BALLINGER
I went over to visit Katie about once a month, and each time we sat on her porch through the evening, covering and retracing familiar ground: Tulip, life, death and the past.
Katie's memories of her childhood were unshakeably rosy. Her daddy, as she always called him, had been director of the first marching band in the small town of Ballinger near San Angelo in the twenties, and Katie remembered him as being very handsome in his uniform, leading his troops from the gazebo in the old fairgrounds park. I studied his picture and said he had indeed been handsome.
They had a good time out there in Ballinger. There was a grandmother’s
house and a schoolhouse and cousins who were country and cousins who
were rich, and ranchers who thought nothing of driving two hundred miles
to go to a party and drive home the same night. Katie was a good-looking
girl with loads of boyfriends. She documented that claim with faded black
and white photographs. She had a favorite sister Olivia. She stressed
the “Oh” and said the “v-i-a” like a single syllable,
Oh LIV-ya.
Olivia had a boyfriend once who blew through town in the height of the depression in a big long car and threw around money like there was no tomorrow. He was a real city slicker and his car had cost a fortune, and nobody ever did figure out where he was from or where he got his money. They made up their minds that he was a gangster in the mafia and running from the law.
Katie had one boyfriend, she said, who was a pitcher in the west Texas baseball league, and she used to go to the minor league games to watch him play. Once he told her he’d hit a home run for her, and he did, too. He went on to become a centerfielder in the major leagues, but that was after she broke up with him. He even played in the World Series.
Katie’s family was very poor, but they would give a hot meal to any hobo passing through, and Katie had only bitter scorn for the richer folks on the other side of the tracks who went to church and looked down their noses at Katie's daddy and wouldn't have given a glass of water to Jesus Christ himself on a hot day.
“I guess you might say we lived on the wrong side of the tracks,” she said. “I still do.”
Then she would say, “I just hate hypocrites, don't you?" And I would agree. Next
