William Humphrey - Farther Off from Heaven

Farther Off from Heaven

A Memoir

William Humphrey

TO MY MOTHER

I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER

THE FIR TREES DARK AND HIGH;

I USED TO THINK THEIR SLENDER TOPS

WERE CLOSE AGAINST THE SKY:

IT WAS A CHILDISH IGNORANCE.

BUT NOW TIS LITTLE JOY

TO KNOW IM FARTHER OFF FROM HEAVEN

THAN WHEN I WAS A BOY.

Thomas Hood

The names of some of the people

who figure in this account

have been changed to spare them

or their survivors

pain or embarrassment.

I

S ON ! W AKE UP ! Wake up! Son, wake up!

My mothers voice came to me as though through water. I could sense her urgency, but trying to wake was like trying to save myself from drowningor rather, like having given up trying to save myself, surrendering to it. Consciousness shone dimly above me, like sunlight from under water, but after each effort to rise to it, my tired mind sank back deeper into the soothing dark.

Son! Wake up! Wake up! Son, wake up!

I felt myself being shaken, as one is when he is brought out of the water dying. I could no more wake up than I could come back to life.

I had been permitted to stay up late the evening before, and the evening before that, to celebrate the Fourth of July, and I was just turned thirteen. I had never before been wakened at three oclock in the morning.

T HE F OURTH OF J ULY fell that year1937on a Sunday. This, in a county town like ours, Clarksville, Texas, meant that there was no Sunday that week but rather two Saturdays.

Saturday in Clarksville was always a holiday, the day when everybody came to townSundays when nobody did. Children were free from school, and from Sundays sanctimonies and restraints. The stores, with all their wares, their wonders, were open; and even when you could not buy, you too could look. Food forbidden to you all week you were allowed to buy from the street vendors who appeared that day. Stand for just an hour anywhere on the public square, and the tireless circling of shoppers and strollers brought round to you in turn all your kinfolks and most everybody you knew from all over Red River County. Miss somebody and it was cause to wonder whether something was wrong with him. The square, being nobodys dwelling place, was everybodys gathering place. Not even above the shops, on the second and third floors, did anybody live; up there were offices and storerooms. Not used much during the week, the square on Saturday became the towns reception room, its public parlor.

And on Sunday, strewn with paper cups, bags, popcorn boxes, hot tamale shucks, fruit peels, peanut hulls, the shops dark and the shades drawn, it was like a parlor the morning after a late-night party.

But that year, throughout the entire weekend just past, downtown Clarksville had been so clogged with cars and people that motorists passing through headed west toward Paris or east toward Texarkana on U.S. 82, which ran through the square, had been detoured around our festivities through residential streets.

On Saturday morning there had been a parade, with the high-school band and the local Boy Scout troop in their uniforms, veterans of three wars in theirs: bobbing along in the lead, our two surviving Confederate grays, like the last living pair of passenger pigeons, U.S. Army khakis from the Spanish-American and what was then called The World War, followed by merchants and tradesmens floats, on one of which I had ridden, my costume a suit of striped coveralls, a miniature of those my father wore to work, with the emblem of his and his partners auto repair and body shop sewn on the back. I was so proud of those coveralls that for the rest of the weekend I could not be gotten out of them short of skinning me.

By noon that day no parade could have made its way downtown. Cars in the street moved as one, when they moved at all, like the linked coaches of a train. The square was getting to look, even on ordinary Saturdays, like the end of a Detroit assembly line. More and more cars appeared there weekly, and round and around they drove all day and into the night, the riders goggling out and being goggled at like goldfish in a bowl. Today every child out of infancy had been down on the square since breakfastno fear of ones getting lost: everybody knew whose you were; now, their housework done, their mothers joined them. The tradesmen who couldunlike my father, whose busiest weekend of the year this wasshut up shop and came to swell the throng.

Meanwhile, from out in the country, farmfolks streamed in in greater numbers than had ever been seen there before, as though there had been an increase in their population. Increasingly motorized was what they were, and better able to get there, and, in 1937, they had something to celebrate. Nobody was saying any more that prosperity was just around the corner; but at least our regional troubles no longer compounded the depression for us: the long drought had been broken, the dust storms had blown themselves out, and just now, at just the right time for it, the prairies surrounding Clarksville were whitening a little more each morning with the cotton on which we all depended as though in the night fresh snow had fallensnow in July being no more improbable to us, on whom it never fell, than snow at any other time of year. Things were looking upone sign of it: during those two days I had been given no less than seventy cents by men on the square, not one of them under obligation of kinship to me, just friends and acquaintances who, moved by the holiday mood and the generally brightened outlook, and mindful of my reputation as a good boy, had stopped me in my play to ask, Billy, how would you like to have a nickel? With that money I had offered to pay a little on my large, long overdue bill at Athass Confectionery, but my friend Jim, the owner and head kitchen magician, insisted on extending my credit.

There had been platform speaking on the shaded lawn of the courthouse, three blocks north of the squareone of that years guest speakers the young Lyndon Johnson. On Saturday afternoon out at the Old Fair Grounds north of town, a baseball game; on Sunday, after sparsely attended church services (my own scheduled confirmation had been patriotically postponed), a barbecue and another baseball game out at the New Fair Grounds west of town, followed after dark by a fireworks display.

The summer days were long, and for the past two, time went uncounted, the chimes of the courthouse clock muffled by the daylong drone of motors, the cackling of horns, the burst of firecrackers, the blare and thump of jukeboxes in the cafes and the drugstores and the shouts of children playing around the Confederate monument in the center of the plaza and chasing one another among the parked cars.

That was my town square only somewhat livelier than I was used to seeing it, and as I had last seen it just hours earlier. Now at three oclock on Monday morning, minutes after my mother had wakened me with a look of fear such as I had seen on her face just once before the square bore to that familiar and vivid image the relation of a photographic negative to the printashes to a firea darkened stageset after the play is over and the actors and the audience have left the theater. That other time, my mother had been afraid for my life. I thought that she was afraid for me now, and this made me afraid for myself. What was wrong with me?

Get dressed as quick as you can! my mother said. Your daddy has been hurt.

One light shone from a second story window on the southeast corner of the square, and at the curb there sat parked the only car. That lone light, except for the corner streetlamps, was the only light we had seen burning on our drive downtown. We and whoever occupied that office were the only people awake. In that stillness, our car as we drove toward the light made a sound as loud, it seemed to me, as all the cars of Saturday.