Chasing Utopia

Fred Hudson

Description

Fourteen-year-old Fred Warren Harker was anxious when Dad asked him to quit school forever in summer 1924 and take off to far west, desert Texas, while the younger kids got to hang around home, get Mama's cooking and a clean bed to sleep in. Dad's ideas were extreme. He wanted to raise cotton some place where the banks, ginners and the retailers had nothing to do with anything by gathering a community of like-minded farmers, working out the details and forming a cooperative. And Fred was supposed to make the gas and food money for the trip. It turned out he was one of the best cotton pickers anybody had ever seen. There were pretty girls in the cotton patch and fun in between work and traveling. Then there were also wonderful folk of all cultures for their polka and waltz across Texas, accompanied by Dad's charming fiddle playing.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 28 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528947718
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Chasing Utopia
Fred Hudson
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-02-28
Chasing Utopia About the Author Dedication Copyright Information Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Heading West Chapter 2: Looking for Cotton Chapter 3: The Cotton Picker Chapter 4: Politics and Town Kids Chapter 5: The Contest Chapter 6: Quick Departure Chapter 7: New Field Chapter 8: San Antone Chapter 9: Sabinal Chapter 10: Local Boys and Newton Boys Chapter 11: Utopia Chapter 12: Skinny Dipping Chapter 13: Indians Chapter 14: Storm West of the Pecos Chapter 15: Trail Ending Chapter 16: Maybe Home Chapter 17: Football and Dust Chapter 18: The Landlady Chapter 19: Ranches and Snow Chapter 20: Dad in Jail Chapter 21: Birthday Present Chapter 22: Home
About the Author
Fred Hudson is a retired Associate Professor. He has spent most of his career in industry and academics, developing systems and teaching engineering in Texas, but has spent productive times in Norway, New York City and New Jersey. Along with painting and writing, he enjoys the arts, swimming in springs and rivers, and cooking. He delights in his wife, children and grandchildren. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Dedication
Chasing Utopia is dedicated to my father, Fred Hudson, and his father, Forest Hudson, who dreamed of justice and opportunity among narrow structures inherent in Anglo/American financial and governmental institutions.
Copyright Information
Copyright © Fred Hudson (2019)
The right of Fred Hudson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788782401 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781788782418 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528947718 (E-Book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge my tireless, insightful wife, Carole, and other family members, along with friends Anthony Wilbanks, Eugene John and Judy Davidson, for their encouragement and reading.
Chapter 1: Heading West
I was worried I might have to quit school. Mainly, I was trying to stay awake as I listened to the rattling car carrying us west, with the hot sun keeping at our back. I was still feeling some excitement for adventure; or maybe I felt sadness at leaving Mama and the other kids, and my new girlfriend, Lassie. Stark terror was somewhere in there, that I kept pushed down, making me feel like I was floating through the bright light flooding into the Model T. I knew I had hundreds of miles to go across Texas and I was only 14 and had just learned to drive yesterday. But again, I held on to a bit of resentment that maybe Dad expected me to quit school forever and take off, while the younger kids got to hang around town, doing mainly nothing; even if the older boys were working, cutting utility poles all day, they would get Mama’s cooking at night and a clean bed to sleep in.
The humid air on the dusty road carried a hint of a stink that I hadn’t come across before. I thought maybe Dad was making it; but it got much worse than anything a sleeping 58 year old could possibly produce. It was about to make me sick, so I slowed the Model T and yelled out over the road noise.
“What’s the stink?”
Dad spoke without opening his eyes. “Sour Lake—that’s an oil field you’re smelling.”
“I don’t see any sign of it.” I knew about oil wells, but I didn’t see any and didn’t see any gushers shooting in the air, like the picture show showed it. All I saw was run-over-looking pines and muddy, rutted clearings.
“Yeah. The rich people like the Rockefellers suck it out and haul it away to New York, and leave the land torn up and the air stinking here.”
“So the gas I’m running this car on maybe was made from it…”
“Yeah, but those that drilled it and hauled it and worked it and made it into gas got a penny or so, and the Rockefellers got the rest of the two bits.”
“Oh…” I didn’t ask any more questions. I knew where Dad was likely to go. Things like ‘means of production’, ‘the working man’, ‘limitations on property ownership’, and other lectures I didn’t care to hear right now could come next if I didn’t watch out.
The road we were driving was maintained by the state, according to the signs I saw every few miles. It was a raised roadbed, maybe five feet higher than the sandy land around us. The surface was a mixture of yellow clay, seashells of some sort, oils, and gravel. It was wider than roads I was used to, and it looked like the ruts were kept out by a maintainer similar to the one they moved the sand around with in the thicket. Water had seeped into the bar ditches, but the road avoided most of the swamps.
We came to a town that had a makeshift sign: ‘Sour Lake—Get in on the Boom’. The town was wild-looking and everything seemed piled up and pushed into a strip along the main road—the only road in town without deep ruts and stinking mud. Stray dogs and wandering drunks stepped wobbling over the ruts on the side roads in the rising heat and the glaring light of nearing midday. Clanking and grinding noises were everywhere.
“Keep going on this road; it veers south right up here,” said Dad. He knew I could tell my directions even out in the deepest part of the thicket. I held to the road and was glad when we got past the last building in the wild-looking town. A sign indicated Nome was next.
After a half hour or so, the stink seemed to evaporate, replaced by the smell of late July sun on pine trees that grew straight up. No torn-up land and no stink meant no oil.
“Turn west at Nome and tell me when we get to the Houston outskirts,” said Dad, still looking like he was snoozing. “You can tell by the paint on the houses.”
I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but I didn’t say so. I just kept driving.
I had been to Dallas on a train when we moved back from up on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, and I noticed the buildings there were big, but that was over five years ago and ‘big’ to a little kid didn’t mean the same as now. I mainly knew the thicket, with its sandy-bottomed creeks, swamps, water snakes and timber. The trees were very big, especially the long leafed pines we cut for poles. There was a big mill over in Silsbee, and the smell of new lumber was in the air for miles around. Paint cost more than the new-sawn planks in this part of the country.
Houston. It didn’t seem like it would be a place I would want to be in for long. Dad always said big cities were nothing but places for good people to fall in with bad, get to drinking and get sucked into the work-a-day rat race that led no place. Dad also said he wouldn’t work for anybody else for more than a couple of weeks. Working for ‘the man’, as he said it, tied you to fixed wages and wages did nothing but keep working men down where the ‘big owners’ wanted them—stuck.
Still, I saw several working men in our little town come home from the mills each week with pay and keep their families well-fed; they even bought new shoes from time to time. All around us, people seemed to be doing better than we were. 1924 was not a bad year.
Dad had good excuses—the dam had busted loose out on the Clear Fork and ruined his irrigation scheme; he’d sold the land there in Fisher County for a big loss during the drought next year; the place in Kaufman County had been flooded by the Trinity when the cotton was just opening; we lost the crop and Dad had to sell the land—cheap, right after the War. We’d moved to Southeast Texas where Dad bought some interest in some timber. We were cutting poles and selling them, and then Dad busted his leg. That was three months ago, the sawbones had told him he was lucky to keep the leg and not to expect to do any hard labor the rest of his life. Dad was taller than average, raw-boned, and very strong for a man in his late fifties. In many ways, he seemed younger than he was. Right now, though, he couldn’t even work in the garden, he couldn’t drive and he and Mama had yelled at each other the first time I ever remembered.
As the thicket thinned, I looked for cotton crops on the small farms we passed. Picking cotton was not something I had done for four years. The last time I picked, I had not liked it. My back hurt and my hands were sore and rough all the time. But I knew I would have to change my thinking. If we were going to make it out West, I was going to have to pick. I would have to do it alone, at least for a while. Dad’s leg was not mending very well and cotton picking would injure it further. This was what was mostly bothering me. I’d worked hard in my life, but the thought of being the only person to be making money on our trip made me extremely nervous.
The numbers clicked through my head; I was good at things like that. Dad said we had to go six or seven hundred miles. The Model T would make about 20 miles to the gallon and gas cost a quarter, so going a hundred miles would cost a dollar and two bits. Did that mean we could go all the way for less than ten dollars? Then there was traveling cost. Making only about a hundred miles a day would mean in six or seven days, we would need cash if we wanted to eat three meals every day. I’d heard Dad say he had about five gallons of gas and a five-dollar