strange how, as adults, the thoughts and impressions we attempt to recall from childhood seem remarkably lucid and rational, as if they were filtered by the judgement we now possess. But it is impossible to reconstitute a body of reason in the context of another, long-past age. I know that much.
And so I also know that some of the memories that seem real and vivid to me cannot have happened—which things, I must leave for you to determine—because memory is pliable, it revises itself, it mends wounds, it reinforces prejudices, it enhances pleasures, it allows disappointments to nag incessantly through sleepless nights, it fixates on insults, it conjures and conjures and conjures again to catalog and re-route the pathways of experience. It is an independent agent—but not a subjective one—that defines your life, both a taskmaster and an enabler. Oddly enough, it was the fall of the twin towers, a few months before I began writing this, that made me think of the hill and want to reassemble as many details as I could recall from my twelfth year. It’s not as if the September tragedy and the fate of the hill are similar. It simply reminded me that lofty places, real or ideal, are always at risk of siege—assaults by the greedy, the fanatical, the discomfited, the envious, the paranoid, wanting to conquer or prove themselves or merely to destroy, all believing they have absolute if not divine rights either to occupy the height or reduce it to their own dismal level.
And despite what she hoped, the siege against Babe and me and the stars that watched over us had not ended.
In August of 1960, the day before my twelfth birthday, a thunderstorm passed over the hill just after breakfast. It released a brief cloudburst, barely more than a tantrum, before it hustled away. In response, on the north end of our house, the honeysuckle vines that had stopped blooming at mid-summer opened a few timid blossoms.
Babe weeded a tomato garden in back of the house until the Coppertone on her face was streaked with dirt. Next, she dead-headed some shriveled rose blooms and marigolds in the garden bed north of our front walk, where she also grew irises. The irises were named for Eleanor Roosevelt. Only their green foliage stood up to the August heat, but Babe hoped they might present her in a few weeks with an Indian Summer bloom, when their long, slim petals—some folding, some outstretched—looked, said Babe, like socialites costumed for a Beaux Arts ball after the first chill of autumn.
That was the garden bed where she had buried a pocket watch.
Babe moved on to the south bed where dahlias grew around the borders and canna lilies in the center. She constantly re-adjusted the wooden stakes that kept the dahlias upright in the fitful wind. Their petals fanned out like the tips of short, thickset feathers to form blossoms the size of softballs dyed pastel orange or muted purple or bright yellow or bold pink. Altogether, as if they had assembled expectantly, posture well-corrected, they were an attentive audience for whatever was on Babe’s mind on any given day.
Curved purple streaks traveled through the dense, emerald-green leaves of the canna lilies. Like Shanghai, and like the life Babe had been forced to accept as her own, the cannas were luridly schizophrenic, with vibrant reds and speckled yellows clashing on the same bloom.
Babe enjoyed their insolence in the summer heat.
That was the bed where she had buried the jewels collected by her late mother, a groundbreaking movie star whose history I did not then know because she had been forced to conceal it.
On her knees, jabbing and twisting with a trowel, Babe continued to weed and water past 10 a.m. She filled most of a garbage pail with debris. All the while, she cursed the bermuda grass that ran amok into the flowerbeds. The grass surrounded our house like an island before it gave way to the disheveled and brushy, unmanicured slopes of the hill.
The barn was about twenty yards from the house, to the northwest. That’s where the rain had driven me. I sat next to Buddy’s industrial-sized turntable, lifted the heavy tone arm out of its rest and set the needle down on the scarred acetate disk, which reflected, on its bare inner circle where the grooves ended, the light bulb that dangled above it from a rafter. Buddy’s voice came through the tall, black, dusty speaker next to the turntable, a voice that was mellow, with no edge to it—mellow and tender and stutter-free but anxious, I think, to find a way of preparing me for the world through his stories, even after his death.
Buddy had been gone since early in 1956, a few months before I turned eight. One of his projects in the last sentient days of his life, before he could only nod and smile, had been to record a collection of story disks for me on a machine with a cutting lathe like the ones radio stations used then to make electrical transcriptions of programs and commercials. On each of my four birthdays since his death, Babe had given me a new set of disks from Buddy—disks that continued the stories he was telling, adding information and insights. He had planned it that way. The next day, on my twelfth birthday, the fifth since his death, I was to receive the remainder of the set. I suppose that Buddy had considered twelve a kind of cut-off point, before I became a teenager and was distracted and lured by other interests.
Buddy had inserted the finished disks into brown sleeves, which he labeled sequentially in his careful, trembling script. I packed them into latched boxes that he had left for that purpose, with my name etched onto the plastic handles. I listened to them in a corner of the barn where Babe had let me set up my own private space. On that damp August morning, now that I was soon to be twelve years old, I had decided to transcribe Buddy’s stories and make a book of them. I would have the rest of them within a day, and could compile a complete account. It would be a difficult, demanding task that required listening to each disk over and over, because it was impossible to freeze the momentum of a turntable while writing down as many words as my memory could hold. So I would have to lift the tone arm, transcribe what I had heard, and try to set the needle down again without damaging the disk where I had left off.
Some of the stories were entertaining self-contained legends, jovially told, like “Why the Buffalo’s Head Hangs Low,” “The Barber and the Saloon-Keeper,” and “Conrad Camel Joins the Cavalry.” But within the growing sequence of disks, Buddy was also telling a darker, episodic story, like the serials that were about to disappear from the radio in 1960. Those serialized stories—in hindsight—were almost always about the dual nature of his characters, people who were displaced and seeking to find some continuity in their lives. There was his hero, a man known as the Phantom Padre, Jesuit-educated, expert in astronomy, but also a gambler and gunslinger who, according to Buddy, roamed our part of Texas seeking a treasure. There was a boy comrade named Young Eagle, kidnapped by Indians from a farm settlement, torn away from his natural family but adopted so thoroughly into the tribe that he considered himself one of them. He existed in a kind of identity limbo that I could identify with. And there was the girl, Selenia—loved by the Phantom Padre, protected by Young Eagle, harassed by a callous and powerful businessman. Well, that had to be Babe. And I did get into vicious fights defending her honor.
What made the stories extraordinary was that the Padre and the people he loved and hurt and saved were more than allegorical figures. They had lived, although none of them, the Padre especially, would qualify for our schoolbook histories that eschew uncomfortable complications in people and events. And unfortunately, the Padre’s Boswell, an artist and adventurer named Charles St. George Stanley, rendered him in tabloid accounts that were sometimes pure invention, and in any case far more fiction than fact.
It’s obvious to me now that Buddy was hoping I wouldn’t feel so isolated and displaced myself if I identified with those stories, knew what other outsiders had faced, and learned from them. I was of uncertain ethnicity, although most certainly part Chinese, and Buddy knew that life off of Lonechap Hill would be hard for me because it had been hard—no, impossible—for him. He had come from one of the most prominent families in Texas, but his relatives treated him with contempt, like an idiot, and had nothing to do with him after he married Babe, not even when he was dying. As for me—I was just another undeserving, alien part of an outrageous scandal that revolved around the possession of Lonechap Hill after Buddy’s death.
So there I was, in the barn, in the company of my soon-to-be-completed collection of disks, listening to Buddy, having set the needle down on disk number one.
* * *
BUDDY WATKINS [DISK #1]: Hello, son. I’ve always gazed at stars and marveled at the stories they tell, those points of light, the fires of the past, still burning to enlighten us. We look at their brightness, their arrangements, how they’re aligned, and we connect them into figures that represent our visions of life, our strengths and failures, our objects of worship, even the tools we use to condemn or reward ourselves. They are where the best stories begin because, long ago, they are where we looked first to ask questions about who we are and where we came from.
One of my greatest joys has been sitting with you on our bench, looking at stars from the top of our hill, the doorstep to the universe. You have an ability to see things that others don’t. And your questions have always made me proud to witness the wonder you express, and the enthusiasm for making sense of things and seeing beauty in them. One of my greatest sorrows is that I won’t be here when you are older to share with you the stories about this strange part of the world that we inhabit and the trials we face and the benefits we can look forward to. That’s why I’m sitting at my record-making machine on this night, because I want to leave those stories behind for when you may enjoy them or learn from them, or even need to hear them. I’d like to say they’ll all have happy endings, but if they did then they might not make us think about how we face our hopes and fears, how we learn to decide between the many selves we inherit from the stars.
I’m going to begin by telling you a true story about a man who also loved to stargaze. He was known later in his life as the Phantom Padre—a gunslinger in a priest’s outfit who was looking for a lost treasure. He packed a Remington Army revolver within his custom-tailored black duster cassock, and he knew how to use it. I like to think that he visited this very hill back in the day. But how did he learn about the stars…?
* * *
Ready to start the process of immortalizing Buddy’s stories on paper, I licked the tip of my thick blue pencil, tasting the graphite and newly shaved wood, imbuing the pencil with something of myself, my anguish, my hopes. The pages of my tablet rustled intermittently in the breeze of a rotating fan. Whereas I could only swallow my anger, the Phantom Padre had done something about his.
Then I heard Babe fire her revolver. She wore a holstered .22 caliber sidearm whenever she was outside on the hill—protection against varmints of all types, she said. But she rarely fired it, and on such occasions it was usually pointed toward our spook. That’s what we called the rider who often sat on his horse for hours on the other side of our western fence line—sometimes in the morning, sometimes as darkness fell—clearly an attempt by the Fowlers to haunt and unnerve Babe and, I suppose, to spy on our mundane comings and goings, whatever that was worth. It was the first time in my life that I realized the extent to which people would go for no reason other than to disturb or intimidate. The spook was always well out of range of Babe’s revolver. She was just making a point. But he hadn’t shown up that morning, so the gunfire might have been directed at some real threat.
I put down my pencil and tablet, lifted the tone arm but left the turntable spinning, and ran out of the barn to see what the trouble was. Babe had crossed the bermuda grass lawn and was walking west through stiff yellow weeds, heading toward the tire tracks that served as our driveway, a dirt scar that ran the length of the hill down to the front gate. Her right arm was rigid. The gun in her hand was pointed toward the sky. With her left arm, she pushed back her wide-brimmed bonnet and wiped the perspiration from her forehead. Below us at the gated entrance, parked on a shoulder of the county road, was a gray pickup truck with a large trailer hitched to it. The bed of the pickup was covered by canvas. A man wearing a red leather vest, a white linen shirt, a loosely-knotted cloth bandana, and jeans sat on our gate with his hands in the air, smiling.
I stayed a few yards behind Babe, dodging back and forth through the higher grass because I didn’t want her to notice me and tell me to get back into the barn. Halfway down the hill, well within pistol range, she stopped, stared at the stranger, and slowly lowered the gun toward him. He took off his battered straw hat and waved it in the air.
“You don’t need that gun, lady,” he shouted.
“Nobody comes here without calling first,” Babe replied. Her accent was an eclectic blend of a dialect that sounded British—you could hear it in the way she pronounced the word ‘first’—and a Texas twang she picked up in her adolescent years. “You were just gonna drive that truck and trailer on up this hill?” She also was fluent in Mandarin, courtesy of her mother, who privately disdained the Guangdong dialect spoken in the San Antonio Chinese community where Babe grew up. But it didn’t really matter whether you clearly understood what Babe said. Her meaning and intent were always unmistakable. “This hill is private property.”
“I was just driving by. I wanted to ask your permission to do some work.”
“We don’t need any hired help.”
“That’s fine, because I do sketches and watercolors—wildlife and landscapes.”
Babe cupped her palm over her brow and squinted down at him, less intent on dismissing him out of hand than she had been the second before. She had studied art history in college and worked at the Fowler Plains Museum in Wendellton before she met Buddy and made eternal enemies of the Fowlers. “What’s your name?”
“Pony Antone.”
“Never heard of you.”
“You’re in good company.”
“Where do you sell?”
“Bars. Restaurants. Gun shows. Festivals. I just sold a watercolor of the Monahans sand dunes to a motel there. You’ve got a nice view from the hill, I imagine.”
“Yeah. We’ve got a view of grass, far as you can see. Artists come here all the time, you know. They want to move on from painting sand to watching the grass grow.”
Pony laughed, unhooked his thumbs from the pockets of his faded red vest, and tipped his hat toward Babe with a shrug. “I’ve got a case full of rigger brushes, if that’s what it takes. But I’ve got my subject with me in the trailer.” He looked to be in his early 30’s, about Babe’s age. His nose was too prominent, his brow too high, and his face too thin and weatherbeaten. But he was one of those people with features so unusually and incompatibly arranged that you come to accept them as handsome—maybe appealing is a better word, or even magnetic—after you get used to them. Plus he had that slightly cocked head, the quizzical look that made you wish you could read his mind. “Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk to the other side of the road.” Without waiting for a response from Babe, Pony scissored his legs together, dropped nimbly off the gate and began to walk backwards across the two-lane county road, still with both hands slightly raised. “You and the boy come down and meet Bill. He’s who I want to paint up there. If you want to see some of my work, there’s a sketch book on the front seat of the truck.”
Babe holstered her gun and looked back at me. “You can come on if you want to. Just stay behind me till I’ve sorted this out. And keep your mouth shut.”
Cautiously, we walked to the bottom of the hill. Babe opened the door of the truck and inspected the Moleskine sketchbook, lowering it in her hands so I could look, too. She knew and appreciated good art when she saw it. In a larger sense, she felt that art—and she included her hilltop gardens in that appraisal—legitimized people more than any other pursuit. She flipped through the Moleskine, nodding with each turn of the page. The sketches included finely detailed and shaded pencil sketches of virtually every aspect of Bill’s anatomy.
Pony leaned against the sign post for County Road 207 with his arms folded across his chest and one tan boot crossed behind the other. He retrieved a silver piece from his jeans pocket and flipped it into the air several times, catching it without looking. I could see that he was studying Babe. She was extraordinarily beautiful, thanks to her exotic mix of features, with an oval face, skin that remained flawless under a punishing sun, and a delicately-turned chin. Even with her ebony hair pulled under her bonnet, Babe could exert a power that was frightening. I was seven when Buddy died, but I remembered the worship in his eyes as he looked at her. It didn’t matter that he could barely raise his head to speak. His eyes said everything.
Babe returned the sketchbook to the truck cabin, and we walked behind the pickup to peer through the vaulted iron bars of the trailer. Bill barely seemed to notice us. “He looks like he should smell a lot worse than he does,” Babe sniffed. Then she called to Pony. “What the hell are you doing toting around a buffalo?”
Although Buddy had taken me to watch the buffalo herds in a refuge near Toomis Canyon, I had never seen a buffalo up close, and neither had Babe. Bill was still growing, but already stood more than five-and-a-half feet tall from his front hoofs to the top of his hump. And because bison can’t raise their heads above their shoulders, it looked as if some faulty measurement had resulted in Bill’s enormous noggin being situated too low on his body without taking his hump into account. It was just like one of the stories that Buddy had recorded—“Why the Buffalo’s Head Hangs Low.” A jet black mane spread over Bill’s shoulders and sprouted in the broad space between his horns, dangling haphazardly down his forehead. He was breathing steadily, with a barely audible one-note hum.
“You know how birds imprint? Buffalos do, too. I found him a year ago March. He was a newborn standing alone with his head in the grass along the fence line of the Toomis Canyon refuge. They must have moved the herd, mother and all, without noticing the little guy.” An unlikely event, but neither Babe nor I knew. “What’s your name, boy?”
“John.”
Babe rolled her eyes, shot an irritated look at me, and shook her head, resigned to my disobedience.
“Well, John, he had a nice red coat then, and he stood stock still with his eyes shut when I went up to him—like, if he couldn’t see me, then he must’ve figured I couldn’t see him.”
“Did you rescue him?”
“Sounds more like he stole him,” Babe said. “I told you to hold your tongue.”
“He would’ve died if I’d left him there. They might never have found his mother if I’d turned him in. So I covered his eyes, blew into his nose, put him in the truck, and off we went. Fed him on powdered milk out of gallon jugs.”
“Blew into his nose, did you?”
“George Catlin said it’s what he did, out on the plains after a buffalo hunt. Catlin the artist, you know?”
“I know.”
“He learned it from the Indians. Have you ever seen his buffalo sketches? There’s a couple in the plains museum back there in Wendellton.”
“I’ve seen them.” Babe’s lack of enthusiasm had more to do with her past at the museum than the Catlin sketches.
“I always liked the expressions he drew on them, like he could imagine what they were thinking. You know what I mean? Kind of surprised and panicked at the same time.” Babe didn’t reply but Pony was loquacious enough not to let any gap of silence last too long. “Well, those little calves he picked up, they’d follow him for miles back to his camp after he breathed on them.”
“And this one still follows you?”
“He does.”
“He’s not a calf anymore.”
“That’s why I’m on this expedition with him. There’s a new frontier coming. I want to paint him out here where his ancestors used to roam on the old frontier, and I want to borrow some of his wisdom. Then I’ll take him back to his kind when the summer’s gone, before he gets too old.”
“So you’re showing him the world in the meantime.”
“He gets along well with the world. He’s not tame like a dog, but he won’t cause you or the boy any trouble. You’ll see.”
I tugged on Babe’s hand, raised my eyes to her, and mouthed the word “Please,” hoping she wouldn’t turn Bill away. I didn’t care about Pony. To indicate I would follow whatever rules she set starting then, I zipped my fingers across my mouth.
She gestured for Pony to come back across the road, and they made a bargain. Pony and Bill could come onto the hill as guests. Pony would do a portrait of the two of us after he finished his studies of Bill. We also could look through watercolors he had done and pick anything we liked. It was clear that Babe thought Pony had exceptional talent—enough to cause her to let her guard down.
Finally, she formally introduced me to Pony and I was free to speak again. We shook hands. Pony’s grip was strong but the pressure he applied was even, unlike the handshakes of a lot of adults who squeezed my knuckles with viselike holds as if to expedite my torturous initiation into manhood. “You suppose there’s any puddles left up there from the morning rain?”
“Likely not,” I said. “If there is, it’ll be near the barn.”
“Well, whatever’s left in it, if you could get a garden hose and add some more water, you’d do Bill a favor. It’ll help him fight this heat.”
“Yes, sir,” I nodded eagerly.
“I bet you help your dad a lot.”
“Well…”
“I’m a widow,” Babe said.
“Ah. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.” Pony apologized with a solemn smile. “This boy acts more like a man than most his age. I figured he must have a good example to follow.” He raised his eyes toward the hill. “Has your hill got a name?”
“Lonechap Hill,” Babe said. “For as long as anyone can remember.”
“Lone…chap? Like a hermit or something?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Nothing like it for miles, pretty much in all directions, is there?”
“Nope.”
“Doesn’t really look like it should be here.”
“Nope.”
“Kind of a natural wonder, if you ask me.”
Pony was right. Lonechap Hill always must have been a notable feature in the landscape, called by many names through many eras. But any being approaching it across the great sea of grass could be forgiven for ignoring the hill’s finer points and viewing it as a wonder, both for its size and for the opportunity it offered to climb out of the all-engulfing landscape. As it undulated from its base to its peak, the hill sloped gently upward out of the plains as if some giant god-child, unattended while his Mother wrestled with the business of Creation, had set out to create a perfect mound, tamping and caressing and creasing its sides, plumping them here and stamping them there, working into it the vigor of sunshine and the grace of moonlight, so that we mortals could ascend easily to survey the past and future from its generous, wind-blown crown.
From a southern approach, through our front gate, the hill seemed to spread two welcoming arms that gave it a luxuriant width. Between the arms were long ridges that hid gentle depressions, perfect for lazing privately. And, just as it had cycles of sleeping and waking, just as it could be barren and jaundiced in the winter or drunken and giddy with Babe’s flowers in the spring, it had a heartbeat, I am certain. I was hypnotized by it. And no matter how depressing things got at school, I never failed to be exhilarated by my treks home to the top of the hill, as I climbed farther and farther from the vexing world that shrank beneath me. The hill lifted me above my enemies and troubles and allowed me to see without being seen.
To the north, the hill overlooked a vista so imposing and yet so empty that only by consulting the arc of the sun or the rotation of stars could you tell where you had come from. “Forced to consult the sky,” I once heard Dwight say, “you are forced to confront the essence of the plains.” Even a trained eye found no object to rest upon, except what a military scout once described as the shadows of broken flying clouds “coursing rapidly over the plain and seeming to put the whole in motion.” The surface, he said, “will certainly bear comparison to the waves of an agitated sea.”
Babe and I climbed into the cab of Pony’s truck, and up we went, up to what Buddy called the doorstep to the universe. Sometimes life leads you to the place where you are meant to be and loans it to you, but only for a while, and for me, Lonechap Hill was one of those places.
© 2018 Robert Brown