THE BOOK OF EULA MAE

Chapters One and Two, plus the opening of Chapter Three (draft)

CHAPTER ONEThe Shoes of Eula Mae

Every family has one story that tells you who a person really is. In ours, it’s about a pair of shoes.

But a story like that doesn’t start with the shoes. It starts with a woman, a house, and a long stretch of road she had to walk before anyone knew she was limping.

Her name is Eula Mae. She was born a Fairless, on November 27, 1934, at home, in America, Oklahoma, in McCurtain County. As Teresa understands it, her father, Walter Henry Fairless, liked the name and wanted it for her, and she called her own mother, Paulina Angie White Fairless, Mama. A man named David called her Becky, though as Mom tells it, he called every woman who walked into that house Becky. Granny called her Eula Mae. An aunt named Trella called her Eukie, which made her mad. Some of the Kelley cousins called her Becky Freckles, as Pam remembers it. Her four daughters called her only one thing, and they have never stopped.

They called her Mother.

Before she was Mother, she was somebody’s daughter, and her people are worth meeting.

Her mother, Paulina Angie White, was born December 17, 1907, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Teresa says most people called her Granny, or Pauline, though her own father, Grandpa White, said Paulanna. To us grandkids she was Little Granny. By Teresa’s measure she stood about four feet ten and was one of the hardest-working women she ever saw. She had a good sense of humor, loved history, and had a memory Teresa calls amazing: she could tell you the date, who was there, and what everyone was wearing. She listened to the news on a little radio in the kitchen while she cooked breakfast. She got that habit from her own father, William Thomas White, who stayed on top of what was going on in the nation and once wrote a Senator. The family also remembers a trail in the mountains of New Mexico that carries his name, the Willie White Trail, and Teresa confirms it is named for him. She says he is buried in Haworth Cemetery. Teresa says that she can remember going to that trail only once, when she was probably about ten. Pam adds that Willie homesteaded land south of Cloudcroft in Otero County, New Mexico, which later became known as Willie White Canyon, and that today there are popular hiking trails and marked trailheads off Upper Rio Penasco Road. Little Granny kept a vegetable garden every year, weed free and perfectly straight, and that, Teresa says, is where Mother’s love of gardening comes from.

Her father, Walter Henry Fairless, was born May 1, 1907, in Denison, Texas, and died October 12, 1952, before Teresa was born. Teresa describes him as a quiet man and a hard worker who lived for his family, a cigarette smoker who played the guitar. He and his brother, Uncle Jim, played the fiddle at home dances. Walter and Paulina were both twenty-one when they married in Childress, Texas. They had met working the cotton fields around Paducah. Soon after the wedding, Walter’s father, Ortie Orlando Fairless, left West Texas for Oklahoma, and Walter and Paulina followed. Teresa says Granny cried when she got there, because she thought she had reached “the jumping off place of the world.”

The house stood on 12th Street, and it held four girls: Teresa, the eldest, then my mom, Sheila Gail, then Pam, then Donna.

Teresa remembers that house as small. A living room with a couch, a TV and a picture window on the south wall, and opposite it a wall furnace, the only source of heat in the house. In winter they hovered close to it to get warm. In her words: “The house was small but full of love, all we had was each other.”

Teresa has one more picture of that house. In the living room stood an upright freezer, and she remembers that once, during a game of hide and seek, someone climbed up on top of it to hide. She laughs that she can’t remember who. Pam says she believes she hid on top of the freezer a few times playing hide and seek, so it may well have been her. I will still check with Mom.

They were poor, and barely getting by on the Social Security checks that came in. Teresa says Daddy, Don Stephens, bought that house just before he died, and without it she doesn’t know what would have happened to them. They might have had to move to Oklahoma for survival’s sake.

Pam remembers that tiny house as a full one. In the years between Daddy’s death and Mother’s second marriage, relatives kept moving back and forth between Oklahoma and West Texas, coming to look for work. Mother let them stay with the family until they could get a check or two and find a place to live. Pam remembers Uncle Jay and his family, Allon Fairless, and of course Aunt Margie and her boys, and says there were probably others.

And then there were the smells coming out of Mother’s kitchen: fried chicken, bacon, cakes and pies. “Mother was a gifted homemaker and could cook like a dream.” Teresa remembers lots of fried chicken and pinto beans, and jelly rolls she loved. Mother made a dessert called “devil dogs.” They were poor, but they “never ever lacked for good food to eat.”

Teresa told me more about the sweets when I asked. The devil dogs, she says, were a miniature chocolate cake made into a sandwich with cream filling between, not a cookie but a cake texture, kind of like a round Twinkie, only chocolate. She loved the jelly rolls, and she loved Mother’s date nut roll then and still does. Others liked Mother’s chocolate cake and orange pound cake, and Teresa loved her hickory nut cake. She doesn’t remember why Mother made certain cakes. She just knows she ate the heck out of them.

Teresa was the one who noticed. Children notice what grown people miss, though they rarely say so:

“I can remember Mother walking with a kind of shuffle, sliding her feet rather than picking them up for their next step. I noticed that as a kid but never said anything.”

Notice what she did with it. By her own account, she said nothing. Why, I can’t say. I only know the memory stayed with her, the way a stone stays in a pocket.

Mother shuffled, and Mother was Mother, and the world is full of things that simply are.

To understand the shoes, you have to understand what stood behind them. And that begins with a man named Don Stephens.

I never met him. None of the grandchildren did. He was Mother’s husband and the father of her children, and he died before any of us grandchildren were born. Mom was small when it happened. What she keeps from that house is not the loss itself. It’s the noise before it.

A pillow fight in the bedroom. Three girls and a bedroom. And a father who “came in and told us to calm down.”

That is where I first meet Don Stephens: one sentence from a man who has never spoken to me. It’s enough to know he was in the room.

Pam adds where it began. Mother and Daddy were married on August 11, 1951, in Ashdown, Arkansas, in a cabinet shop. She was sixteen and he was eighteen.

Mom also remembers a phone call, and a ride. The girls piled into the back of a yellow and white pickup truck, and Mother, “of course pregnant,” was “zipping around corners” with all of them sliding around in the truck bed, on the way to the hospital.

Teresa was eight when Daddy died, and she keeps only vague memories of him. He worked on a rig, the only job she ever heard that he had. The full account of what happened that day belongs to her cousin Larry Ridge, and I will ask him for it before this book is final.

Teresa remembers it this way. After Mother was told, she loaded the girls into the yellow and white pickup and drove frantically to the house of Daddy’s sister, Aunt Clara. The girls stayed there while Mother drove on to the hospital. She was gone about four hours. Then she came back to Aunt Clara’s and told them Daddy had died. She was in horrible shock. Teresa remembers her big and pregnant, lying across the bed, grieving so badly she could hardly function, and being so scared that Mother was going to die too.

Mom remembers the same yellow and white pickup and the same frantic drive. When I asked her again, she said the ride ended at Aunt Clara’s, which matches Teresa. Each of them carries that day in their own way. Teresa adds that her only memory of it is being at Aunt Clara’s, and that so many years have passed.

Teresa calls it one of the darkest times of Mother’s life. Three girls to take care of, a baby soon to be born, and no idea how she would keep the house or put food on the table. “It was heartbreaking.”

For Teresa, the worst came after the funeral, on the first day back home. She says her heart shattered into a million pieces, knowing she would never see her Daddy again. It was so painful she could hardly bear it, and she would go outside and cry.

Donna puts his death in April 1962, and thinks it was the 16th. She was born the next month, on May 14, and never had the chance to know him. The newspaper clipping Teresa found appears to say he was twenty-eight and that his funeral was held at the Nazarene Church in Denver City, and I will confirm that before this book is final.

What I do know is this. After Don Stephens died, a woman stood in that house with young children and a great deal to figure out.

Here is where the legend of the shoes begins to make sense.

As I read it, Mother didn’t have a plan, and she didn’t have a fortune. What she had was a family. Mom says it simply: “She had help from granny.”

She also had paperwork, and paperwork, in those days, in that part of Texas, was its own battlefield. As Mom tells it, a Social Security representative began coming to the library in town, once or twice a month, and Mother applied for Social Security cards for all four girls. All four were approved.

Pam adds what that paperwork meant in practice. As she understands it, in those days a widowed woman had to file for legal custody of her own children before any claim for benefits could be filed, Social Security included, and that took time. In the meantime, a local grocery store let Mother charge groceries on account until money started coming in to pay for them.

And Mom gave me a number that I think about often. As she remembers it, an insurance check came from her father’s employer, “for like 10 or 20 bucks a month.” Once a year, the rep from the company sent a Christmas card, “just wondering how we were.”

Ask anyone what ten dollars a month buys, and they will tell you it buys less than it sounds. Mom says it herself in a sentence I will carry the rest of my life: “It wasn’t enough to live on but we made it.”

How does a woman make it with money like that?

She works.

Mom describes her mother’s ordinary day this way: “Her normal day was to be at home … Go to the post office, go around town paying her bills.” That’s the part the girls saw. A mother on errands, a house kept running, the bills paid, the day done.

The rest of it happened at the edges of that day. She waited tables at a cafe. She watched other people’s children. She worked at a bar, and Mom believes she did it “for cash … so she could keep her social security.”

It makes a person think about the sums. A mother of four, a small check, a cafe, a bar, other people’s children, and food on the table in a house on 12th Street. If she ever put a word of that work on the table with the food, nobody has told me.

Mom said what her mother must have gone without: “I’m sure everything … I’m sure it was a lot.”

Teresa remembers one thing Mother looked forward to after Daddy died, when there was nothing else to look forward to: bowling. She bowled on the league, and Teresa says one year Mother and her best friend, Helen Moore, won the tournament, and their pictures were published in the paper.

Pam remembers the rest of her social life on 12th Street. Mother was a bit of an introvert, but she tried. She kept a small circle of close friends, especially Helen Moore, and Pam remembers being along when she dropped in to visit several women. Mother also joined the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, in the women’s auxiliary called the Rebekahs, and Pam remembers going to meetings with her and waiting outside or in the small lobby. Once, for some fancy event, Mother worked for weeks sewing a long dress, what the girls called a “formal.” Another time, the children took part in a Mother’s Day program where they sang a song and held up letters spelling M-O-T-H-E-R, “M is for the many things she gave me.”

Now you can see the shoes.

Four girls needed things, and a mother has one budget. As I read it, she looked at what the family had and at what it needed, and she took the thing she could do without, which was herself. The soles on her shoes came loose, and she walked on them. She slid her feet so the soles wouldn’t catch. She had the girls, and the girls had what they needed.

Teresa was grown before she learned the truth, and she tells it better than I can:

“Many years later after we were grown, Mother mentioned that, and the reason she didn’t pick up her feet when she walked was because the soles were loose on her shoes. Mother was always a very sacrificial person especially when it comes to her family.”

There it is, the whole legend in two sentences. Some people are remembered for swords and crowns. My grandmother is known in this family for soles worn loose so four girls could have what they needed. She has never asked for a song. She mentioned it in passing, years later, the way you mention the weather.

When I asked Mom what she was like, she didn’t give me a list. She gave me this: “She was just mother. She was always there taking care of us.”

I think that’s the truest thing anyone has said about her so far, and it’s the reason I’m writing this book.

Ask Teresa for three words to describe her mother and she gives you these: hard worker, creative, sacrificial. Keep them in your pocket. You will see all three.

There was also Danny, and his place belongs in this story.

He came between Pam and Donna. Donna wasn’t here yet, and she says so plainly: she knows it because she was told. But Mom has told it many times, and her account agrees with Donna’s. Danny was born with hydrocephalus and spina bifida, and he lived only about three months. As Donna understands it, he died of spina bifida.

That was all I had at first, and I won’t invent more than the family gives me. I know he was Mother’s son, that she lost him, and that Mom still tells it. He is in this book because he happened.

Pam has since given me her own memory of him. Danny was born with spina bifida and was paralyzed from the waist down. It was fall, and the flu was going around. Mother and Danny both got sick, and Danny did not survive. Her account and Donna’s differ on some of the details, and I will leave it to the family to settle them.

Pam has since found a copy of Danny’s death certificate. It gives the cause of death as bronchopneumonia and dehydration, with congenital spina bifida and congenital hydrocephalus as contributing factors. She hadn’t remembered that the flu turned into pneumonia until she looked back at it. It agrees with both Pam and Donna about what he was born with. Teresa has given me his dates: Danny was born October 13, 1959, and died January 28, 1960.

One last thing before I close this chapter, because the story of the shoes is not the story of a woman who stayed alone.

Another man was coming into the picture. Mom says of him, “He was a wonderful man. He could not have ever been a better father.” The grandkids all called him Grandpa. But he belongs to another chapter, and he will get one, because he earned it.

For now, I want to stay a little longer with a woman walking down a street in shoes that were coming apart, sliding her feet along the ground, so the soles wouldn’t catch.

CHAPTER TWOThe Bigger Table

West Texas did not smell good. Mom is plain about it. The only time the air turned sweet was after a heavy fog or a fair rain. The rest of the time it smelled like dirt, and somewhere past the edge of town, like the oil fields.

Teresa remembers the wind. In the early years, she says, it blew to beat ninety. She remembers playing outside in one of those famous sandstorms, the sand stinging as it blew past, and the tumbleweeds, which still remind her of the old song “Rawhide.” Every Easter, she says, they had to fight the wind just to find the eggs, and it was miserable. As the years went by, farmers began planting cover crops on their land, and the sandstorms stopped being nearly as bad. And there were happy times. The thing she loved most as a child was swimming at the free swimming pool, and she says it is still free today.

That is the ground Eula Mae Fairless was handed. When the family first got the place on 12th Street, the brush had to be cleared, and under the brush was clay. Mom doesn’t dress it up:

“It was clay. It was horrible dirt. But I also remember mother planting flowers.”

The dirt was horrible, and she planted anyway. A yellow rose bush climbed beside the front door. Honeysuckle grew on the other side, by the girls’ bedroom. Irises ran along the east side of the house, and Mom says of them, “they smelled so good.” Carnations grew just to the left of the front step. Think about what kind of person looks at clay and sees a flower bed beside her front door.

Teresa says that when she asked Mother this week what she enjoyed most of everything she did, the answer was working in the yard. Mother loves flowers. Teresa can’t remember which of Mother’s flowers came first, only that they were awfully pretty.

Donna, the youngest, was too young to remember much of 12th Street. Her yard is the one at the house Grandma and Art had outside of town. There, in the blistering hot, dry West Texas weather, she says, her mother somehow got things to grow and to bloom. Giant chrysanthemums stood in the flowerbed behind the house, the kind that back in the day they made homecoming mums out of. A snowball bush, loaded with white clusters, grew as tall as the windows in front of Donna’s bedroom. There were peach trees, a cherry tree and an almond tree. Mint grew on the west side of the house, by a water faucet. And on the south-facing front, just outside a bedroom window, stood a huge lilac bush that Donna says smelled wonderful.

I notice what the two yards have in common, and I notice it the way Teresa once noticed the shoes. As far as anyone has told me, a woman with four girls and a small insurance check had little money to spare for beauty. She made it anyway, out of clay and out of time.

Then the road turned, and the man who turned it was named Art.

His name was Maurice Dee Arther, but everyone called him Art, short for Arther, and the grandkids, me among them, called him Grandpa. I promised you at the end of the last chapter that he would get his own pages. Here they are.

It began, of all places, in a bar. Here is how Donna tells the night they met, and she is careful to say it is what she thinks, not what she swears to. Grandma was working at Glen’s bar. Some of the men Art worked with kept trying to get him to go there with them. He refused over and over, because he really didn’t drink, and finally he gave in. Grandma was there. He asked her to go to supper, and she was hesitant, but she said she would go.

Donna isn’t sure whether they knew of each other beforehand. She thinks that was their first real conversation, and that he may have asked her more than once before she said yes. I like that part. A man who did not drink went into a bar he did not want to be in, and, if Donna remembers right that he asked more than once, he kept asking until he got his answer.

Teresa has her own account of how they came to meet. After Daddy died, she says, Mother was deeply depressed, and her sister, Aunt Margie, was desperate to get her out of the house. Aunt Margie worked at Glen’s bar, over in Lea County, New Mexico. One day Mother drove over just to get a Coke, and she took Donna with her. After she had done that a few times, Aunt Margie talked her into working there. It brought in extra money, and Teresa says it helped Mother mentally just to get out and be around people.

Then, as Teresa tells it, one fateful day Pop let some of his coworkers and friends talk him into going over to play some pool and have a beer, and there he met Mother. On the beer, Teresa and Donna remember him differently, since Donna says he really didn’t drink. My own memory is that he never drank around Grandma, and the only beer I ever saw him have, maybe one in several years, was out on a construction project. Teresa is plain about the rest. Pop was separated from his wife when they met. That marriage was long over, she had moved on, and all that was left was signing the papers, which they did.

Pam has her own detail from that first date. When Mother finally said yes to supper, Art realized he had come to the bar with his friends and had no car with him. They had to take Mother’s car.

Teresa says she didn’t pray back then, but Pop was surely a Godsend, the answer to a prayer. He was unlike any other man: patient, caring and compassionate, full of wisdom, and he showed them what a man was supposed to look like. He was a mentor to many, a confidant to many, and he helped anyone who needed help. In her words, he was the greatest man they ever knew, and it was a devastating loss to all of them when he went home to be with Jesus. “He made a mark on all our lives.”

Teresa calls the day Mother married Pop one of the happiest of her life. Her life forever changed, she says, with many, many years of highs and, of course, a few lows, and she wishes she could go back to that for just an hour, to see Mother smiling and so happy. Mother always dressed very nice back then, Teresa says. She had great style and went to the beauty shop weekly to get her hair styled. And Teresa remembers Pop picking on Mother, and the two of them laughing real big.

What I can give you is what came before him. Mom was six when Don Stephens died, and until Art came along, Grandma had Granny’s help, a small check, and a pair of shoes with the soles coming loose.

You have already read Mom’s verdict on him: “He was a wonderful man. He could not have ever been a better father.” Here is some of the evidence.

Art’s business was Arther Electric. Mom says he used a Ditch Witch in his work, and that most of his work was for Shell Oil Company. Donna says he got his training at Coyne Electrical College in Chicago. At the holidays, Mom says, Grandma and the girls made baskets for his clients, with chips and dips, cakes and cookies, and Mom says the dessert boxes mostly went to the Shell Oil people. Art was also the one in that house with sayings. The only one Mom can give me is “fiddlesticks.”

Teresa says Mother had no favorite sayings that she can remember. Most of the sayings came from Granny. One Teresa heard as a kid and thought was hilarious, said when someone got taken advantage of, was that they really got a shellacking on that deal.

And Art loved Nutter Butters. Donna remembers it because it was nearly the only store-bought sweet that ever came through the door. In a house where the banana cake, the chocolate cake and the caramel apples all came out of Grandma’s own kitchen, the Nutter Butters were for him. Donna says he loved them with bananas.

Donna’s favorite Art story is about a jacket.

Art got a bright orange puffer jacket from Ditch Witch. Donna liked it, so she was always wearing it. She kept backing up to the heater, and no matter how many times Art warned her not to get too close, she did. One day the puff melted and left horizontal vent marks.

“They both were furious at me.”

Now watch what Grandma does. Donna does not describe a new jacket bought, and she does not describe the old one thrown away. She describes this, in her words: “Mother searched until she found matching bright orange material and patched it, so he could still wear it.”

I have been looking for Eula Mae since the first page, and I think she is right there in that sentence. She is not standing on a pedestal. She is a woman with a needle who goes looking until she finds the right color. I think years of making do had turned into a skill, and now she was spending it on a man who loved Nutter Butters.

Donna says it in plainer words. Her mother only had an 8th grade education, she says, “but she could pretty much do whatever she tried to learn to do. I think all of us girls share that trait from her.”

She hung laundry on the clothes lines a lot, for many years. She had a dryer as well, but Donna guesses she liked the way the laundry smelled coming off the line, from being outdoors.

She baked for the family, and she also made wedding cakes and cakes for special occasions. Donna remembers one drive in particular. In her cake decorating days, Mother made a cake and drove it in the back of a station wagon all the way from Denver City to Albany, Texas, for the 60th anniversary of John and Hettie, Art’s parents, in 1977. They had been married since April 15, 1917. They were Sharron and Joy’s grandparents. Teresa remembers it as their 50th, but with the wedding in 1917, 1977 makes it the 60th, which is what Sharron told Donna. Teresa also remembers Mother and Pop putting the cake in the car to take to Albany.

Art came with daughters.

Joy and Sharron had a mother of their own, a woman whose name I’m saving until her family says I can share it, and Mom says they came to live with the family a little later. Sharron was Art’s eldest. Joy was the same age as Mom. Bedrooms were shared. Four girls became six.

I asked Mom how that went, and I expected a longer answer. “It was pretty easy,” she said. Mom says there were no hard feelings at all. They just had to get to know each other, and in the end, she says, they “ended up loving them.”

Teresa answers the question I asked about being a blended family. Like Mom said, she says, they had to get to know each other, and as they did it became a blessing. She calls it rare for stepsiblings to love each other as much as they do, and says they all get along fabulously. In her words: “we are all sisters and we are one great big family!”

On the phone with Mom, I said that Grandma always accepted everybody. “Yeah,” she said. “She always did.” My cousin Jennifer says it from the grandchildren’s side of the table. She cannot remember a moment of her childhood at Grandma’s house when she did not feel “safe or accepted.”

A woman who once gave up her own shoes did not find the table too crowded. She kept finding room. The family got bigger by two girls and one man, and the woman at the center of it went on baking, planting, and mending.

Teresa adds one more thing about the woman who married Pop. As a child, Mother says, she was so bashful you could hardly get a word out of her around other people or at school. She came out of her shell, so to speak, when she married him. She has always had an eye for detail, Teresa says, and nothing escaped it. Teresa’s verdict is that she would have made a good FBI agent.

In time, there would be land too. There would be a willow tree and a cow pond in a town the family calls DC, and a hundred acres in DeKalb, and a barn Mother and Art lived in while the house went up. That belongs to the next chapter.

CHAPTER THREEThe Land

I have told you about the shoes, and I have told you about the clay. Now the story reaches the part where the ground gets bigger.

The family keeps that part of her life in two places. DC is Denver City, Texas. DeKalb is a hundred acres, where Aunt Teresa lives today. Ask Jennifer, or ask me, about Grandma, and we go to one or the other.

My cousin Jennifer gave me her whole childhood in five short lines:

“I remember hiding under the willow tree. Swimming in the cow pond. Both DC. Exploring the woods. DeKalb.”

At DC, the way Mom tells it, there was a willow tree, and behind the house, across the driveway by the well house, a little dugout of a pond with a pipe to fill it. The kids swam in it. Donna says Art put fish in it, and she calls that “just a little memory.” Some memories are little because they were happy and nobody had to make a speech about them.

Donna remembers a small farm there too. Art grew alfalfa in two small fields and baled it for the few cows they had. He and Mother kept a little mini farm: chickens, ducks, guineas, turkeys, pigs and cows. They grew a garden for several years. Think about who this is. The same woman who once stretched a small monthly check now had animals in the yard and a garden coming up.

Teresa says some of the best years of Mother’s life were in Denver City. When she and Pop married, they bought a big, spacious house with plenty of room for a family as big as theirs. Mother especially loved that kitchen, with tons of cabinet space and lots of room to work and make all her delicious delicacies. Her most creative years were spent in that house, and Teresa says she was a totally fulfilled person, doing all the things she loved.

Mother was the ultimate homemaker, Teresa says, and nearly everything she did, she taught herself. She sewed, and made many of the girls’ clothes for years. She made flower arrangements and cakes, professionally, and Teresa remembers her making a corsage. She quilted, gardened and canned, and kept beautiful flower beds. She and Pop had animals, so the family ate fresh eggs, and beef and pork from their own cows and pigs. Mother loved to read, and she loved her special magazines, the ones on health tips, herbs and gardening, and the ones on homemaking, decorating and baking.

She so loved her family, and those years were full of activity. Six daughters, and always something going on at school, sports and the like. Weddings when the girls all married, and grandchildren being born. A trip to Europe that she and Pop took with Donna. She and Pop were active in their church, the Nazarene Church. There were Christmases and Thanksgivings and family gatherings. In Teresa’s words, “so much love and laughter filled that house there in Denver City.”

Teresa says the holidays were the happiest of it. When they all gathered, someone was always acting up or had something funny to tell, and the house was full of laughter, the smells of everyone’s favorite food, coffee going, and most of all love. The tradition she hopes keeps going down the family line came from Granny: everyone got a gift sack under the Christmas tree with their name on it, holding an apple, an orange, nuts and some candies.

Teresa asked Mother this week how she learned to sew, and Mother says she taught herself. Granny could sew too, and used the old time treadle sewing machine. Mother also made Teresa’s wedding dress. It was the day and age of the miniskirt, Teresa says, so her wedding dress was a mini dress, and she was stylin’. Another time Mother made her a special sweatshirt with her son Don’s football number on it. Don was named for Daddy, Don Stephens. Teresa says Mother made many other things too. Sitting there thinking, Teresa says Mother’s life reminds her of Forrest Gump, who had all kinds of occupations and could do nearly anything, and so could she.

Teresa says Mother likes it quiet. She doesn’t remember her humming or singing while she cooked, or listening to the radio, and Teresa says she and Billy drive Mother a little crazy, because the only time the TV is off at their house is when they go to bed. Granny liked it quiet too. The only time she listened to the radio, that Teresa knows of, was while fixing breakfast, when she listened to the news. She and Willie watched the news around noon and then turned the TV off, and watched it at night only when they had company. Teresa thinks the reason was that they believed in keeping busy, and knew that if you didn’t work hard, you were never going to have anything.

Teresa tells the story of Mother’s faith the way Mother told it to her. When Teresa was a toddler, Mother and Daddy lived in Sundown. Life was hard then, money was scarce and work seemed slow. Mother had a friend close by named Mrs. Carpenter, about the age of Mother’s own mother, who would stop and visit and invite her to church. One day Mother took Teresa along, and one particular Sunday at the First Baptist Church she walked forward and made a profession of faith, and she was baptized there too. As a girl, Teresa says, Mother had also gone to the Holiness church. After Sundown, Mother and Daddy moved to Denver City and lived some in Seminole, and for the most part Mother had no church for years. When Teresa was seven, the family lived across the street from the Nazarene Church that Mother and Pop would later join. Teresa went over because the pastor and his wife had children she played with, and she was in the Christmas program two years in a row. One year she was the Christmas Angel.

Teresa says she takes after Mother in that she believes in serving her family, whether her own or extended, and Mother always did. She learned to be saving and resourceful from watching Granny, and Granny’s daughters learned from their mother’s knee, and the girls learned from all of them. She doesn’t sew or do any kind of hand work. “I don’t do much of anything lol,” she says, “but I can make a buck stretch and food stretch and hopefully make my family and friends feel loved and valued. I enjoy giving when I have it to give, bringing cheer to the downcast, that’s what I do.”

Teresa doesn’t think she inherited many of Mother’s talents, but she says they share a love of gardening and flowers, as do her sons James and Don, and, she says, me. She isn’t the cook Mother is, but her boys, Don, James and Nick, all enjoyed her cooking and ate plenty of it, and they all know how to cook, and so do I. She thinks that goes down the Fairless side of the family. Tommy, Kenny and Eddie spent tons of hours with Granny, and she taught them a lot. Tommy was a wonderful cook, God rest his soul, Kenny is a dang good cook, Eddie can cook, and so can their cousin Walter Ray Fairless.

Then one day that chapter closed, and they packed everything up and moved down to DeKalb. Teresa remembers watching them drive off. Pop was about to get into his truck, and he turned around to look one last time at the place where their lives had been so happy. His eyes filled with tears and his lips had a bit of a quiver. Then he quickly turned around, got into the truck, and drove off, leaving it all behind.

Then there is DeKalb. Mom says they lived in the barn “forever,” and then they started building. Pam sets the picture straight. They moved to DeKalb about 1991, when all the daughters were married with families of their own, so it was only Mother and Art in the barn while the house went up. Donna says she married in October 1992, so I will confirm the year of the move. Mom says it the same way: they were all grown and gone from home while Mother and Art lived in the barn. They had first bought a hardware store on the main road through town, then a house a few blocks away, and it was a few years after that before they bought the 100 plus acres. When people came to visit there were plenty of extra beds, and places to sleep in the camper and in what was left of the original little house where they lived first after moving onto the land. Of the place itself, Mom says, “The land is gorgeous … The house is gorgeous.”

Teresa says there were happy times in DeKalb, but nothing compares to the years in Denver City. When they got down here, everybody was getting old. Granny’s and Willie’s health was going down, and the folks were aging as well. All their energy had been spent back in West Texas in happier times, and DeKalb became a place to take care of loved ones who were going downhill.

Us grandkids called her Little Granny. In her last years she had dementia and Alzheimer’s, and Mother took care of her. She passed away on February 23, 1998, according to Teresa, who says it was in Idabel and, as she understands it, from pneumonia. Pam says it was at the Idabel hospital. Teresa adds that it was McCurtain Memorial Hospital, the only hospital in Idabel. Mother’s place in DeKalb sits right by the Oklahoma border. Teresa and Pam both say Little Granny is buried at Bokhoma Cemetery.

The losses came one after another. First Willie, then Granny. Teresa says this Willie was Willie Elmer Friend, Granny’s second husband, and not her father, William Thomas White, whom people also called Willie. Mom confirms Willie Friend was Granny’s second husband. Uncle David had already passed when they moved. Teresa and Mom both say that was Mother’s brother, Walter David Fairless, born September 12, 1936, in Bokhoma, who died of a heart attack on November 11, 1991, at 55. Donna first remembered it as the 1970s, but she says that date could well be wrong. She remembers Art coming to school and getting her out of class to tell her of a death, and she now thinks that must have been David’s son, David Henry. Then Aunt Margie, then J.W. (Teresa says those are his initials, not short for a longer name, and that the family called him Jay; Mom says the same, that JW was just initials), and, to the family’s devastation, Pop. Then Henryetta, and now, Teresa says, the next generation is starting to go: Tommy died last January. So DeKalb has been full of sad times.

One of the happiest memories, the one everyone still talks about, is Christmas in the Barn. I don’t have that story yet, and I mean to ask for it. Pam thinks she has a copy of a letter Mom wrote about it, and she is going to look for it.

Mother was alone a lot in the DeKalb years, Teresa says, because Pop worked construction all over the United States and even in Jamaica. When he was going to be gone a long time, sometimes she went along. She spent time in Jamaica, Georgia, Alabama and Ohio. She really enjoyed Ohio, and she came home with a trailer load of things she had bought at estate sales. How she loved those sales, and the auctions.

At home in DeKalb, with Pop away, she stayed busy. She bush hogged, quilted, and wrote poems and short stories about her life. She refinished furniture and even installed the ceiling in her bedroom. In Teresa’s words, “there was just no limits to Mother’s creativeness and talents.” I would very much like to read those poems and stories.

My wife, Deanna, has her own DeKalb memory, and it is a quiet one. Early in the morning, at Grandma’s house in DeKalb, the two of them sat talking and drinking black coffee. Deanna came down there with me, and that is the memory she holds on to. I will let her tell you what they talked about when she tells me.

Mom says Grandma always accepted everybody. I think it looks like this up close: someone who was not born into the family, up early, with Grandma, over a cup of black coffee.

Coffee goes a long way back with her. Mother told Teresa she was around seven when she first had coffee. Her Mama and Daddy didn’t mind, and she said her daddy rolled his own cigarettes.

And Art, bless him, never got rid of anything. I have seen it myself, especially in DeKalb. I will come back to that, because a man like that deserves his own pages.

I don’t have the years yet, or who did which chores, and I won’t pretend to. I am collecting them from the women who lived it. What I do have is the shape. A woman who started with clay and a flower bed ended up with a pond, a pasture, a barn and a hundred acres. And when Jennifer remembers those places, the first thing she gives me is not how big they were. It is that she never felt anything but safe or accepted. That is the land I want to walk with you.