Farewell by Colin Joh

Author:Colin Joh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1999-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Nineteen twenty-five was a rainy spring, a time of sad ness for the Brookses. I would often see my mother crying, and my father, saddened too, trying to comfort her.

My aunt Laura, married now and living in Dallas, was pregnant with her first child when Papa died. She stayed on in Wharton for a month, until the birth of her child, a boy she named Tom Brooks after her father.

Aunt Laura in her sophomore year in high school had been sent away to a girls’ school in San Antonio, and after finishing there to Sullins in Virginia. After graduating from Sullins she came back to Wharton and started a kindergarten using the sun parlor of the Brooks house for her classroom. Her full name was Laura Lee and she was named for Papa’s youngest sister. Everyone said she had inherited her sweet singing voice from the aunt she was named for. She was gentle and shy by nature, and I thought very beautiful. She had a scar across her throat that she said made her very self-conscious. It was the result of having swallowed carbolic acid as a baby, left within her reach by a careless nurse.

Laura’s husband, Oliver Ray, had come to Wharton from Alabama when he was a boy. His father, a successful planter in Alabama, had been attracted to Texas by the richness of the soil, the moderate climate and the long growing season. He felt it was an ideal place to raise potatoes. His first year in Wharton the weather conditions were ideal and he made a large crop. The next year he was almost as successful. But the following year the rains started early and continued for weeks until the potatoes rotted in the ground. It was so the next year and the next, and in despair he gave up potatoes and tried farming cotton. Again, the weather was against him and crop after crop failed.

Oliver’s grandfather Asa Ray had come to Texas at the same time as his son and his family, and had started a store out in the country. He was alone there one night when a young black man came in and shot and killed him, all for a can of sardines, which was the only thing he took. Embittered by this and by the constant crop failures, the Rays sold their farm and moved to Dallas.

A year after moving there, Mr. Ray had a flat tire on his way home one night, and when he got out to change the tire was struck down by a passing motorist. He was dead by the time he could be gotten to a hospital.

Oliver and Laura had been going together for some time before the Rays moved, and they became engaged just before he left for Dallas with his family. After several years passed and they still hadn’t married, Laura’s family began to wonder if they ever would.

Laura finally gave him an ultimatum, I was told, and plans for a wedding were soon being made in spite of his small salary (he was night clerk in the Dallas post office).

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