What Came Before

In the movie “True Grit” the character Mattie Ross introduces herself as “From near Dardanelle, in Yell County.” Dardanelle is a real place, a small town on the banks of the Arkansas River. In the 1870s it was a regional trading center. Since then Dardanelle has become a backwater, a typical declining small town of older neighborhoods and red-brick storefronts set among the rolling expanses of Arkansas River valley farms.

I was not born in Dardanelle. It was only our family home for three years or so. But Dardanelle is the scene of most of my earliest memories.

Go to Dardanelle and you’ll see signs here and there with the name “Sand Lizard.” The Sand Lizard was the local high school mascot. I remember seeing an annual homecoming parade that featured a Sand Lizard float. The Lizard looked more like a tyrannosaur. It was mounted over a car, with hatches in the lower part of its body for the driver to look out. I remember Mom taking me over to the huge Lizard and saying hello to the driver who looked out from the hatches. There was something fascinating about this strange machine.

This must have been the same high school homecoming that I was supposed to play a role in. Homecoming “courts” usually include a little boy and girl who are there to add cuteness to the scene. I wanted no part in this; I fled from the rehearsal and that was that. All I remember about the rehearsal is how the band started to play, and how I started to walk up to the front of the gym, and how I felt very little and scared and ran away. Guess that’s why today I don’t much care for pageants and such that involve making little children get up and perform before an audience. Although Mom tells me that in a later pageant I was in, when I was five, I seemed quite at ease in front of the audience. That part I don’t recall at all.

Other memories involve the church that Dad pastored—the reason we were in Dardanelle in the first place. Mainly I remember walked from the parsonage to the church. I recall the walk as crossing a wide, open field. In fact it was merely a yard and a parking lot. Your sense of scale changes so much as you get older!

Small church congregations form an extended family, especially for the pastor’s wife and children. One church family in particular was close to ours. They served as babysitters for my brother and me. We visited their house often. This house lay in the shadow of Mount Nebo. Nebo rises dramatically from the open fields of the river valley, completely dominating the landscape. From our babysitters’ house I could see Nebo and its smaller companion Jones Mountain rising in the distance like some great beast and its young. Seeing that mountain as an adult makes me a child again as almost nothing else can.

I learned from Dad not long ago that these church kin who lived near Nebo made their living by running chicken houses. This explains an isolated early memory of standing in a huge enclosure surrounded by hundreds of tiny, peeping chicks. It’s a vague and surreal memory of the sort that makes you wonder whether you really just dreamed it. But clearly it must have happened on a tour of the chicken houses.

Again and again I find myself wondering just how reliable those very early memories are. One night somebody burned trash in a barrel in our backyard. I recall looking out the window and seeing sparks shooting out of the trash barrel in all directions, forming a huge cone of fire like some pyrotechnics display. What was actually happening was the eruption of aerosol cans that somebody had rather foolishly tried to burn. The field out back caught fire. This explains why I can remember having seen a fire truck out there that evening.

There are assorted other isolated memories too—of Dad driving home one afternoon with a big new blue car I had never seen before; of walking through the house saying my name over and over again, as if I had just realized that this was my name (And perhaps that’s what had happened); of getting shocked and seeing sparks fly when I tried to mess around with an electrical plug-in; of saying “three” (My age then) and having it keep coming out “tree”; of driving down a winding highway on a visit to my grandmother and my brother throwing up all over a pillow in the back seat because he got carsick.

And there’s a vague memory of other children, older ones, being around the house. Only a few years ago I learned that Mom’s sister and her three children had come to live with us for a time after she fled an abusive husband. We lived in a fairly small house; it must have been quite crowded in there. Yet all I took away from it is that vague memory of other kids having been around. I was amazed when I learned that we had ever shared a house with another family.

All of these memories are just isolated scenes and images here and there. It seems as if that’s how I perceived the world in those earliest days—as something I just moved through, only occasionally having experiences that made an impression. Is that what being a very small child is like for everyone? Or is it just what I recall?

The last memories of Dardanelle are of watching all our family belongings being loaded into U-Haul rental trailers (“U-Haul” is one of the first things I ever learned how to read) and bedding down one last night in our old house on the floor. And then we were riding along in that big blue car, and Dardanelle and everybody there was left behind.

Dad was moving us back to his old home town, where he soon became pastor of another church. This is where my joined-up memories began. As far as my memories are concerned, the new town is pretty much where my life began. There’s only a very little of what came before still with me.