“Hey, Chrissy,” Terry was always calling across our backyard, inviting me up to the Big House, as he did one morning when a bunch of us—his sisters and mine—followed his lead by turning the large staircase into a Disneyland ride. This was a change of pace from the competition to see who could claim to be the most interesting character from different movies. My pick from The Magnificent Seven was the character Chris, played by Yul Brynner, a really cool-looking cat in that movie. Even though my name was a match, I’d been overruled by the older guys who got first picks. Movies had a powerful influence on me, like books, letting me look through windows into other worlds. Nothing shaped my view of life more than The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie from childhood. One day I planned on living in Kansas where nothing bad ever happened except for a very occasional tornado.
In the meantime, I got to have some good old-fashioned playtime at Terry’s instigation. We spent most of that day while the adults were out by sliding down the stairs in cardboard boxes that went zooming down the steps and colliding into bumpers we made from the couch cushions. When we exhausted the fun from that, Terry proposed, “Hey, Chrissy, let’s do a pillow fight. Boys against girls!”
“Yeah!” I was all for it. It was him and me versus two of my sisters and three of my girl cousins.
Before long the pillow fight got out of hand, mainly because Terry decided to put a sizable piece of lead in his pillowcase. The next thing we knew he had smacked his sister Elaine in the head with his lead pillow, followed by shrieks, screams, and blood everywhere.
Everyone scattered as one of the older girls went to find Paul Crawford. This was Terry’s father, a man who was always referred to by both names. Although he wasn’t married to Ms. Bessie, Paul Crawford—a carpenter, handyman, and hustler—was very much present in the Big House, not only as our resident sheriff but as the provider of limitless supplies of one-hundred-pound bags of potatoes. We might have been money-poor but we weren’t ever going to starve.
Paul Crawford was somebody else’s daddy that I would have been proud to call my father, if that had been the case. He had a style, a hustling, tough guy, workingman’s pizzazz, just in the way he was never seen without his fully loaded tool belt slung low, his workman’s cap with an authoritative tilt, and, never without an unlit cigar hanging from his lower lip. The only time I ever saw Paul Crawford light it was the day he confronted his son about the serious injury inflicted on Elaine.
