Trinity is never far removed from its colorful history
TRINITY — In one of William Goyen’s bestknown short stories, set in a little East Texas town not unlike Trinity, a renegade white rooster that crows day and night is slowly driving Mrs. Marcy Samuels crazy — the rooster and her elderly father-inlaw, that is.
She’d be washing dishes or sweeping the kitchen floor, and the bored old gentleman would sneak up behind her in his wheelchair, “laughing fiendishly or shouting boo! And then she would leap as high as her bulbous ankles would lift her and scream, for she was a nervous woman and had so many things on her mind.”
The crowing rooster in her pansy bed and a wheelchairbound Grandpa Samuels scaring her out of her wits were bad, but his coughing was as terrible as those irritants put together: “He would, in a siege of cough, dig away down in his throat for something troubling him there, and, finally seizing it, as if the cough were a little hand reaching it for it, catch it and bring it up.…”
I’m assuming those kind of things still happen in this unassuming little town where Goyen, arguably the state’s best barely known writer, spent his early years. Although the Goyen family moved to Houston when he was 7, to a small frame house in Woodland Heights, Trinity’s people populate much of his fiction. He loved the old tales they told each other, the richness and lyricism of their language, the deeply twined connections that
bound them together like honeysuckle vines in Marcy Samuels’ front yard. The landscape of his stories, he said, was “pastoral, river-haunted, tree-shaded, mysterious and bewitched.”
Goyen, who died in 1983, was a cosmopolitan fellow who spent much of his life in New York and Hollywood, but I’m guessing he would have appreciated the loading dock at Stubbs Chemical and Feed, where Goyen-worthy tales are told daily. Feed store owner Lyle Stubbs, a lifelong Trinity resident, an award-winning country-gospel singer (2001 Male Vocalist of the Year), a former mayor who held the office 23 years and now a justice of the peace, told me a story from Trinity’s early years, when a portion of his building was the Gates Saloon.
Country courtesy
On Aug. 7, the notorious gunslinger and cold-blooded killer John Wesley Hardin was wounded by a blast from the shotgun of Phil Sublett, who had lost money to Hardin in a poker game. Near death, with two buckshot pellets lodged in his kidney, Hardin was hauled across the railroad tracks to a hotel, where he was laid out across starched and ironed sheets, soon red with blood.
Hardin lived to kill again (in every Texas town I visit, it seems). Some weeks after his recovery, he mailed the sheets back to the hotel. Starched, ironed and folded.
That bit of country-style courtesy reminded Stubbs, 73, of what he likes about his hometown. It’s friendliness for sure, but also its generosity.
“We have people here who give who don’t really have it to give,” he said.
These days the main part of Stubbs’ building is redolent with the earthy smell of animal feed and fertilizer and decadesold dust. The oldest brick structure in town, it used to be Trinity’s Bijou Theater. Now it’s not only a place to fulfill all your animal-feed needs — with curb service to boot — but it’s also an impromptu community gathering place. It’s been that way pretty much since Stubbs opened up in 1988.
“Knock on wood and praise the Lord,” he said. “I’ve got customers I’ve had for 25 years. They’re like family.”
Tall and angular Larry Denson, a retired rodeo bull rider and now wild-hog exterminator, is “family.” He farms 150 acres and supplies the feed store with square hay.
The hogs, he said, “are here in this part of the country like flies. We had such an acorn crop this year they didn’t go to the corn feeders. I went out Saturday and caught 13.” Denson loves the taste. “I’d rather eat that than any store-bought pork,” he said. “I take the backstraps out of ’em, put ’em in the oven and they just fall apart.”
You learn about such things sitting on a bench on the Stubbs loading dock of a morning.
‘Policed on the side’
Talk about deeply twined small-town connections; Trinity natives Wayne and Hayne Huffman, 76, share deeply twinned connections. Wayne is a deputy sheriff and Trinity’s mayor pro tem; Hayne is a justice of the peace and Trinity’s longtime volunteer fire department chief.
Wayne also was a rural mail carrier for 43 years and “policed on the side.” He joined the fire department in 1964.
Hayne, who spent 20 years on the school district appraisal board, was elected fire chief in 1969, accidentally. The firefighter doing the nominating intended to nominate Wayne, but a fit of nervousness tangled his tongue and he named Hayne instead. Wayne stood down and has always complimented his brother on the job he’s done.
Such things happen in a little town like Trinity.
In its early decades Trinity was a timber town. Lumber companies moving west from Alabama and Mississippi discovered cheap and abundant “stumpage” in East Texas and built towns, mills and railroads out of the virgin forests of ancient longleaf pine. Freight lines linked the mills around Trinity to Houston, 85 miles to the south.
Most of the towering stands of yellow wood were gone by the 1930s and with them many of the sawmill towns — “little goodbye villages,” Goyen once called them. Trinity, never a wealthy community, hung on. Its largest employer was the Texas Longleaf Lumber Co., manufacturers of yellow pine and southern hardwoods and at one time the largest lumber mill in Texas. It closed in 1955, and Trinity suffered.
Stubbs grew up in Milltown, a self-contained community of mill employees on Trinity’s outskirts. As he recalls, 156 houses were set aside for white employees and 52 for black. Milltown children went to segregated schools in town until the 1960s.
History haunts
Feed-store regulars will tell you that Trinity residents — black, white and brown — manage to get along pretty well these days, although old-timers remember stories about the Ku Klux Klan and fiery crosses, about merciless beatings and worse in the woods. Trinity, of course, is not the only East Texas town with a burdensome past.
These days the little town relies on timber to an extent, as well as two steel mills, two nursing homes, the nearby Texas prison system and Lake Livingston traffic on state Highway 19 through town. Cattle ranching is the county’s second-largest industry.
Although Trinity’s population has stayed about the same the last couple of decades — about 2,700 — Denson, the hay farmer and hog killer, is worried his hometown’s getting too crowded, and too appealing. “Somewhere out there, there’s a sign that says ‘Move to Trinity,’ ” he grumbled, good-naturedly. “I don’t know where it is.”