Free Chinaberry Sidewalks by Rodney Crowell Page B

stricken in Iola’s presence. Yet on this matter she was given a reprieve, less than two weeks into their marriage, when my father fell sick with rheumatic fever.
    “It was the first time I had my husband to myself,” she said. “Iola didn’t want nothin’ to do with him while he was sick. I never understood that. But I was glad she didn’t. He was so bad off. I took care of him day and night. His poor balls swelled up till we thought they was gonna bust open. They hurt him real bad. He run a temperature round the clock. When he started gettin’ a little better, we got him some crutches and started goin’ off by ourselves in the woods. It was some of the best times I ever had with your daddy. We talked and talked back then. He was so sick and handsome, and he was such a sweet boy once you got him away from Iola. I was so in love with him I coulda just died. I didn’t realize it till a long time later, but I didn’t have a single one of my spells while he was sick. I didn’t have time to. The next one I did have like to’ve killed me.”
    After my father had recovered enough strength to go back to work on the farm, my mother’s greatest fear was made real: an attack with only Iola present to care for her. “ ‘Send for Momma’ is what I kept tellin’ her when I felt it comin’ on,” she explained, “but she just kept lookin’ at me like I was a knot on a log. She ran and fetched your daddy is what she did.” When they returned, my mother was lying semiconscious on the kitchen floor, the worst of the convulsions having passed. By her estimation, it was the closest he ever came to witnessing firsthand the hideousness of her affliction.
    Two days later, Cauzette was back living with her mother and father, an arrangement that lasted into the summer of 1943. My father worked Monday through mid-Saturday on his father’s farm, then would ride a mule fifteen miles to spend Saturday night and all of Sunday with my mother. At three-thirty on Monday morning, he’d get up in order to be back at work by daybreak.
    In August the couple went in search of a new life. First stop: a one-room log cabin near Paris, Tennessee. My father found work as a butcher’s apprentice, and by late fall they were living in a boardinghouse in Murray, Kentucky, where he was on the evening shift at the Tappan stove factory.
    The previous fall and winter, my mother had experienced two failed pregnancies. “I couldn’t seem to carry a baby no more than fifteen minutes,” she told me. “And your daddy swore up and down I was losin’ ’em on purpose.” But she did finally manage to complete a full-term pregnancy, and Tex Edward was born on January 27, 1944. He died thirty-seven hours later.
    Staring into some vacant yet familiar dreamscape, where the sharp pain of thirteen miscarriages is softened by visions of a heavenly playground for lost children, my mother, sifting through fractured images that documented her baby’s all too brief passage through this world, introduced me to my brother time and again. “Oh, he was beautiful, Rodney. He had a full head of curly black hair and the bluest eyes you ever seen. While I only got to hold him for a minute or two, I can still feel him to this day. They had me knocked out most of the time, but I could hear him cryin’ off in the next room. They said I almost died, too, and for a long time I wished I had. They never brought him back and nobody told me nothin’.”
    My parents dutifully accepted no explanation as the official cause of their baby’s death. Years later, my mother admitted that at the time she’d never even heard of any such thing as a valid death certificate. So Tex Edward was buried in the Shady Grove Cemetery, and for fifty-three years the grave site was marked with a single red brick.
    As a boy, I accepted the vagueness surrounding my brother’s death much as we recognize poetic license as an accepted contrivance in the shaping of family myth, and I suspended my