Leon Hale’s Old Hometown

I’m sitting in a little coffee shop here in Eastland, Texas this morning. My view is over some cars to a wooded hill washed in early morning light. Trees are necessary in this part of West Texas where sunshine seems to acquire a extra measure of glare.

Those cars, by the way, are police cars, because just across the street from where I’m sitting is the jail. A line of prisoners in striped orange and white, wearing handcuffs, was just escorted by the window of this shop.

The last person in that connected line of mostly young men, white and black, was a tiny older woman of indeterminate race. Her skin wore the dark beige of hopelessness you see sometimes among the homeless and her face was full of sadness. This is not where she wanted to be this morning.

I’ve arrived in Eastland at the tail end of a book tour around Texas. It’s the county seat, population a little less than that of La Grange. Readers of Leon Hale will know it as the location for many stories of his old hometown.

Coming here creates time travel for me, a mixed experience of vivid memory pushing through into the present. There are places like that for most of us, I think. Usually, they’re places we ourselves have lived.

But this is mine only through my husband’s eyes, his writings and my previous visits here with him.

Imagination provides the texture, surely— the way absent people feel alive and present. It can only be through a quirk of memory, right?

Driving down Main Street yesterday on the way to eat, I had the strongest sense of Hale’s sister, her daughter and grandson, alive and eating supper themselves in the two houses on Pershing Street nearby.

I know the younger ones are living in Mansfield, now, and Ima Ruth has moved into the cemetery, a few blocks further along, so this strong feeling of mine had no logical source. I found myself weeping, anyway.

Feelings are unpredictable, aren’t they?

I visited the Eastland library yesterday and fell into conversation with an older woman sitting quietly beside her walker. A large black plastic sack, well-filled, rested beside her. Somehow we got onto the subject of calliopes— a keyboard instrument of the past.

The woman was sitting by herself, waiting or just resting. But she grinned at me—a few front teeth were missing—and we had a pleasant talk. She wasn’t sure what a calliope looked like and I had trouble describing the one I remembered. I wanted the kind the operator climbed into. Before I could find the right photo on my phone, there was a honk outside. Without needing to be asked, the librarian on duty hurried over to help the woman into the regional transit van. It seemed to be a regular routine. Eastland is not a tourist destination, despite Lake Leon nearby. For speculative developers, it’s a little too far from the Metroplex on one side and Abilene on the other. It’s untouched, therefore, by magical transformations like we’re experiencing in the pastures around Fayetteville and Round Top.

In Fayette County, hardship normally does a good job hiding itself. We know it’s there, but we don’t generally bump into it among the prosperous shops and watering holes that fuel our economy.

Sure, there are successful businesses here in Eastland, too. And pride and ambition. But somehow this visit has made me notice how thin the membrane stretches between prosperity and hardship.

And how necessary it is to be kind.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story, is available at the Fayette County Record office and bookstores everywhere.