A Home, for Now

By William R. Mitchell

Drawn from actual events in the author's life, this touching story explores the relationship between two brothers, their adventures in rental homes, what a home is, and how a home is made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359793440

Book preview

A Home, for Now

A Home, for Now

William R. Mitchell

Cross Timbers Books

Copyright

© 2019 William R. Mitchell

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

This is a novel based on the author’s interpretations of people, places, and events in his life. The descriptions, dialogue and actions of the characters are fictionalized. Some of the places and events are factual, others are invented.

First Edition 2019

ISBN 978-0-359-79344-0

Cross Timbers Books (http://crosstimbersbooks.com)

Dedication

For all those who need a home.

Acknowledgements

I need to thank my colleagues Joe Hall and Robert Scrutchins for their critique of the first draft, for suggestions about integrating the development and thematic coherence. I also must acknowledge the help of my son Daniel Mitchell for critique and encouragement and for masterful technical help.

Chapter 1 - Provenance

I know that for some people home is a four-letter word, with poignant ironies. That was seldom true for me, but I think it sometimes was for my older brother Tom. For him and me to be as much alike as we were, we had subtle, profound differences. Maybe what home was for us, as children and again as adults, somewhat explains the differences.

Or again, considering the ways we were so similar, maybe the differences were simply more striking than they ought to be. People who had long known only Tom, or only me, were often startled to meet someone so uncannily like their old acquaintance, but with puzzling variations that didn’t fit. Like hearing a melody played simultaneously in different keys that jarred the ear and mind and smeared the memory with strange disharmonies. It was unexpected, funny or sad or confusing or unpleasant.

Tom and I looked like brothers all right, and we had similar mannerisms. We grew up on the same Oklahoma farms our father share-cropped. We were each accustomed, as boys, to a ten-hour work day of sweaty labor. We both had seen the horizon of the world from across the rumps of a pair of mules. We each left home as soon as we graduated high school, with vague visions of some other life.

At the bedrock of our souls lay the same red-clay stratum of a strict discipline, of hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley for lullaby, of prayer before meals, of an ingrained sense of right and wrong as strong as hunger and as inescapable. And we both understood that if the world went wrong it was our responsibility to put it right again.

But he was taller than I would ever be. He was muscular and handy. I was scrawny and uncoordinated until nearly grown. He was practical and outgoing. I was dreamy and introspective and inept. I lacked his self-assurance, his confidence in his knowledge of the world. I brooded more on human enigmas. He saw them all right, but he went right ahead with life, trusted his first response, acted with only brief thought about what to do. He knew there were imponderables, but knew also that puzzling over them was mostly little help and a nuisance and a waste of time.

He was the first and I was the fourth of five siblings in the Trenton family. Family roles were well settled in his adolescence, before I was old enough to know what a role was. His life was displaced by frequent moves to another house, whereas I lived on the same hardscrabble farm, in the same home, ‘til I was sixteen. He had his father’s name, Thomas Wesley Trenton Jr., while I, William R. Trenton, was still Billy when I was a man.

Tom left home when he was eighteen and I was seven, and we hardly saw one another until after the war. He negotiated childhood and adolescence in a different environment from the one I knew, though at eleven I was the oldest son left to be Dad’s main helper. So our adolescence, even our childhood, had been markedly different as far as the interior life went. We never really knew one another until he was back from the war and I was nearly adult. When we rediscovered one another, we were strangers. But similarities of idea or expression would suddenly emerge spontaneously, to amuse and startle and puzzle both of us.

For what had intervened was of such a magnitude that former consciousness was displaced and transformed—as was the case I suppose for most people who experienced the breach in their lives that World War Two occasioned. Maybe that too somewhat explains our differences.

Then again, maybe our likenesses and our differences were already established before we were born.

The Trenton clan had left their farms in Iowa and Kansas, after successive hard winters when the cattle froze to death, and settled on newly opened lands in Indian Territory—lands reluctantly surrendered to white invaders. Like others, the Trentons were putative benefactors of a treaty that freed unused, unsettled Indian lands for homesteaders—but a little late for the Trentons, since most of the free land had already been claimed. In fact, one of the Trenton clan, a distant cousin, was shot contesting a claim.

But in 1897, when Grandpa Trenton was building a house on a tract rented from a luckier man, a tornado claimed the unfinished house one afternoon, claimed also my grandfather with his mules and a wagonload of lumber on the way home from the lumberyard. He could never do a day’s work again and soon died. So all five of the children were sent to day labor on other farms to earn enough for the family’s survival. My father was nine years old. He left school after the third grade.

The children all stayed together and worked together in their adult years. My father was the only one of them that ever married and pulled free, at least free enough to establish a different household at twenty-six. My uncle Bert, the oldest sibling, had taken on early the role of parent and guide. As soon as his intelligence and management became obvious enough for a landlord to consider him a good risk, the family began to be share-croppers instead of mere day-laborers. So they gained not only a percentage of their produce—a third or fourth, or rarely half once they had proved themselves—but also a house to live in, at least for a year. The rental had to be re-negotiated yearly, and often was dissolved if either landlord or tenant wanted to try a different opportunity. So the Trentons moved frequently, usually in winter.

Moving meant a different locale, whether better or worse. Maybe new neighbors, a different church, a different one-room elementary school for whatever time whichever sibling could be briefly spared from whatever labor. Moreover, perhaps most importantly, it meant a different house, a different home for whatever duration.

My father had a strong tenor voice, and he was often the designated song leader in the various Methodist churches the family attended. In one of these, about 1915, he met the school teacher of the local elementary school, a beautiful and devout lady, the daughter of a pioneer circuit-riding preacher who had pastored churches throughout Texas and Oklahoma. Unlike many teachers of that time and place, she had one year of college. They were married in 1918, shortly before my father entered the army and boarded a train for a debarkation center in Virginia. He trained to be a medical aide, which I understand to mean he would carry wounded men on stretchers off the field to be amputated or otherwise salvaged behind the lines.

But before he was shipped out, the Armistice intervened, and he returned to Oklahoma to take up the share-cropping life again, with nothing left of his envisioned compassionate purpose except a yearning to fulfill it in some worthy alternative—of which his humble life seemed to offer little recognizable or practicable instance. The yearning remained however, to play itself out in the everyday griefs and deprivations of the share-cropping communities of Lincoln County, Oklahoma. So I conclude on evidence of his constant sensitivity to hurt or misery, and the sharing of labor or clothes or food with whoever needed help.

In 1919 Tom was born, then another son and a daughter before I was born in 1930. All of his children worked on whatever rented farm, and attended whatever local one-room school. The schoolhouse often was also our church house. The neighborhood was too poor to support a preacher, but like others Mom and Dad taught and sang and preached on occasion, and did service with a meal or a shirt for whoever was tattered or hungry during the lean thirties.

When I was five and Tom was sixteen, our house—more accurately, the landlord’s house in which we lived—burned one night as we slept. We escaped in our nightclothes, and the seven of us stood barefoot in the yard in the cool dark night invaded by a scorching heat and a roaring agitated brilliance, and watched the angry flame and towering smoke and ash, aware, in our alert awe, that we were all still alive.

Only later did I realize that everything was gone—everything we owned, except the farm animals and plow and cultivator and such. Everything glass was melted into strange blobs, kitchen stuff into weird blackened shapes, bedsprings ungainly metal snarls. Of the house itself, nothing was left but the scorched sandstones of the foundation. Only the empty sky remained where the house ought to be.

We lived in a borrowed tent. Kindly neighbors gave us clothes, and shared with us from their cellars fruit and vegetables they had preserved in half-gallon jars. That was what folks who still had a house should do for whoever had none.

Daddy walked where he had to go to use a telephone, and called the landlord in Oklahoma City to tell him his house had burned down. The landlord commiserated, I suppose, but said he could not afford to build another. He would, however, establish a line of credit at the lumberyard in McLoud if Daddy would arrange the labor to build one.

Daddy sought the counsel of our good friend, Mr. Winkler, as to what could be done. Though the Winklers were Baptist whereas the Trentons were Methodist, they had collaborated to start the little church in the schoolhouse where both families attended. Mr. Winkler assured Daddy that help could be found. He had built houses all over Lincoln County, and knew a lot of families there. Daddy had led singing in Methodist churches throughout the county, wherever he and his family had moved from one share-crop farm to another, and he too knew many men, some of them the same men Mr. Winkler knew. They put out the word.

On an appointed day in May 1936, about seventy men assembled in early morning at the clearing Daddy and my brothers had made in our blackjack woods. Some of them had walked there from miles away. Mr. Winkler divided the men into work crews. Some dug foundation trenches, some hauled rocks to lay for foundation, some hauled water in fifty-gallon oil drums and mixed concrete, some cut and assembled two-by-eight stringers for the subfloor, some began nailing together frames for walls and roof. Some built a rough table and benches and bedsteads. Some fetched our scant belongings, mattresses and bedding and clothes donated from various closets, spare minimal cookware and tableware, and the cast-iron cook stove that had survived the fire intact. My two teenage brothers helped and were proud to work with the other men.

At noon I walked with Mama and some other women I didn’t know as they took dinner to the builders. Mama carried Rex and the others carried food in wash pans and big bowls covered by dishtowels to keep out the dust. When we came up where the house was building, the men all stopped and washed up and then gathered around Daddy and bowed their heads while he said a blessing. It was different from the blessing he usually said at noontime, longer and in a shaky voice. I had a good lunch with all the big people, sitting on the floor they had made for the house.

By nightfall the house was standing, with windows and doors and rough sheetrock interior walls. It had three rooms, one of them the whole length of the house, and one large closet between the two bedrooms. There was still trim to do and painting inside and out, but we could do that for ourselves later. We had a new home, and slept in it that night, all seven of us.

That’s what they did for me—Mr. Winkler and the nameless, unknown, unthanked, unpaid men who built a house for me and Tom and the rest of us one day—and went home never knowing how they had colored my mind and heart indelibly, and stirred my dreams for the next eighty-two years.

Among the other losses in the fire were the few books Mom and Dad had collected, some of which Mama and I read together by lamplight in the evenings. Not one of them was left, nor any of the books Daddy used to read—that had no pictures in them. Not even a Bible.

Mama was teaching me to read already—nursery rhymes and other poems I had memorized without trying, just by listening and saying them over while I played by myself. I read, this way, The Owl and the Pussycat and The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, and other poems from Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and could now read them by myself. But after the fire burned all our books I forgot how to read and had to learn all new in the first grade.

And the fire also burned Daddy’s treadle pump organ, where we used to sing and play together. I would sit on his lap and mash down the keys while his feet worked the pedals. He would put his hands on mine so I could mash the right keys, and we would sing Rock of Ages or Old Black Joe. But nothing was left except the little black twisted metal pieces that had been the reeds.

Everyone sang at our house, from my earliest memory. Mostly we sang alone, by ourselves, for some reason. Mama or Daddy sang lullaby when they rocked me to sleep at bedtime. I can still remember clinging to consciousness while one or the other softly sang hymns. My sister would harmonize with her friend Valdora Winkler when she came home with us from church Sundays for dinner. Even Tom and Donny sang when they thought nobody was listening, and my younger brother Rex sang to himself, like me, from his early childhood.

In an unlearned way, I was musical, yes. My mother told me once that I could hum recognizable melodies (hymns, of course) before I could talk—so music was literally my first language. I had many melodies by heart and could make an improvised tenor to my sister’s or mother’s soprano.

But musical education was altogether beyond the resources of the rural elementary school I attended, and any private experience that might have opened my way to a more sophisticated understanding of music was foreign to the environment where I grew up, and any that would have required expenditure were not even considered. Like everyone in my family, I sang all the time and loved whatever music I chanced onto, but without any ambitions beyond my personal delight.

In high school my brother Tom had a good science teacher who taught him how a radio worked, and he promptly built one from scratch with parts his teacher provided. It had only one tube and was not supposed to work, but it did. Then he sawed up a cedar fence post and made a beautiful case. So in 1937 our family had a radio when most neighbors did not. I grew up listening to Amos and Andy, The Lone Ranger, and Fibber McGee and Molly. In April of 1939, though I didn’t yet know what I was hearing, we heard Marian Anderson sing Schubert’s Der Erlkönig from the Lincoln Memorial. I listened in awe as a chorus sang Brahms, from a college campus fourteen miles and two light years away—where twenty