amazing people and accomplishments to celebrate, as well as an inconceivable amount of trauma and grief to understand. But somehow what gets missed are the stories of all the ordinary people living ordinary lives within the time and place that they were given. So for this last day of Black History Month (Is it ironic it’s the shortest month of the year? I’ve always wondered about that.) I want to talk about the ordinary life of a man who made an extraordinary impact on me. His name was Roland Wyatt.
My family had just moved from Richardson to Celina Texas. Celina at the time was a tiny, poor farming community in a rural county. It was many years away from becoming a rich, conservative extension of Dallas. My parents had indulged my lifelong dream of owning a horse and decided that we needed a little more space. So we bought 7 acres with an ugly orange brick house, packed up the mid-century modern couch and the chrome side tables and the books and moved off the paved road. To say we were misfits in the community would be a gross understatement. My dad, a beatnik atheist engineer, still drove his Torino to Texas Instruments every day to design weapons systems for the military. My mom, a feminist housewife with literary pretentions, decided that if we were going to live the farm life, we might as well have calico curtains and can tomatoes and jelly and buy a shotgun. My sister, who was 16, was pretty good natured about changing schools and having to share a bedroom with her little sister, but Celina high school was a terrible culture shock. She survived by commuting to Dallas for part time jobs and socializing.
Roland lived in town with his wife and his two grandchildren, in a ramshackle unpainted wooden house on the wrong side of the tracks. He farmed some of the land around us. I don’t know if he actually owned any of the land, or if it was all leased. After he introduced himself as our neighbor, he offered to cut and bale our hay field for a percentage of the hay. We had good Bermuda grass and no farming equipment, so that was a win-win. I loved watching his tractor chugging across the field, one day laying the waving grass down into rows, another day gathering the dried grass into tidy little rectangles that dropped out the back of the baler. I watched the ease with which his lean grandfather’s arms loaded and stacked the bales onto the back of his old truck.
I had a blue child’s bicycle, the kind with a banana seat and streamers on the handle bars, that was pretty useless on the limestone driveway and road of our new home, so I gave it to him for his granddaughters to use. He was delighted and invited us to his house to meet his family. As we sat around the table together, he told us about his daughter. She lived in the shack next door, but she was lost to heroin addiction, which is why the grandchildren lived with them. He didn’t say so in front of me, but I realized later that his daughter must have been paying for her habit with prostitution. Concepts that I was barely aware of and didn’t understand, at the age of 10.
The next week in school, one of the kids mentioned, spitefully, that they’d seen our car “over the tracks.” I didn’t understand why that was supposed to be a bad thing, but I was smart enough to recognize racism when I saw it. I also knew quite well that no one else in town had invited us into their home or made us welcome, so I cheerfully told that kid to go to hell.
One side of our pasture bordered a creek, and it didn’t take our horses long to figure out how to cross it and go adventuring. After a couple of trips down the road to retrieve them from Roland’s wheat field, my mom turned to him for help. A couple of days later, he drove up with a truck full of barbed wire and fence posts, and within two days had strung a tight, straight fence between pasture and creek. Having since struggled with my fair share of fence building, I know just how hard a job it is, but he made it look easy.
The year I turned 11 was 1977. There was a farmer’s strike that year. Farming productivity was high and consequently prices were depressed. The endless conundrum of farming is that, when the weather is good and the yields are high, farmers go broke and lose their land. Demanding a fair price for their products, some farmers banded together and called for a strike. There was even a farmer’s march on Washington DC. Locally, the farmers drove their tractors in from the fields and parked them around the square, refusing to work the land. I remember driving around the square, seeing all the green tractors lined up tire to tire, wondering what it was all about. Even the children parked their toy tractors next to the big machines and played on the square – to them doubtless it was a grand adventure.
But Roland didn’t join the strikers. My mom asked him about it.
“I’ve been a farmer all my life,” he said. “Farming is all I know. I guess I’ll just keep on doing that and let these other fellas parade around town.”
The Johnson grass and sunflowers grew tall on either side of the gravel road. Choked with white dust, they crowded the roadway and blocked the view. One day I came home from school and saw that the verge on both sides had been neatly mowed back several feet. Roland was at the house, drinking iced tea and visiting with my mother.
“Road looks pretty good, all mowed back like that, doesn’t it?” he asked me with a twinkle.
“Yes it does; it’s very nice,” I answered politely.
“Who do you think mowed it?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I answered in my suburban naivete. “The county?”
“Oh lawd, honey, no,” he smiled at me.
“You did it then,” I finally understood.
He just grinned.
“It’s real nice,” I added, a little lamely.
My most spectacular memory of Roland was the Christmas day when he rolled up to the house with a stock trailer containing a weanling Hereford steer, a perfect little red and white bovine chonk.
I knew it was for me. I hope my parents paid him for it. It’s entirely possible that they didn’t, knowing my parents.
I named him Quinto. He lived in what had been the large vegetable garden, well fenced and just the right size for a paddock. Cows, I was soon to discover, are a lot different than horses. I tried. I really did. I haltered him and groomed him, but I also had horses to raise and schoolwork to do. He got fat and glossy but remained stubbornly untrained.
When I was 12, my parents divorced and sold our little rural paradise. My dad moved into an apartment in Dallas. My sister moved to Dallas too, to live with a friend. My mother and I and the horses moved to Denton. Quinto got sold, all but one of the dogs got rehomed, and the horses were pastured on a big empty field outside of Denton that belonged to the broker my mom worked for. Gone forever were my early mornings walking out of the kitchen into the dawn to feed my horses and listen to the meadowlarks rising up into the light. And of course, I never saw or heard from Roland Wyatt again.
Many years later, I’ve found my way back to the country life that I learned to love in those short years. I wake to a chorus of song sparrows, and rain or shine, before breakfast I’m in the barn, feeding my horses. When my lean arms tire of stacking hay bales, when I’m tightening the wires of my fences, when I’m dropping spring’s seeds into trays of soil, when I’m spreading manure across the pasture, when I’m raking out the chicken coop, I remember Roland. I wonder sometimes what he saw in this pale, misfit, city child that was worthy of his generosity and teaching, or maybe it is just the nature of people like Roland to be generous teachers. Either way, I count myself as lucky to have known him.
