The Fiddler in the Subway Page 5

  Finally: “You know, I heard something.”

  While he was squatting down there in the dark on the side of the road beside the overturned car, he says, he heard a kind of a gurgle and a splash, but it was so feeble and far away he figured it was a frog. Yet that’s exactly the spot from which the body was recovered. It haunts him still.

  “I might could’ve saved his life.”

  Life is filled with might could’ves. Roscoe Gist might could’ve followed the sound of the frog, and he might’ve dragged W. J. Blythe out of the ditch in time, and Bill Clinton might’ve had a real dad instead of a drunken stepfather who walloped his mother and forced him to grow up fast and focused. And Clinton might not have been so oppressively aware of the possibility of sudden death at any age that he might not have hurried up and become the youngest governor in America, and president of the United States at forty-six. Or he might could’ve anyway.

  So far, the story of the Man in the Ditch has been treated as a minor prologue to the inspiring public biography of the Man from Hope. What little has been published is almost caricature: William Jefferson Blythe was a handsome traveling salesman from Texas who met pretty nurse Virginia Cassidy in a Louisiana hospital in 1942. Their eyes locked across the emergency room, and it was love at first sight. They married; he went off to war, then returned home and perished on the highway a few months later at age twenty-eight.

  He was traveling to Hope, Arkansas, from Chicago to bring his pregnant wife back north to start a new life. The baby became president.

  It’s all the truth, but it is not all of the truth.

  Reporters following the Clinton campaign through the South last year heard tantalizing rumors of a shiftless drifter who resembled not so much a mythic American hero but the traveling salesman of bawdy humor, a footloose ladies’ man who left a trail of broken hearts across the south-central United States, and maybe a baby or two. Nothing was written; it was just talk.

  Talk is unreliable. Sometimes it is true. Sometimes it is hooey. Sometimes it is a thick embroidery of both.

  If the Bill Clinton story is about the American Dream, no less so is the story of his father, W. J. Blythe, a rag-poor farmer’s son who grew up at a time and in a place when the American Dream nearly strangled in the dust. It was an era of unimaginable desperation; if you weren’t careful, you could drown in your own despair. People sometimes did things not because they made sense but because nothing else made much sense either.

  Bill Clinton was surely shaped by the challenging circumstances of his youth, and by the imprint of a strong-willed mother. But every parent leaves a mark, even if the child never knew him. The president of the United States has his father’s genes, a legacy as apparent as his nose and as elusive as his nature.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the Mojave Desert, in a sun-caked valley ringed by snowcapped mountains, an old woman with an exquisite face comes to the door. You apologize for arriving unannounced, explaining that you were afraid that if you called ahead she would not have agreed to see you. You say you want to talk about private matters that are more than a half century old. You want to ask her about W. J. Blythe, her first husband. You want to know if he is the father of her only son, which would mean that her son is the half-brother of the president of the United States. A brother no one knows about, not even the president’s mother.

  The woman puts down the quilt she is sewing, with pretty pink hearts, and asks you politely if you would mind repeating what you just said. You do, and she smiles and says, okay, she supposes it can’t hurt now.

  EVERY FAMILY HAS its secrets, its old scandals, seldom-entered rooms with hidden recesses. This is true of the Blythes, an ordinary family that—with the spectacular prominence of one of its members—suddenly becomes a public curiosity. Who was Bill Clinton’s father? Where did he come from?

  The Texas branch of the Blythes has passed down a tale of how the family moved to Sherman, Texas, from Tippah County, Mississippi, in 1909. They came in a covered wagon, it is said, and as they lumbered through Arkansas in the gathering dusk they became aware of furtive shapes in the distance.

  Indians.

  And so they pulled the horses up short, and the men stood guard, talking robustly, brandishing their weaponry while the women and children huddled inside. In this fashion they spent the next ten hours, braced awake by their own terror, peering into the darkness, waiting for the attack. At dawn, with reddened eyes and raw nerves, they studied the shadows to discover that the lurking Indians were nothing but a field of tree stumps.

  The Texas Blythes love that story, because it evidences how uncertain were the lives of their forebears. A farmer had as many children as he could, and he had them as quickly as he could because you needed extra hands and you never knew how many children would survive. And so Willie Blythe—Bill Clinton’s grandfather—married young. It was 1906. He was twenty-four and his bride, Lou Birchie Ayers, was all of thirteen, and they started up a family right away. Clifford was first, then Raymond, who was nicknamed “Doc” and died at nineteen of “yellow jaundice,” then Pauline, then Earnest, then Maureen, then W.J., then Cora Lucille, the crippled girl, then Vera, and finally Glenn, the baby. Nine children, eighteen years from first to last, by which time mother Lou Birchie, at 4 feet 11, weighed 200 pounds.

  W.J., the fourth son, was born in 1918, and he was named exactly that way—just two initials—to distinguish him from his father, William Jefferson Blythe. W.J. did not officially become William Jefferson Blythe until years later, when his birth certificate had to be re-created after a lynch mob dynamited and burned to the ground the Grayson County Courthouse and all its vital records. The vigilantes were trying to flush out a black man jailed there on charges of raping a white woman. He was mutilated, hanged from a tree, his body burned. It was 1930; it was one of the last lynchings in America.

  “In later years, one of the main lynchers’ mothers became a good friend of our family. That’s how things were.”

  This is Vera Ramey, one of two of the Blythe children still alive. The other, Pauline, is eighty-three and her memory fades in and out. But Ramey is sixty-nine and her recollections of her favorite brother, W.J., remain as vivid today, she says, as they were when he was imprisoning her in an inner tube and hurling her, happily squealing in protest, into the pond.

  Ramey does not consider herself an emotional person, but she cannot watch Bill Clinton on television without choking up. She sees in the president the unmistakable imprint of his father: the eyes, the high forehead, the large but slender hands, the pleasantly plebeian nose. “I wish I could look without bawling, but I can’t,” she says.

  No death of a loved one is easy to bear; for Vera Ramey, a seamstress in Denison, Texas, the death of W.J. was very nearly disabling. She was a young woman when her brother had his accident, but she recalls the time as one recalls a tragedy from which complete recovery is impossible.

  “I have a good husband and I love my kids and hug ’em every time I can, but I don’t believe I have ever been as close to anyone as I was to W.J. I think my husband would tell you that.”

  Ramey describes her early childhood as hardscrabble but almost idyllic. There was no money on the farm, but plenty of food. They lived in a nice house, a lot of poor people getting along fine.

  W.J. was a tall, friendly kid who loved an old flop-eared hound dog, and figured out a way to catch and keep squirrels as household pets. There were 40 acres of pastureland, cotton to be harvested, cows to be milked, chickens to be fed, and the two-room White Rock school was a saunter down the road. There was an old wooden root cellar to which the children were banished when a twister was sighted; the kids huddled down there in the dark on an old bed, next to their mama’s preserves and tinned meats, their father outside on a chair, leaning against the house, balefully scanning the horizon. There was a swaybacked old mule that five children could ride at once. There was the old cow barn, which had a 6-foot hayloft from which the kids would leap.

  The barn is still there,
out on Preston Road off Route 691, midway between Denison and Sherman. It is a rotting firetrap of bowed gray oaken board and rusted hinge, leaning precariously. The current owners have left it standing because they fear that if they try to tear it down it will collapse on them. In front of the barn stands the farmhouse in which the president’s father and his eight brothers and sisters grew up. Outside, two chairs ooze their stuffing onto the ground.

  Your first thought is, there must be some mistake.

  In a pink housecoat, Lucille Waw invites you into a small living room dominated by an enormous color TV. Yes, she says, this is the old Blythe place. She’s lived there since ’36. The house is dismayingly tiny, just three medium-size rooms and a kitchen. There’s no upstairs, no downstairs. The rooms were even smaller, back then; her husband added on.

  “How they lived, I do not know,” said Waw. “I’ve wondered. Lord, I’ve wondered. Nine children they had. The walls were canvas and paper, it crumbled when you touched it. They didn’t have a closet, didn’t have a cabinet. Didn’t have running water. Didn’t have electricity.”

  Waw says she’s heard that one of the Blythe boys was a cousin of the father of the president of the United States.

  Actually, she is told, he was the father of the president.

  “The president’s father lived here?” she says dubiously.

  TO UNDERSTAND WHAT happened to the Blythe family, what flattened them, you need only leaf through the scrapbook of old photographs kept by Ann Blythe Grigsby, Earnest’s daughter, who still lives in Denison. She has Blythe family pictures going back to the turn of the century.

  The oldest are a Joadian gallery of weather-beaten faces, grizzled men and hardy women in baggy clothes, smiling gamely beside barns and silos and livestock and children. Among these is a photo taken in Sherman in 1921 or ’22. Father Willie Blythe, dressed in a Stetson and a dark suit and looking like a lean country preacher, is proudly holding an infant, Cora Lucille, as the older children grin at the camera—all except three-year-old W.J., sullen in a prissy sailor suit. A big, young family squinting hopefully into the sun.

  Then there is another picture, taken just a decade later, of Willie Blythe on his front porch. He has become an old man. He is unshaven, hollow-cheeked, someone ready to give up the fight. His sallow face is creased with pain.

  In 1930, Willie Blythe contracted colon cancer, and it took five bad years to kill him. These were years when country banks failed and even hale American farmers lost their homesteads to debt. The small Blythe farm, with its patriarch shivering in a bed in the back room, didn’t stand much of a chance.

  They tried. Much of the burden fell on W.J., at fifteen the oldest unmarried son. W.J. took a job at Ashburn’s dairy down the road, bringing home milk and butter and eggs and a meager paycheck that he handed over to his mother.

  W.J.’s bed was in the living room, but he was hardly ever in it. “He would go to work in the afternoons after school at two or two-thirty, and work till ten o’clock,” Ramey recalls. “Then he’d sleep till three a.m., when he would milk our cows, wash them down, carry the milk to the dairy. Four hours of sleep a night was enough for him.” After eighth grade, he quit school altogether.

  By late 1934, Willie Blythe was near death. Vera was eleven; she recalls how convulsions would seize her father and rattle his body.

  “I would take my crippled sister and run out of the house. W.J. and my mother held him down. They’d have to give him morphine by mouth and wait for it to take effect.”

  After fifteen minutes of this, W.J. would come out of the house, smiling, and tell the girls everything was okay now.

  “He was always smiling,” says Ramey. “Things that would be disturbing to other people would just make him laugh. I think he felt that was one way of keeping the rest of us happy.”

  In February 1935, Willie Blythe succumbed. An undertaker came to the house to embalm him, and then he was to be taken to the cemetery. But a storm rolled in, and the roads froze and became impassable. And so for more than a week, the cold body of Willie Blythe lay in the family’s living room.

  “I never went into that room alone again,” Ramey said, “unless Mama or W.J. was with me. Never.

  “I was a daddy’s girl. And when my daddy died, I think W.J. just kind of took over. He used to come and hug my neck. I guess I was afraid he was going to leave us like the other brothers did, and he said, ‘Puddin’, I will always be there for you,’ and he was. He never called me by my name. He called me Puddin’.”

  In the Blythe family, there is some uncertainty over just what happened to the farm. By 1936, with Willie dead, it is clear that Lou Birchie was having trouble meeting her mortgage payments. Ramey and other family members recall that she somehow disposed of the property to avoid foreclosure; that some money came out of it, that it wasn’t total disaster.

  But in the Grayson County Courthouse, in Deeds Book 387, p. 203, there is no ambiguity about what happened.

  In January 1934, with the farm failing along with Willie Blythe’s health, Lou and Willie had secured a loan from the Federal Farm Mortgage Corporation, an emergency lending organization created by the New Deal.

  But by June two years later the new widow was two payments delinquent, and the bank foreclosed. The language is brutally precise: “. . . unable to pay said installments and unable to protect any equity which the undersigned has…” With a few dozen dollars due on a promissory note of $3,500, Lou Birchie lost the farm.

  The family moved into an upstairs apartment on Houston Street in downtown Sherman. At forty-three, W.J.’s mother became a hotel chambermaid.

  And at eighteen, W.J. resolved two things about his life: He would not become a farmer, and he would become a millionaire.

  By 1938, he was working out of Oklahoma for an auto parts distributor, on the road all the time. By all accounts, he was a persuasive salesman. He came off as forthright and friendly, a man without pretension. Everyone liked him.

  “I think that’s why he was such a good salesman,” says Ramey. “He never saw a stranger.”

  And here is where the few sketchy public accounts of W.J. Blythe’s life kick in. He traveled all over the middle South, selling shock absorbers and oil filters and such to auto dealerships. In 1942, while bringing a woman friend to a hospital emergency room in Shreveport, Louisiana, he met Virginia Cassidy, a student nurse with mischievous eyes, generous lips, and a personality as outgoing as his. They courted, he was drafted, and they married just before he left for Europe. He served in North Africa and Italy and was discharged in December 1945.

  In the months afterward, living with Virginia in Arkansas, he talked almost not at all about the war. Ann Grigsby remembers sending her uncle a letter when he was in Italy, asking him to mail her some leaves for a school project she was working on. “Sorry, there are no leaves on the trees,” he wrote back. “They’re all shot off.”

  That was about as close as he ever came to discussing what he’d seen in the war. When W.J.’s mother had a stroke in early 1946, Virginia traveled to Texas to help nurse her, creating a reservoir of goodwill with the Blythe family that remains strong to this day. Vera Ramey remembers how the attending doctor predicted that her mother would survive, but Virginia the nurse looked doubtfully at the pallor of the older woman’s feet and gravely warned the family that she was done for. And she was. She died the next day. W.J. insisted on paying the funeral expenses, Ramey recalls. He had a little money, and it was important to him.

  Both W.J.’s mother and his father had died young, at fifty-two. The whole family was acutely aware of this, but only W.J. made a joke of it. He talked about hurrying up and starting a family real quick, because who knows how long you’ll be breathing? He wanted lots of kids.

  In May 1946, with Virginia pregnant and staying with her family in Hope, W.J. secured a job with a Chicago auto parts company. The couple had chosen a house, and he was driving home to get her when he passed Roscoe Gist on the road, moving, as was his custom, a litt
le too fast.

  And the story could end there, except it can’t. There was another side to W. J. Blythe that was as much a part of what he was as were his ingratiating temperament, his devotion to his family, his prodigious appetite for hard work, and his determination to transcend the heartbreaking poverty into which he was born. Just like those things, his other side was a product of the times in which he lived.

  SHERMAN, TEXAS, IN the 1930s was something of a frontier town, but Madill, Oklahoma, some forty miles away, was even more so. Madill was the place where Texas folks drove when they had public business to transact but didn’t want too many questions asked.

  And so it is that in the Marshall County Courthouse in Madill is an old marriage license, dated December 1935, under a handwritten notation, “Don’t publish.” It registers the marriage of W. J. Blythe to one Virginia Adele Gash. Bride and groom are listed as being eighteen years old.

  Behind the story, another story.

  “There was a child,” confirms Vera Ramey.

  She says she vowed to talk about this only if someone else brought it up—and only to correct what she believes is a terrible misperception and clear her beloved brother’s name.

  As Ramey remembers it, Adele Gash was the daughter of a Sherman saloonkeeper who got pregnant, and W.J. married her. She stayed in town a few months, even living briefly with the Blythes, but then left for Dallas. That was no secret in town, she says.

  The secret, Ramey says, was that W.J. was not the father.

  She says she recalls lying awake at night as a thirteen-year-old, listening to her mother and young W.J. talking heatedly. The father of the child, she says, was another member of the family, a married man whose identity she does not wish to disclose. She says Lou Birchie asked her son to claim paternity and marry the girl, to prevent not only a scandal, but a divorce within the family. W.J. protested, but did it, Ramey says.