Lovett had found the bull in the pasture as a day-old calf. Walking back across the field, they discussed a pecan tree that had no leaves when it should have and whether it had to come out. They had delivered a check to a bulldozer operator who was digging a ditch. A plaque on the kitchen wall that says “Beware of Bull” commemorates an encounter Lovett and his uncle Calvin had two years ago with a bull in the pasture behind the house. In the parlor, the principal adornments are two saddles, each in a corner on a sawhorse. Among the horses in the barn are ones that Lovett and his father bought to breed and race. The walk through the horse barn to the back door of Lovett’s mother’s house is about a hundred yards. It is surrounded by shade trees, and there is a pond in front of it. It has clapboard siding and is painted white, and has a wide front porch with columns. The house is a small, one-story frame house of a style called pier and beam, which means that it sits on blocks. When he sits in the kitchen now, early in the morning, drinking coffee and looking out the window, as his grandmother did, he sees the same things she saw. He recorded the placement of the outbuildings. Before Lovett had the house transported two hundred yards, onto land that belonged to his parents, he measured the distance from the house to the trees in the yard, so that he could plant new trees. In 1985, Klein and Lovett persuaded the group that a good way to improve the property would be to let Lovett buy the house and its barns and remove them. The arrangement gave Klein no incentive to care for the buildings. The investment group put up “For Sale” signs, and while it waited for offers it leased the farm to Lovett’s uncle Calvin Klein, a cattleman, to use as pastureland. Believing that the tax bill would be too much to accommodate, the family sold the house and what remained of Adam Klein’s farm-about a hundred and sixty-five acres-to an investment group from Los Angeles, then discovered that the accounting of the bill had been wrong and they probably could have held on to the place. Lovett’s grandmother, who survived her husband, died in 1979, when Lovett was twenty-one. He developed a deep attachment to his grandparents and to the house, and he thought that when he was grown he would like to live in it, among their possessions. Each day after school, he went to his grandparents’ house until his parents came home from work. They had always intended to move to Klein and send their son to the Lutheran school. Before that, they lived an hour from Klein, in Houston, where they worked for Humble Oil. In 1962, when Lovett was five, Bernell and her husband, William, who was from East Texas, and who died a few years ago, built a house next door. Bernell Klein, Lovett’s mother, was born in the house. Up and down the roads that enclose the farm are houses occupied by Lovett’s relatives-each generation passed land to the next as it came of age. Lovett’s house was built on Klein’s farm by his grandparents, in 1911. His mother’s people are Kleins-Adam Klein was his great-great-grandfather. According to a historical marker by the graveyard in Klein, which Lyle Lovett, the singer and songwriter, drove me to in his pickup one morning and then got out of his truck to show me, nearly the oldest grave in the cemetery belongs to one of Klein’s daughters, who died of diphtheria. Then he rode a horse to Panama, sailed to Galveston, and settled among Germans with names such as Klink, Klebs, Doerre, and Strack, on land that reminded them of the farms they had left behind.
He had made his way to New Orleans, taken passage up the Mississippi, and gone to California to mine gold. Where there are fields with cattle or horses, the trees in the distance appear as remote and aloof as a coastline. The roads run straight along the old property lines and meet at right angles, like joints in furniture. Klein, Texas, is halfway between Tomball and Spring, on the coastal plain north of Houston.