The Apology

When I was a boy, I lived in the country about fifty miles outside of San Antonio, Texas. Our house was a trailer my father had set up on large cedar posts, three feet in the air. He covered the space below with aluminum siding and added a front porch to give the trailer a more houselike appearance. We had an above-ground pool, too. My sister and I could swim in the pool only when our parents gave us permission. Our family had a solid rule: always vacuum the pool after you swim. We had many solid rules: Don’t keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t shut your bedroom door. Don’t speak unless spoken to. Don’t forget your chores. Don’t talk back. Don’t, don’t, don’t. If my sister and I slipped up, we received a spanking. It was all very simple and direct. Our father used his belt; our mother, her hairbrush.

My father was a mechanic. He had a large shop made of steel girders and corrugated tin next to our house. There were pulleys in there, welding machines, rusty chains, tanks, jacks, compressors, and every hand tool you could imagine. During the week he worked for a large tractor company in San Antonio. Many of the farmers and ranchers who lived near us would bring their tractors and pickups to his shop, and he would fix them after work or on the weekends. They all liked my father and gave him tools for Christmas. My father drove a Ford pickup and hated foreign cars because he didn’t know their engines. He always said, “If you can’t work on it, don’t drive it.”

We lived on a dirt road that was colored rust red by the iron ore in the ground. It was called Good Luck Road. We had a stock tank, maybe twenty yards across, full of brown water, snakes, frogs, and small perch. We had seven cows, one bull, and two horses. My sister and I fed the cows and horses hay in the winter, and they grazed the rest of the year in the green pasture between our trailer and our neighbor’s. We also fed the horses sweet feed every day. They’d come running whenever I banged on the red bucket filled with feed.

On our side of the road there were three trailers, all sited on land that had been cleared, bulldozed, and root-plowed of mesquite. On the other side were five houses scattered over several square miles of hay pastures, pecan trees, oak trees, and mesquite brush. Those houses were the remains of Jake’s Colony, a community of ex-slaves established in the 1890s. My father called it the “nigger colony.” When our preacher came over on Sunday night, he and my mother and father referred to it as the “black side of the road” or “where the blacks live,” and to its residents as the “black family there,” or the “other black family with the barn,” or the “blacks with the red truck.” For a time I thought everyone on that side of the road was related, all of them members of a large family named Black.

I eventually learned the name of the closest black family, who lived only a mile from our trailer. They were the Cunninghams. I saw Mr. Cunningham occasionally on Sunday afternoons, when I went walking on the road. His first name was Sherman, and he’d wave to me as he drove past in his red pickup. I remember he would slow down so his truck didn’t throw a cloud of dust on me, and I’d wave back. My father drank lots of Lone Star beer on the weekends. One Saturday night he got drunk on it and told my Uncle Calvin a story about Mr. Cunningham:

“That old Sherman Cunningham is a crazy son of a bitch. He shot his own brother once. They lived with their father, and when the old man died, the two boys, Sherman and Chamberlain, had to divide up the cows, and Chamberlain — he was a real hot-headed nigger; he had big yellow eyes. You know how some of them niggers got yellow eyes? Apparently Sherman’s wife picked out a cow that Chamberlain wanted, and they started fussing with each other, and before you know it, old Chamberlain’s hitting Sherman’s wife with a stick. Well, Sherman just gets off his horse, goes in the house, and comes back with a pistol, and he shoots his brother three times. Didn’t kill him, but he never had trouble with him again. . . . Just crazy. You should’ve seen his father when the old man was alive. He was almost as white as you and me, with long white hair. Looked like Albert Einstein. When I first came out here, I was going to go talk with him, with the old man, at their house about something. I can’t remember what. And the old man is something like eighty, and he makes his sixty-year-old son leave the room. He says, ‘Go on, Sherman. I need to have some words with Mr. Dietz here.’ Now that was something. That old man was a gentleman. Real light-skinned nigger.” The color of a person’s skin was very important to my father. People with light brown skin were “Mexicans” or “wets,” and people with dark brown skin were “niggers” or “coloreds” or “blacks.” We had pink skin and considered ourselves white people.

It was around the time I heard the story of the shooting that Mr. Cunningham’s pigs started popping up all along Good Luck Road. Every day, as my mother brought my sister and me home from school, we’d see ten to twenty pigs wandering in the ditches looking for food. My mother said it was becoming a problem; she was afraid she was going to run over one of them. “Can’t the Cunninghams keep their pigs on their property?” she’d say. My sister and I thought the pigs were funny, all the little piglets running around, squealing. When our father saw them, he said, “Those goddamn pigs.” One day, on our way home from church, we pulled up to our gate, and when I got out to open it, my father jumped out with me. “I’m going to grab one of these goddamn pigs,” he said. “This ain’t no way to keep pigs, out in the goddamn road.” He put the squealing piglet in the car, and my sister hung on to it while I shut the gate.

My father and I built a pen for the pig, which I named Arnold, after a pig on TV. It was my job to feed and care for Arnold, and I eventually grew quite fond of him. He was intelligent and preferred me over my sister and everyone else. When I let him out of the pen, he followed me around and played with my dog Libby.

I never had much free time; my father kept me busy. All I had was my Sunday-afternoon walk with Libby. I’d take along my pellet gun and shoot at any snakes I could find in the ditches along the road. One Sunday, not long after we’d taken his piglet, I saw Mr. Cunningham out repairing his fence where it had fallen over. He stopped working and said hello to me, and I said hello back. I was a little afraid of him, remembering the story of how he’d shot his brother. He was a small man, and thin, with short white hair. He wore an old jean jacket, and black pants tucked into his dirty boots. He held a posthole digger in his hand.

“Where you going with that gun, boy?”

“I’m going to shoot some snakes.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause they’re bad.”

“Tell me something,” he said. “What did a snake ever do to you?”

“Nothing.” I thought about it. “One could bite me though.”

“Yeah, I guess it could. Well . . . don’t worry, my pigs will eat the ones you miss.”

I watched him plant a new cedar post into the hole he’d just dug. “What happened to your fence?”

“The rain washed the old rotten post away. All my pigs got out.”

“I know. I saw them.”

I watched him work. He tamped the dirt down around the post and then re-nailed several strands of wire to it. When he’d finished, he threw all of his tools into the back of his red pickup, turned to me, and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t sit out here talking to you all day. I got things to do.” I was confused, because we hadn’t said anything for ten minutes, and he laughed and said, “How old are you now, Freddy?”

I told him I was nine.

He said, “I remember when you were born. Your daddy was all excited. My daddy was one of the first people he called. He came over to our house that night and brought my daddy a cigar. Our yard was flooded with water from the rains, and your daddy had on a pair of brand-new boots, must’ve cost a hundred dollars, and he just walked right on up into the yard, right through the water, with all the dogs barking at him and everything. . . . You tell him to come by and see me. I’m seventy years old now. I’m not going to be around forever.”

Then he drove away, and I continued my walk. I didn’t shoot any snakes that day. Nor did I tell my father I’d talked to Mr. Cunningham.

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