Jackson Pollock Read Online Free Page A

meetings to try to learn new techniques for pruning and spraying
     trees, but the truth was he just did not care. He missed working with cows, chickens,
     and hogs, and he longed for the Phoenix farm. Sometimes, after dinner, he would take
     a bottle from the pantry and sit down in the living room. Stella would tell him to
     put the bottle back. LeRoy would start chewing tobacco, but Stella didn’t like tobacco
     any more than she liked alcohol. She would tell LeRoy to quit chewing tobacco in
her
house. LeRoy would end up sitting around the living room looking sad, and Stella
     would tell her boys, “Stay away from Dad. He’s got the blues.”
    LeRoy was desperate to get out of Chico. He spoke to a local real estate man, Chris
     Sharp, who offered to trade the Pollocks’ fruit farm for a small mountainside inn
     near Reno, Nevada. The prospect of running an inn did not particularly appeal to LeRoy
     but certainly seemed preferable to working as a fruit farmer. Less than two years
     after moving to Chico, LeRoy told his wife he wanted to move. Stella immediately opposed
     the suggestion, arguing that their sons were doing well in school and she had no intention
     of moving them to some backwater town whose educational system consisted of a one-room
     schoolhouse. But LeRoy was adamant, forcing his wife to agree to a compromise: they
     would move to the inn near Reno but leave their three older sons in Chico, arranging
     for them to board with a friend and continue at the local high school. The two younger
     boys would remain with their parents—though that too posed problems. Jackson,age seven, had just completed the first grade at the Sacramento Avenue School, and
     his mother was upset at having to disrupt his schooling so soon after it had begun.

    In January 1920 LeRoy acquired the Diamond Mountain Inn in Janesville, California,
     a tiny town near the Nevada border. The inn, named for the mountains that surrounded
     it and located on the town’s one road, was a twenty-two-room establishment catering
     for the most part to gangs of road surveyors who needed a place to spend the night
     on the desolate stretch between Reno and Susanville. Unlike the other towns of Jackson’s
     youth, Janesville really resembled the Wild West of legend. On cold nights old codgers
     who lived nearby would gather at the Pollocks’ inn, sitting around the wood-burning
     stove in the dining room drinking whiskey and bragging about gunfights. At the Janesville
     School, Jackson and Sande met their first roughriders. In the months when the town
     was snowbound, local cowboys, armed with six-shooters, would sit in the back of the
     classroom making eyes at the pretty teacher.
    As anxious as he had been to leave Chico, LeRoy only became more discontented after
     moving to Janesville. The job of running an inn, which required mainly that he clean
     the guest rooms and assist his wife in the kitchen, gave him none of the satisfaction
     he derived from farming. In retrospect it seemed to him that he had ruined himself
     irreversibly by selling the Phoenix farm, losing not only his land but the modest
     financial security he had worked so hard to obtain. He was furious with his wife,
     who, in her stubborn desire to improve her situation, had seemed instead to have trapped
     the family in obscurity. Though Stella tried to assure him that they could always
     acquire another farm, LeRoy was long past the point of listening to anything she said.
     Early one morning he packed up his belongings and left Janesville with a group of
     surveyors.
    Stella was deeply upset by her husband’s departure. Whatever differences the couple
     may have had, she seems to have genuinely loved LeRoy and refused to accept the possibility
     that their marriage was over. In the next four years she would move herchildren to five different towns, following LeRoy around the West in hopes of bringing
     him back into the family. For Jackson, whose itinerant youth had already