Tulia, CA - Characters

Genevieve Telea Bishop is working in what she still calls the pottery shed, though what she's been making in it for the past ten years or so are ceramic musical instruments. She's hunched over the bench in deep concentration, working on the most difficult part of the instrument, correctly aligning the flue hole with the wedge which produces the tone.

She is in her early forties, beginning to get a little broad in the beam, but she makes it look good sauntering to and from the pottery shed and the old ranch house at the front corner of the 1 acre lot that is all that's left of her father's parents original property on the outskirts of Tulia, CA. He was Steven Burton, a Navy lieutenant in WWII who met her mother, Salamasina, (she was always called Sally in the States) in Samoa. Genevieve was his mother's name, Telea was her father's name. So our Genevieve has an interesting Euro-Pacific look, dark hair and a permanent tan, with dark grey eyes.

She had married Kevin Bishop, a good-looking, ambitious guy she'd met in college. He'd been working his way up in the local bank when, sometime in their early thirties, he developed some kind of rare blood disease and, after a prolonged illness, died. There were no children. Genevieve got a half-time job in the local branch of the county library and, after her grieving was past, found her solitary life quite liveable.

Between owning the house, the life insurance, and the library job, she manages quite well, and up until recently the ceramic instrument making has just been a hobby, giving them away to friends and family (she has a younger brother who's married with 2 children and a job in Silicon Valley). The instruments are painted with bright colors and Samoan motifs and she makes them with anywhere from 4 to 8 holes, and for a couple of years now she's been experimenting with different shapes for the resonating chamber, achieving a wide range of scales.

She started getting together with three friends (a man and a woman, married but not to each other, and a single guy who was a possible but of course turned out to be gay) to jam with the instruments, and she's hung a hand-painted sign out by the road: Teleatones - Hand Crafted Ceramic Musical Instruments. An annual agricultural/arts & crafts fair is held in town the last weekend of August, and she's planning on having a booth and giving some performances.

"Ruby Appel, right?"

"Ned McShirley, actually. Ruby's the one with glasses." The zesty, 40-ish woman with the unlikely name didn't seem to have taken offense at his mistake. She recognized him as the new tenant from 818 Osmont Street.

"Got it: Ned." Ernst stuck his hand out to her over the bar and added, "Ernst Stratford; we're neighbors."

"Stratford - like Stratford-upon-Avon!" said Ned, shaking his proffered hand with real pleasure. One of the proprietors of The Clotted Cow, Tulia's own faux-English pub, Ned was a fan of all things British, no matter how tenuous the connection.

"I guess so," agreed Ernst. He looked around the snug bar parlor of the pub. "Nice place. Been meaning to stop in ever since I moved to Tulia." Irish fiddle music played somewhat incongruously, but thankfully not too loudly in the background, as a handful of patrons enjoyed the cool darkness of the pub this hot, dry August afternoon.

Four women talked business over tea and crumpets at one of the wooden booths at the back, portraits of the Queen, Prince Charles and Lady Di smiling down on them. At the bar two old gents, the navy tattoos fading on their forearms, were getting around a couple of the bar's thirty one draft beers.

And Jim, redhead, college student, and barista extraordinaire, served up a couple of skinny iced lattes for his current customers, two serious teenage girls with their arms linked. "How're Megan and Skaya today?" he enquired of them nonchalantly. A conversation ensued. Ernst's gaze returned to Ned behind the bar, polishing a glass that didn't need polishing. The pub and everything in it shone with cleanliness and care.

"Yeah, we like it," she said, picking up the thread of their conversation.

"How long have you had it?"

"A little over two years." Just then a crash kitchen-ward caused Ned to jump; "'Scuse me," she said hastily, and dashed for what she would undoubtedly have described as a green baize door at the end of the bar. Jim expertly finished his conversation with the girls and moved down the bar towards Ernst. "What can I get for you?"

"How about a medium coffee to go," said Ernst. Jim handed him a white cardboard cup with "The Clotted Cow" stamped in brown ink on the side, and gestured over to two big airpots.

"Help yourself. Today's brews are Pukka Sahib and Greater Dorset." He accepted Ernst's $1.40. "You know Ned?"

"Just met," said Ernst, heading toward the airpots. "I moved into her building on Osmont Street a couple weeks ago. Saw her and her roommate the other day at Hertel's, and the druggist told me they were the owners of The Clotted Cow."

"Um hmm," said Jim. "Ned, Ruby, and Gabriel Acuña. He's from Puerto Rico, but he's just as much of an Anglophiliac as Ned and Ruby."

Ernst served himself a mixture of two-thirds Pukka Sahib and one-third Greater Dorset, topping it off with half-and-half from a ceramic cow's mouth. "You seem to have everything. Latte, crumpets, beer..."

"And lunch from 12-2," added Jim. Come back and try our oxtail soup sometime. It's really excellent."

"That I shall," said Ernst. He tucked his cup into a black and white cow-spotted Java Jacket, waved, and headed out the door of the Cow, as a couple more Tulians came in for their daily jolt.

He had a good feeling about Tulia, CA. He was going to like living here.

Jim let the last patron out and was locking the door of the Clotted Cow. He stuck his head outside for a moment to see how the street looked at that late hour. He finished locking the door and walked to the bar where Ruby was counting the day's receipts.

Jim looked at the stacks of bills. "That same guy is at the bus stop across the street. He's playing one of those Teleatone things."

Ruby finished counting and looked up at Jim. "Yes, I know. He's a fixture in my life. You're too young to know about him. His name is William Faulkner Ingram, better known as Woofie. He's the reason Roger picks me up in the alley. Woofie and I went out together for a short time when I was a senior at Tulia High. He never got over me and is always someplace in the background wherever I go."

"Why don't you get a restraining order on him?" Jim asked.

"It used to bother me. But now, you know, its been going on so long, I think I'd miss him if he stopped stocking me." Ruby said wistfully. "He's harmless."

[For more about Woofie, click HERE]

Everything changed for Bob Futz on September 11, 1949, the day he arrived in Tulia to find his mother already living there. In fact she’d lived there her whole life, but it came as a surprise to Bob, as did nearly everything that day. Less by choice than by necessity, Bob stayed on in Tulia. His mother helped him get on his feet, often gave him lunch, and pressed books on him: first Readalot the Rhyming Rat, then The Bad Umbrella, and later the Pimpleton series, of which Bob’s favorite had been Pimpleton at Prep. Bob got older, got work and got married to his high school sweetheart. They bought a house on a quiet tree-lined street and Bob took up a series of offbeat hobbies to pass away the time while his wife caught up on an ever-lengthening backlog of recorded video. He had tried writing and got three chapters into his book, Me and Nothingness, before he set that aside to design the first in a sequence of bubble-pack easy chairs. When it struck him that, wrapped in bubble-pack, a man might roll down a steep hillside unharmed, he experimented with that for a while on the nearby slopes of Mount Tulia until he glanced off a rock one day and spent the remainder of his descent tumbling vertically down the incline. Next, Bob conceived an idea for a local radio call-in show, The Savvy Fool, in which each broadcast would feature a one-time host-counselor chosen from the ranks of ordinary Tuliards (as the town’s residents would be called). He spent a few weeks pitching that to the program director at KTUL over espressos at Your Brain On Drugs, but abandoned it when he ran across an old Punch puppet at an antique shop. He took the puppet home and, realizing he needed a team, made a second puppet out of a sock and an eggshell. He got a cardboard box and set it up in his garage as a little stage. He propped a mirror in front of it and got behind the stage, holding the two characters above his head and watching the action in the mirror. He had given Punch his traditional bat, a length of one-inch dowel fished from the scrap wood box; but since the homemade member of the team had no hair, it could hardly be Judy. Bob thought a moment and waggled the egg-faced puppet from side to side.

“It is I, Death, Punch!” Bob chanted in Transylvanian tones.
“’Deathpunch’? Are you a wrestler?”
“Many have wrestled my shadow, Punch”
“Ah! Your trademark Shadow Punch. They don’t see it coming, eh?”
“Laugh it off, Punch, but it is always I who have the last-“
Punch’s bat swung around and whacked a dent in Death’s little egg head. But Death talked on, in a voice like that of Peter Lorre.
“You can dent me, Punch, you can hit me with that stick of yours, but you can never kill me, Punch. I will always be here, waiting for you, watching you-“
Punch landed a second sharp blow straight down on the top of the eggshell head, smashing right through it and causing Bob to cry out in pain. Punch yanked the sock puppet from Bob’s left hand and Bob stuck the fingers in his mouth. He was already thinking of his next hobby.

Marcie Bean sat in the shade of the old cottonwood tree watching her goats. She sat on a small roll-up backpacking chair which was easy to pick up and move when her goats moved on to a new patch of weeds. In her hand she absently held a much used white plastic soprano recorder. She played it to keep the goats close, but that job was also done by Little Ben and Betsy - the corgis. (Little Ben was actually Ben E. Gooddog, but Marci always called him Little Ben because he was smaller than Betsy, who loved her dog chow.) Bill, the pony was tied up to a nearby piñon pine. Bill was a Shetland pony/American Cream cross and just the right size for Marcie. He was dozing, his back left foot tipped up. Marci's eyes now wandered from the thirty or so goats up to the growing bank of clouds beyond the tree branches. More rain perhaps, was the thought that edged into her mind, but mostly she just thought what a splendid afternoon it was.

The goats were methodically eating every tumbleweed and wild mustard along a long stretch of hillside that overlooked the west side of Tulia. Fire prevention regulations required that weeds be cut back each year. After several years of small weed clearing jobs on empty lots or peoples' neglected side yards, and after persistant phone calls and letters to convince the town officials to give her ever growing herd of goats a try, Marcie had snagged this job - her first official professional assignment as a Goat Weed Abatement Specialist.

Though Marcie had been born in Tulia, she like many a young person before her, left to go to university in the Big City. Marcie had not entered adulthood thinking she'd herd goats. No, Marcie, as a practical minded twenty-two year old, went to library school and at twenty-four, emerged as a newly minted Archival Librarian. She promptly got a job in Sacramento in the State Historical Library organizing, preserving and cataloging old California documents, letters and photographs of all kinds. For twenty years exactly, she worked there, going home to Tulia every other weekend to visit her parents Matthew and Maria Bean. They still lived in the original Bean farm house too, which stood on the remaining 10 acres of the original 160 acre homestead. Then three years ago she got the sad news that her dad Matt had been found unconscious, ax still in hand, next to the old wood chopping stump. A week later, he died in Tulia Community hospital. Narcie, knowing her now 75 year old mother would need help with the chickens and the vegetable garden, (not to mention chopping wood), gave notice at the library immediately. Over the next two weeks, she was taken out to several good-bye dinners and endured pleas to stay for the sake of California history, or for the sake of various co-workers. But Marcie was certain that going home to Tulia was the right decision. Actually, she felt that it was meant to be. She craved the slower pace and the smell of the bunch grass and white sage.

As she drove her loaded truck pulling the small U-Haul trailer with her overflow stuff, she thought of her great grandfather Thomas Breen. He had traveled a similar route over the Coastal range on his way to Tulia. Only, he did not know he was going to Tulia. Thomas was looking for a change in his life too. His father, John Breen, had as a fourteen year old, survived the Donner Party tragedy. In fact, the entire Breen family - Patrick, Margaret their six sons and infant daughter all survived and were quietly proud that none of them had resorted to eating human flesh. But rumors persisted and Thomas had tired of all the tales and speculation. So he packed up a newly built farm wagon, hitched up his new team of four American Cream horses, helped his bride of one week, Edna, onto the seat beside him and slowly made his way over the Coastal range until he came, just by chance, to the small town of Tulia. A little to the east of town he bought one hundred sixty acres of slightly rolling farmland. It was dotted with valley oaks and divided by two streams - one of which had nice trout.

"Bean, my name's Bean." Thomas had told the land office man. And Bean the family name remained, at least in Tulia. Marcie had told only one co-worker this story. Millie was a good friend too, and she was surprised Marcie had never revealed her family history to her supervisor, considering that they worked in the State Historical Library. But Marcie kept the story secret. She didn't want a lot of curious questions either.

Little Ben and Betsy suddenly began barking. The goats moved together up the slope away from the red pick-up that had just pulled up. Frank Short, the one who'd given Marcie the go ahead on the weeding project, got out and surveyed the slope. Marcie walked through the goats to meet him.

"Hi", he said, "Just came to see how you were doing here. I been tellin' folks at City Hall about your goats eatin' weeds along this stretch."

"Well, we've completed weeding from that pole way down there all the way up to here just today." Marcie said. "They eat everything."

Frank watched a goat dropping a pile of pellets on the ground. Marcie followed his gaze.

She added, "And seeds don't even sprout from their droppings."

He nodded, "Looks real good. Making good progress." He smiled, took a last look at the goats who were beginning to crowd up to him out of curiosity, then waved good bye.

Marcie looked up again at the gathering clouds and decided to call it a day. She called to the two corgis as she picked up her chair. She untied Bill from the tree and packed the rolled up chair, and her left over lunch in his saddle bag. Marcie mounted and directed Bill along the slope to a little used back road that she had picked as a safe route down which to move the goats. Betsy and Ben E. sprang into action, running back and forth behind and next to the goats. Together the herd started down the road, baaing and bleating with several hundred hooves tapping away on the old asphalt.

Fifteen minutes later, Marcie dismounted from Bill and unlatched the fence at the back of the homestead. "In!" She commanded and Ben and Betsy went back and forth behind every last dusty goat until they all had passed through. They settled into their own yard which had two small barns in it and hay bales to climb on. Marcie then led Bill to his own stable. She unsaddled and brushed him while the corgis ate their dog chow nearby. Then she headed to the house. It had been a long day and she was more tired than she had realized. She opened the screen door. Mmm, snickerdoodle cookies were baking! She set her lunch box on the counter.

"Hi, Mom, I'm done for the day!"