Aside from faith, the most significant factor in Southern life may be the family. Who we come from – those living alongside us and who lived before us – can provide an established path for us to travel through life by embracing and cultivating certain places, traditions, beliefs, and patterns. In other cases, families may have traversed a history that winds through cultural wilderness, with individuals shifting and changing to meet challenges that arose over time. The latter creates a very different scenario for a Southerner, where myths and narratives are less visible and more ephemeral. In this essay, a writer with roots in eastern Texas grapples with issues of lineage and identity within her own family’s narratives in the midst of bringing her father’s ashes home.

Ghosts in Goliad
By Dr. Danna Walker

My synapses snapped open, and my late father seemed to enter my kitchen like a genie from a lamp. I took a step back, startled. What the hell?

A strange but familiar smell was emanating from a distressed cardboard box that showed up at my suburban Washington, DC, home via UPS, with Shreveport the return address. I was puzzled because Mom never sent anything outside Christmas and birthdays, and dad had been dead since 2014, five years prior. Inside was a decorative wooden case with a TJ Maxx price sticker on the bottom.

Then I remembered a phone conversation from months before, my father’s widow, Roxanne, asking if I wanted dad’s ashes. She no longer did, she said, I assumed because after so many years of looking at them, they still made her sad, or she was moving again and clearing things out. She wasn’t specific. I agreed to her offer to send them from Louisiana. After a few months, I assumed she had forgotten or the weight made postage too expensive. Then, I, too, forgot.

As I looked closer, there was broken glass in the box and an even stronger waft of what might be described as dive-bar-the-morning-after-payday.

 “Your dad used to buy those little half-pint bottles by the case,” Roxanne 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 mailed it to you, I forgot it was in there. I’m sorry it got broken.”

Monte Durward Walker’s presence intermingled with the distinct odor of cheap booze seemed perfect – dark humor worthy of dad. He’s enjoying this, I thought.

I was the steward of dad’s ashes. How did that happen? I had left dad so long ago, and he had left me, with our connections fraying like twine over his last several years, tentative and teasing. We got along, we didn’t. Rinse and repeat.

Now, Dad had come back to me. I didn’t realize I had been wishing he would. Now I had him to myself and he would have to listen. More irony, I thought. He needed me for the first time.

I put the wooden box in my basement with my wardrobe of coats, old camping equipment and beach chairs, where they stayed until some two years later when I went excavating for a bathing suit for a trip to Shreveport to visit my ailing mother for Mother’s Day. She had broken a hip and we discovered later was losing her memory. Both my sister and brother would be there – the first time the three of us would be together since Dad had died seven years before.

I had recently been exploring our family history, uncovering secrets, lies and mysteries on Dad’s side, and I wanted to share them. Dad and his ancestry were in my head, and rediscovering his ashes, though accidental, seemed almost ordained, if somewhat aggravating, because it meant I had to take them back down South. I had considered scattering them near my weekend mountain home in Western Maryland, but it was a place Iloved, not he. Beaches were Dad’s favorite places, but the ones around me hugged the upper Atlantic, not the Gulf or Florida coasts where he spent so much time over his life.

My siblings could help me. Dad could take credit for bringing us together to feel his presence on our own, not sharing him with others who didn’t know him, or knew him differently, like those at the small gathering at his and Roxanne’s modest two-bedroom house after he died. No funeral, no memorial, not the massive crowd of admirers I had always imagined for Dad – just people mostly unaware of his eldest daughter, sharing drinking stories and toasts.

At one point, I reflexively headed for the makeshift bar before remembering I hadn’t had a drink in thirty years. Wouldn’t that just be the Shreveport irony of the century if I did now, I thought at the time. Roxanne’s granddaughter, Misty, in her 20s, had just regaled a table of drinkers with stories about Dad at a time during my childhood, and I jerked my head around to listen.

 “Paw Paw was so funny,” Misty said, her tone upbeat. “He would always tell stories on himself, his crazy past. Like remember when he said, when he was young, he and the other men in his office would have sex with the secretaries in the supply room? Right there in the office. I mean it was the ’60s! So crazy!”

The 1960s, when my mother, sister, and I were at home, worshiping Dad, waiting for him to walk through the door each night, hoping for a moment of his affection, suffering through each day until he arrived, my mother young, struggling with her weight after two kids, pinching every penny, in love with a man she deemed the smartest she had ever met.

No, there would be no funeral for the man, no formal service, no body, no burial. I wouldn’t get my chance to stand up in front of Dad’s Shreveport and dazzle its citizenry with my repartee about Double-oh-eight-and-a-half, the nickname some of his friends called him. Shreveport, with its ubiquitous Spanish moss reaching its tentacles to grab my ankles and pull me back – to Dad, to drinking, to my self-loathing. Shreveport, the perfect reflection of my father’s – and thus, my – life. The way it got stuck in time, occasionally getting ahead, having a few good years but the inevitable setbacks and isolation, like a neon sign sputtering against time, striving for relevance, forever battling forces known but unspoken.

Dad was cremated per his instructions, his large life reduced to a shrink-wrapped block of ash. Roxanne said she was honoring his wishes. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it,” I imagined him declaring, thinking he was doing everyone a favor rather than depriving them of a chance to grieve.

Finding a good place for Dad’s ashes would mean I could create the sendoff he deserved in defiance of his and my hometown’s limitations. My sister, brother, and I could pull this off, I thought. We could scatter them on the banks of the Red, or in the bayou behind his old house – anywhere but Maryland or the Delaware Shore, either feeling like betrayal, like me once again going off on my own without Dad’s permission, damn the consequences.

I wanted to believe my sister, brother, and I could come together and lay Dad to rest, not just for him but for ourselves. Maybe we’d get some peace that might carry over to our lives, which, with luck, would continue for a long time after Dad.

On this day, still picking out seasonal clothes in the basement, I opened the case and took out the white plastic-coated brick to put into my carry-on.

Human ashes are surprisingly heavy, and BWI security got suspicious about my bag with the cube of inert material inside. I was sweating from exertion and from the May heat, and 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 took out my notes on the research I had done about Dad’s family. What I found was surprising and disturbing, everything leading to one place – Goliad, Texas.

I uncovered that Goliad was where my great-great grandfather, Ruben Caldwell Purcell – a man my grandmother Sug often spoke of with reverence – was gunned down in 1869 in a horseback shootout as part of 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 federal marshal or one among a marauding bunch of outlaws wreaking havoc in defiance of the Union victory in the Civil War. I chose to believe the latter. I figured killing and stealing had been burnished down to risky driving and rule-bending real estate deals by the time my father came around. My grandmother had always portrayed Purcell as a victim shot by the legendary Jesse James. Family lore was that there was a letter from James in Purcell’s grave apologizing for shooting the wrong man.

But my real interest was in the bloodline from the son Purcell left behind. He went on to have eight kids, including my grandmother Sug, before he died of a fractured skull in a car accident east of Goliad in 1931. A horse “jumped into auto,” according to the death certificate, making no mention of whether alcohol was involved. 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, much to his aggravation.

But 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, the brooding Iola, whom we knew as Sug, her nickname from being a waitress in a Victoria, Texas diner. 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.

 “You’re from a long line of ne’er-do-wells, I’m afraid,” she said with her usual humor.

I pictured her running her rough, tan hand through her short gray hair, smiling as big as the Texas cattle ranch on which she and her husband worked as overseers, her eyes twinkling on her sun-wrinkled face, her glasses on a cord around her neck, her hand on her hip, elbow askew.

Would she understand that I waited and wondered a long time, and that such secrets shouldn’t be buried forever, even just for the sake of generally setting things right and freeing one’s mind for old age and future generations? Sure, she probably didn’t owe a great-niece much, but sometimes good things did come from truth, didn’t they?

I held my breath and then she said, “I promised Iola I’d never tell, but you deserve to know.”

I had never synced Tom Land, the name of the man she labeled “a rat, a no-good, so-and-so,” with historical records until just before my Shreveport trip. Research seemed to indicate 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, leaving behind another son who walked the streets of my father’s hometown as an older lookalike, according to gossip at the time.

I didn’t know if my dad knew this story, though he did find 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 short marriage to Sandy Franklin Walker, performed in Goliad – one of Sug’s three known marriages, according to accounts from my dad’s papers and my great-aunt.) He had gone through almost his entire life with a name that was not legally his.

I had distinct memories of Goliad, population 2,000, but never understood its centrality in my family’s history. I had last been perhaps fifty years before – a kid roaming the orchard behind my great-aunt’s old, white frame house, eating berries from trees to stay alive in a childhood survivalist fantasy with my sister and other distantly related kids.

My reverie from memories of the call with Gee Gee over, I got back to revising my notes, proud to have put this much together on so little information, much of which had been false or misleading. My father’s footprint on Ancestry.com was so much slighter than his presence in real life. His story, though, was likely familiar to many American families who “came from dirt,” as my mother used to say – the “ne’er-do-wells,” waitresses, drunks, and all the other misfits who went on to raise sons and daughters on false promises, romantic dreams, and crazily misguided expectations. I guessed I was one of them.

We were all sitting in my mother’s den in Shreveport while Mom, Tim, and Pam discussed “Lies, Half-Truths, Rats, Ghosts, Jesse James, Blood Feuds and Other Tales from the Walker Family (that, as it turns out, have little to do with ‘Walker’),” the tongue-in-cheek title I gave my now typed-up family history.

It didn’t last long, with Mom and Tim questioning my findings and doubting my conclusions, coming up with their own guesses and scenarios. I fought my frustration, staring at the white-painted Pecky Cypress paneling on the asymmetrical mid-century modern walls, the zebra-print art, fake African knick-knacks and old keepsakes, the familiar music box on a kitchen shelf featuring a ballerina dancing “inside” a champagne bottle, the more than fifty-year-old liquid now dark and turbid. Beyond us, the living room sported bright loud walls of yellow, orange, and green painted by my mother, herself, to set the tone for her budget glamour in the 1962 house she and dad bought almost new. The era of James Bond, the Rat Pack, Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra, the big bands with their horns and saxophones like my dad used to play – it’s all here, I thought, which brought me back to him.

 “We need to figure out where to spread dad’s ashes. I brought them with me,” I said to Pam and Tim. By then, Mom had returned to her TV.

“We’ll figure it out,” Tim said as if there was plenty of time, but we only had a couple of days before we went our separate ways.

We started bandying ideas, but figured growing outdoor crowds during Covid would thwart Tim’s brainstorm of sneaking the ashes onto the grounds of the Elks Club pool, where the bartenders knew Dad’s drink and his favorite joke by heart: “Well, if it feels good to get it out, you should probably just let it stay out.”

I wanted to push the issue but knew my siblings had their own separate histories with Dad and I couldn’t force us to come together for my sake. I dreaded the idea of carrying his ashes back home to Maryland, their fate still undecided. Loose ends were ubiquitous in my family, but I didn’t like them. I knew they would just dangle forever, never to be resolved, like hurt feelings, misunderstandings, strained marriages, diet plans and many of my family’s other aspirations.

I was here, with the ashes. I wasn’t taking them back. I could do more research in Goliad, a six-and-a-half hour drive away. Maybe that would help me figure out what to do. I was retired now and could extend my visit a few days. Goliad. The name took root in my brain, seeming to spread through my being. I had discovered my great-great grandfather’s grave was there. My great-grandfather and one of my great-aunts were also buried there. My grandmother met my ne’er-do-well grandfather there and married the elusive Sandy Walker there. When I called the town historian, I learned she knew part of my family’s past, which was featured in two books of Texas history.

I had to go, and I had to take Dad with me.

* * *

I hoped Dad was acquiescing of his own free will as I put the brick in a plastic grocery bag and slid it under the driver’s seat of my rental car, the same spot where Dad sometimes hid a fifth of Wild Turkey on road trips. I thought about Dad as though he were napping in the backseat, resting up to be ready to see his family’s hard-scrabble south Texas Shangri-la for the first time in decades.

I felt like I was a kid again on one of our family’s familiar road trips to see relatives in Texas. I saw myself from afar on a quest perhaps with divine guidance, flesh-and-blood but ghostlike, in search of a place of peace for myself as much as Dad.

“There’s my great-aunt’s grave,” I said to my dearest friend who was sitting shotgun. I had picked her up in Austin after she agreed to accompany me to Goliad. She knew my dad, and my struggle to tell our story. She’s a writer, too, and seemed to immediately understand this as a quest beyond my control. “I spent time in this place, but I only remember a few details,” I said. “They’re vivid, though.”

My research found that Goliad’s own past was fraught with death and intrigue. It was the site of the Goliad Massacre in the Texas Revolution as well as the scene later in the 19^th century of bloody post-Civil War conflicts between posses of the law, Confederate sympathizers, and desperadoes, my relatives included.

Goliad is a tiny museum of a town, with an imposing courthouse in the town square – its French-style cornices and mansard roof in stark contrast to the “hanging tree” oak on the lawn, with its grim history of lethal justice. The place is rife with southern live oaks so revered that roads were often built to curve around them as though everyone knew it was God who oversaw such haunted land, not common men. The sight of the oaks and the blacktop carved into the dirt with no shoulders or curbs lit up my memory. Victorian homes stood in various states of repair, just down the street from rusted-out shacks guarded by chained up dogs, barking with fury at every passing car. If my body yearned to meld into the landscape, Dad must have been feeling it, too. I sensed from under the seat his focus shifting away from me to the place where he could rest. In peace? Maybe.

I had made no plan or looked at any map as we drove into Goliad, hewing to my dad’s devil-may-care approach to travel of any kind. It didn’t take long to find a cemetery, and I instinctively pulled into the parking lot. Beckoned by the graveyard cats whose kibble had been left in little piles on the cement steps, I wandered among the headstones, quickly stumbling upon the graves of my immediate ancestors. I don’t know why I was astonished. We had just come from the courthouse, where I found land records for my great-great grandfather, as well as the Market House Museum, where the town’s historian documented my family as part of the town’s history. She disputed the idea that Jesse James shot Ruben Sr., though she confirmed James was in the area at the time. She said even if he had written the letter touted in family lore, it would have disintegrated after 151 years. “I checked with the undertaker on that,” the historian said, alarm on her face at any hint I might be considering exhumation. (I was; Goliad would have remembered me after that.)

When I saw the group of headstones in Oak Hill Cemetery with the name Purcell, I felt again like a kid visiting Goliad, wondering who all the relatives were who gathered at my Great-aunt Idell’s, enveloping my father, clearly their favorite son, and laying out the lace tablecloths and ambrosia salad for the holidays. I pictured Idell tending to her beehives and brushing out her waist-length white hair 100 strokes each night, my Great-uncle Tom’s pride at his hobby – taxidermy, with stuffed birds, raccoons and deer heads lending a wildness to the domestic draftiness of the big house. Dad always said Uncle Tom’s black hair never turned gray because he didn’t work a day or earn a penny in his life. I was always an observer of the place’s tranquility, but I could never relax there. Too many stories hidden.

There was no tombstone for my grandmother Sug. She donated her body to science at the University of Houston, fitting for her practical personality and love of history; she collected arrowheads and practiced genealogy, though Dad saved none of the records. It was just as well she wasn’t here, I thought, since Sug loved only my dad and me, never my mother, who took away her son, or my sister, who as the second and planned child guaranteed he would never return.

She had kept my dad’s father a secret from all of us, and I could never let that go. When the University of Houston sent me a letter offering to ship her ashes decades after she died, and not long after Dad did, I was startled by the timing. They could send them to me for a modest price, they said, or I would have to spend several hundred dollars to retrieve them after they went into deep storage. The fate of Iola, too, ironically rested with me, but this time I didn’t ponder the possibilities.

I looked at the letter opener, noticing I gripped it in my palm like a weapon. I pictured Dad surveying the scene from afar, and I mimicked how I thought he might do it, smashing the heavy bond paper into a ball and then taking aim for the corner trash, wrist cocked just so – my one graceful body part so much like Dad’s. No one needs to know. No one left to care, I thought.

* * *

At the cemetery this day, I looked up at the gnarled old oak tree standing guard over the family who had watched out for Dad. I didn’t really know how Dad felt about Goliad, but I reasoned he probably had little opinion. It was just part of his past, not to be questioned, like so many things in his life.

I embraced the solid old tree standing as sentry over my families’ graves, sensing its resolve. It seemed perhaps the only living thing that Dad might allow himself to lean on.

I had traveled here, Dad in the backseat of my rental car, silent for once, perhaps listening for once. A plan came together quickly in my head, almost outside my consciousness.

A writing exercise before my Shreveport trip had me picking 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. As a bonus, 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. In my fictional letter, I asked for her help in laying my dad to rest.

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, I told Lorde 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’s identity. 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 walked 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 I found the right place in Goliad for spreading dad’s ashes, the words I wrote for Lorde’s reply were ready to be called up on my phone. I read them out loud under the old oak in sight line to my great-aunt’s grave:

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, and
restless ideas
cast shadows
in the violent light
of Goliad.

Because of my dad, I grew up thinking it normal for men to flout rules and ignore convention. I understood that men weren’t beholden to others, and they didn’t admit to harboring guilt or regret, or need the acknowledgement of anyone, even in death.

I also knew from a deathbed scene with Dad that he remembered we connected during our lives when it was most important, even though he had no model for doing that in his own formative years.

After scattering the ashes – all that was left of Dad’s 6’2”, 190-pound frame, crooked smile and graceful long limbs – I cried at my loss for the first time. I figured it wasn’t the last word where Dad was concerned, but I had gotten him home with those who loved him in ways flawed and raw. Him – the outsider, the one with the history, the stain of his secret birth that made him separate and special – not with the others in the ground but on his own, already drifting into the elements, alone, just as he always had.

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