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I Will NOT Be a Blank Page
7
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A Restart to Nothing New
Delma mashes her little nose up against the window of the car. I stay quiet, thinking about what lays ahead, something I don’t yet know about. I try to picture it, a town with gypsum snow under the ground, a town where Dad is happy, a town where….
“Where we goin’, Cono?” Delma whispers.
“I ain’t so sure Sis, but it’ll be someplace good ‘cause looky here, we’re ridin’ in a four-door automobile!”
She turns away from me then and keeps pressing her little nose up against the window until she finally gives in to sleeping on Mother’s lap. At least we are together, Delma and me. It’s just another place that I plan to watch over her. I want to keep her close by, so nobody can snatch her away again. As long as I can do that, it doesn’t make no difference where we are.
The car keeps humming slowly down the highway. I try to sleep but I can’t. Instead, I think about Mr. Ed Rotan and decide right then and there that “Cono, Texas” has a real good ring to it. Cono, Texas won’t just have snow gypsum under the ground and a railroad on top of it. It’ll have oil underground and derricks on the top, pumping night and day. I call them jacks “grasshoppers” because that’s just what they look like when they’re pumping up and down. They’re grasshoppers trying to hop away, but they’re stuck and have to settle for hopping up and down in the same place.
My town will have at least two good cafés that serve T-bone steaks and tea iced in clean tin jars, free to me since it’s my town.
My mind leaves Cono, Texas and I think again on Ranger, the town where I learned how to brush my teeth, where Ma and Pa have a farm and a house that you’ll always want to go back to, where Polo takes me anywhere I want to go. Ranger is about haircuts that teach you about boxing and about boxing that teaches you to keep standing up. It’s a town where a Tiger can stir the ground and make you a little sister.
Oh yeah. The town of Ranger teaches you that goats freeze, but hands burn.
I go back to the comfort of Cono, Texas, off the poor list and high on the hog. I don’t quite know what to expect, but I sure do like this red brick highway leading to someplace new. I’m thinking that everything’s going to be “copacetic,” like bright colorful times might be ahead, like we’re following a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
But I don’t know nothin’ from nothin’.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper by C. Dennis-Willingham
photo credit
via Restart
More than a Bloody Moon
Dad is slumped over on me now; half of his weight is on my right side, my right arm under his. I walk him to his side of the bed hoping Mother won’t wake up and see how drunk he is, see the blood I didn’t get the chance to wipe off his face. He lies down and is out cold. He’s good for the night.
I go into my room and see Delma asleep on her bed. I lie down on mine and stare up at the ceiling. A dim light comes through my window. The half-moon pays me a visit, casts shadows of a kid named Cono who never could beat Hicks Boy.
Well, I guess Dad has met his own Hicks Boy.
I can’t believe I’m not jumping up and down, celebrating. I feel kinda sorry for him, my dad beaten by a cue stick. The same man who, to my knowledge, never lost a fight except for in the boxing ring with Shorty Houghton when I was three years old.
I also feel pretty good that I was there for him, did something for him that maybe he’ll remember. But it doesn’t really matter if he remembers. I will. For the first time, I felt useful to him.
I hear Mother scream. I snap back into the present, out of my daydream. Maybe she’s woken up, has seen blood on her sheets reflected in moonlight, seen the blood on Dad’s face.
I start to get up but the quiet has taken over. I think I might just go back to sleep but the silence only lasts for a moment.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper by C. Dennis-Willingham
Image credit
via Dim
No Birthday Without Her
Scooter and me walk to the swimming hole. He’s playing the blues harp, but even his sour notes don’t distract me from thinking about my birthday. Without Mama, it wouldn’t be a birthday anyway. It would be a few friends, a cake and presents without promise. Now I have to talk to The Secret Keepers, Miss Helen or Miss Delores. If they know where Mama is, maybe they can send word that I refuse to turn twelve without her.
Excerpt from The Moonshine Thicket, by C. Dennis-Willingham
via Present
When You’re Hit Between the Eyes
I grabbed my little sister’s button nose and held out my hand to show her my thumb tucked between my two fingers.
“Cono, I’ve done told ya I was too big fer that!” Delma yelled and stomped her little feet in the dirt.
Instead of kicking me in the shins as usual, she picked up a stave from the ground and hit me right square between the eyes. She could tell by the look on my red face that I was madder than a hornet.
“Ya better start runnin’, Delma Jean, ’cause I’m comin’ after ya, and I’m gonna whoop ya!”
She ran those deer legs of hers right straight to the outhouse and got there just in time to lock herself in.
“I’m gonna push this outhouse right over on ya, Delma Jean!” I said, banging on the old cedar door.
I stood outside that smelly outhouse, listening for what she was gonna say next. Then I listened some more. When I didn’t hear anything, I said, “OK. Well, when ya come out, I’ll be right here waitin’. Then ya can see this knot between my eyes that’s growin’ into a real-life unicorn horn.”
I thought for sure she’d come out right then to see for herself. But she didn’t. I tiptoed away and went on about my business. I pretended that my new horn was a badge of courage, which I guess it was if you had yourself a little sister like Delma.
I can’t say for sure how long she stayed in there, but she knew that I wouldn’t spank her. And, of course, I’d never push a stinky old outhouse over with her in it.
Delma showed up for our quiet suppertime more clammed up than usual. I put an elbow on the table and used my left hand to hide the goose egg on my forehead. I didn’t want Delma to see it any more than I wanted Mother and Dad to. Then with my righthand, I ate my supper in silence like everybody else. Several times I caught Delma staring between my fingers trying to get a peek at my bump.
Later that night, Delma told me she didn’t mean to put a horn between my eyes. I told her it didn’t matter, that it didn’t really hurt anyhow.
By the next morning, my badge of courage was almost completely sucked back into my skull. Even though nobody else could see it, I reckoned it was still in there somewhere. And that’s where I decided I’d keep it from then on, next to the other ones I got elsewhere.
— Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper, a novel about my father growing up in west Texas during the Great Depression.
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via Courage
If I Tell You a Rooster Wears a Pistol …
To know him means you “got” his colloquialisms, his dry, sometimes sarcastic wit (I was a quick study). To know him means you understood what it was like to run away towards something good. And if it wasn’t “up to snuff,” you’d take advantage of the situation to make it so. He used to say, “If I tell you a rooster wears a pistol, look under it’s wing.” It meant, just like his grandfather intended, that he was truth-telling.
It’s 1946 and he’s telling you a piece of his story:
I was standing in my flight section of fifty-four men. All the ranking men had gone except for the second lieutenant, who was greener than a gourd. He was the squadron commander over everything, and he walked straight over to me and asked, “Soldier, you’ve done previous service, haven’t you?”
“No sir,” I said, standing in rigid attention and trying to figure out why he asked me that question.
“But you’ve had previous training, haven’t you?”
I thought real quick. Hell, I’d had previous training alright—previous training in ranching and sandwich making, not to mention in bank robbing conversations, fighting, and escaping. So I said, “Yes sir, I’ve had previous trainin’.”
“Where at?”
I knew what he was thinking, so again I lied through my teeth and said, “ROTC, sir.” Every officer likes to hear that.
“Can you drill men?”
Shoot, I’d seen enough picture shows to know how to drill men. Any idiot can drill men. I’d been drilled all my life—told what to do, what not to do, when to do it to boot.
“Yes sir!” I said.
He called over the little corporal, pointed to me, and said, “This is your new assistant.”
I had no inkling of an idea of what it meant to be an assistant to a corporal, but I learned quickly enough. An “assistant” meant wearing a piss pot, a little blue helmet that identified you as an assistant just like a piece of tape with your name on it identified you as the newcomer at a Baptist revival.
Little Corporal put that piss pot on my head, and I marched those soldiers straight to the classroom. Then I went to the PX to drink some more coffee.
Cono Dennis (12-18-1928 – 6-24-2009)
My father. I knew him well.
(new logo for my children’s books)
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper by C. Dennis-Willingham
via Inkling
The Shadow Beast
I dreamt I sat on a low branch of Grandfather tree. It was dark when the man walked toward me, twigs growing out of his head like petrified breadsticks.
I reached down, determined to break off each one so they would not interfere and grow roots to our ancestral tree. Each time I snapped one off, his twigs became thicker and stronger, harder to break off.
Still dreaming, I went to bed and saw the shadow once again- not from my friend the pecan tree lurking outside my window, but from the silhouette of the man I knew him to be.
It was not the Shadow Beast, but a real beast, lurking in the shadows.
In my waking moment, I knew he had to be stopped.
Excerpt from a CD-W novel
photo credit
via Silhouette
The Darkness Within
She downed the last of several shots. A deep hole waited, someone she knew to be placed inside.
She tripped over pebbles and glanced up ahead. Almost there now.
A small gathering stood around the gravesite. Had they started without her?
She took in their glares, their finger points. Tardy like a schoolgirl. Shame on me.
She didn’t see the hole.
Falling, falling, falling. She landed on her side, her dress torn and ruined.
She pushed a palm into the soft dirt but couldn’t sit up. Stuck. Had this grave been dug just for her? Had they been expecting her? Her nails, ruined by the earth’s filth.
“Six feet under and no place to go?” her mother whispered. “You’re a disgrace. Now get up and get to work. Sofie!”
“Sofie? Sofie?”
She turned and found herself in the reflection of her friend’s eyes, her own muddled haze lessening.
But the hallow void beneath her opened its mouth and called to her, threatening to swallow her whole.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” The skinny preacher mumbled.
For the most part, the sky remained clear. The few scattered clouds resembled claw marks as if God, if there was one, was desperately trying to scratch his way in. Or perhaps, out.
(Excerpt from a CD-W novel)
photo credit
via Tardy
The Truth Bites Like a Ratt’ler
Dad’s ignoring me as usual, but I guess that’s better than a slap on my face. Mother dries off the breakfast skillet, picks up a fussy Delma, and says, “Cono, yer goin’ te town this weekend te sleep over at Mamaw’s.”
“How come?” I ask.
“Aunt Marguerite and Aunt Eva are there. They wanna see ye.”
Well, I can see all the way down to the truth, and it feels like I’ve swallered a ratt’ler. Dad’s still mad that I’d bitten that toothbrush in two and doesn’t want me around. I don’t want to be around him either.
Still, I don’t want to go. I like Dad’s sisters well enough, but I want to stay here with baby Delma.
Mamaw, Dad’s mother, is the toughest grandma I know. It would be a whole lot easier if I just ran away and caught a train to somewhere else. As I sit on that idea like a chicken warming her eggs. I decide against it. Everybody says that the trains are filled with starving hobos on their way to California. They say they like to eat children under the age of twelve. I’m afraid they’d eat me too even though I’m little and skinny.
I guess I have to go.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper
via Age
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Feel Each Day Divine
The years are not your gremlins
but merely passing times
so spend them wisely
grow and learn
and feel each day divine
Happy Thanks-Day, everyone!
#feelinggrateful
via Gremlins
Carolyn Dennis-Willingham 