In 2017 a late February fire burned in Tulia, Texas, the town on the south plains of the Panhandle where I was born. A friend went to Rosehill Cemetery there, where my parents and four grandparents, my brother, two aunts, and two uncles are buried. She told me the Musick and Curry graves were spared. Seven Februarys later, Rosehill was once again spared, but most of the Panhandle from Amarillo up to southwestern Oklahoma was aflame. Fires burning on the north plains since February 27 turned ranchlands and farmlands into its own kind of graveyard.
My grandparents buried their son in the Rosehill cemetery, established just south of the cotton gin in Tulia. After Kirby’s headstone was erected MaMaw and DaDa planted bushes on either side of the granite. Because green is not the native color of that land and must be bought at a price, my grandparents hauled water in the bed of their pickup to keep the plants alive. It was heavy work, hard work, the only kind of work they knew. They pumped water from the ground and hauled water and poured water, counting each drop. A drawn bath was a shared bath, first one, then the other, then the other, until all were washed. Washed when my father and his siblings were small, with lye soap my grandmother cooked in a black iron pot over an open fire. I thought it was nasty, sitting in used bath water. I knew nothing. I knew nothing of their long labor, nothing of its cost. But they, drought driven from one failed farm to another in the long decade of the 1930’s, they knew. Water was not to be wasted, for water meant life.
The cemetery sits on a slight rise, from which mourners can watch the traffic on the Plainview Highway. It’s a local road, not part of the late 20th century interstate bypassing Tulia, and my grandparents might stop their weeding and watering to comment on a friend headed south, perhaps to Lubbock, or turning west to Nazareth. Then they would turn again to the rough, buffalo grass-covered plot. I think they, born to farming, needed to put in some crop on the land where their son, who meant to farm the land long before he lay in it, was now himself planted. He died in battle, on other fields, far from home.
They could haul water, just enough to keep the bushes alive in summers so hot water mirages rise from the melting pavement, just enough to help them set roots as anchor in the winter blizzards. But about the wind, the sculpting wind, the battering wind, the killing wind, the driving wind, they could do nothing. They knew what all people who live in the high desert and south plains of the Texas Panhandle know; the wind cannot be mastered. The wind must be endured.
Trees planted there are wind shaped, west winds bending the canopies east. When I was a child I thought these stunted elms and cottonwoods looked like dancers in a chorus, their arms reaching up, in unison, and then reaching out, in unison, east to Oklahoma and beyond. Now I see the trees are bent down, not dancing, bowing, as if in obeisance to the greater power, to the master of the land.
These trees, for the most part, did not just come up. They were planted, as my grandparents planted the green flanking my uncle’s dun grave. The trees were planted by hand, watered by hand. Windbreaks, mostly, to protect the house and the barn from the tempests. I remember when my uncle planted rows of Russian Olive trees, woody shrubs, fast growing and dense enough to protect fields from the gales plowing up the soil and the seed and the first tender growth and tossing it all away. And that’s what I think of when I see the pictures of the blackened trees, ghostly silhouettes now of windbreaks around Canadian and Pampa, Borger and Fritch. I think of my grandparents at Rosehill Cemetery. I think of my uncle on the farm digging the holes, putting the seedlings in the holes, filling in the holes, fashioning the earthen dam all-round the slender trunks to hold in the water. And then, the watering, all by hand. My uncle could tell you when he planted each tree, speaking of each as one might speak of a prized animal. For trees are prized out there, valuable enough to merit the most valuable of all, water.
Too little water, too much wind, too much heat. There was no reprieve for the north plains of Texas this week. All the work, all ashes. I am grieving the place that shaped me as its winds shape the trees.
It is a hard land. Farmers and ranchers wrest their living from that land, a land so easily taken: by drought, by wind, by fire. People cut their fences this week, to let the animals run for their lives. Now comes the reckoning, shooting the burned and dying cattle and horses, burying the burned and dead cattle and horses. Making the decision to move to Dallas to be near the kids or deciding to stay and rebuild. Deciding, as farmers and ranchers in that hard, sky swept land have done in so many seasons, to begin again.
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