At the Far End of Nowhere

by Christine Davis Merriman

  Later, I hear Jimmie and Daddy talking about it. Daddy uses the n-word and says, “All this push for desegregation while it’s those people who are ruining the neighborhood.” I’m not sure what desegregation is, but I can tell Daddy doesn’t like it.

  At School 65, in first grade, they give all the children tests to see how smart they are. They put me up with the second graders. My new teacher, Miss Eriksen, puts me in a special reading group with two other kids who are extra good readers. She makes us read out loud, faster and faster.

  At home, my daddy lets me read the newspaper with him in his armchair. I sit on his lap, and we read the funnies together. He lets me help him with a newspaper puzzle he does every day. You have to unscramble some words, and some of the letters have circles around them. You put those letters together, and unscramble them again to find out the surprise answer to a cartoon riddle. I am learning to do it, very fast, all in my head.

  One morning, I come downstairs for breakfast and I find Jimmie, sitting on the davenport, talking on the phone. Usually, by this time of day, she is wearing a housedress and has her hair pinned up in a bun. But this morning, she is still wearing her pretty nightgown—it’s smooth and glossy and the color of black cherries—and her hair winds long, black, and wavy down her back.

  Jimmie hangs up the phone. She is crying. I hate to see Jimmie cry.

  “Why are you crying, Jimmie? Did your daddy die?”

  Jimmie looks up at me and stares. “Yes. Just last night. He had a stroke.”

  “Don’t cry, Jimmie.” I stroke her hair. “I hate to see you cry.”

  “But how did you know Granddaddy died?”

  “Because I know how much you love your daddy. I think he was missing Grandma.”

  I ask to go to Granddaddy’s funeral. Jimmie thinks I’m maybe too young to go, but my daddy lets me. He stays home with Spence. Jimmie goes to the Methodist church early to help with arrangements. I ride with my Uncle Frantz past miles and miles of farms. He drives very fast around the curves, and slams on the brake at the very last minute. I reach out both hands to keep myself from falling into the dashboard.

  Uncle Frantz grins. “Did I scare you?”

  The church is very small and plain compared to Emmanuel Lutheran. All of Jimmie’s brothers and her sister are here, along with a bunch of other country people. Uncle Frantz takes me to sit next to Jimmie on a hard wooden pew. Jimmie is crying into a handkerchief. Her nose looks red and swollen.

  “Do you want to say goodbye to Granddaddy?” Jimmie asks.

  She takes me up the aisle to where Granddaddy is asleep. He is tucked into shiny white sheets in a narrow bed surrounded by baskets of soft white lilies. Granddaddy is a farmer, and he usually wears overalls and an old felt hat. But today, he is all dressed up in a black suit.

  “Why is Granddaddy wearing lipstick?”

  “The undertaker fixed him up to look nice,” says Jimmie.

  I sit back down with Jimmie. Now everyone seems to be crying. The organ plays, and we sing sad hymns. The preacher talks about a house with many mansions where we will all go some day. I keep my eyes on Granddaddy. I know, for sure, he will wake up at any minute, sit up straight, and surprise us all. And everyone will laugh and hug, and we’ll all be happy. And maybe even Grandma Magda will come bustling through the back door behind the altar. She always loves big family reunions.

  When school closes for the summer, Daddy sells our house in the city because Jimmie inherited her parents’ property, and we move out to Grandma and Granddaddy’s spooky old farmhouse in the country. It has a big front yard, and all kinds of trees and bushes and flowers, and gardens all around it, and you can sit on the big front porch in the summertime. The house has pointy parts on its roof that my daddy calls gables.

  We have an incubator in the cellar where we keep baby chicks, and we have three chicken houses: a little house for the pullets, a bigger one for the broilers or fryers, and the biggest one for the layers. We also have a rooster and a couple of broody hens.

  Spence and me have to do regular chores now. Jimmie teaches us how to feed the chickens every morning and evening, and how to get the eggs every day.

  My daddy pays Jimmie’s brothers to change Granddaddy’s old garage into a woodworking shop, and turn part of the barn into a garage for our big black Oldsmobile. Daddy even has a phone put up on a post out in the woodshop.

  When school starts up again, I have to go to a brand-new school in the county—an Annex school for just first and second graders, away from the bigger part of the school where my brother goes for fourth grade. The Annex is a little brick school with only four classrooms—lower and upper first grade and lower and upper second grade. They put me in second grade here even though I was in second grade last year in the city. They go by different rules here in the county.

  First, they put me in the lower second grade, but soon they move me to the upper second grade across the hall. But then they keep me stuck in the middle reading group. I can hear the kids in the top reading group, and I hear them stumble over words I know how to read, but I think I am invisible to Mrs. Breton, my new second grade teacher.

  In front of the Annex school there is a playground with swings, a jungle gym, and a big circle with a white line drawn around it. The circle is for playing games. At recess time, when the circle is empty, I sometimes skip around and around it, following the white line—all by myself. When the other children are playing in the circle, I like to just stand and watch them. If it’s windy, I get cold just standing there, but I don’t really know how to play with the other children. I miss being at home with my daddy.

  I am the new kid at the Annex. All the other kids went to first grade together. I am very shy, and don’t know how to make friends here. I find friends in the storybooks I read, or I make up imaginary friends in my head. I have a gold plastic Snow White ring that I got in a cereal box. I wear that ring to school every day. I talk to Snow White sometimes when I’m by myself on the playground.

  After school every day, as soon as we get home, Jimmie and Daddy make us change into our work clothes, so our school clothes don’t get messed up when we get the eggs and feed the chickens.

  I hate it when the teacher makes us play Quizmo. It’s like a bingo game, but you have to do arithmetic to get the answer. I don’t like adding and subtracting all those numbers. I don’t understand number games, and I think I may be afraid of some of the numbers.

  In class, I am afraid to raise my hand to tell the teacher when I have to go to the bathroom. One day, I wet myself at my desk. The back of my dress is soaked, and there’s a big puddle around my feet. When it’s time for recess, I go to the girls’ bathroom. My shoes got wet and they make a little track, which I hope no one will notice. I squeeze out the back of my skirt into the toilet, the way Jimmie uses the washing machine wringer to get the extra water out of our wet clothes when she does the laundry.

  All during recess, I stand up against a wall to hide the back of my dress. I hope it will dry out before we have to go back inside.

  But then recess is over, and we have to go back into class and sit at our desks for Quizmo. An old man, the janitor, comes into our class and shouts out to Mrs. Breton, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Where’s the little girl who wet herself?” Mrs. Breton points me out, and the janitor comes over with a bucket and a string mop and wipes up all around me.

  The only good thing is that Mrs. Breton doesn’t call on me for Quizmo.

  At home, my daddy sometimes lets me read for him what’s in the big black letters—the newspaper HEADLINES. There is something called a Sputnik that just sent a dog up into outer space. There are people called Communist dictators in a place called the Soviet Union. My daddy blames the bad headlines on the Soviet Union and its crooked politicians. He hates crooked politicians. He says they are bad because they tell lies.

  He says, “President Roosevelt trusted his ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin, and Uncle Joe lied and walked all over us. Now we have that rascal K
hrushchev to deal with.”

  My daddy tells me, “Lissa, you must never tell a lie. You must be straight as an arrow.”

  Whatever my daddy says to me is very important; it goes around and around in my head, and it won’t go away. I scrape my mind trying to figure out how I can ever be really sure I am not lying. How can I ever be sure about what is really true? To stay safe and never tell a lie, I always say, “Maybe, maybe not.” I answer every yes/no question that way. Other questions, I say, “I don’t know.”

  If my teacher asks me a question, like do I like the story she is reading to us, I say, “Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.” If my mother asks me if my alphabet soup is hot enough, I say, “Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.” How can I ever know for sure what is hot enough or not hot enough?

  At night, a mean witch visits me. She balloons up and out from under my bed, clutching something that is very important to me. She runs away with it, cackling like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. I wake up screaming and Jimmie asks me, “What’s the matter? Are you okay, honey?”

  I tell the truth the best I can. I say, “Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not.” That way, I don’t tell a lie, and I am safe for now. If my daddy asks me if I am finished with my homework, I say, “Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not.”

  This goes on and on. My big brother, Spence, says I’m acting goofy. My teacher sends a note to my parents that says I am having some kind of problem.

  In February, all the kids put Valentine cards for their friends in a big cardboard box. I still don’t have any friends here. Jimmie gives me a card for the teacher, and I put that in the box.

  On Valentine’s Day, Mrs. Breton’s favorite student—a boy with a big forehead who is not shy at all—is the postman. He delivers all the cards to our desks. I only get two cards—one from the teacher and one from a little girl whose mother makes her give cards to everyone in the class.

  Finally, in spring, my daddy takes me out to sit with him in the red porch swing he built for Spence and me. He painted it red—me and my daddy’s favorite color. It’s evening, and the wind is tickling the leaves on the maple trees the way I tickle my daddy’s whiskers. In the swing, we look out over what used to be my Grandma Magda’s tulip garden.

  Daddy asks me, “Lissa, why don’t you ever give us a straight answer anymore?”

  “Because I’m afraid I may tell a lie, and you say I should never tell a lie, Daddy. So all I can say is maybe, or I may be telling a lie, and then you will be mad at me.”

  “Well, you know, my little tadpole, just do the best you can, and I won’t be mad at you. Sometimes, the truth is kind of hard to get at—like trying to figure out what color a tulip really is, or whatever really happened to old Fringe-a-Frock.”

  “Fringe-a-Frock? Did it happen in once upon a time?”

  “Yes, Lissa, once upon a time, way back when I was a little boy. So, come back with me to the far end of nowhere…where everything begins. There, you can decide for yourself what happened, and the truth is whatever you make it out to be.”

  I let out a big breath, and with it, all the maybes and maybe-nots, and snuggle up closer to my daddy.

  “Lissa, you see the tulips here? Some petals are a pure velvet red, but others are a mix of colors—like those over there—red, stippled with gold, and maybe even a little purple if you look very close.

  “The tulips are in full bloom today, just as they were at this time of year on Tulip Hill in Southern Maryland when Fringe-a-Frock decided to force a log through the saw at his lumber mill. Now, Fringe-a-Frock was not a tailor, as his name might suggest; he ran a sawmill down near Criderstown, off a tributary of the Loco Moco River. He was sawing lumber to build a house for his new bride, and he wanted it done quickly.

  “When a stubborn log bogged the saw, he yelled at his steam engine, ‘More steam! Give me more steam!’ as he stoked the fire. The log began to move again; the saw began to chew, then bogged again. ‘More steam! Give me more steam.’ He increased the pressure on the boiler. The saw groaned a mighty groan, then bogged again.

  “Again, Fringe-a-Frock increased the pressure. Then with a final, terrible groan from the saw, the boiler blew, sending the steam engine and Fringe-a-Frock flying every which way. The only visible remains of Fringe-a-Frock were some fragments of his shredded clothing hanging from a nearby tree, which, some say, was a tulip tree.”

  “I bet it was a tulip tree,” I say.

  My daddy nods, and says, “And I bet you are right, Lissa.”

  Afterward, Jimmie makes me raw fried potatoes for supper, and I go to bed. The witch doesn’t come to visit tonight. And in the morning, the maybes and maybe-nots are gone away—for now, anyway.

  One day, we have an air-raid drill at the Annex. The air-raid siren goes off real loud—BREEEET, BREEEET, BREEEET, and the teacher tells us to get our coats from the cloak room and crawl under our desks with our coats overtop of us. If someone is really dropping a bomb on us, our coats will protect us from the flying glass.

  “Walk quickly, class, don’t run,” Mrs. Breton tells us. “No pushing or shoving.”

  I get jostled and pushed by some of the bigger kids in the cloak room. We have to stay under our desks until we hear the all-clear sound.

  Sometimes, I dream at night that a big bomb in the sky is falling on me. It’s very scary. Soon after this, the counting begins.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE COUNTING BEGINS

  AT the farmhouse, we inherit my granddaddy’s television set. Gray shadows are blinking on the TV screen. That’s when the counting begins. If I count to twenty-four, I am safe. I like the number four. Numbers that have four in them are safe.

  On Saturday nights, after supper, we all watch TV in the darkened dining/living room. Every Saturday night is the same. I am on my daddy’s lap in his armchair. Jimmie is in her chair, and my big brother, Spence, is on his mother’s lap.

  First, we watch The Lawrence Welk Show. Jimmie loves the man who plays bouncy accordion music. Daddy gets a chuckle out of the way the band leader talks and how he counts out the beat when he conducts, “Ah, one, and ah, two, and ah, three!” I like it at the end of the show when the “Champagne Lady” goes out into the audience with Laurence Welk, and they dance in the ballroom with all the bubbles coming up around them.

  Then we watch Gunsmoke. Matt Dillon is always in a shootout, and he always wins. Sometimes, bad guys come to Dodge City and make trouble for Miss Kitty at the Long Branch Saloon. Now I am counting to be safe—one, two, three, four…. All this counting is inside my head. Counting is my secret. No one—not even my daddy—knows about it. Counting to just the right number—but not going past it—keeps me safe. If I pass the top number I set, I have to start all over again. So sometimes I count to this special number over and over again. If I don’t do it, something bad will happen.

  Sometimes, I have to go to the bathroom while the others are watching TV. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs. To get there, I have to walk by myself through the dark hallway, past the closed downstairs bedroom where Jimmie’s mother and then her father died. I think that the ghosts of my grandparents, and maybe other dead relatives, maybe even some of my daddy’s relatives, too—his mother, Lovenia, and his oldest brother, John, who slit his wrists long before I was born—are in that downstairs bedroom.

  At night those bedroom walls melt away and the room turns into a big meadow with hills and flowers and shady trees and a shiny stream where all my dead relatives meet to have a picnic together. All my pets are there, too—my turtle who got squished under the cellar door, and my parakeet who flew away and never came back, and one of my cats who got run over. That bedroom becomes a special place in heaven where my dead relatives all meet and are glad to see each other again.

  I tiptoe past that bedroom door, careful-careful not to disturb them. I cannot open the door and peek in, or they would all have to disappear. There is a wolf that hides in the shadows, near the bottom step. I turn on the light switch at the bottom
of the stairs, run quick-quick up the fourteen steps to the bathroom, and turn on the bathroom light.

  But then I have to go back down the stairs to get back safely to my family. If I don’t make it back down the stairs and back into the dining/living room before the toilet finishes flushing, the wolf will eat me. I flush, wash hands, and run down the stairs and through the hall as fast as I can—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14—through the hall, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24—STOP counting to be safe. Now I’m back safe in the dining/living room.

  Besides repairing clocks and watches, my daddy makes wooden inlaid lamps, plates, and jewelry boxes. He made me a jewelry box of rosewood with a pink rose inlay on the top and a gold key shaped like an “L” for Lissa.

  My daddy is such a perfectionist that if he discovers the littlest flaw in a piece of cherry or walnut or mahogany, he starts to swearing and plucking the hairs out of his head. After a while he tosses that piece out, no matter how far done he is, and starts over. He keeps telling me, over and over, “Lissa, you are my best and most perfect creation. I turned you on the lathe myself.” He tells me I must be ladylike at all times—I must be quiet, obedient, and perfect in every way that he thinks is perfect.

  I am skinny. “You eat like a bird,” Jimmie tells me. And my ears poke out. Jimmie makes me wear a scarf tight over my ears at night to try to make them grow flat against my head. My hair is getting very long now. Jimmie pulls it back tight and puts it into two long braids so it won’t get so tangled. My daddy thinks I am the prettiest girl in the world.

  My daddy never makes a fuss over Spence the way he makes a fuss over me. He expects Spence to follow in his footsteps and become a craftsman. Daddy is disappointed; Spence would rather stare for hours into his microscope, or tinker with his chemistry set, than work in the woodshop with my daddy. My daddy yells at Spence whenever he does something wrong.