Foy Davis was born in 1960 in the small, West Texas town of Fort Davis, which lies within a triangle formed by the cities of Van Horn, Fort Stockton, and Marfa. When he was young, his father told him the town was named for Colonel Davis, a distant ancestor of theirs who fought the Indians with great passion and vigor right up until the time he ran off to join them and was never heard from again. A few arrowheads and a leather bag were produced as evidence of the story, but none of it was true. The Davis family was new to the area, his father having arrived in 1956 with his new bride. He came to be the associate pastor of the Baptist church at the end of Bloys Avenue, which was unpaved then and remains so today. Their house was 50 yards east of the church, around a little curve in the road. It was a yellow plaster house with a metal roof and a small corner porch with concrete steps. The house was modest enough, but the view from the backyard, if you could call dirt and sand a backyard, was spectacular. The foot of the Davis mountain range - also named for Colonel Davis according to his father - lay no more than 100 yards from their house. These were desert mountains, brutal mountains. Rocks and outcroppings jutted toward the sky at harsh angles. The sand and the scrubby, barbed plants blistered in the summer heat without trees for shade. Foy’s father used to say this was real desert, none of your sissy deserts like they have down below San Antonio and Uvalde.

Coyotes ate his first dog, so said his father, and it may well have been true. She went into heat and disappeared one night when the Coyotes’ howls were particularly close. A second dog was purchased and met with the same fate. Coyote cries at night. No dog in the morning. After that Foy and his younger brother were given a Guinea Pig. It was left out in the sun one afternoon and suffered some sort of heat-stroke. It never took another step, but stood, blinking, wherever it was, until someone picked it up and carried it to another spot. They did not have good luck with animals.

When he was three he used to lay in bed at night and listen to the sounds of the desert that trickled in through the open window. He stared into the darkness until he made himself see green and red lights. He flew the lights around the room in formation until one night they got out of control and he couldn’t shut them off. At least that’s how he remembered it. He would pick his nose at night and reach over in the darkness to wipe the mess on the wall. Once it left his hand it was gone completely, as if it never existed. No other possibility occurred to him until his father bellowed from the room one morning. It was his first philosophy lesson. Things still exist after you let go of them in the darkness. They will be there in the morning. Their existence is not dependent on you. It was the first of many Copernican revolutions, and the new idea was so pleasurable that it overcame even his fear of his father. He watched as his father scrubbed the wall, mouth agape in wonder.

When he was five, Foy’s nose began to bleed regularly because of the dry climate. His father was a kind man and overall a good parent, but he had a tendency to insist on using his personal treatments for ailments and physical problems. He pulled their loose teeth with a string, regardless of their protests, because it was the best way. Get it over and be done with it. He told Foy the best thing was to get the inside of his nose cauterized. No reason to fool around with bloody noses in West Texas when the doctor can fix it right up. Having lost battles like this in the past, Foy made a private vow never to be seen with a bloody nose. He would squat behind the shed and let the blood drip into the dirt until it stopped of its own accord. Then he covered it with sand, like a cat. His parents never found out about that, nor did they know that Foy ate seven or eight tablespoons of white sugar every morning for breakfast. When his mother wasn’t looking Foy would scoop spoonfuls of sugar onto his Rice Crispies and shake the bowl until it settled at the bottom. He would skim his spoon along the surface and eat cereal until his mother turned away. Then he used his spoon to dredge the bottom of the bowl for the good stuff.

Periodically his grandparents would appear from deep East Texas, where both of his parents grew up. It was an epic journey, almost a thousand miles after they swung far south into the Rio Grande Valley to buy grapefruit. His grandfather never lost his excitement about grapefruit. It absolutely thrilled him and was certainly worth the extra 250 miles. He said the Ruby Red from the Valley was the greatest grapefruit in the world and grown right here in Texas. Foy loved the grapefruit, but he was bothered by the strange membrane that separated the sections, visible after he spooned out the meat. It didn’t seem right that something like that should be in any way connected to food.

His grandparents always brought Foy and his brother a new pair of boots, which was occasion for great celebration, so much so that in time Foy developed the vague impression that they only made boots back East, an idea that stuck with him much longer than you might imagine. Once his grandfather brought dry ice and put it in water so that a ghostly fog bubbled out of the glass. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. All of these things, the boots, the grapefruit, and the ice, created another vague impression that far away in distant lands were exotic mysteries and wonderful things to behold. This impression stayed with Foy for as long as he lived, and as an old man he would weep when he saw pictures of places he knew he would never go.

His grandparents liked the climate in Fort Davis. It was hot, but the lack of humidity made it cool in the evenings. His grandfather never tired of pointing out that theirs was a dry heat and not nearly as difficult to manage as the heavy, humid heat of East Texas. Now that was real heat. This aggravated Foy’s father, who was a straight thermometer man and believed you looked at the number on the thermometer and shouldn’t factor in modern notions like humidity. The men in the family had a powerful need to claim the bragging rights that came with living in the most rugged and difficult part of Texas. Though Foy would grow up to be very self-aware and laugh at this trait, he could not escape it. All of his life he enjoyed telling people about the dogs.

“We lived out in the wild parts of Texas. Out West. The coyotes ate my first dog. Got another dog and they ate him too.”

He enjoyed the horrified stares that this comment often brought and the way it tended to silence to the conversation. He was only bested once, by an old man in his church in San Antonio who claimed he was strapped to a dental chair in Van Horn when he was twelve and had his tonsils removed without anesthesia. Tonsil care was a part of dentistry in those days, apparently.

“They made me drink CoCola when they was done to cauterize it. It burned like the devil going down.”

That time it was Foy who was silenced and stared, horrified. Of course, cauterizing always did give him the heebie jeebies.

When Foy’s mother was very old, long after his father had died, Foy asked her if she believed in God. He had always wondered about that but for some reason had never gotten around to asking. It was part of the secret they shared that the question didn’t really need to be asked. She was so old when he finally did that it was obvious the question came from pure curiosity and nothing else. He knew she would understand that.
 
Foy and his mother shared a way of looking at the world, a way of thinking and being. When he was young she nurtured his mind behind the scenes. She played the church hostess, pouring coffee for her husband and the deacons while they discussed theology and church things. She sat smiling, letting the men talk while she fed Foy philosophical tidbits under the table. The Sunday School teachers swaddled his mind every Sunday morning with Church wisdom and Church ideas. On Sunday nights she took him outside under the stars. There under the glitter of the world’s most ancient wisdom, she carefully unwound the swaddling clothes and set him free.

She wasn’t a hypocrite or a liar. She went to church every Sunday with the family. She wanted to go. But she did not want her son bound and trapped as she had been. She wanted his mind to be free. She read science books to him. She taught him the constellations. She bought him a microscope. She probed his mind with trick questions, teaching him to think.

“Foy, are squares real?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know? Have you ever seen one?”

“Yes, they’re everywhere. All over the place”

“That’s funny, because I’ve never seen a square. And I’ve been looking for them all of my life.”

She explained to him that there was no such thing in all the world as a perfect square, and of course only perfect squares count as squares. When the truth of this became clear to him, he was as filled with joy as she was.

“Then why do they teach us about squares in school if there really aren’t any?”

“That,” she said with a satisfied smile, “is a good question.”

Once she asked him what he thought the number four was. He knew her game by then, so he said, “What do YOU think it is?”

“I don’t know, but something feels wrong about it. I know what it means that there are four marbles or four chairs, but I’m realizing that I don’t know what FOUR is. Is four something in and of itself?”

The two of them sat together, trying to wrap their minds around the question. It seemed like something was indeed missing from the idea of four. What was four?

She said, “Maybe it’s just the state of being that happens whenever there are four of anything in a defined area. Four is what IS whenever four things are.”

Then she giggled. “What a weird world,” she said.

Foy’s mother was the first in her family to go to college. Her grandfather was a sharecropper. Three of her father’s seven siblings died, one while the family was on the way to California after Oklahoma turned to a bowl of dust. Her father came back to Texas, married, and went to work selling shoes in Conroe. He was smart but uneducated. She was his only daughter, and his dream was that she would go to college, which she did. She went to college to become a teacher, because that’s what girls did in their world. Then she took a philosophy course and was hooked. She changed her major to philosophy but kept it a secret from everyone. She took up smoking and lived for two years in a world of the mind, where the only things that mattered were romantic, metaphysical ideas. Her senior year she was offered a fellowship to pursue a master’s degree in philosophy, but she turned it down. She had fallen in love with a young man who was heading for seminary. It was the mid-fifties, and she lived in Texas. It seemed like a noble thing to stop dreaming and get on with real life, which was having children and being properly religious. Any regret or resentment she felt about this was strictly latent. Unconscious. Deep stuff. At every conscious level, she celebrated her life.

She did, however, keep her philosophy textbooks. And she was ferociously protective of them. Foy’s father once suggested that she get rid of them. Her response displayed an anger wildly out of proportion to his suggestion. He said she could keep her crazy books if that made her happy, and he never mentioned them again. She kept them neatly arranged on the shelves in his study with his theology books. The Greeks first, the cosmological thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the 19th century Germans, Existentialism, British Empiricism, and then the collection stopped. That’s as far as she had gotten in college. Over the years her books became outdated and brittle. Most were out of print. Having been pressed together for years, the covers fit each other perfectly, like fingers on a hand. Occasionally she would flip through them to bone up in case philosophy ever came up in a conversation. It never did. The people they knew in Fort Davis were not interested in such things.

Not long after Foy was born, she went out into the backyard with a red light and an astronomy book. She came in hours later, thoughtful. Foy’s father asked if anything was wrong. She looked at him for a few moments, then decided this was not a conversation that would come to anything. “No,” she said. “Everything is fine.”

Later that week she removed her books from his shelves and put them in the living room near the porch. It had an odd name, the living room, since no one did much living there. The children were not allowed on the furniture. She imagined that this was the place where intelligent guests would gather to play the piano and talk over coffee. She kept this room immaculately clean and often rearranged her ancient books like a boy sorting through his baseball cards. Her philosophy collection remained there until after she died, when Foy took the books to his home. He smelled them with great affection and put them on his own bookshelves between Systematic Theology and Jung, where they seemed to find a place of individuated harmony after all the years of schism.

Foy’s mother was 80 years old when he asked her if she believed in God. He was 55.

“Do I believe in God?” She stared into space for a few moments with her mouth open.

“You know, I’ve never been able to answer that question because I’ve never been able to figure out what the question means. I don’t really know what it means to believe in God. Is that just thinking the right things about God or do emotions factor into it as well? What if a person loved God SO much - just the whole idea of God - but if you pressed her, what if she admitted that she wasn’t sure that God was real? Would that person be a believer or an unbeliever? What if you believed in God, say, three times a week on average, for several years. Just three or four times a week you’d say, ‘Yes, there has to be a God.’ But then other times it didn’t seem like there was a God. You see what I mean? I know this sounds silly, but I still don’t understand the question. Everybody else seems to have answered the God question by the time they were 10 or 12, and run to the ends of the earth with their answers. And here I am still trying to figure out the question. And now, Foy, I’m old. I’ll die an old sinner, a silly old woman who always over-thought everything until it was a wonder I made any decisions at all.”

Tears appeared in her eyes. Foy put his arm around her.

“It’s okay mom. It doesn’t matter. I like that about you, that you don’t always have stuff figured out. I’m sure that God is very…warm feeling…toward…that kind of honesty. And as far as I’m concerned…”

She pulled away from him and seized his arm.

“I will tell you this. I never gave my soul to anyone. They didn’t get it. Not your father or the church or science or any other man-made thing. I saved it for God, if there is a God. My soul is as innocent and tender as a peach. And it’s ripe for the picking. God can pick it himself, if he wants it, thank you very much. I don’t need any damn middle men.”

It was the first and only time he ever heard her curse. They stared at each other for a few moments, then they burst into laughter at the same time. They laughed so hard. Foy started to choke. And then it all turned to tears, and he wept. His mother pulled him in close and laid his head against her chest.

“My boy,” she said between laughs.

rlp