Mrs. Thompson's House(Carl Brooks) Mrs. Thompson’s House

By
Carl Brooks

One of my first recollections as a small child was lying in bed at night, resisting all bids for sleep and looking out of my bedroom window at a house across the dirt road from ours. In my young mind, part of the scene I watched seemed a bit strange to me, or at least different from any of the other houses around us. Ours certainly wasn’t what you would call grand, or even all that nice, but it held my parents, my older sister and brother and me…. seemingly quite well. Our’s was a very small, white, two bedroom, frame house at 199 Nelson Street in Bowie Texas. Directly across the road was an unkempt vacant lot that was choked with weeds and litter, and next to it was what I came to know as Mrs. Thompson’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson didn’t own their very meager two rooms, but rented them from the ancient woman who lived on the other side; a woman who I learned to fear at just the mentioning of her name, known in our neighborhood as Mrs. Tinkle. I suppose you could loosely call the place a duplex, but in those days it was simply a house that had been split in half to allow two families to share walled-up rooms.

Mr. and Mrs. Thompson had lived in their house ever since I could remember and that was just about all of my very short life up to that point. Mr. Thompson, or Talmadge as he was called, was quite slow in the head and wandered around outside tinkering with reel lawnmowers and other pieces of scrap junk, sharpening the blades and going through the motions of making repairs to them. He couldn’t hold a job of any kind, but instead was occasionally hired as a day laborer, or was gratuitously allowed to work on simple machinery for people who were aware of his condition and wanted to help. While busy with any task, he constantly mumbled to himself, as well as any other imaginary entity that might be present at the time, perpetually chewing on a mouthful of Garrett Sweet Snuff… whenever he could get it. His face was perpetually covered with a salt and pepper stubble that never seemed to get any longer or shorter, but vividly reflected a history of severe hardship, worry, and the very definition of sacrifice. Several times I stopped by his back yard and tried to talk with him, but all he could manage was an unintelligible sort of mumbling. Then, without warning, he would spit snuff juice through his remaining four or five stained, front teeth. I never considered him either nice or not nice, he was just and old man who mentally lived somewhere else in his mind. Truthfully, he simply wasn’t there most of the time.

Because Mr. Thompson could not hold a job, both he and his wife were on what they called, “The County,” meaning that they were indigent and received a very meager subsistence check from welfare. Mother had explained all of this to me, and even so, I understood very little of their situation. Mother did tell me that Mrs. Thompson was a diabetic and could not eat sugar of any kind. She once knocked on our door, softly crying and asking Mother for something… anything sweet that she could have to make her terrible craving go away. She said that she just couldn’t stand it any longer, that she had to have something. Welfare wasn’t the same as it eventually came to be in later years. People could literally starve to death while receiving subsistence back then. Apparently on a certain day, once a month, people on welfare could go to the county fairgrounds some five miles away and be given a few commodities such as small packets of cheese, butter, and rice; if they could beg or borrow a ride. Otherwise, a $10.00 or $15.00 voucher was mailed to the recipients for their absolute necessities. This was shortly after WWII and America was still trying to get back on its feet. There simply wasn’t that much to give. I know that Mother would often give Mrs. Thompson an occasional bag of groceries to get her through the month, and a couple of other people also pitched in. Thinking back, I am so proud of who and what we were back then; people who generously and willingly helped our neighbors in bad times and times of need.

Since there weren’t any street lights in those days, at least in a small town such as ours, the blackness of nighttime was intensified so that we could sit in our back yard at night and see practically every star in the sky, and being thoroughly entertained at the fire-flies, or lightening bugs as we called them, doing their evening fairy dance. Because of the darkness, any light outside was visible for a long way off. The clarity was as sharp as a laser. Lying in bed at night, Mrs. Thompson’s house was in full view for me to inspect with unlimited curiosity before an involuntary, heavy blanket of sleep finally overtook my consciousness.
Her place was barely what you would call a house at all, but looked as if it had been an afterthought, thrown together hastily from scraps of gray, weathered and very old wood. A hundred years ago, it was probably an average house built by a farmer for his own use, but now had deteriorated into not much more than a old shack. It had two front doors, as many houses in those days were built to allow access from either side to the now rotting front porch. A perpetual cardboard sign was held to the screen door by a metal adjusting rod that was designed to keep the screen door square and true, even though it was attached to a house that wasn’t. The sign had three compartments aimed at telling Buster Glass, the roving iceman, to leave 5lbs – 10lbs – or 15lbs of ice for the occupant’s ice box. Mrs. Thompson’s ancient ice box was located on the lean-to back porch whose floor was missing all but just enough boards to keep it off the ground.

Having been in Mrs. Thompson’s house many times as I was growing up, I was convinced that the stories that she, herself, had purposely spread about the place being truly haunted were true, and that Mrs. Tinkle was a real witch who ate small children for breakfast. That, at least kept noisy kids from disturbing Mrs. Tinkle during the day and at Halloween. I know that I believed the stories were true. Mrs. Thompson once said that if we make too much noise, Mrs. Tinkle might ask her to move. I would have done anything to prevent that. At night my imagination went wild in believing the spooky place was haunted, or something just as vile… at least I had hoped that it was. From my bedroom window, as I watched from the darkness, I could plainly see streaks of light shining through not only the two windows, but also through the cracks in the overlapping boards carelessly nailed to the outside of the structure. I wondered how Mrs. Thompson could keep from freezing in the winter time with so many cracks in the walls. I eventually learned that her inside walls were papered with a combination of old and new wall paper scraps and discarded newspapers. My father was a house painter and paper hanger and often brought Mrs. Thompson leftover wall paper scraps from jobs that he had finished, and piecemeal tried to cover the cracks in the walls on the inside. In spite of those repair attempts, when her kerosene lantern was on at night, the light could easily be seen through the cracks. Even today, whenever I smell the pungent aroma of a kerosene lantern, I think of Mrs. Thompson’s house. Having electricity and electric lights was simply not an option for her.

From my very early age, I was allowed almost complete freedom to wander within the liberal confines of our neighborhood, which of course included my best friend’s house a block away, and braving the scorching hot dirt road two blocks down to Mr. Dewebber’s filling station and bread store for a Grapette or Nehi orange soda pop. No one bothered small children back then, so while generally exploring my world, and without us realizing it, the neighbors kept a sharp eye out for the welfare and safety of us kids, no matter where we lived.

My first experience with Mrs. Thompson came quite by accident. Mother and Dad liked to go to Ft. Worth on weekends to drink, dance and generally have fun. Mother had to leave us kids somewhere, so Mrs. Thompson was asked to accept the job, or at least part of it. She had always been exceptionally nice to everyone in the neighborhood and Mother knew that the neighbors liked her. Her manner was not only very pleasing to everyone who knew her, but she seemed to especially love children. Besides, Mother knew that Mrs. Thompson desperately needed the money.

The Thompson’s had two sons of their own; both were now grown men and lived somewhere else in town. J.T. was the youngest and worked as a stone cutter at the Bowie Monument Company cutting granite grave stones, while Grady, his older brother, had recently returned from the Army and the war in Europe. All of us kids liked him because he generously gave us Army patches and insignias that he had accumulated while fighting Hitler. He came back a little different than when he went. I later learned that most of our soldiers did. My brother and sister were farmed out to relatives while our parents were away, but I wanted to stay in my own neighborhood where I was known and where my friends lived. Sometimes, Mrs. Thompson stayed with me in our house, which offered abundant access to groceries sufficient for our meager needs, as well as warmth from the cold outside. Also, Gerry Prestwood, my best friend, lived just across another vacant lot from Mrs. Thompson, actually just a Tarzan yell away when it was time to meet and busy ourselves with fantasy and movie make-believe. It was all very convenient for everyone. But mostly, I stayed with Mrs. Thompson in her house. There, I was kept mesmerized with her stories about life in the back woods of rural Mississippi and the ghosts and “haints,” as she called them, that resided there. We talked endlessly as she went about her chores. I learned a lot about life in Mrs. Thompson’s house; about love and how to be tolerant, about how other families worked with each other, about how to survive outside the confines of normal society, and especially how to survive in the clutches of dire, constant, grinding poverty.

Mrs. Thompson had nothing in the way of even the simplest necessities of life. She was well aware of that fact, as well as knowing that those things would always be out of her reach. Hoping for them was just a waste of time, and she didn’t believe in wasting anything. She wasn’t a participant in the world of having “enough” that I knew so well. Hers was a much different world of always being needy; a world of want, with never having anything to call her own. I helped her wash their clothes on a dilapidated, hand-me-down washboard using lye soap that she regularly made from hog fat (whenever someone would donate the renderings to her from a hog kill in the fall) mixed with wood ashes and lye. We would pour the liquid mixture into wooden square molds to allow them to dry and harden into cakes of soap. The only hot water available to her had to be heated in a ten gallon cauldron in the back yard. There was no hot water heater… thus, no hot water from a tap. We built our fire in a rock circle and boiled the clothes in the well-used, black cauldron. My job was stirring the clothes with a broken broom handle while they were boiling, the agitation helping to clean them. We’d wring them out, rinse them several times and hang them up on her makeshift clothesline strung between two stunted trees.

In the afternoon and evenings, we had to be very quiet not to disturb Mrs. Tinkle on the other side of the house. There was no radio with my old friends Superman, Jack Armstrong and Lum ‘n Abner to hold my attention, so Mrs. Thompson told me endless stories about her life in the Mississippi Delta. In order to keep me quiet, she made up volumes of ghost stories that kept me very close to her chair as I sat on the floor, listening intently and mesmerized by her soft spoken, slow and methodic telling of those stories. I had a vivid imagination anyway, from participating in family groupings sitting around our radio at home with all the lights out and listening to the “Inner Sanctum,” “Lights Out” and “The Shadow.” I soon found myself in her lap, both for safety’s sake and also because it was warm and loving there. If that didn’t work, she sang songs very softly to me until I drifted off into dreamland. We’d sit in her dark house and watch the light and shadows under the door to Mrs. Tinkle’s rooms on the other side of the wall. The light would move and change shapes as Mrs. Tinkle went about her ritual of getting ready for bed. I wondered where she kept her pointed hat and magic broomstick.

Before I realized it, I’d awake on my floor-pallet the next morning, ready for a new day and a new world. My true understanding of Mrs. Thompson’s poverty hadn’t been fully realized yet, so without thinking about her situation I asked for some pancakes for breakfast; surely, a little flour, an egg, and some milk was all that was needed. Everyone had access to those basic items didn’t they? Well, she didn’t, but after a quick trip to our house, she was able to scrounge what she needed… everything that is, except the syrup. That setback didn’t faze her in the least; thus, my introduction to “Sugar Syrup.” She quickly mixed together some sugar and water and heated it on her two burner gas stove, and breakfast was ready. Her syrup wasn’t as good as Karo syrup, or Br’er Rabbit black strap molasses, but I never let on. Her total commitment to the effort; her creativity to do her best to please me was so glaring that all I could do was appreciate her love and caring for the spoiled kid across the road.

Mrs. Thompson’s oldest son, Grady, rarely ever came to visit, but sent a few dollars to his mother in the mail, when he could afford it. Grady seemed more mature, serious and reserved than his younger brother. It was quite obvious that he worried a lot about his parents and their welfare, even though he could do little to change their situation. His brother, J.T., was much more outgoing and fun loving. Because he was working, he had bought himself a used 1932 Ford coupe, complete with a “Rumble” seat in the back. He often gave us kids rides in that small, closeable compartment, just because he could, and because he was Mrs. Thompson’s son. His job at the monument company paid almost nothing, but it was a steady job and those were difficult to find after the war. He also contributed something to his parents when he could. I certainly don’t want to portray Mrs. Thompson as a beggar, or any kind of burden to anyone. She and her husband had been born into a life that had no avenue of escape, and she simply did the best that she could with what she had. She often told me that her reward would be waiting for her in heaven. I certainly hoped so. Mother very much enjoyed helping the Thompson’s on many occasions. We had a small chicken yard in back of our house which produced a regular supply of fresh eggs and an occasional chicken for Sunday dinner. Especially on holidays, there was always an extra one for Mrs. Thompson. Upon presenting her with these heartfelt gifts, Mrs. Thompson would tear-up. Sometimes she would even refuse the gifts, not wanting to take even the slightest advantage of Mother’s friendship.

Physically, Mrs. Thompson was a bit plump in build, and that seemed a little odd to me. She had sugar diabetes and rarely ate anything at all that I had witnessed, but she looked healthy in spite of it. Her efforts seemed very much labored when she walked, as if every step was painful. When going out, she wore thick cotton stockings rolled down past her knees to cover a roadmap of varicose veins. Complaining about anything was simply not in her nature.

Some years later, I had acquired a job at Cotton’s Café as a dish washer. To my surprise, I discovered that she was to be my relief for the night shift. In her medical and physical condition, it must have been very painful working on her feet for eight hours at a stretch and then walking to and from her house, a good five miles distance. A year before reaching my official driving age, I bought a broken down 1941 Chevrolet with no first or reverse gears and had a hole in the radiator the size of a dime. But after that, and as long as my old Chevy was running, I always made sure that she had a ride to and from work.

Later, while working for my grandfather in his furniture and appliance store, I happened to mention Mrs. Thompson’s hardships and plight. Granddad was the most generous person I have ever known, even to a fault, and insisted on helping anyone less fortunate. He took great pride in his rather large garden and orchard that he tended as a hobby and to supply neighbors with his rather abundant harvest. After our conversation, Mrs. Thompson received regular bags of fresh fruits and vegetables from Granddad’s garden, as well as furniture and small appliances he had acquired as trade-ins from the furniture store. Soon, Mrs. Thompson had her very first wringer washing machine. Mr. Thompson had died a few years earlier and she had moved to a slightly better two rooms. At least it had electricity, but her water still came from a well in back of the house.

Not long after, I lost track of Mrs. Thompson when I joined the Marine Corps and moved away. She literally defined the adjectives: simple, loving, unassuming and kind hearted. Her death somehow got past me in my busy world, but she will vividly live in my memory and deep within my heart forever. Occasionally, after a particularly difficult day, and when I can’t fall asleep, I conjure up the sight of her house across the road with the light shining through the cracks in the boards and remember what it was to love someone so dearly. In a way, Mrs. Thompson was like that old house. She too was old, gray, and weathered, with a few patches on the outside, but the love that shone through the cracks was as strong and bright as any I have ever known.

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