When They Were Saplings

“Did you want to show Bobby the rock wall that killed your Grandpa?” Mom asked.

“There it is. I guess it killed him. He fell asleep and hit it. Was a long time before anyone found him. He died at the hospital. That’s where his car hit. See that newer patch right there?” Dad laughed at himself. “Not newer, I guess. That was 1971.” I snapped a pic of the knee-high rock wall that allegedly did my great-grandfather in.

Dad’s family had farms out there in Uvalde County. He later spent a big chunk of his adult life working the railroad that runs parallel to Highway 90. I had court in Uvalde, so I asked if he and Mom wanted a trip down memory lane.

After court and a good lunch at The Vasquez, we had an hour to explore before the two-hour trip back. We headed east to Knippa.

My great-grandparents, Henry John and Mathilde, are buried in the Knippa cemetery. Dad got Henry as a middle name when he was born in Tynan, Texas, in 1944, to Robert and Lydia Falkenberg.

One of Dad’s great-uncles is just a few feet over from his parents. He and his brother fought in World War II.

“Did your uncles ever talk about what they did in the war?” I asked.

“No.”

Mom pointed out that not one tree grows in that flat patch memorial. Highway 90’s incessant noise assaults the ear. The modest cemetery is filled with the people of Knippa, both in name and geography, from the late 1800s through the first half of the 20^th century.

People that lived and worked and laughed and baked and cried and drank and sewed and danced and worshipped and farmed and crushed rock together. Now they rest together.

Dad’s cousin still lives in Knippa. We drove by what we think is his house. I asked Dad if he wanted to stop and visit with him.

“How much time do we have?” he asked me.

“Thirty minutes. If that.”

He shook his head. “We won’t have enough time to talk, so I don’t want to bother him. That’s his shop right there,” Dad said, pointing to a modern metal building with new machines in and around it.

“Oh, right, how do you know that’s his shop?” Mom asked from the backseat, chuckling.

“Cause that’s his shop.”

So it is.

A freighter named George Knippa is credited with settling the area in 1887, back when the Texas & New Orleans Railroad existed there. Knippa encouraged people to come and live on the fertile land. The people who answered his call in the late 1800s were mostly German Lutherans. They insisted on a German-speaking service, even after World War I. The town grew over the decades. The trap rock plant, established in 1919, had a spur line that fed into what became the Southern Pacific Railroad, later the Union Pacific. Vulcan owns the trap rock plant today. The high school mascot still represents the town’s history: The Knippa Rockcrushers.

We drove down the road a bit to find Grandpa Henry and Grandma Mathilde’s house.

“Grandpa owned and farmed all this,” Dad said, drawing his hand across the rounded horizon. “He offered it up for sale to the first of his sons to buy it.” One of them did.

I stopped the car. Asked for a picture. Dad obliged.

“Who lived in the house after that?”

“Grandma and Grandpa got to live in it until they died. That was a condition.”

The fields that threaten to swallow the farmhouse that Henry and Mathilde built in 1939 are still plowed and planted and harvested today. The house is faded memories, hanging onto that small patch of earth, white roman brick by white roman brick.

A rusting tin roof. Missing doors. Small windows. A big tree that Dad doesn’t remember. Probably because he and the tree were both saplings then.

I snapped another pic at the tracks. My 79-year-old father next to the fields that he once played in, hemmed in on one side by the railroad he worked as an adult. I recall a photo I’d seen of my dad as a child, wearing a costume cowboy hat and toy pistols. Wonder if he ever wore them out here.

Something about the house fired up a group of neurons in Dad’s brain. “One time me and my cousin was staying with Grandma and Grandpa. We saw Grandpa’s pistol up on the shelf. It was a little .38. Something like that. We asked him, ‘Grandpa, what are you going to do with that gun?’

“‘That’s for when the Russians come,’ he says.

“I says, ‘But Grandpa, you’ve only got six shots.’

“He says, ‘Well, I figure I only need two. By that time they’ll have killed me.’”

Our wheels left gravel and I gassed the car back up to 75 on the paved highway, leaving Knippa fast in the rearview. “How old were you then?” I asked him.

“Twelve, maybe. My brother and me would come out here and stay a while. Me and my cousin would ride the mule all over the place.”

“A Mule?” my Mom asked.  

“A living one,” Dad said.