I carried my father’s ashes 1,500 miles to scatter them in Goliad, Texas
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I finally got the last word
I had a difficult relationship with my late father but when his widow said she no longer wanted his ashes as a reminder of his death two years prior, their stewardship fell to me.
For once, Dad needed me.
They showed up via UPS and I opened the package with trepidation. Inside was a wooden box and a strange but familiar smell.
“Your Dad used to buy those little bottles by the case,” his widow said later in explanation of the tequila that had spilled inside. “It seemed like a good tribute when I first put one in the box. But when I sent them to you, I forgot it was in there. I’m sorry it got broken.”
My Dad’s sudden presence intermingled with the distinct odor of cheap booze seemed kind of perfect — tragic and funny.
I put the box in my basement, where I would look at it occasionally while digging for seasonal clothes as I continued to live my life as a journalist and academic through four years of the Trump administration, another family death and the Covid 19 pandemic.
What to do with the ashes started weighing on me while making plans to see my family in Shreveport, LA, for the first time since Covid hit. My sister and brother agreed to help me spread them, meaning I had to schlep them back down South.
Human ashes are surprisingly heavy, and BWI security got suspicious about my bag with the shrink-wrapped brick of inert material inside. I was sweating from exertion and the June heat but stared silently through half lids — really? — as the TSA agent solemnly handed back the package labeled “Aulds Funeral Home.” On the plane, Dad and my iPad rode together under the seat in front of me.
I reminded my siblings of their promise a few times during the visit. Growing crowds during the Covid downturn thwarted the idea of sneaking the ashes onto the grounds of the Elks Club pool, where the bartenders had known Dad’s name well and his drink even better.
We got down to the last day and I realized that forcing the issue meant my hope of fostering a shared sense of purpose with my younger sister and brother, who had their own stories with Dad, could backfire. But there was no way I was taking the ashes back to the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
Then I realized the plan my subconscious had come up with all along.
Side trip becomes main event
In anticipation of this rare reunion with my mother and siblings, I had begun formal research into two family mysteries:
1. Did Jesse James really shoot my great-great grandfather to death after the Civil War, as family lore had it?
2. Who was my father’s father?
What I found had been surprising and disturbing on both counts, everything leading to one place — Goliad, Texas.
My online digging uncovered that Goliad was where my great-great grandfather, Ruben Caldwell Purcell, was indeed shot to death in 1869 in what’s known as the Sutton-Taylor Feud. Depending on the history book, Purcell was either the victim of a terror campaign by a corrupt Marshal John J. “Jack” Helm or one among a marauding bunch of lawbreakers wreaking havoc in defiance of the Union victory.
Jesse James was said to be in the area, but “probably Jesse didn’t shoot your great-great granddaddy, unless he was riding with the Helm bunch,” the Goliad cemetery historian confirmed.
The other question of my father’s lineage was linked, of course, in that the son Purcell left behind went on to have eight kids, including my grandmother, Iola. She had one child, at 22, by a man she met in Goliad.
But who was the Goliad man who fathered that child, my father? Dad never allowed the question to be asked out loud — even from me, the one who questioned everything — so my immediate family had never known. Now, I think I do.
“He was a rat, a no-good, so-and-so”
I turned up notes from a phone call circa 1991 that I had had with my great-Aunt Virginia, the sunny optimist we knew as Gee Gee, in stark contrast to her sister, my grandmother, the brooding Iola or “Sug.” Gee Gee had given me the name of my father’s father all those years before, agreeing only because Sug had recently died at age 80.
“I promised Iola I’d never tell,” she told me. “But you deserve to know.”
I had never synced the name of the man she labeled “a rat, a no-good, so-and-so” with historical records until just before my Shreveport trip. My conclusion? He was a 54-year-old married father of three at the time of my father’s birth to the unmarried Iola. A lifelong railroad conductor and reputed gambler, he died in 1959.
My other conclusion, based on my own memories and soft evidence, is that my father never knew this story despite the fact that he found out later in life that his given surname at birth was falsified. (Sug had put the name Renfroe on his birth certificate; no such person is to be found.) According to his records, in 1993, at age 60, Dad had his name legally and quietly changed to the only one he and his children had ever known — Monte Durward Walker. (“Walker” came from a brief marriage — one of three Sug had, according to perhaps sketchy records.)
So, yes, Goliad, population 2,000, where I had last been perhaps 60 years before — a kid roaming the orchard behind my great-aunt’s old, white frame house. My great-great grandfather’s grave is there. My great-grandfather and one of my great-aunts are also buried there. My grandmother met my ne’er-do-well grandfather there. Heck, the town historian knew at least part of my family’s potentially shady history, which was featured in at least two books of Texas history. I had to go.
And, now I was taking my father’s ashes with me.
Goliad’s dark history
Goliad’s own past is fraught with death and intrigue. One of the oldest municipalities in Texas, it was the site in 1836 of the Goliad Massacre, where the Mexican Army executed more than 400 prisoners of war from the Texian Army in the Texas Revolution — the largest single loss of life in the war.
As noted, it was also the scene later in the 19th century of bloody post-Civil War conflicts between posses of the law, Confederate sympathizers and desperadoes, my relatives included.
I was traveling to that very place, my Dad in the backseat of my rental car, silent for once, perhaps listening for once.
Driving from Shreveport, I picked up my oldest and dearest friend in Austin. Would she accompany me to Goliad to not only dig up family skeletons metaphorically but to literally help scatter the remains of one at this site of Texas’ brutal history? It seemed a lot to ask on short notice.
“Sure,” she said in her stalwart way. She knew my Dad and immediately understood this as a quest beyond my control.
But there were loose ends. Where to deposit the ashes? What to say? How to be?
Again, fate intervened.
Calling forth poetic words
I retired during Covid and began taking a lyric essay course by writer and poet Sheila Bender to begin mining my history for a memoir focused on my Dad and the legacy of alcoholism and secrets in my family.
One of our assignments was to pick a historical figure with whom to exchange letters in the vein of Kit Bakke in Miss Alcott’s E-mail, a mix of history and memoir in which the author imagines she can correspond with Louisa May Alcott, penning both sides of the conversation.
I chose the late writer and activist Audre Lorde, one of my feminist heroes, for her ability to confront painful truths, anger and injustice — but also love — through poetry, which she regarded as a vital necessity of human existence. In my fictional letter, I asked for her help in laying my Dad to rest. Besides, she was one I could rub in Dad’s face a little, still pursuing my endless arguments with him over politics, women’s rights and the state of my bedroom.
Poetry is also already part of Goliad’s history; Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (Section 34) commemorates the “tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men” in the Goliad Massacre of 1836. I guess some places — and people — can’t be explained any other way.
In my pretend correspondence with Lorde, I told her it wasn’t just me who could use her input right now.
I filled her in on 2020’s “cultural reckoning on race,” as journalists put it, with people even putting sayings from her on signs in their yards. I figured she would want to know, too, that Roxane Gay made quite a literary splash during all of it with a collection of Lorde’s own essays.
I told her about my Dad’s roots in Goliad, though I had discovered he wasn’t at all “rooted.” I explained he was the only child born of an affair and never knew his father. I further revealed I could push his buttons like no one else and that he struck me hard once, hurling me across the room in an unsuccessful effort to control my teenage defiance.
I told her that I never won an argument with him until at 34 I confronted him about his drinking, which meant that he stepped on eggshells around me forever after, no longer easy with me as his funny and outrageous self. He must have wondered then how to love me.
I noted that the wonderful irony of the words coming from her — also the confrontational woman — likely wouldn’t be lost on a man who once loved jazz, sometimes took the less fortunate under wing, read voraciously and grudgingly tolerated his feminist daughter.
In my class assignment, Lorde responded with a poem. That meant that when my lifelong friend and I found the right place in Goliad for spreading the ashes, the words I wrote for Lorde’s reply were ready. I read them out loud under the perfect, gnarled old oak tree in Oak Hill Cemetery in sight line to my great-aunt’s grave:
Ashes to Goliad
Trees without roots must search.
Trees without roots struggle to support branches.
Trees without roots burn quickly
with their ashes packed
but waiting to burst,
dependent in your hand
in the flat heat
where you say what goes.
Where love can erupt
where restless ideas
cast shadows
in the violent light
of Goliad.
Finding peace with yourself
I can’t say whether the spreading of my father’s ashes in Goliad was pre-ordained. Perhaps just the intention I’d had in thinking about my father, the research, the Purcell history, etc., made it feel that way.
I just have to think that engaging in the search — even sometimes without knowing why — is worth the effort. My family’s past wasn’t always pretty, but for the first time I had an understanding and a semblance of peace.
After the scattering of the ashes, as I clung to my dearest friend and cried openly for the loss of my father for the first time since he died seven years ago, I had the clearest feeling Dad would have more than tolerated my questioning. He would have understood.
