Prologue

Hawkins City, Texas Winter 1925

 

Darkness. The keening whistle of a high-pitched north wind blowing through a screened porch. A loose door on a distant shed clatters now and again. The family sleeps in a sprung clapboard house with no insulation. Children huddled under quilted comforters.  The only heat in the home comes from their bedcovers. Midnight, the parents are evenly snoring in the main bedroom.  Quietly, furtively, the 15 year-old brother steps from his bed and pads on the freezing boards to the room of his sisters. He slips under Florence’s covers and presses his body next to hers.  He whispers, “Ah’m so cold sister, please help me to warm up.” Florence is 11 years old. She is petrified. She doesn’t know what to do.  If she calls for help, she will be blamed for something. No one ever tells the fifteen-year old Preston that he is wrong.  Even Daddy is scared of Preston because if he punishes him, Mama will not talk to Daddy for weeks.  Mama lets Preston do what he wants. Since he was ten, he has intimidated the whole household. Preston puts his long arms around Florence and draws her close. Florence feigns sleep and draws her knees up to her stomach. Preston spoons against her backside and slowly inevitably he touches her with his new-found manliness. He presses against her. He has done this before but never with this kind of intimate insistence. Jo bites her lips but does not cry out.

 

There is trouble enough in this household. Far be it for her to be the one to accuse her brother, apple of her mother’s eye, of anything like the horror she is feeling now.  She is so young she does not even recognize it as a horror; it is only somehow disgusting and wrong. But Preston is so needy, and it seems to somehow calm him. It is not so awful, and he was so cold.  And suddenly he is gone. She knows this is not the last time he will come to her on these freezing nights in the winter of 1923.  The secret between brother and sister will be sealed for a very long time, but they will look at each other and always know. It is a foreign body under the skin that will grow to a terrible day of reckoning.

 

The white wooden house sits on a slight slant of ground that if you stand in the yard, you can see down the street, past the courthouse square all the way to the river. The dusty gravel roads are mostly quiet. Now and then a car or a horse or a mule goes down or up Sycamore Street. There is no electricity in the town. People burn oak scrap in the stoves and live by kerosene light. This is hard-scrabble country of caliche, cedar, and scrub oak. It is a mystery why anyone in their right mind would have settled here.  True, that before the cedar came and sucked up the water and dried the grass, (and before the white man killed them all) buffalo use to graze here in large numbers. The Comanche thought it a good place with many deer and acorns. Life was easy here before the white men came. No wonder they fought so hard to keep it. The Mexicans came here first and gave the rivers their names, The Pedernales, The Blanco. Pedernales meant flinty in Spanish, and Blanco meant white.  And that described the area. Flint rocks and the white limestone river bottoms with huge cypress trees that stood around the clear water that ran quickly through the little settlement. Hawkins City, Texas, founded in 1850 by stolid German burghers and arbeiters, running from the wars of Europe and the bondage of their fatherland.

 

Hawkins City, TX, the home of Sam P. Hawkins, former state representative from the counties of Gillespie and Kendall, a man once of some power and prestige but who was found with his hand in the till once too often, and who was finally beaten in the scrappy election of 1916.

 

For seven years he has been without a real job. He owes every employed man in town something, from the Mayor to the hired help.  He has had business ideas for making iron tools, to mining gravel and selling it to the county, to hiring teams of wetbacks to paint barns. He has bought cattle high but sold them low, pocketing debts and breaking his backers. And worse, he has in the last few years taken to strong drink.  Only the shiftless domino players on the square will socialize with him now. Sam spends time with them every day, telling stories of his adventures in Austin, and how he knew and circulated with the great men of the State, which doubtless he did, for a while.  He had been to the big show and a few county fairs, and now he could not let people forget it. His wife Sarah reads poetry, while he talks politics, and drinks.  Lately he has had a job putting base and gravel on the roads to the capitol city. He has mules and some of the town boys to help. It is nasty work for a man who is used to picking up pieces of paper rather than shovels and rakes. He is paid five dollars a day and counts himself lucky; his hands make only two. His boy Preston, will have none of it. In the summer he spends the whole time sleeping until the sun is warm.

Sam would yell at him, but Preston would answer, “Oh shut up, you old drunk. Mama will put you in your place.” When Sam stopped bringing home regular money he lost his right to tell anyone what to do. Sarah looks at him with sad eyes and only sighs.