A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  Evenings, my father carried a wicker chair out to the front porch, where he sat alone in the long Oregon dusk, sheltered from view by a curtain of Virginia creeper that hung from a wire between the porch pillars, whistling softly to himself, filling every tune with sorrow. Mother and I ached for my father in his despair, and I still grieve when I hear “Bedelia” or “Smile Awhile,” and, most heart-wrenching of all, a song about “the West, a nest, and you, dear.”

  I felt so claustrophobic at home that I made my trips to the orthodontist last as long as I dared, wandering through Meier & Frank’s department store looking at all the merchandise I could not buy. Almost every day I walked to the library, choosing books for Mother as well as for myself and lingering until I knew Mother would begin to worry.

  Early August brought a welcome invitation. The Browns, who had once lived in the Halsey Street neighborhood, invited me to go to their mountain cabin for the weekend as company for their daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth and I slept on cots in a tent pitched in huckleberry brush under ancient fir and hemlock trees.

  That weekend was idle and restful. My tension drained away. As Elizabeth and I lay on our stomachs on a flat rock beside a stream that flowed through maidenhair fern past the cabin and on into the Zigzag River, we watched rainbow trout laze in the pool below. Like boys in Norman Rockwell covers on The Saturday Evening Post, we tried fishing with string and bent pins, but the trout were indifferent.

  Sunday came. As time approached for Mr. Brown to drive me into Portland, leaving Mrs. Brown and Elizabeth behind, I began to dread going home. I wanted—was desperate—to stay in the mountains, and so I did the unforgivable, according to Mother’s standards. I asked if I could stay longer. Mrs. Brown kindly said I could stay for a week.

  Elizabeth had a saddle horse, Brownie, which kept her busy. While she was riding or grooming her horse, I lay in a hammock, staring up at bits of sky visible through the sieve of evergreen branches, swaying gently, thinking of nothing at all. Sometimes I wandered through the woods, chanting as I had learned to chant in our eighth-grade study of poetry:

  One day, Mrs. Brown rented a horse for me, so I could go riding with a high school girl whose mother packed us a lunch that included two cantaloupes. We mounted our horses, which I called our “trusty steeds,” and rode off across the Zigzag River into a logged-off area where second-growth timber was beginning to rise out of the magenta blossoms of fireweed. We talked sporadically about life in Grant High School: which were the best courses, who were the favorite teachers, all that I could look forward to.

  Still clutching our cantaloupes, we rode on until we came to a ghost logging camp, where we dismounted to eat an early lunch. Carrying cantaloupes on horseback was not practical, we decided. We ate near a decaying shanty that still bore a crude sign: “Haircuts two bits. Bring your own hair and shears.”

  Then we rode on aimlessly, up a steep corduroy logging road made of slab wood wide enough for wagon wheels and now silver with age and weather. The sun warmed and relaxed my back.

  In midafternoon we turned back, the horses’ hooves slipping on the silver road. We did not know where we were; we trusted our horses to take us safely back to the cabins, which they did. I felt I wanted to ride on forever.

  At the end of the week, on the highway back to Portland with Mr. Brown, I prayed my father had found work. He had not. Worse, my parents were angry with each other, which filled me with a fear and sadness I had never before experienced. There had been tension over the sale of the farm, but at that time each understood and sympathized with the other.

  This was something different. They argued in front of me. Dad said we would have to sell the house. Mother said flatly, “No we won’t. We’ll pull through somehow. We have to. If we let go of this house, we are lost.”

  Finally Mother gave in. “Go ahead and advertise it,” she said in a voice stiff with anger, “if you must.”

  Dad placed an advertisement in the Sunday paper, calling the house a bungalow. “Bungalow!” said Mother to me when he was out of hearing. “This is no bungalow. Bungalows are those cheap little houses out in Parkrose.” She loved her house and was fiercely proud of every inch, from the plate-glass windows in the living room and dining room to the hardwood floors. “The oak came from Siberia,” she always explained when they were admired.

  That Sunday was a long, terrible day while we waited for the telephone to ring. It remained silent, so silent that its failure to ring became a jangle to our nerves. At the end of the day, I sensed Mother’s triumph. No one was buying houses; some were losing theirs because they could not meet mortgage payments. We would hang on to ours as long as we could.

  My father gave up smoking his pipe to save a few cents. Then he sold the car. I felt, as he must have felt, that we were trapped in Portland forever.

  With the sale of the car, I balked at the long walk to Sunday School, where Dad had driven me and picked me up afterward.

  “But you must go to Sunday School,” said Mother.

  “Why?” I asked. “You and Daddy haven’t gone to church since Yamhill.”

  “I don’t have the clothes for church” was Mother’s excuse.

  “Do you go to church to worship God?” I asked. “Or do you go to worship clothes?”

  Mother laughed and relented. “You have a point,” she said, “and it is a long walk in bad weather.” Spending money on bus fare was out of the question, and then there was the collection plate to think of.

  As August wore on with no sign of work, my father grew more depressed and irritable. Late one afternoon, when Mother asked him if he would like potato soup for supper, he flew into a rage. “Don’t ask me questions like that!” he shouted. “Don’t expect me to make such decisions! If you do, I’ll eat my meals in restaurants!” He went into the bedroom, slammed the door, and began to sob.

  Mother and I sat motionless, helpless, and sick. Then Mother said in a weary voice, “He would have to make decisions in restaurants.” We both knew there was no money for restaurants.

  Finally Mother quietly made the soup, but neither of us had any appetite. I thought of the revolver that still hung on my parents’ bedpost, and of the bullets that lay on the dresser, and was filled with fear.

  Late that evening my father finally came out, looking drawn and exhausted. Mother said softly, “Lloyd, sit down and smoke your pipe.” He smoked in silence and seemed to take comfort.

  It’s not his fault, I thought in anger. It’s not his fault.

  I excused myself and went to bed, where I tried to soothe myself by thinking of the mountains, the calm of the woods, the graceful trout. Remembering helped, but I felt as if all three of us had forgotten how to smile. I vowed that I would never ask my parents for anything that cost money, a vow I kept.

  Mother wondered how she could earn money, but in those hard times no one would hire a married woman. Jobs went to men for the support of families. She did, however, work on the election board and help take the 1930 United States census. After entering many contests, she won two dollars for Honorable Mention in naming a new brand of bread.

  High School Freshmen

  “Well, well, so you girls are going to be frosh,” a neighbor said to Claudine and me when school was about to start. We exchanged knowing, amused looks. What an old-fashioned word, “frosh”! We were freshmen.

  Having grown both up and out, I was now medium-sized, but my clothes were not. Everything I owned, except the sunburst pleated skirt, which Mother had insisted I buy to grow into, was either too short or too tight.

  A neighbor gave Mother an old pink woolen dress, which she successfully made over into a jumper for me. She contrived a cream-colored blouse from something found in a trunk in the attic. One of her friends, now married to an eastern Oregon wheat rancher, had a daughter older than I who passed on two nice dresses. In our neighborhood, no girl would dream of entering high school in half socks. I used hoarded nickels and dimes to buy silk stockings. Five dollars from my Arizona uncle bo
ught a raincoat.

  Claudine was more fortunate. Mrs. Klum solved her wardrobe problem by buying her three knit dresses, at five dollars apiece. Three new dresses, not hand-me-downs, and all at one time; the Miles girls, passing their clothes to one another, and I were awed by such luxury. We began admiring one another’s clothes by saying, “Is it new, or new to you?”

  Then the Depression came to Claudine’s house, for Mr. Klum, a steam fitter, lost his job when construction came to a halt. A family friend offered him a job as a night watchman at a pharmaceutical company at a small salary he was not too proud to accept. My father had no close friends, only acquaintances.

  And so, the day after Labor Day, when smoke from forest fires dimmed the atmosphere, the sun was a sullen orange ball, and ash drifted over the city, Claudine and I walked on our silken legs up the steps of Ulysses S. Grant High School, where we both were enrolled in a college preparatory course—with no possibility of college. “Things will get better in four years,” Mother said with her usual determination. “They have to.”

  As we entered the building, Claudine and I tried to pretend our insecurity was invisible. Everyone else looked so confident, mature, and sophisticated. Girls wore lipstick. Some even pinned up their long hair. Boys in long, dirty, cream-colored corduroy pants with ink lines doodled between the ridges of the fabric seemed worldly because they had resisted their mothers and washing machines.

  The horrible boys from the eighth grade suddenly looked subdued and self-conscious in their new, clean corduroy pants. Some, poor things, still wore knickers and probably suffered as much as girls who wore lisle instead of silk stockings.

  Grant High School, Claudine and I soon discovered, was not the friendly, tolerant place that Fernwood had been. Grant was snobbish and full of cliques. Sororities and fraternities with silly initiation rites dominated the social life. Girls were admired for being cute, peppy, and well-to-do, and, most of all, for driving cars. Popularity required energy I lacked. All I wanted was a few good friends. Claudine was occupied with her music.

  Grant High School arranged everything possible in alphabetical order. Claudine and I went in different directions to find our registration rooms, which we quickly learned to refer to as our “reg rooms.” I was filed with students whose last names began with A or B, while Claudine took her place with J and K. Since the boy alphabetized in front of me and I were enrolled in many of the same classes, I went through four years of high school staring at the back of his neck, which I came to know very well. It was a slender, sensitive neck that supported an intelligent head of softly curling brown hair. I grew fond of that neck and of the boy it belonged to.

  Life was better at school than at home. Grant High had excellent teachers—well-informed, efficient, strict, and caring—although I had some doubts about a couple of coaches who taught history and seemed to have a prejudice against girls. Except for English, I worked just hard enough to keep Mother from nagging; but on the whole, I enjoyed school, but not physical education, taught by a woman who wore blue rompers and long cotton stockings. I never succeeded in learning to climb a rope, and thought volleyball was tiresome. When trapped into playing basketball, I made my own rule: always run away from the ball. No one ever complained, or, as far as I know, noticed.

  In freshman English, tiny Miss Hart led us through Treasure Island, which pleased the boys. The book bored me. This was followed by As You Like It and Silas Marner. We also waded into a compact little green book, The Century Handbook of Writing, by Garland Greever and Easley Jones, a valuable book that was to accompany us for four years. Completeness of thought, unity of thought, emphasis, grammar, diction, spelling, “manuscript, etc.,” and punctuation—we went over it all every year.

  Claudine and I, who were inclined to giggle at almost anything, found The Century Handbook entertaining. We often quoted examples. If I said, “Phone me this evening,” she replied, “‘Phone. A contraction not employed in formal writing. Say telephone.’”

  After a test, one of us quoted, “‘If I pass (and I may),’ said Hazel, ‘let’s celebrate.’” This, from a rule on the use of quotation marks, was worth a fit of giggles.

  Mother insisted on coaching me in Latin, the foundation of the English language, she kept telling me. I liked the sound of Latin and danced around chanting, “Amo, amas, amat,” but Mother could not understand my listless attitude toward declensions and ablative absolutes. Mother loved Latin, truly loved it, and coaching me took her mind off her troubles. She also kept an eye on my algebra and wanted to study along with me. I flatly refused her company. If there is one thing a fourteen-year-old girl does not want, it is her mother studying algebra with her.

  We also studied poetry and discovered Carl Sandburg, so different from Kipling and his moralizing “If” and the nineteenth-century poets we had studied in grammar school. No rhymes, and it was still poetry. What a relief! We were required to write a poem, and after reading “Chicago,” the class was inspired to rousers such as

  Portland.

  Shipper of wheat,

  Grower of roses.

  Oregon.

  Feller of trees,

  Catcher of salmon.

  We also memorized one hundred lines of poetry of our own choice, a requirement for each year of high school.

  For an assignment in original writing, I wrote a little story, “The Diary of a Tree-Sitter,” following Mother’s advice, “Make it funny,” and “Always remember, the best writing is simple writing.” Sitting in trees, on houses, or atop poles to set records was popular at the time. My story was based on an incident in the Journal and had the advantage of not having to be concerned with spelling. When the paper was returned, Miss Hart had written, “E+. This is very funny. I hope it is original. You show talent.” I was ecstatic.

  The inspiration for my next story, “The Green Christmas,” was a newspaper account of a boy who fell into a river below a dye works that dumped green dye into the water. In my story, being dyed green saved the boy from playing the part of an angel in a Christmas program at church. To my surprise, Miss Burns, the chairman of the English Department, called me out of class to ask where I got the idea for the story. Puzzled, I explained the source of each part. She told me she had wanted to make sure the story was original. I was a little hurt that she could think it might not be original.

  “The Green Christmas” was published in the Grantonian, the school paper, but another girl’s name was given as the author. I did not hesitate to point out, in indignation, the error. A correction appeared in the next issue, but somehow that small boxed paragraph was not the same as seeing my name on my own story, a story which, much altered, became a chapter in my first book.

  The recognition I was winning at school helped balance the unhappiness at home. My father still had not found work. Money from the sale of the car was running low. The house was always cold, as wood and coal were fed sparingly into the furnace to try to make it last through the winter.

  Then one day, Meier & Frank’s green delivery truck pulled up in front of our house. The driver handed my surprised mother a package with her name on it. “What on earth…” she puzzled as she tore off the wrapping. The package contained a ham sent by my father’s sister Minnie. Mother smiled, it seemed to me, for the first time in days. “Minnie always knows just what to do,” she said, and Aunt Minnie always did know. She was that kind of aunt.

  We ate ham baked, fried, ground, made into a loaf with plenty of bread crumbs, scalloped with potatoes; and when we were finally down to split-pea soup made with the bone, Dad came home smiling. In the darkest Depression, he had actually found work managing the safe-deposit vault at the Bank of California. The vault, with its heavy steel door and time lock, was located in the basement. It was a sad place for a man who had spent so much of his life working outdoors in the Willamette Valley. But the job brought home a paycheck, smaller than he had earned before, but one that put food on the table, made mortgage payments, and paid taxes. We were luckier than m
any. Dad whistled to a livelier beat and ordered a few more sacks of coal.

  The Pukwudjies

  When we moved from Hancock to Thirty-seventh Street, I transferred to a Camp Fire group, the Pukwudjies, an Indian word for “little people,” in our new neighborhood. We were a group of eight, including Claudine and three of the five Miles girls, led by Lucy Grow, the childless wife of a physician whose lungs had been damaged by gas during the war. Mrs. Grow was short, rotund, with sparse dyed hair, cut short, that stood straight up. She was the first married woman I had ever known who did not devote her life to being a good housewife. For this she was considered eccentric. Mrs. Grow thought much that went on in Camp Fire Girls was nonsense and said so, but she recognized the importance of such an organization for girls “too old for toys and too young for boys.”

  The Pukwudjies took turns meeting at one another’s houses, where our mothers provided refreshments. We never looked forward to one girl’s house because her mother, who believed in plain living, handed each of us a simple, nutritious apple. My mother served warm gingerbread with whipped cream or cream puffs with hot chocolate. “Girls always enjoy whipped cream,” she said, and she was right.