Mealer - The kings of Big Spring: God, oil, and one familys search for the American dream

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To my children, and their children

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.

JOHNNY CASH

In January 1981 my father was given a choice to make.

He was twenty-seven years old, with a wife and three children, and for most of his adult life hed struggled to find his niche. From one year to another, hed bounced between jobs in the oil fields, painting houses, and selling used cars. By the time I was six wed lived in three different towns in two states, leaving whenever Dad found better work or when his lifestyle became too fast or frightening. Mostly we ended up in places where we had family, since family provided sanctuary and a spiritual zip line into the abiding arms of Christ, whom Dad raged against and returned to for most of his life.

But by the early eighties, he seemed to have achieved a balance. We were living in a small town south of Houston surrounded by relatives. He had a career-track job at a nearby chemical plant, we belonged to a good church, and Dad and his brother were making plans to start a business together. Life for our family was not only stable, but the future had promise. Then one evening, as Dad was ready to walk out the door for a graveyard shift, his childhood friend Grady called.

Bobby Gaylon! Howd you like to be a millionaire?

Back in their hometown of Big Spring, another oil boom was kicking off and Grady had it by the horns. He was looking for a partner. They were going to get rich.

For Dad, it was the biggest decision he ever had to make, but it was an easy one. Although he never put much stock in the notion, somewhere in his mind he was trying to shake what my family had always called the Mealer Luck. We could trace it back to Ireland, where it rose from the sacked estates and spilled blood of our ancestors, then followed us across the ocean and down through the generations, whispering its name whenever forces greater than us, ones we didnt see coming or fully understand, left us busted and picking up the pieces. And in better times, and there were many, it reminded us what not to take for granted.

Nearly a century had passed since wed struck west from Appalachia to settle the raw country, in a time when America was still young. Like others around us, we were eager to put down roots and start something better, to help build this nation during its greatest century. We planted its cotton and drilled for oil, left our mothers and wives to fight its wars. We prayed for peace and rain and thanked God when the streets filled with trucks and men and a sour smell on the wind promised meat on the table. And when our sons didnt come home we endured it. When the oil and cotton went away we moved and started again. Only in Texas was there enough space for so many second acts.

Along these roads, of course, there was life: love and heartbreak, sin and redemption, small victories and unbearable tragedy, and laughter when little else could save us. We drew our strength from the enduring power of our own flesh and blood. My familys story is like the stories of so many others who came looking for their own square of soil and promise of America. It is the story both of Texas and of how this country came to be. And for us, it begins in a Georgia hollow after the Civil War, with a man facing his own fateful decision.

John Lewis leaves the hollow and heads west a child is born the boll weevil comes to Texas

In the spring of 1892, my great-grandfather John Lewis Mealer left his home near Sharp Top Mountain, in the foothills of the Georgia Blue Ridge, and headed west in the direction of his brother. He was in his early twenties, unmarried, and had begun to feel the closeness of the hollow in new and unsettling ways.

Lately, thered been trouble between the moonshiners and revenuers. Some of the boys who kept their stills near the creek had organized for vengeance, donning black hoods and setting fire to homes of suspected informers. The Honest Mans Friend and Protector, they called themselves. The sheriff and deputy had given chase, and the boys had met them with gunfire and taken to the woods. The lawmen wasted no time destroying their stills, and ever since the presence of the feds had been felt in the valley.

With so few ways to earn money in the hollow, John Lewis and his brothers, along with their father, had found easy work with the moonshiners, providing them firewood, along with apples and corn for their mash. But few men wanted a war. The revenuers were a ruthless bunch who practiced a kind of terror justice that brought back memories of the Confederate Home Guard. During the Civil War, the militiawhose mission was to protect the families of fighting menhad instead pillaged their way across Gilmer and Pickens counties. Two of them had murdered John Lewiss uncle Peter Cantrell in the summer of 1864 after accusing him of desertion. Uncle Peter lay buried in the family plot near Burnt Mountain, his stone proclaiming for the ages: KILLED BY THE JORDAN GANG .

At its best, the hollow was as peaceful as the first breaths of creation, crowded with pine and yellow poplar and broad Spanish oak. The Mealer house stood almost hidden in a grove of cottonwoods, save for clusters of daffodils that served as landscaping. John Lewiss father, Robert, had cleared enough trees to allow a few vaults of sunlight for raising food and animals.

The family had lost their mother when John Lewis was four years old, leaving Robert to raise four kids on his own. His second wife had given him ten more mouths to feed in as many years, and for the most part, the forest had provided. Within a ten-minute walk they found wild strawberries, blackberries, honey hives, and a grove of apple trees. Theyd learned to harvest and prepare pokeweed and chinquapin so they could eat it without being poisoned, and how to brew sassafras root into tea. The water that bubbled cold from the spring tasted like the iron and copper that lined the valley floor, something the Cherokee believed carried healthful properties. A dairy cow grazed amid the trees and the garden provided herbs and vegetables. As for meat, there were hogs and pullets and a forest full of squirrels, which they parboiled with cayenne to vanquish the gaminess, then pan-fried with milk gravy.

But short of moonshine, the forest offered meager paying work for Robert and his boys. A pair of men with a crosscut saw could make something from the rough timber, and if you were handy with a froe, you could split white oak into shingles to sell in town. But that way of life didnt hold young men the way it used to, not since the war, especially when half the South, it seemed, was bounding westward.