Haley, Texas 1959 - Hardcover

Watt, Donley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0938317482 ISBN 13: 9780938317487

Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press, 1999

Synopsis

It's East Texas in the 1950's, somewhere between the sand hills of that region and the black gumbo soil of Central Texas, a place where the disparate faces of rural America live and breathe-the solid ethics of work and religion are set over and against the open wounds of prejudice and bigotry.

Haley, Texas 1959 is about that place and time. It contains two novellas: imaginative shapings and interweavings of events, both invented and actual, that occurred when Donley Watt was growing up.

In the novella Seven Days Working, an older man recalls his own childhood and an impossible task he was given by his father when he was 14-to clear out 70 acres of mesquite, using an axe. The way the boy sees it, he'll never finish. He has only seven days and during that time-camping out alone in the pasture with a dozen brindle cows, some lizards, frogs, rabbits and a lot of flies for company-he strikes at the trunks of those thorny, unyielding trees even as he hacks through the rough places in his own understanding. The boy has the task of clearing mesquite, while the man, recalling, uses the memory to get at the root of who he is. God, death, women, his family, why he is always restless, always hungry to move on-these are the issues the man wrestles with as he meditates on and sifts through each one of those long boyhood days, one day at a time.

In the title novella-Haley, Texas 1959-Watt uses the intense racial prejudices of a small town in East Texas to paint the backdrop for the murder of a black man. A young teenage boy-the "preacher's boy" as he is referred to-is an unwitting accomplice. He's bored. His older cousin lets him tag along as he and two rowdy friends cruise the back roads in a '55 Chevy. What starts out as a joy ride-a chance to have a little fun and teach a black man a "much-deserved" lesson-quickly turns deadly. The boy's father, Reverend Wallace Wilson, is called in after the murder to help bring about a softening of hearts between the white and black community, little suspecting that his own son is involved. When the boy finally confesses to the truth, his father looks desperately for a solution that will fall outside the bounds of punishment and ruined lives-yet finds himself

About this title

From the Back Cover

"When Donley Watt, or any of his characters, says, 'Listen to my story,' we'd best attend. A fine offering from a natural-born storyteller, Haley, Texas 1959 is original and honest, gritty, wise." (Janet Peery)

"It's easy to forget that nostalgia at its roots means the pain of going home, that it is memory unrevised by sentimentality. Donley Watt, in honest and graceful prose, takes us back to a time in Texas that was both idyllic and agonizing. The seeming simplicity of the forties and fifties, undercut by violent racism and the muted emotions of family life, is faced without compromise in this brave and beautiful book." (Rick de Marinis)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From SEVEN DAYS WORKING: One Monday in June, the summer I turned fourteen, Daddy drove me over to a seventy-acre pasture he owned in Navarro County. He maneuvered our 1950 Ford sedan down a weed- ridden, double-rut road that led from a barbed wire gap on the north side of the land to a barbed wire gap on the south. This seventy acres was choke-full of second-growth mesquite trees. Daddy steered wide of the lacy leafed trees with their tire-spiking thorns. He guided the Ford off the road, easing it across the pasture and to a stop under a bois d'arc grove at the south fence line.

"Dadgum mesquites," he said. He pushed open the lid of a tin of tobacco with his thumb, filled his pipe. He clenched it in his jaw, but didn't light it. "Donnie, I want you to wipe 'em out." He looked over at me, a skeptical look as I remember it. I gazed across the field of trees; they seemed to go on forever. "All of them?" I asked. "If you don't get them all, it won't do any good. They'll come right back. A waste of time is all it'll be." Daddy took a kitchen match from a box he kept on the seat beside him, dragged the blue tip across the sandpaper side of the box until the match flared. He lit his pipe, sucked on the stem two or three times until the tobacco glowed red hot, then pulled his wrist watch with its broken band out of the top pocket of his khaki shirt. He held it out and leaned back so he could read it. He shook his head. "Wasted most of a day already," he said. "You better get to work." And I stepped out into the heat and the glare of the Texas sun to begin seven days of work. I didn't realize it then, but I was a poor third choice to fight the mesquite battle. For in 1954 there were a couple of more conventional ways to deal with those invasive, pesky trees. Both smacked of warfare: You could root-plow your field: hire a big dozer that dragged a row of two-foot long dagger-like plows behind. This took care of the mesquite, but the big Cat churned up everything in its path. It lay waste to your topsoil, burying it under waves of heavy clay and gravel. After root-plowing a field took on the characteristics of the bombed-out strip of ground along the 38th parallel, that sorry piece of land that divided what had just become the two Koreas. The second technique cost just as much, but was quicker. You could hire a wired-together biplane owned by an almost-ace WWII pilot who lived out towards Chatfield. He would, in a few swooping passes, dump enough herbicide on your place from his stubby yellow plane to frizzle every plant that dared to wave a green leaf. Both of these methods took big bucks, and Daddy's cow-and-pasture math at its most optimistic couldn't justify the cost. Besides, quite simply, he didn't have the money. But he had me. And I was cheap.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0938317482
• ISBN 13: 9780938317487
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192