“Canna Lillies for Rosie”
It is a beautiful Sunday afternoon on October 25 th and I am on my way to the Pine Creek Country Inn near Nacogdoches, Texas. Recently I was invited to be a member of the Geriatric Art Society (GAS). This is a loosely organized group of men that do watercolor paintings. They go on painting trips together every fall and in the spring.
This trip to Nacogdoches is my first trip with them. The general format for their trips is that each day each member does a watercolor painting. At five o’clock in the evening, they all gather for a social hour, have dinner together, and then meet for the critique session. During the critique session, each member presents their painting to the group. Knowing that several members of the group are very good watercolor painters, I was really concerned if I was in something that was beyond my league.
In deciding which route I wanted to take to get to Nacogdoches, I decided to follow the old El Camino Real as much as possible. I wanted to see what the early Spanish pioneers looked at as they slowly made their way to this far away place during their time. Present day Texas State Highway 21 follows the old El Camino Real of Texas (sometimes called The Old San Antonio Road) from San Antonio to Nacogdoches, Texas.
So from Houston, I went up Interstate Highway 45 to Madisonville and turned right on Texas 21 and started enjoying the scenery. About ten miles from Crockett, Texas, I came around a bend in the highway and there was the road sign “Austonio.” This once was a village, but it is now just a few houses at the intersection of Farm to Market Road FM 1280 with Highway 21.
And the memories flooded back in my mind.
You see, about four or five miles down that little narrow Farm to Market road there is place that used to be called Creek, Texas. At one time there was a country dry goods store, a little church and a cemetery there at the cross roads of two dirt roads. The only thing left now is the cemetery. A number of the people who are buried in that cemetery have a whole lot to do with who I am. One of them buried there in 1936 is William Jackson Carlisle, my grandfather. For the rest of the trip to Nacogdoches, I thought about him and his life.
In 1904 he lived on a farm near Opelika, Alabama, with his wife, Mattie Ruth Bostic, and their five children. When Mattie was pregnant with their sixth child (my father), she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, commonly called consumption in those days. Their doctor advised them that her only chance of survival was to move to a sunny climate. In those days a little town in Southwest Texas named Uvalde had the reputation of being a good place for people with consumption to live.
So after my father was born, they named him Acree after the surname of their neighbors on the adjoining farm. His mother Mattie could not touch him, so his older sisters, Mary and Alice, took care of him. They sold their farm, packed up and got on the train. Mary once told me that she remembers that their neighbors gave them a big basket full of fried chicken to eat on the way to this far away place.
In Uvalde, William set up a wholesale dry goods company and they built a small house north of town on the Rocksprings highway with the money that Mattie’s father sent to them. About five years later Mattie died and his dry goods company went bankrupt. Depressed and defeated, he decided to return to Opelika, Alabama, where he had known happier times. However, now he couldn’t afford the price of the train tickets to go back, but he still had the mules and a wagon from his dry goods business. They packed what they could in the wagon and started back.
The oldest boy, Henry, now a cowboy, left to go to the valley to make his fortune. Clinton, now a carpenter’s helper decided to stay in Uvalde. He is probably the reason why I eventually became an architect. The two younger boys, my dad 6 years old and his brother, Arthur, 14 years old, walked beside the wagon. Not owning any shoes, both walked barefooted beside the wagon. The two girls got to ride in the wagon.
From San Antonio, they followed El Camino Real eastward. Eventually they got to a little cross-roads place where there was a country dry goods store. Exhausted, William decided they should camp there for a few days. That place was Creek, Texas .
The owners of the little dry goods store at the road crossing, the McCoulloghs, had a daughter, named Rosie, who was recently divorced. My grandfather married Rosie and did not go any further toward Alabama. He had a second family of two boys and a girl. The oldest boy from this second marriage, J. D., lived here in Houston and told me about their lives. It seems that my grandfather’s personality had changed. He became a sharecropper farmer and they were constantly moving from farm to farm living in sharecropper shacks.
At that time, all the little towns in East Texas had baseball teams and there was a lot of rivalry between the towns. William started betting on these baseball games. The low point came when he lost their milk cow on a bet that Crockett could beat Lovelady. Next he got into a squabble with the other deacons in the little church at the cross roads, and they voted him out of the church membership.
In 1936, during a severe rainy period, way out in the country, he slipped in the mud and broke his hip. Since the roads were impassable they couldn’t get him to town for help. He died a very painful death there.
Years later, Rosie remarried. For a number of years, as a teenager I went with my father to visit her and attend a big community homecoming at Creek every July. We always turned off the main highway at Austonio to go there. When we got on the narrow dirt road, my dad would say “We are almost there.”
We would stay with Rosie and her husband, a Mister Oliver, in their home way back in the piney woods. They had no indoor plumbing or electricity in their unpainted home which would be called a shack today. Their home was guarded by a big “mean-as-hell” white tick-infested bulldog. When that bulldog learned that I would spend hours picking the ticks off of him, he would always greet me with his tail wagging.
Rosie was the only mother my father ever knew that he could touch. I could tell that she loved him by the look in her blue eyes in that old wrinkled face and the way she touched him with her now shaking hands (due to untreated Parkinson’s disease). Rosie was very poor, but she had a heart of gold.
These were my thoughts on my way to Nacogdoches to be with my new GAS friends to do watercolor paintings. Even though it rained the whole time we were there, I had a wonderful time. In one of the lulls when it wasn’t raining, I walked around on the grounds of the Pine Creek Country Inn and found some interesting canna lilies and got the urge to do a painting of them. I have dedicated this painting of those canna lilies to Rosie, since she had very few things in her life that were pretty.
Cheers,
Acree
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