Grace From Amarillo by Dustin Rice
Though the house we were shooting was just outside of Quitaque, a short drive down the craggy caprock from the sprawling expanse that is the panhandle prairie, I was struck by the pure sparseness of the life that must have been lived there. I was suddenly flooded with bits and pieces of stories I had heard growing up. Details from stories of life on the vast plains about an hour and a half north of the house we saw in front of us. It reminded me of one person specifically, Callie Grace. Her mother died a matter of weeks after she was born. Complications from birth. Her father, Odie, dropped his three children off in the doorway of his mother Sallie’s house, one not unlike the house in Quitaque. They had been a loving family for roughly six years, but Odie told Sallie that he couldn’t bear the loss of his dear wife, Blanche, and left. No one really knows where Odie went until he passed, but on June 10, 1908, he was gone. The family has always maintained it was from a broken heart.
It was 1907 and Amarillo was just a panhandle town with denizens as rough as the winters. Horseback and buggy were still the most common forms of transportation and guns were kept on hips. Sallie had already managed to raise two grown men, Mose and Odie, and send them out into the world, what she got back was some joy and mostly heartbreak.
At this point Grace’s grandmother Sallie had already had a life of heartache. Her husband had left with her sister, but they left a little boy behind. She was raising him when she was left with Odie’s three children (two boys, plus Grace). The pair would return only to take the boy she had raised. It was a purely evil thing for them to do and she never quite recovered.
Her other son, Mose, was the successful proprietor of the Cozy Corner Bar in Dalhart, Texas, until he was murdered by a drunk in late 1909. The murderer was released on $2,500 bond and never seen again. That meant that Grace had lost her mother, father, and uncle all in a year and Sallie lost both her sons.
Amidst all this, Grace grew up loved. She and her brothers grew up in Amarillo, and Amarillo grew around them. By the mid-1920s Grace became a flapper girl, somewhat rebellious against the ranching lifestyle that surrounded town. She smoked, she went out, she danced. She fell in love with a young man named Horace. They married and had children. They made it through the Depression by having jobs that were essential. She worked for the Bell Telephone Company, directing phone calls on the switchboard. He worked for Santa Fe Railroad as a dispatcher and Morse code messenger. They wrote each other letters when he was away, and she kept those for the rest of her life.
With all the chaos and heartache that surrounded her early life, it would have been easy for Grace’s heart to harden, but she chose otherwise. She was a doting mother of three children, two girls and a boy. Grace loved all of God’s creatures. She would buy crickets in the grocery store to walk them all the way outside and let them free. She picked up a turtle from the side of the road that had been hit by a car. She cleaned him up the best she could and glued him back together. Because of a broken leg, Sam lived in a box under her bed for the rest of her life. He was bathed twice a week and loved bananas. He outlived her by a decade.
I didn’t meet Grace until 1982, when she was in her mid-seventies. Grace was my great grandmother. She loved to visit with family but struggled to hear the conversation. That was from her decades wearing loud headphones at the switchboard. (Her daughter became an audiologist.)
I knew very little of this when I stopped that day in the caprocks, imagining what it must have been like to be born on this prairie. I never knew the traumatic childhood that my great grandmother endured. I only knew the angelic, four-and-a-half-foot sparkplug that drove a Mustang II badly because she could barely see over the steering wheel. Although she passed in 2004, at ninety-six years old, I feel like I am still getting to know her.