William Childress has died, and I’m not surprised. He was halfway hoping to make it to ninety, but fell just 361 days short, not wishing to endure the pain of mounting multiple afflictions, foremost among them Alzheimer’s Disease. Even so, his emails kept coming; that is, until he could no longer manage his computer. So it was back to snail mailing me letters that, as in days of yore, bore as many words on the envelope as within.
Ours was what is called an epistolary relationship. Fact is, writers tend to be more interesting in print than in person, because—let’s face it—that’s our goal, to make ourselves look good. Chilly the writer wooed many a woman reader; Chilly the husband tallied multiple divorces. Much of his adult life was spent living alone in a trailer in rural Missouri, where he penned columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A compilation of said columns, Out of the Ozarks, published by Southern Illinois University Press, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. If you can find a copy, by all means snatch it up!
As longhand failed him, Chilly turned to his cell phone, until that, too, became unworkable. His last communications came in the form of garbled voice mails. Then came two weeks of silence, followed by a message from his son Jason that the old man had drawn his last breath in Paradise, California, having traveled widely from Hugo, Oklahoma, where he’d come into the world “on a kitchen table top, delivered by a country doctor too stiff to bend at bedside. I rode into Oklahoma on the blood and urine of afterbirth, midwife cleared, only to be stranded in a paradise of bigots.
“Mama had come to Hugo from Paris, Texas, where things were really about the same, but in Paris she was just a working girl and the holier-than-thou’s didn’t bother her. At twenty, she was stitching Army tents, two dollars a day and glad to get it. In Evergreen Cemetery (which was never green), a cross-carrying concrete Jesus wore cowboy boots, the city’s claim to fame. ‘Never saw nothin’ like it,’ mom said. ‘Rearin’ above your daddy and me like Judgment Day. But it never slowed our squirmin’ none.’
“On the day she told me I was born a bastard (she preferred the term ‘out of wedlock’) we were hoeing cotton. The wind blew scarlet dust so thick I could barely breathe. I listened, but what did I know of pregnancy or birth, a tow-haired kid of twelve? Besides, wasn’t my daddy plowing in the next field over? ‘That ain’t your dad, that’s your stepdad,’ mom said. I could tell she didn’t like talking about it, but I was never bothered by being conceived in a graveyard. When I was grown, I’d even find drama in it.”
Chances are, you’ve never heard of William Childress, but if ever you’ve opened a magazine, you’ve surely read his words. Other writers may be better known, but none made more sales than he. He was prolific and driven, the only freelancer I know who actually earned a living at it. Nowadays, a writer needs a day job—or, better yet, a gainfully employed spouse. Chilly had neither. So I admired him, even after he dismissed me as a prima donna because I’d been conceived within wedlock, never picked cotton and have never jumped out of an airplane wearing full combat gear. The Korean War was a bitch, but then again, Chilly had found a lot of drama in it. As someone once said, that which doesn’t kill you gives you something to write about.
William Childress wasn’t done writing, but dang it all, he’s done living. As far as I know, he has no final resting place; however, if I ever get to Paris, Texas, I’m going to lay a wreath at the booted feet of the Cowboy Jesus. The hallowed spot where a great literary career began, the result of raging hormones on a moonlit night following a country dance, eighty-nine eventful years ago.
