During the four years that Gerald was away in the Navy, Jack was in high school. After Gerald’s discharge, his marriage to Donna, and his buying the Manor House Motel, his brother was courting a young Colorado woman he had met in college and, after their marriage, the couple moved to Texas. Jack and his wife taught school there for a while, had children, eventually prospered in the real estate business, and became members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their devotedly Catholic mother, Natalie, was mortified by the news. As she expressed it to Gerald, “Your brother Jack is lost.”
Neither she nor the rest of her family and kinfolk saw much of Jack after his conversion, but this was of no concern to Gerald. He was absorbed by his own interests and his private life in the attic. When he was not escorting Donna and their two young children for weekend visits to see his parents in the farming community, he was often writing about them and his years growing up with them—doing so while reclining on the attic’s rug with his notebook, his pencil, and a flashlight. This became his regular routine: if he was bored with what he was seeing through the vents—if he was spending hours watching people watching television—he would shift his attentions from voyeurism to his personal history, where he would recall his boyhood adventures in rural Ault and his sorrows during a period of time he never seemed to outgrow.
The town was truly a rural paradise, surrounded by 2,000 neatly self-sufficient farms that survived the Depression and two World Wars, and the community was energized by the ranchers and farmers who kept Main Street alive. Here everyone knew everyone, and everyone’s story was known. There were churches of every Protestant denomination, and one Catholic parish. Parades were held on Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4, and a week in the middle of January was devoted to the Lamb Feeders Festival. The populace lined up on the main thoroughfare to watch the parades, floats, and home-crowned royalty.
The town’s everyday royalty were its doctors and dentists, its high school teachers, and the football coach who’d taken the team to the state championships four times in a decade. The town doctors were especially respected and revered, and they still made house calls. The long dark hallway to our doctor’s office on Main Street led steeply upstairs and the black rubber treads on the steps absorbed all sound. The doctor was tall, bald, and sardonic, and he could produce dimes from behind the necks and ears of his young patients, unfurling his closed hand to reveal the sparkle of a coin.
Following our appointment we’d drive five miles back to the farm, passing the fairgrounds and field, and the dome of the courthouse glowed gold. The hill behind the courthouse was lined with tall trees whose dense, leafy branches met over the street, and the branches appeared to lift as the cars passed. Open fields bordered our farm house, tasseled corn filled them in summer, and thick stalks of freshly mowed hay purified the air in the countryside with the most pleasing smell of all time. Cows grazed the high-banked meadow across the road and glanced over at us placidly. They sometimes spooked and ran off like clumsy girls, rolling their eyes and lolloping out of sight.
The telephone numbers in our town went from 3 to 5 digits. Ours was 133J2. Aunt Katheryn’s 227R2. My mother’s car was a two-toned 1946 black Mercury sedan. The car was black and white, and flat as a boat. As we arrived home, my father would be cooking home-grown russet fried potatoes in the kitchen, “starting supper,” the only domestic chore he ever performed. I knew he’d learned to peel potatoes in the Army, cutting those peels in one continuous spiral motion.
My dad, who was past thirty when he entered the Army, met my mother at a Lamb Feeders dance in 1933. He was 26. She was 19. He was handsome, a farmer, and had a car, a 1930 Ford. They married in 1934, the year I was born. In the winter of 1940, when my mother had two children, she was ill and undernourished, retired to bed, and our doctor came to see her. She was now down to nearly 100 pounds. The doctor sat down beside her bed, his black bag on the floor. “Now, Natalie,” he said, while lighting two cigarettes, “we’re going to smoke this last one together.”
His mother resisted cigarettes, regained her health, and Gerald’s life returned to normal. When he was not helping with farm chores, or attending school, he was wandering around town alone, feeling: