I noticed that my college writing instructor Robert Flynn is 94 today. Quite randomly I stumbled upon a personal essay which my college writing teacher Robert Flynn (Home, W) had published in the Houston Chronicle in 1998. It is a beautiful essay, and I am reposting it here to celebrate Robert Flynn’s 94th birthday. See also my 2007 audio interview with Robert Flynn. Editorial Note: In the middle of the essay, It appears that the digital version might be missing a sentence. I will look up the original essay and try to rectify that. Stay Tuned. RJN
Quest of a hoe hand – He began digging for universal truths as a young writer in Chillicothe, Texas – and he’s still at it.
March 15, 1998 | Houston Chronicle (TX)
By ROBERT FLYNN; Novelist Robert Flynn is writer in residence at Trinity University in San Antonio. | Page: 8 | Section: TEXAS MAGAZINE
To be a writer in Texas is to have your eyes opened to truth and beauty. A friend and I were standing in the cotton field one day. It was one of those 100-degree North Texas days when the hot wind blows – and the wind always blows, and it always blows either hot or cold. And the only thing there is to move is sand. And the sand moves every time the wind blows. We were leaning on our hoes, and way off in the distance we could see a pickup truck going down a country road and leaving a cloud of dust behind it. We must have stood there, transfixed, for 10 or 15 minutes, just admiring that cloud of dust on the horizon. My friend said, “Ain’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?” It was my introduction to beauty.
My introduction to truth was not so dramatic. My grandmother was born in Vermont in 1842. That was the year the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was signed between the United States and England settling the boundary of Canada west of Lake Superior. She married my grandfather who was an Irish immigrant and followed him to Texas where he helped build the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. Grandmother bore him three sons, all born at a constantly moving end of the track. Near Chillicothe my grandfather bought a piece of land. A few years later, in 1897, he was murdered. Grandmother hung on to that piece of land and she doomed her children to do the same.
Every day both going and coming from the two-room country school I attended, I had to cross over the railroad tracks my grandfather helped to lay. And in both directions the tracks ran as far as the eye could see. A few miles to the east and we would have been in an oil field. A few miles west and we would have been on land good for nothing but running cows and chasing jack rabbits. Slowly the truth appeared on the horizon. My grandfather had been tricked into buying the only place in 20 miles
The cotton field is one of the great classrooms of life. Put a young man in a cotton field, place a sack on his back or a hoe in his hand, and right away his thoughts will turn to truth and beauty. A far-off look will come into his eye. Put a young man in a cotton field and he will take up prayer. “Lord, if you will just get me out of this- I will never again as long as I live look at the women’s underwear in the Sears catalog.”
It was in the cotton field that I first learned the power of the English language. I had a girlfriend who chopped cotton with me. She was called a hoe hand. I know because my mother told me. As I stood there all alone in the cotton field – my girlfriend had been sent home because I used the wrong word – it came to me like a flash of light that if the wrong word like hoer had the power to move my mother to such action, just think what using the right word – like hoe hand – could accomplish.
That was when I first got the notion of being a writer. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We didn’t go in much for writing at the country school I attended. Writing was something that was done by weirdos and other New Yorkers. Real men studied penmanship. We made little push-pull lines all over the page. And row after row of spirals. It was called the Palmer Method and was invented during the Spanish Inquisition as a means of turning boys from writers to pray-ers. “Lord, if you will just get me out of this I will never touch another pencil. And I will never again drop my eraser and try to look up Myrtle Bailey’s dress.”
But we knew what a writer was. A writer was somebody who was dead. And if he was any good he had been dead a long time. And if he was real good, people killed him. They killed him with hemlock. Hemlock was the Greek word for Freshman Composition.
The country school I attended was closed and we were bused to Chillicothe. Chillicothe had a teacher who had seen England. From a boat. She had discovered truth and beauty from eight miles offshore and had come to Chillicothe to share her vision with picturesque rustics. With some timidity I confessed that I too hankered after truth and beauty.
Chillicothe is small. Chillicothe is so small there’s only one Baptist church. Chillicothe is so small you have to go to Quanah to have a coincidence. For a good coincidence you have to go to Vernon.
Chillicothe was fairly busting with truth and beauty and my teacher encouraged me to write about it.
I decided to write about my father. My father, the youngest of three sons, was born in a boxcar at the end of the track that has since come to be called Chillicothe, Texas, thus becoming the first born in my hometown. The boxcar served as the station house for the railroad and was, with the exception of a dugout that served as a store, the only building in town. I wrote that my father was born in the finest house in Chillicothe.
My teacher told me to write something that had an epiphany. For an epiphany you had to go all the way to Wichita Falls.
I wrote about Delmer Lance’s pet heifer, Snuggles. Snuggles was raised on a bottle and was as friendly as you’d want a heifer to be. Until Delmer locked her in the barn with his range bull, Bradley. The next morning, Snuggles was gone. Also the barn door. The top rail off the fence.
Delmer chased the cow all over the country but Snuggles went wild as a new rope. One night Delmer was driving down the highway and ran into Snuggles. Delmer said he recognized her when she passed over the windshield by the puzzled look on her face. That was an epiphany. I spent half my life thinking I could recognize a bad girl by the puzzled look on her face.
My teacher said to write about something that had happened to me. I wrote about the year there was a blizzard and everybody from the two-room country school – two teachers, 38 pupils and three adults who had sought refuge in the school – had to walk two miles through the snow to our house to spend the night. I remembered it because that was the day my father came home with 400 baby chickens and it was so cold we had to keep them in the house. All over the house it was butts and feathers.
Forty-two chickens were squashed in the linoleum. Three drowned in the chamber pot. One was crushed when Ed Byars put on his boots. When Mother lighted the gas oven 13 went up like a torch. Three more were scorched so bad that Dad threw them out in the snow. Ed Byars spent the rest of his life minus the end of his nose because he preferred frostbite to the smell of singed chicken feathers.
My teacher said I didn’t know the first thing about truth or beauty. I promised to go to England the first chance I got. Or at least Korea. She loaned me books that were not available in the Wilbarger County Library, books that had been written by real writers.
Real writers wrote about such things as I had never heard of. Damsels. Splendor falling on castle walls. For splendor we had to go to the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show. Since I wasn’t overly familiar with damsels and splendor, I tried reading what real writers wrote about rural life. “Dear child of nature, let them rail. There is a nest in a green vale.” Which was pretty mystifying to me. I remember asking Bubba Spivey, “Don’t writers get chiggers like everybody else?”
I set out looking for a green vale to make a nest in and when I got there I found out what made it so green. When it comes to vales, a cow will get ahead of you every time.
I wrote a story that contained the wisdom of the world in eight poetic pages of arcane words and mysterious imagery full of towers, turrets and spires. My teacher loved it. She had never met a symbol she didn’t like.
Assured of success, I went to college to become a writer. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to reveal the false hopes, the futile dreams, the fleeting victories, the glorious visions, the hidden desires, the sudden and secret joys, that bind us into one humanity. I wanted to refine the language, to explore the avenues of communication, to stretch the limits of understanding, to probe the mysteries and futilities and glories of man, to heal his broken spirit, to restore his sense of purpose, to discover the nature of beauty and truth, and to sell it to the movies for a million dollars. After which I intended to marry a movie star and move to Paris, Texas. Or at least Commerce.
My instructor told me the way to find truth and beauty was to write about heroes and villains, good people vs. bad people. The best people I knew did bad things, and the worst people I knew did good things. We weren’t heroes or villains, we were just puzzled. How could I write about the people I knew when I was attending a college that did not approve of dancing? Smoking. Swearing. Drinking. Dating members of the opposite sex. Dating members of the same sex. I used to pray, “Lord, if you will just get me out of college I will never be a Christian again.”
We were told to write a love story containing truth and beauty. I was petrified. I had never seen a moat or a moor. I had never known a knight or a knave. I was the only great lover I knew. The only time I came close I began nuzzling the girl’s ear and lost my chewing gum in her hair. It was Bazooka bubble gum and I hadn’t gotten all the sweet out of it. I spent the next hour and 45 minutes alternating between kissing her eyes and frisking her scalp, and holding my hands over her eyes while chewing her hair. Her mother called her three times before my jaws came unstuck.
I wrote about a boy and a girl. He is true. She is innocent. They have found a nest in a green glade. They smoke a Salem. They speak of truth and beauty.
I threw the story away. I wrote about a boy and a girl. The boy is generally true. The girl is relatively innocent. They find a meadow. The sun is hot, the wind roughens their complexion. They smell of sweat and Salem cigarettes. He speaks of love with some truth. She has a puzzled look on her beautiful face.
I tore up the pages. A boy and a girl. He is a bastard. She is a bitch. They are lying in a pasture among cow dung. Scratching chigger bites. The blazing sun raises blisters on his back. He has a herpes on his lip. She has bologna breath. He whispers obscenities into her ear. He loses his gum in her hair. It is Fleers bubble gum and still has some of the sweet in it. Her mother calls. He gnashes his teeth.
I tore my hair.
I wrote about Bud Tabor. Bud was a married man, and Sherry McIlroy’s father shot him through Box 287. Ed McIlroy was the postmaster and when Bud came in to get his mail, Ed stuck a pistol in the open end of the box and shot Bud in the eye. Ed was a conscientious man and he waited until Bud opened the box and looked inside so as not to deface government property.
They never found Bud Tabor’s eye. Buried him without it. They fixed him up with a glass eye for the funeral, but Sherry and Bud’s wife got in an argument over who got to keep it as a souvenir. Sherry won. Put it on a chain and wore it hanging down between her breasts. Folks used to say Bud may have gone to hell but his eye went to heaven. Some folks’ idea of heaven is mighty small. Larger on one side than the other.
My instructor said it was not a love story.
Delmer Lance had some sheep but they developed an unnatural affection for an old yellow dog. They followed the dog wherever it went. No pen could hold them for long, and once they were on his trail, the dog couldn’t shake them. In desperation the dog ran away from home, the sheep right behind him.
From time to time the dog and sheep would show up at someone’s tank or feed trough, the dog looking gaunt and haunted eyed, the sheep looking all unraveled. Elmer Spruill shot the dog. Elmer said he couldn’t stand the puzzled look in the dog’s eyes.
My instructor said there was no beauty, no truth and no moral.
Lowell Byars came to the county with his wife, Lou. They lived in a dugout and poor-boyed, working as long as there was light to see. There was no time for visiting neighbors or going to church, just day after day of chopping weeds and carrying water, with nothing to eat but biscuits and gravy, and nothing but the gritty quilts Lou’s mother had given them to sleep on.
The roof of the dugout caved in during a rainstorm, they were dispossessed for two days by a skunk, the crops blew away in a sandstorm. But Lou stuck it out, and if she cried of loneliness or despair it was when Lowell was away from the dugout. One morning Lowell got up early as usual and said, “Get dressed, Lou, we’re going to Quanah to see the Mollie Bailey show.”
Lowell milked the cow, fed the mules, hitched the wagon, and when he got back to the dugout he had to fix breakfast. Lou was still brushing her hair. They drove to Quanah and watched the wagons come in, drawn by elephants. They looked in the store windows and stared at the crowd of people in town. They drank lemonade and had a supper of sardines and crackers and saw the show and it was over, time to get in the wagon and start for home.
It was a long way back to the dugout and Lowell knew he would have to get up early the next morning to make up for the work he had missed but he didn’t care. The moon was bright, a thousand stars twinkled in the sky, and he had shown his wife a sight. Lowell felt pleased with himself.
“It ain’t so terrible being married to me, is it?” he asked Lou who was sitting silent and sleepless beside him. Lou began to cry. She cried all the way home. She cried all night. When he got up the next morning she stopped crying to fix his breakfast, but she wouldn’t speak to him for three more days until he cut his hand heading red top maize and she had to ask how he was.
Lowell promised to take her to the Christmas dance and rather than disappoint her they drove 15 miles in an open wagon in the face of a norther. Lou danced every set of the all night dance. She went home with a fever, took pneumonia and died of frivolity.
I had found a story with a moral but I also found it wasn’t easy writing about people I knew. I got all puzzled. I didn’t know what was beautiful, and what was foolish, and where truth lay. Was Lou Byars a silly girl unsuited for a rugged country? Was she the innocent victim of a foolish dream? Or was she a tragic heroine who knew that the quality of life was not measured by the years endured in twilight, but by the moments spent in the candle’s flame?
Ideas are neat. You can outline an idea. You can label an idea. Ideas don’t bleed. They don’t cry. They don’t blame you for their unhappiness. They don’t die of frivolity. But a person has many faces. Some of them are vain, and some are foolish, and many are secret.
It looked like for truth and beauty you had to cross Red River. All I knew about was a little place called Chillicothe. And it wasn’t even the Chillicothe that was on the map. It was a little place I called Wanderer Springs that existed only in my mind. And all I had to go by was my grandmother who died at the age of 90 the year I was born, and that my father was born in a boxcar at the end of the track. Would truth and beauty as I wrote it stand up against the reality of my grandmother? Would my
I wrote the love story of Grover and Edna Turrill. When he was 16 Grover had married Edna, at the request of both families.
Grover’s father gave them a milk cow, and Edna’s father gave them a steer. Grover yoked them together and started to California. It was his promise to Edna.
They crossed Red River and stopped near Preston where Edna had a baby boy with no one to help her but Grover. They started again as soon as she was able to travel, Edna and the baby in the wagon, and Grover walking beside the wagon, prodding the ox and milk cow, and picking up firewood.
One day Edna placed the sleeping baby in the back of the wagon and got out to walk beside the cow. Grover found a tree stump and not knowing the baby was in the back of the wagon, he threw in the stump, killing his child. Some cowboys found them, two teen-agers traveling across the prairie with a dead baby wrapped in a quilt. The cowboys buried the child.
Grover and Edna were still on their way to California when the milk cow died near Wanderer Springs. They lived in the wagon while Grover broke the land with the steer and planted a crop. Later they built a house and had two more children. When Billo was 12 he went hunting on Wanderer Creek with some older boys. They ran a coon up a dead tree, and Billo was sent up the tree to shake the coon down. A pile of brush had been washed up under the tree and the older boys set it afire so that Billo could see. The dead tree caught fire and Billo was burned so he couldn’t lie down and Edna and Grover took turns holding him the four days it took him to die.
A few years later, when Polly was 13, she complained of a stomachache. Polly wasn’t fat, but like Edna, she was slope-shouldered, solid and a good eater. When she was unable to eat breakfast, Grover hitched up the wagon, made a pallet in the back, and with Edna to comfort Polly, they started for the doctor in Wanderer Springs, several miles away. The wagon had no springs, the road was just a set of ruts across the prairie, and Polly whimpered the whole way although Grover drove as slowly as he dared.
When they got to Wanderer Springs, they found that Dr. Vestal had been called out of town. Over near Medicine Hill, folks thought, expected to be gone all day. Polly was too sick to wait so they started for Medicine Hill, sending word ahead by Buster Bryant who volunteered to carry the message.
It was August and the sun was hot and Polly cried out at every bump, so Edna stood and held a quilt to shade her, and Grover drove the mules as fast as he dared. They met Buster Bryant who had missed Dr. Vestal somehow. The doctor was on his way to Bull Valley. Grover turned the mules toward Bull Valley with Buster racing ahead.
Dr. Vestal had left Bull Valley for Red Top. Buster rode to head off the wagon. The mules had played out and Grover was walking beside them to lighten the load. Edna was standing with her feet spread, holding the solid little girl in her arms, trying to absorb the bumps and shocks of the wagon with her own body. Buster told them to go home. He would find Dr. Vestal and meet them there.
It was almost dark when the wagon got back home and Buster and the doctor were waiting. Edna was sitting beside Grover holding Polly who was so big she lay across both their laps. The mules stopped of their own accord and neither Grover nor Edna made a move to get down. Dr. Vestal started to the wagon but Grover said, “I don’t want you to touch her. We’ve been praying for you all day and listening to her die. I know it ain’t your fault, but I don’t want to see you now.”
Buster stayed with the Turrills although he didn’t dare go in the house. He unhitched the mules and fed them and sat out on the porch. After a while Grover came out. He sat on the porch and stared at the dark, empty, treeless miles over which he had ridden that day, listening to the shriek of the wagon wheels and the dying cries of his last child.
After a while Edna came out also and learned against the porch post, hugging the porch post as though it were a child, her head hanging down a little as though permanently bent from ironing clothes and chopping cotton. She waited while the last light of day faded and one by one the stars came out, watching the prairie that under moonlight had a sheen like a silent sea.
“If that cow hadn’t died, we’d be in California,” Grover said.
“Old Boss,” Edna said, remembering the name over all the years, recalling the dreams they had shared as they traveled across the prairie in the wagon.
“Damn country,” Grover said. “Washes away every time it rains. Blows away every time there’s a wind. Hail or grasshoppers every damn year. Hot as hell or cold as hell. Flood or drought. Too dry to plant, too wet to plow – “
“Yeah,” Edna said, nodding her head in the darkness. “But ain’t it purty.”
Truth in the mythical kingdom of Wanderer Springs was neither comic nor tragic, neither big nor eternal. And it was revealed through the lives of common folk who belched and fornicated, and knew moments of courage, and saw beauty in their meager lives.
But Grover Turrill gave me some problems. Some readers thought the vocabulary was offensive. I could not write about the people I knew without using the vocabulary they knew. My father did not believe a cowboy said “golly bum” when a horse ran him through a barbwire fence.
I went to see Clifford Huff. Clifford was a horseshoer and he had been kicked, bitten or stepped on by every horse in the county. It gave him an extensive vocabulary. I asked Clifford the worst words he knew. He said they were “yes and no.” He had said yes when his wife, Letty, asked him if he was playing around and he had said no when she asked him if the gun was loaded. They had been married 33 years when Letty shot him once through the pantry and twice up the stairs.
Words are not casual things. They are powerful. Even explosive. Words can start wars, or families. Words can wound, they can shock and offend. Words can also heal, and explain, and give hope and understanding. Words have an intrinsic worth, and there is pride and delight in using the right word. Anyone who chops cotton with an axe is a hoer.
I don’t know whether or not Travis drew a line at the Alamo. Maybe that story is myth. I do know that every writer draws the line. Must draw the line. Whether he is dealing with teachers, advisers, well-wishers, editors, publishers, critics or the public. This is my kingdom. These are my people. I know them better than anybody. They will not jump through hoops for the amusement of casual readers. They will not temper their speech for prudish ears. I may not respond the way they do, but I respect them for what they are. And that’s where I draw the line.
I wrote a book about people my grandmother would have spoken to, and they used words my father would have believed. A few people heard of it. Fewer read it. My closest friends bought it. And loaned it out. After a while the book disappeared from bookstores to make room for a best seller written by a man who had never met an adverb he didn’t like. It was about an oil-patch hooker who falls in love with a Soviet spy but turns him over to the CIA to save the Battleship Texas from being stolen by Sandinistas. When it comes to writing, hoers have it all over hoe hands.
But I had already turned down the next row. Writing is a lot like chopping cotton. It’s a long way to the end of the row, and when you get there, there’s always another row to turn down. A friend was disturbed that I was spending so much time at something so unrewarding. “There’s no money in it,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that. “There’s more fame in selling used cars. There’s more fun in running a gas pump.” I didn’t argue with him because he was right.
I just kept chopping on down the row, knowing when I got to the end of it, there would be another row to turn down. And another. And another. And as the day wore on it wouldn’t get any easier. Maybe it wouldn’t get any better. Perhaps no one would come out to the field to see if I was still working. I might not even hear the dinner bell. It didn’t matter. He thought I was a hoer. But I am a hoe hand.
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