Tessie D

Hello, out there…

I suppose I should continue to tell you more about myself.

I’m in Texas. If you drew a dot in the dead center of the state — the part in the middle, away from any city, where it looks like nobody would live — that’s where I’m at.

There’s a small town in the middle of the state named after the capital of Ireland. If you go to that town and then drive another ten miles out into the country, that’s where I live. I think my parents only found our farm because they got lost one day, pulled over, and decided it was as good a place as any to put a house.

Our trailer house is okay. It’s a doublewide at the end of a caliche road. Behind the house is the pasture. When we first moved out to the farm, the front part was covered in mesquite trees, but Grandpa Bruce said underneath all that was “the good coastal.”

So one day, after sitting at the dining room table for months, Daddy decided to actually work. He got up in the morning and drove the tractor out into the field.

He’d come back to the house at lunch, his arms brown and caked in dirt and blood, his shirt torn. But to his credit, he did it. He cleared the field so we could grow hay, watermelons, cantaloupes, and peanuts.

He also decided that Annie and I could help him pick everything when we were out of school in the summer. I hated those summers. We’d get up at seven in the morning, go out into the field with him until it got too hot, and then come in for lunch. I’d lie down on the floor with my head against the air-conditioning vent, letting the cold air blow on my face. I could never get the house cool enough, so it was the best I could do.

But the farm is okay. I have a horse named Prince that Momma and Daddy bought me for my eleventh birthday. There’s also a pond in the back and huge trees. Sometimes there are deer in the pasture in the mornings when the sun is coming up. There’s an old cemetery back there too, with a bunch of kids’ and teenagers’ headstones, all more than a hundred years old.

Before we moved to Texas, Daddy fixed radios in the Army. He always had to do what other people told him and live where they told him to live. Now he gets up in the morning when he wants to and goes out to the pasture when he wants to. A lot of the time, he doesn’t want to.

Then last year, we lost most of the herd to Blackleg, and it seems like every year the heat burns up most of the hay before Daddy can bale it. Then Momma has to work more to pay the bills, and when she’s home she’s either asleep or cleaning the house. And Daddy is back to sitting at the dining room table in his underwear all day, drinking too much again.