The house that burned

Momma, Ruby and I stepped outside the café and saw the long pillar of dark smoke off to the northwest.

“Wanda,” Ruby said, “that looks like it’s out by your place.”

“Watch Bob!” Momma said, and she jumped into hers and Daddy’s 1938 Oldsmobile and scattered gravel as she sped from the parking area and onto Highway 67.

It was early September 1952. We lived in an old, metal-roofed, unpainted house off a dirt road three or so miles northwest of Maud. Momma and Daddy had opened the café about a year before. The café was attached to a much bigger wooden building that during the war had been a machine shop.

Daddy bought the building using a VA small business loan. He first got rid of all the machines inside and turned the building into a bowling alley, refurbishing the building’s hardwood floors. The bowling alley didn’t catch on, so Daddy made the place into a honky tonk. Almost all of Texas was dry then, so selling beer and mixed drinks was illegal. Daddy sold Coke in bottles and small buckets of ice and provided glasses, and didn’t check brown paper bags people brought in.

I was at the café that day after a reaction to smallpox vaccine. Ruby was Daddy’s older sister. She was a vocational nurse and sometimes cooked at the café. After Momma left, Ruby and I watched the dark smoke spiral higher and become wider.

“I sure hope that’s not your house,” Ruby said.

It was our house. Daddy was asleep when the fire started. He had worked graveyard shift at Red River Army Depot the night before. Smoke woke him up. The house was just about all on fire when he woke up. He didn’t have a chance to save anything. He pushed out the window screen and got out of the house.

Momma drove the Oldsmobile as fast as it would go, through Maud and then down the dirt road toward the house. “I took a couple of corners on two tires,” she later said.

Carolyn, my older sister, was at school that day. Francis, 3, and Bill, 2, were with Geraldine, Momma’s older sister.

I don’t remember anything about the rest of the day. We all spent the night with Momma’s relatives or Daddy’s, or maybe split up and with both.

Next day, Momma and Daddy took us kids to the burned down house. It was the first burned house I remember seeing.

Everything was burned. There were charred pieces of wood and blackened tin. That was the first house of my memory.

We stayed with relatives two more days, until Momma and Daddy found another rent house. It was bigger than the house that burned.

By then people had given us boxes and sacks of used clothing. What we got was not any more worn than what burned. I didn’t particularly care for any of the charity clothes. But, people did what they could.