FAREWELL: A MEMOIR OF A TEXAS CHILDHOOD; By Horton Foote; Scribner; $24; 285 pages.When Horton Foote was a Boy Scout, in the 1920s, he was assigned to take a 14-mile hike into the country outside Wharton, his coastal Texas town. He stopped for a bottle of soda water at a country store. When the elderly clerk learned his name, he told the thunderstruck boy that he had been born a slave on the plantation of Foote's great-great-grandfather.
Another time -- one rainy afternoon, snooping in his parents' drawers -- the young playwright and screenwriter in the making came upon a weird white robe. His mortified mother had to explain its use: Ku Klux Klan. It had been worn to the one Klan meeting ever attended by the author's father, a storekeeper so beloved for his fairness and generosity to black customers that they used to line up to shake the hand of "Mr. Footes."
Such are the intimate astonishments that jump out -- like fish breaking the surface of a still, dark lake -- from Foote's quiet, warm, dignified narrative in "Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood."
The writer has always had a gift for children's voices (remember the delightful Scout and her pals in his screenplay of "To Kill a Mockingbird"?), so it's no surprise that, at 82, Foote recaptures so well how the world looks through a child's eyes. Even more striking is his ability to recall a child's premonition of troubles unseen. Though "Farewell" is dominated by scenes of simple joys -- climbing the pecan trees, sitting on the front porch on a summer night listening to interwoven strains of music from a white church, a black juke joint, a Mexican cantina -- there is always a mysterious curtain of adult whispers, or silence. Just behind it, we glimpse dim images of broken marriages, ruined crops, ne'er-do-well uncles (Foote had his share of them) and other scandals.
The book starts mighty slowly. One can become impatient, for instance, with how exhaustively Foote catalogs his many relations in Wharton, as in those endless "begat" sections of the Bible. But it's a necessary discipline to imprint the town clearly on the reader's imagination, to establish the deceptively drowsy rhythms of bygone Southern life that will later be shaken by lightning bolts of change.
The Foote fan, especially, will find the book engrossing. Wharton is, in effect, Harrison, Texas, scene of most of Foote's plays and films. We meet irrepressible Aunt Loula, loquacious font of family lore. We meet real-life models for characters: the sad, henpecked husband of "The Trip to Bountiful"; the poor boy who wins the heart of a rich girl (Foote's father and mother) in "Courtship"; the man who grieves for the mysterious suicide of his son but shuns his bereaved male partner, "The Young Man From Atlanta." (I once asked Foote, "Why Atlanta?" and he answered, "That's where the young man was from.")
If you are new to Foote, "Farewell" may prompt you to explore his distinguished body of work. When the 16-year-old Horton boards the bus for Dallas and acting school, and bids farewell to Wharton, you may find yourself impatient for another installment of his long and well-lived life.