from Tracy Daugherty's "The Land and the Days"

Tracy Daugherty | The Land and the Days: A Memoir of Family, Friendship, and Grief | University of Oklahoma Press | 2022 | 234 Pages

From the roof of the Cotton County Courthouse, looking out past the flagpole toward the west, you can see the lots on which my grandparents’ houses stood; the bare patch where Tracy’s dog, Blackie, lies buried; the filling station, still operating just across the highway from Deenie’s old yard; the Hart-Wyatt Funeral Home; the rodeo arena; the unused railroad depot; Sultan Park; the Electric Co-op’s grain elevators. You can see the road to Lawton, where my parents drank and danced at Some Other Place (long gone). Since last year, what once formed downtown Walters is a blackened sea of ash—one weekend in July, an early morning fire took out the Cotton Bowl, the movie house my father burned to the ground (rebuilt, now wrecked again), and a couple of small businesses (a nail salon and a karate training center) across the street from the shell that housed Daugherty Hardware. A pair of pumpjacks, the size of sewing thimbles from the courthouse roof, pinpoint the golf course and the cemetery.

Graciously, Ruth Palmer, the county clerk’s assistant, escorted me up top once I’d finished reading Tracy’s papers. She appreciated my interest in the county’s records. “We don’t get many researchers,” she said. “Especially researchers with a personal history in town. Our rooftop has the best view of the area. I think you’ll like it.”

I followed her up a back staircase through the attic and onto the roof. A church bell rang across town. Tink-tink. It was late afternoon. Most of the sky was blue, but in a bright quadrant where the sun perched low, a splash of light like a thin yellow tarp appeared to spread round Earth’s slender curve. Near the western horizon, a blue, shimmering line, pumpjacks moved up and down, pulling my eye, and I saw, from miles away, tombstones, like black pepper flakes, dotting the green smudge of the graveyard.

I thanked Ruth Palmer for her kindness to me, for showing me this splendid panorama of my childhood acres, and then I hurried to my rental car, hoping to beat sundown to the cemetery so I could visit my parents’ graves.

And that’s how I came to be standing with Bobby Hearon on a small bluff where he’d just laid three white roses by his mother’s headstone.

“Long time,” he said to me. “Long, long time.”
“Yes. Walters hasn’t changed much. What’s left of it.”
He shook his head. “Sad business, that downtown fire.”
“You remember Butterball?”
“Sure.”
“Whatever happened to him?”
Bobby shrugged.

We sat on a marble bench by a mausoleum whose family namehad long since worn away. Bobby told me he’d moved to Oklahoma in 2008. “I’s wildcatting in West Texas and Mom was in a rest home there, but when she really started to fail, she wanted to come back here. Turns out, all this time, she’s owned a few acres in Geronimo”—a small community on the road to Lawton. “Been in her family forever,” Bobby said. Natalie had died in the nursing home where Deenie had suffered visions of the oil field woman. “She was always frail—that early breast cancer took so much out of her, but amazingly, she lived a long life,” Bobby said. He neglected to mention the toll his father had taken on his mother, and I understood that one of our talk rules would be scant attention to the past. Bobby had built a small ranch on Natalie’s land, he said. He was married. He had a son who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and his wife raised cattle and sheep. They donated hay to the Cotton County food bank every year so it could be sold to purchase canned goods. They volunteered for the local fire brigade.

He’d got the call last July when a Walters Herald paperboy making his morning deliveries noticed smoke in a weedy lot between the bowling alley and the nail salon next to the movie house. “A bunch of Kiowa teenagers had been squatting in that lot,” Bobby said. “Intoxicated. Homeless. No jobs.” He said they’d been doing crystal meth. It was the new scourge here in the Heartland, much worse than pot or alcohol had ever been. It was big business in places like Walters, ghost towns in the making, where oil and cotton had been largely depleted and many farms foreclosed.

Trash. The whole county—hell, the whole state of Oklahoma, to many Americans. Bobby didn’t need to say it. “The reddest [i.e., the red-neckiest] state in the country,” pundits called it on radio and TV. It was Exhibit A in Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”—her 2016 campaign reference to “ignorant” conservative voters. A far cry from Great-Grandpa Andy’s socialist haven. “Texas? Oklahoma?” so many of my Northwest friends have blurted over the years when I’ve told them where I was raised. “God, I’m sorry! It must have been awful to have been brought up in such a . . .”

Backwater. Hellhole. That’s what they barely keep themselves from saying. Am I exaggerating? Only slightly.

That day in the Walters Cemetery, Bobby and I wisely avoided politics, made no spoken judgments of each other’s appearance or choices in life. We agreed that time had seemed to get away from us, and neither of us could believe our parents were gone.

Darkness and the slight chill of summer dusk were beginning to swirl among the stones. Our moment together was coming to a close. There was no question that he would not invite me back to his place and that I would not suggest we get supper together somewhere in town. I regretted all that had gone unsaid between us, but it was clear that the time for saying had passed. We remained strangely important to each other—I sensed this was true of him as it was for me—but we did not belong in each other’s present.

“So,” I said, half-rising, trying to bring our conversation to a fitting end. “What happens to kids like that? Those Kiowa teenagers who set the town on fire? I can just imagine, if my grandfather was still the deputy sheriff—”

“We took them in,” Bobby said. “Court wanted to throw them in the slammer, but we offered to let them help us work the ranch. Sort of a community service deal. And good for us, of course. I made an outbuilding, kind of a bunkhouse, for them to sleep in, and they’re still mowing the back pastures. They’re learning responsibility. Off the drugs, far as I can tell. Yeah. They’re doing all right.”

I shook his hand. “You’re a good man, Bobby,” I said. He shrugged. “Take care y’self.”
“You, too.”

Used with permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. © 2022 Tracy Daugherty.

Tracy Daugherty is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus, at Oregon State University. He has written biographies of Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, and Donald Barthelme, as well as five novels, six short story collections, a book of personal essays, and a collection of essays on literature and writing.