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| Creative Writing Faculty |
Wells Teague
wteague@austincc.edu
Wells Teague has been a caterer, band director, home builder, commercial construction superintendent, consultant, free lance writer, editor, French horn player and bureaucrat; and once caught a four-pound bass. One of his daughters is an anthropologist working among Guatemalan Mayas. The other daughter attends
Teague’s accomplishments are not nearly so grand.
ONCE WHILE TWINING
Once while twining
I went to whining
foretelling my calamities.
To wear my tears was not my intent
but along the river bank I went.
Came I upon a dog
who’d ingested a bright green frog.
This dog it glowed
it positively did
and hid itself beneath a lid.
Then I found a goose
Old Priam had let it loose.
Of all its feathers
it had none
so it cooked beneath the sun.
GOLDEN RETRIEVER
I once ran over a Golden Retriever
killed it still and sodden.
It jumped too quick for me
too quick for its man who ran beside
the man jogged two steps sideways to miss a post
his dog jumped off the curb to miss the man
in perfect order.
It was far beneath the undercarriage
when into that terrible cave I looked.
Then I climbed back in to back away
from this death’s eyeblink.
We stood eye to eye this man and I
I told him I was sorry
(I knew how much dogs could mean)
I took into my blame his.
But he would not take it.
He reached down
bound up his hands in that lush fur
that fluffing fur
that he’d trained so well
lifted the body
as heavy as a child’s
turned and dropped it beyond a rail
to the river beneath our bridge.
He jogged on out of light
and I crossed over.
Behind me traffic had built and stalled.
Now it came on silent
like something turned loose.
SENILE
Come back to see me. The yard will be cleaned up the next time. Forley Mason said he would come on Monday to mow. He didn’t come Monday, so I guess he’ll be along any time. The beans here in this bed are from some my daughter brought me last summer. They have a wheat farm, and then they always keep a garden. She has a boy and a girl. The boy is going to start school this fall. She won’t bring them to see me. I wasn’t in good health as she was growing up, and I was out of my head some of the time, and she’s still scared. She has a good man. He takes care of her, though he has a heart problem now, she says. I don’t know what she’ll do if he dies. And she doesn’t know what she’ll do about me, in a few years. You can tell she worries about that. We all worry about that. I remember my parents. Dad had sugar diabetes, and they didn’t have any help for it in the twenties. We had to let them take his leg off, and he gave up after that. We were living on the Plains and I had to come down to Brownwood to help take care of him. After he died, Mama went to stay with my brother Hath, who was a bachelor. She lived with him nineteen years. That like to have driven him crazy. He shot himself, finally, but that was long after she died. So Lillie knows that. She knew her grandmother, and she knows Mama was part of the reasons I about worried myself crazy, but that doesn’t change things when she has to think about her children. I try not to bother her. Christmas she called and asked me to come up on the bus. I knew she didn’t really want me, but she didn’t want to just leave me alone at Christmas. I told her I hadn’t ever asked anybody for a free meal and wasn’t starting with her. I said that to take some of the responsibility off her. It made her mad, and I think kept her from feeling guilty. What I’m afraid of is that the crazy is inherited and that she will have it too. It didn’t show up in Mama until she was seventy, and I had that spell several years back, though I’m all right now. Lillie has a sensitive nature, and they say people like that is more likely to have problems. There is some around here that seems to have caught it. Some of them I won’t have on the place. There is an old man lives beside the water tower who comes by here, used to. Said he just wanted to see if there was anything I needed, that he knew I was by myself. He wanted to know if I wanted to go into town, he said he was going to do some shopping. You knew what he wanted. He wanted to get me out of the house so his gang of thieves could do their dirty work. You read the papers, you know it’s happening all around. McBride is his name, or what he calls himself. He had put wires in my attic to listen to what I’m saying. He has radios set up so that he can contact any of his gang that is close by and someone will be here the minute I leave to steal everything I own. I haven’t left the house in over six months. There is a woman brings me groceries, I’ve known her since we both lived on the Plains. That is Belle, who knows what it is to work hard for what you have and then have it stolen. She married Don Baxter, and in 1964 he run off with Edith Mason who had the café in Trenton. He was fifty years old and she hasn’t heard from him since. She works in the school cafeteria and it has her worried to death that she is going to come home one day and everything she has will be gone.
Forley Mason drives the egg truck, and every Monday he asks about my daughter. He was born on a wheat farm and so likes to keep a garden. Sometimes he works at the school. He is a good man. He used to have a café in Trenton. Something happened to it and he is discouraged. He grows beans and tomatoes in his garden, and he says if it wasn’t for that he doesn’t know how he would get by. He goes with a woman he met at the school. She dresses fit to kill and wears too much lipstick. They tried to fire her at the school but she claimed her civil rights. When Forley Mason asks about my daughter I never know what to tell him. He used to go with her when she was in high school and then one day she broke up with him, and he doesn’t know why to this day. Lillie broke his heart, it seems to me. Forley never has been much good since then. He started running with a pack of thieves and they were arrested breaking into the dry goods store here in Maravillas. And he was caught with a stolen radio, the two-way kind that comes out of an oil-field truck. He never would say what he was going to do with it. The man he stole it from, John McBride, is one of the boys I grew up with on the Plains, and he says Forley Mason is rotten through and through. Bill McBride is one of the most upstanding men I have ever known and I trust his judgment. He knew my son, who I lost in a hunting accident a few years back. They were good friends. Hath had never married, and lived here with me. He went hunting alone one morning in May of 1967, and when he climbed through a fence the gun went off and killed him.
I hear people say they can’t stand it when some of their family is dying, but I tell them they have to stand it, they don’t have any other choice. I’ve lost enough of my people to be an authority. There isn’t anybody left. There is Lillie, that I haven’t seen since Dad died in 1934. She is in a rest home in Fort Worth and doesn’t know anybody. She is the only one. She doesn’t even know Hath is dead. I haven’t seen her in several years. She was close to Hath, although she was the oldest of us seven and Hath was the youngest. I’ve had them die from lung cancer, that is John Samuel who was next to Hath, and from heart trouble, that was Mason Saul. Mason said to me one time that it didn’t seem as if you ought to die first if you weren’t the oldest. He had just paid for his farm, and Lillie tried to carry on, but she had to sell it out, twelve hundred acres of wheat is too much for one woman. They had one son, who was three when Mason died. They named him after Mason and after Lillie’s daddy, Forley McBride. The other sister was Belle. She died of a hemorrhage while she was running off with the Baxter boy in 1926. He found her dead in bed their first morning and instead of calling the authorities he put her in the back of his Plymouth and brought her back home. So that’s all of them, they are all dead. I’m the last one. A year ago there was two men come through here tried to make like I was some of their family. But I knew them. I had seen them working somewhere sometime. Their faces were familiar, like your mailman’s gets to be. If I hadn’t know them I might not have been suspicious and they would have stolen everything I have.