Excerpt: Branson Fellini (or: Chicken-Fried Angst)

Texas. 1929. A beat-up old farmstead in the middle of Texas, sweet Texas, mother of everything. Where the very dirt is clean and black and full of plants just dreaming to be born.

The battered screen door slams and out comes a girl, not a girl a woman, because this part of Texas makes you grow up quick, a woman who is wiping her hands on her old apron and picking up a pan of pinto beans waiting to be sorted.

If this was Hollywood, Gordon MacRae would just about now start belting out “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” but this is not Hollywood so nobody belts out anything except for a rooster scratching in the yard who belts out a lopsided doodle-doo.

The girlwoman shades her eyes with her hand and surveys her front yard which is immense, seeing as this small farm is set smack-dab in the middle of the great Texas Blackland Prairie, which was still quite a sweep even in 1929. Open space is exactly that. Her front yard is a bare sweep of land as far as the eye can see from one end to the next, a dark string of horizon broken only here and there by another house, a rickety barn, a tree, a skinny horse or cow in a field.

Girlwoman looks to her beans and sighs. Not a lot of them to feed so many hungry people, it's a big family and also a lot of farmhands helping out at this time of year so she had better get more, and the screen door slams as she makes her way to the sack and scoops out another double-handful of pintos. That'll fetch 'em, she thinks, and slams back outside to sit on the porch and sort the pintos, clink clank clunk.

This must be a bad batch of pintos because every handful brings up a rock or piece of wood or a shriveled old bean that won't feed much of anything, but she is assiduous and culls out every last inedible shred until the dirt alongside the front steps is peppered with small pieces of debris, which the chickens come and scratch at in a desultory fashion. The chickens have pretty much picked over every stick and stump and stone in the yard and they can't get at the plants which are covered with lopsided chicken wire, so any fresh introduction to their provender is a welcome one. And though beans are indeed scarce she now and again chunks one at a chicken she particularly likes, and that chicken jumps on the bean like it's manna from heaven. Until it realizes the bean isn't much softer than a rock and it goes back to scratching the dirt, and she goes back to rattling her beans.

Finally, Girlwoman hoists herself off the porch and steps down into the yard, over to the pump which trickles water on to the beans one gush at a time, washing off the dirt and dust. Swiveling around her pan like a prospector mining strange gold, she then totes the pan over to the water trough and empties it out there: it's a dry summer, not a drop of water must be lost. The small motley band of livestock comes and guzzles it thankfully. They would drink mud if they could but the dirt is too hard-packed and sunbeaten for mud, though.

I like to think of her at this moment, this Girlwoman waiting on the steps with a pan of beans in her lap as she waited for her prince to come. And I like to believe that it was at this moment that a shiny Ford came rambling up the drive, throwing out twin dust plumes which bobbled every time the Ford hit a bump. She is there with her pan of beans like Rebeckah at the well, he at the wheel of the car with his cousin riding shotgun: two separate points of light which will soon meet and cross.

Girlwoman is not too much fazed and certainly does not recognize her Prince; her only thought is along the lines of my, that's a shiny car, followed by the thought that she surely better get another handful or so of beans because this means another person or two for dinner, so she turns back to the house.

I do know what the man behind the wheel was thinking as he saw this strapping dust-caked Amazon and her pan of beans. I know because he told me years later: “Wow, what a woman!” Girlwoman was at that time roughly five-foot-eight in her stocking feet and weighed a good 180 pounds, solid and well distributed and she easily could have bench-pressed the man behind the wheel of the car, who had a rakehelly air and a loud tie and a hat which cut off a good half of his face.

This was the era of young bantams like Clyde Barrow, after all: Clyde who worked a lunchcounter uptown at that very time, before he met Bonnie and his fate; and of the other men who scorned farm work and sat round Athens in their creased pants and lowslung hats with pints in their pockets, waiting for their lives to arrive; and this newcomer had the look of one of the town boys who spent a lot of time over to Gun Barrel Lane, trading quips and selling liquor.

He was indeed one of these men, she was to discover, and knew Gun Barrel Lane very well, like the back of his hand. Yes, even as he negotiated the bumpy road up to the farm house, this man had many a thought for the bottles in his trunk, bottles that had to be toted over to Gun Barrel later that day and necessarily in good condition, because if one or two was broken his Paw would have whooped the tar out of him, even though he was almost a grown man at this point. The bottles were well protected in straw but these bumps were enough to shock the tar right out of your jaw, so he slowed down and took it easy on the road.

But all of this would have to wait until the beans were put to boil, so the door slammed again as she turned her back on the shiny Ford and headed to the kitchen.