My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Read Free Book Online Page B

was looking. There was a balcony overlooking the main chamber, and I would take the side stairway up there and root around in the boxes of odds and ends that were stored up behind the highest seats. I’m sure the county records have never been the same. My favorite of all was the spiral staircase behind a heavy door next to the judge’s bench. That was where deputies would take the prisoners up and down from the holding cell on the top floor of the courthouse. Most days there were no trials and no prisoners, so I could play on the metal steps in that spooky old stairwell.
    My dad’s office was in the courthouse basement, so I could go down there and visit him when I got tired of snooping around the building. His main job was advising farmers about which varieties of seeds to plant, how to get the best yields, and how to control weeds and pests. In those days, that meant massive applications of fertilizers, DDT, and dioxin-based herbicides. Years later Daddy agonized about the environmental damage and the health risks caused by all those chemicals. But then it was standard practice, and nobody questioned the chemical companies or the recommendations of Texas A&M. My dad told me about an herbicide that the state and county suggested for lawns, to make them beautiful and weed-free. People would spray their yards, and then before long a school bus might come by and let off a group of children who would run through the sprayed lawn and then track it into their own homes, where their little brothers and sisters crawled around on the floor putting things in their mouths. The chemical was called 2,4,5 T—better known as Agent Orange. Sometimes when my dad went out to the field to work with farmers and ranchers, he noticed that an awful lot of them seemed to be getting sick, and he wondered if there might be some connection. But nobody was keeping those kinds of records back then.
    And nobody thought twice when a city truck rolled through the streets of Quitman at dusk, exhaling a cloud of DDT that was supposed to keep down the mosquitoes. My brothers would run or ride their bikes behind the fogger with the other neighborhood kids, all of them dancing and squealing in the sweet, acrid mist that was so thick they could hardly see their hands in front of their faces.

     
    A county agent was responsible for a lot of things, including handing out bounties on coyotes. The old-timers called them “wolves,” even though the last big lobos had been exterminated decades before. To them it was all the same. If it had four legs and a bushy tail and it preyed on livestock, if was a wolf. The county paid $10 per animal, so the farmers and ranchers went out of their way to kill them. Everybody knew where Daddy lived, so sometimes they’d ring the doorbell, or sometimes we’d just open the front door in the morning and find Mason jars stuffed with “wolf” ears. Later, the rules changed and the bounty hunters had to bring the whole carcass to collect the money. That was exciting, because there’d be pickups filled with dead coyotes in the open beds, and my brothers and I would run outside to see them. Eventually the county ran out of money—and “wolves”—and the program ended.
    Sometimes we’d find less gruesome offerings at our door. Farmers were grateful for all the help and advice my dad would give them, and they showed their appreciation at harvest time. There’d be bushel baskets of fresh vegetables on the front steps, jugs of honey or tubs of pecans. Daddy could have done a lot of other things, taken a big job with the state or gone to Washington, but he loved our little town and the life we made there together.

     
    Once, when Daddy was offered a huge job as an agricultural consultant in Saudi Arabia, he called a family council. We had held family councils all our lives, whenever there were major decisions to be made. Each of us got an equal vote. Our parents had always listened to us, and they took our opinions seriously.