Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

In truth, not everyone had called him T.J.; to his two daughters he would forever be Daddy, to his wife, Ida, he was Father (she was Mother to him), while others knew him redundantly as Junior Jr.: the enterprising son and heir apparent of Junior, a rancher who had inherited his own father's thriving cattle ranch — more than eight hundred head of cattle by 1926, about twelve hundred head by 1929 — until the black blizzards of the dust bowl years rained long-term ecological and social devastation on the Panhandle, that protracted drought abetting the near-simultaneous collapse of the American economy. When, finally, there was no more feed for the starving cattle, no more grazing found on the dirt-swallowed prairie, Junior reluctantly sold his entire herd to the government slaughter program, taking $15 per head for young cows, $10 per head for old cows. Thereafter, he paid all his ranch hands and employees a decent parting wage, temporarily closing shop — he assured them — in full expectation of better days on the horizon. Still, the dusters continued rolling across the plains, along with countless bankruptcies and foreclosures; fearing he could lose everything, Junior divided the ranch into nine parcels, selling most of his property at a loss while keeping thirty acres and the stately Victorian family home T.J.'s grandfather had had built. But that sacrifice didn't prevent him from cursing such bad fortune, from assailing the sandstorm consuming his diminished land — bounding outside as his wife and son sat mystified at the dinner table, shouting obscenities in the midst of the blinding abrasive swirl — and, overcome by hopelessness, dropping on his knees while pressing the barrel of a Colt revolver against his jawbone; the resounding crack-shot then echoed back from where he had come, surpassing the wind's low hum, signaling his departure to the grit-tainted rooms and hallways of a lonesome, darkened house which hadn't been graced with sunlight or sky for nearly a week.

But in its heyday, the huge, neglected three-story house — erected on a grassy hill overlooking the plains, a crumbling monument to the decorous age of cattle barons — and its run-down bunkhouses had provided shelter for more than thirty people, although by the time Hollis arrived there in early 1951, the sole occupants of What Rocks were T.J. and his family (the individualistic foursome having plenty of space in which to carve out their own territory, navigating around one another with a curious mixture of intimacy and disregard). Adopting Queen Anne styling — the exterior consisting of brick, sandstone, and marble, the interior fashioned with mahogany and oak mantels, coffered ceilings, cornices, and parquet floors — the house was already a grand anachronism when compared to the newer, efficiently sized homes springing up in nearby towns and distant cities. As such, at least half of the interior wasn't utilized — the doors of some rooms kept shut year-round, several passageways dulled by unbroken, thickening dust layers. Behind a given entrance could be a gloomy, musty, vacant bedroom which needed mousetraps and a fresh coat of paint, and yet the adjacent living quarters might be bright, clean, furnished, with the wood floors shining.

Eventually, as both daughters married and moved away, less than a third of the What Rocks house became used (most of the ground floor, a bathroom on the second floor). While Ida maintained a regular workweek at the county courthouse, T.J. found it harder and harder to venture past the gates of the property, shunning the weekly domino games he had once enjoyed in town, arranging front-door delivery for his beer, gin, cigarettes, cough drops, crossword puzzle books. Subsequently, he was no longer encountered anywhere, not appearing at Ida's side when she repeatedly won elections as county treasurer, or attending the funeral services for departed friends. Some of those who had known him throughout the years began discussing T.J. discreetly, exaggerating him in a manner which made children wary of the imposing residence outside of town, the eerie hilltop house where the human spook named Junior Jr. crept at night. He would, in fact, creep out the remainder of his life inside the vacuous home, growing old faster, it seemed, than his peers, sometimes mumbling continually but addressing no one — often crossing from one room into the next with eyelids half open, as if he were trapped within a dream he couldn't escape.

Yet decades before T.J. died, Hollis had recognized something of himself in his reclusive father-in-law, had, in his own way, experienced similar lapses which likely summoned a disparate mix of mental imagery: the vast cotton fields T.J. had helped farm since the dusters subsided and the maze of two-lane backroads running for hundreds of miles through endless, un-ambivalent prairie — interwoven with lush, dense tropical islands abruptly seared black and left smoldering by the contrivances of warfare; the inability to reconcile such polarized worlds had irrevocably shaped him, Hollis was positive. But only after T.J.'s passing did Debra, too, begin to contemplate that lurking disparity, suspecting then that his visions must have gradually consumed him like an incurable malady while, at the same time, he had quietly resisted them without much success. So, in hindsight, she concluded he had started drinking to moor himself to the present — among the clutter of the living room, on the couch, with the TV rarely turned off — doing so to lose consciousness of the widespread battles which had urged him from his small town, enticing him overseas with the kind of heroic possibilities which could rouse those who truly longed for peace: your country needs you, the posters on Main Street had importuned; and T.J. answered the call, leaving his young wife and daughters behind, going westward in his Rambler, sporting new blue jeans and shined leather boots, inhaling exhaust and cigarette smoke as the flatlands stretched out ahead and ultimately guided him to the ocean.

As the Second World War approached its atomic conclusion and T.J. returned to What Rocks upon receiving the Purple Heart (a bullet having torn away the top joint of his right thumb, a minor injury in light of the graver wounds sustained by many he had served with), his earlier borderline alcoholism soon became a full-time vocation. Yet he pretty much limited his drinking to the living-room couch, the TV tray functioning like a desk and holding the few items he required. On occasion Hollis had drank beside him there — the two men sucking cough drops, sipping from Lone Star cans — but while both were veterans, the fifteen years between them, as well as T.J.'s uneasiness with small talk, made any casual rapport difficult. Still, Hollis had wanted to somehow engage his father-in-law like a confidant, to ask, “Just how awful was it over there? Was it as terrible for you as it was for me?”

Except they never would speak of their wartime experiences, would never utter more than what was required in the moment — the television usually prompting their unsustained remarks, laughs, nods of agreement, or halfhearted cheers. Nothing stirred up the man's ire. Nothing provoked debate or notable commentary. The closest they ever came to sharing an insightful exchange occurred while watching a network documentary about Martin Luther King Jr., the black-and-white program flickering through a bluish, fuzzy glow. “You know, King was an amazing man,” Hollis had remarked at the start of a commercial break, attempting to gain his father-in-law's perspective.

“Yep,” T.J. replied without hesitation, eyes fixed on the screen. He took a thoughtful drink from his beer can, then added: “There's one nigger who had something going for him.”

All the same, Hollis — like Debra — had viewed him as a tolerant man, not as someone inclined toward hatred; T.J.'s head had often shook at what the nightly news reported — the Tet offensive, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring — resigned sighs escaping like a kettle's first shuddering gasp. Before secluding himself at the big house, he frequently drove down to Nigger Town, playing Chicken Foot well past midnight, nursing gin and orange juice with grizzled black men who were fated to pause in front of his unsealed coffin (put to rest late one March, months after his failing liver had become a pitiful filter, his dribbling urine turning redder than wine). When seeing him inside the casket — rosacea-tainted skin retouched by the embalmer's garish palette, eyes now permanently shut, arms placed at his sides, wearing a brown polyester dress suit — it was impossible to glimpse a handsome sailor upon that emaciated, inanimate form. During the war, however, he was an attractive man in uniform, bearing a superficial resemblance to Tyrone Power — although his luck wasn't as good as his looks: separated from his naval unit while fighting the Japanese on the island of Tinian, forced to take refuge with frontline marines, witnessing innumerable variations of death in the southwest Pacific which, later on, he avoided talking about, hoping instead to dismiss it all from his mind even as he never could. Those final weeks of his life unfolded at the V.A. hospital in Amarillo, where — after seeing a news report about HIV-tainted blood reserves — T.J. refused any transfusions out of fear he might contract AIDS, pleading instead for cigarettes while remaining oblivious to the fact that he was already a dying man.