999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [251]
Anyone who hasn’t been in a cave for the last fifteen years knows that Lansdale has excelled in the horror, western, suspense, and comic book fields; much of his work exhibits “crossover” features which blur (annihilate might be a better word) the distinctions between genres. This is a very good thing—not because it’s a gimmick but because there are no reasons for those distinctions to he there, except to limit less masterful writers.
The other piece of Joe’s I wish I’d written? “The Night They Missed the Horror Show.”
News, as opposed to rumor, didn’t travel the way it does now. Not back then. Not by radio or newspaper it didn’t. Not in East Texas. Things were different. What happened in another county was often left to that county.
World news was just that, something that was of importance to us all. We didn’t have to know about terrible things that didn’t affect us in Bilgewater, Oregon, or even across the state in El Paso, or up northern state way in godforsaken Amarillo.
All it takes now for us to know all the gory details about some murder is for it to be horrible, or it to be a slow news week, and it’s everywhere, even if it’s some grocery clerk’s murder in Maine that hasn’t a thing to do with us.
Back in the thirties a killing might occur several counties over and you’d never know about it unless you were related, because as I said, news traveled slower then, and law enforcement tried to take care of their own.
On the other hand, there were times it might have been better had news traveled faster, or traveled at all. If we had known certain things, perhaps some of the terrible experiences my family and I went through could have been avoided.
What’s done is done though, and even now in my eighties, as I lie here in the old folks’ home, my room full of the smell of my own decaying body, awaiting a meal of whatever, mashed and diced and tasteless, a tube in my shank, the television tuned to some talk show peopled by idiots, I’ve got the memories of then, nearly eighty years ago, and they are as fresh as the moment.
It all happened in the years of nineteen thirty-one and -two.
I suppose there were some back then had money, but we weren’t among them. The Depression was on, and if we had been one of those with money, there really wasn’t that much to buy, outside of hogs, chickens, vegetables and the staples, and since we raised the first three, with us it was the staples.
Daddy farmed a little, had a barbershop he ran most days except Sunday and Monday, and was a community constable.
We lived back in the deep woods near the Sabine River in a three-room white house he had built before we were born. We had a leak in the roof, no electricity, a smoky wood stove, a rickety barn, and an outhouse prone to snakes.
We used kerosene lamps, hauled water from the well, and did a lot of hunting and fishing to add to the larder. We had about four acres cut out of the woods, and owned another twenty-five acres of hard timber and pine. We farmed the cleared four acres of sandy land with a mule named Sally Redback. We had a car, but Daddy used it primarily for his constable business and Sunday church. The rest of the time we walked, or me and my sister rode Sally Redback.
The woods we owned, and the hundreds of acres of it that surrounded our land, was full of game, chiggers and ticks. Back then in East Texas, all the big woods hadn’t been timbered out and they didn’t all belong to somebody. There were still mighty trees and lots of them, lost places in the forest and along the riverbanks that no one had touched but animals.
Wild hogs, squirrels, rabbits, coons, possums, some armadillo, and all manner of birds and plenty of snakes were out there. Sometimes you could see those darn water moccasins swimming in a school down