Julia and the Art of Practical Travel

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  This is what was in Paw Paw:

  • A general store that sold flour, candy, soda, animal traps, and guns;

  • A gas station with one pump;

  • A restaurant called Mary Lou’s Kitchen that looked like it had been closed since around 1932;

  • A “laundry-mat” with coin-operated machines and a blind owner, who sat on the front porch with a cane and a little radio with a hand crank.

  And that’s about it.

  The man at the gas station told Aunt Constance it would take him a couple of days to fix our car. Aunt Constance looked very worried and asked where on earth we would stay for two whole days when there wasn’t a single hotel in Paw Paw. I piped up and said that maybe there was a teepee that we could buy in the general store, and that I’d always wanted to try living in a teepee. But she got very cross and told me to shush: she wasn’t going to live in a teepee. Then the gas station man said that there was one family that took in boarders, whatever that meant, and he wrote down an address for Aunt Constance. When we got to the house with that address, Aunt Constance looked up at it and said under her breath that she would never forgive my mother as long as she lived.

  Some of the front steps were missing and a one-eyed cat lazed in the sunshine on the splintery porch. There wasn’t a doorbell, so Aunt Constance knocked gently on the door and wrung the paper with the address on it into a stringy mess while we waited for an answer.

  Soon a woman carrying a baby and wearing an apron opened the door and informed Aunt Constance:

  Don’t try to sell us something—not even a Bible. We’re dead broke here.

  We’re not selling anything, said Aunt Constance. My niece and I are looking for a place to stay for a couple of days. We heard that you take in boarders.

  Oh, said the woman, looking us up and down. We do have a room out back. Come and have a look at it.

  The room out back was in a sort of shack that had sad red curtains drooping across the windows and two little cots inside. There was another cat in there too. It had both of its eyes, but its fur was coming out in clumps.

  Aunt Constance looked like she was about to cry, but there wasn’t anyplace else to stay in Paw Paw besides a teepee or else our broken car, so she put on her politest face and told the woman that we would take it. Then the gas station man brought over our luggage, including the three travel trunks and all of our silver. After that there was barely any room to move in our shack; the cat curled up in one of our suitcases and went to sleep.

  Grandmother is definitely disapproving from heaven right now, I told Aunt Constance.

  She started to laugh until a few tears slid down her cheeks.

  When we woke up on the cots the next morning, Aunt Constance looked at me while I got dressed.

  You need a bath, Joooooolia, she told me.

  She went inside the main house to ask if we could use the bathtub. When she came out again a minute later, she was carrying two threadbare towels and a gray cake of soap.

  There’s no plumbing in the house, she said miserably, so we have to bathe in the creek back in the woods.

  I grabbed my camera and brought it along because you never know what you might see in a creek in a place called Paw Paw.

  Moss covered the bank of the creek, which felt nice under my bare feet. I started to take off all of my clothes, but Aunt Constance made me keep on a silk slip and she did too.

  You never know who’s out there watching, she said, and no matter where we are, we are ladies and we are Lancasters.

  The creek water was icy cold, even though it was late summer and the air was noon-hot already. With her pale pink-white skin and red hair, I thought that Aunt Constance looked a lot like a wood nymph. We passed the cake of soap back and forth as we washed ourselves in that cold rush of Paw Paw water; minnows and water bugs skittered around our ankles.

  For breakfast, Dorothea—the house’s owner—gave us a plate of corn bread with nothing on it. There was nothing to do after that but wait to hear from the gas station man about our car. Aunt Constance found a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one of the travel trunks and sat on the back porch pretending to read it. I pulled out our map and rustled it around so much that she got annoyed and told me to go play in the woods for a spell.

  I wandered back to the creek and waded out into the middle. All sorts of fish were swimming there—silvery and slick, and fatter than any of the people we’d seen in Paw Paw. I tried to catch a few using the edge of my dress as a net, but they kept getting away.

  Then a voice behind me said:

  I can catch them with my bare hands.

  I spun around, and there on the bank stood a girl about eight years old. At least I thought she was a girl from her voice, but her hair was cut in jagged, short tufts all over her head, as if the haircut had been done with a knife and not a pair of scissors. Plus, she wore overalls and nothing else.

  Who are you? I asked.

  I’m Jack, said the kid. I live in the house where you’re boarding.

  Are you a girl? I asked her, even though I knew that it sounded sort of rude, but I wanted to be absolutely sure one way or the other. She said yes, she was indeed a girl, and she didn’t seem embarrassed at all.

  But why is your name Jack if you’re a girl? I asked her.

  It’s short for Jacqueline, said Jack. I just like Jack better, so I made everyone call me that, ever since I was little.

  I said that made perfect sense, and after that it was understood that we were friends.

  Jack waded out into the creek and came up next to me. Where’d you get that? she asked, and pointed at my camera.

  It’s mine, I told her. It was a present.

  Nice present, she told me. I only saw one before, when a man came through town from a newspaper and took pictures of us and said it was a story about poor people. My mother cried for about a week after that.

  I won’t take your picture, I promised her, and told her that I just wanted a picture of the fish.

  Stand extra-still, she told me.

  We were very quiet for a minute, and then a big silver fish came sliding through the water toward us, and quick as lightning, Jack darted forward and grabbed the fish in her hands. It wiggled and writhed and gleamed in a beam of sunshine that came through the trees, but she didn’t let go. Instead she brought it over to the mossy bank and whacked it on a rock, and when it was still, she laid it out on some fern fronds. And then she caught three more the same way, each one bigger than the last.

  Now we have dinner for my family and for you and your aunt too, Jack said. We were sitting on the bank by then, letting our clothes dry.

  I’ve never eaten fish right from a stream, I told her. At Windy Ridge, we always got our food at the store, or Grandmother would order it from catalogs and it would come in boxes from all over the country and the world.

  We barely get anything from the store, said Jack, only stuff like flour and salt. We mostly eat what I can catch out here in the woods.

  Like what else besides fish? I asked her.

  Oh, anything, she said. Like possums—and once I shot a deer with an arrow.

  I tried to imagine Tipsy Lipps eating a possum caught in the woods—or Aunt Constance, for that matter—and my mind wouldn’t even let me do it. Just then I saw a frog hopping along the edge of the bank.

  If you caught that frog, we could make cuisses de grenouille, I told Jack.

  She just stared at me. Make what? she asked.

  Frog legs, I said. They eat them in Paris all the time. And Grandmother used to have a big French cookbook with a gold cover that told you how to make them here in America too.

  Jack looked very puzzled and said, They eat them where?

  So I told her they eat them in a fancy country across the Atlantic Ocean, and then added that they eat snails there too. Jack looked like she might throw up, but I told her that even kings and queens eat them, and that they were actually very tasty when seasoned well and prepared intelligently, which is what
Grandmother always used to say. Jack told me that her family was always hungry and would usually eat anything, but she didn’t know if they would try snails.

  But I think I might try a snail, she said after a minute. After all, how bad can they be if kings and queens eat them?

  Then I had an idea.

  Let’s make a big Paris feast for your mother and my aunt tonight, I told Jack, and catch everything we need in the woods and the stream. At the very least, your mother will like the fish and Aunt Constance will like the snails and everyone will be happy.

  Jack agreed that it was a swell idea, and we got to work.

  It took all day to get ready for the feast. Jack caught five more silvery fish, and she made a campfire near the creek bank to cook them. I pulled snails off the rocks in the stream, and then we both waded through the water, trying to catch frogs. We caught only three measly ones, but I said that six frog legs were probably enough. Jack put them in a tall wooden bucket, and they croaked and leaped around but not enough to turn the bucket over.

  Then Jack said she knew where we could find mushrooms too, and we walked through the woods to a dell where mushrooms grew on tree trunks like ruffles on a dress collar. Jack showed me the difference between mushrooms you could eat and the ones that would kill you or make you see funny things, and we picked a bunch of them and carried them back to the campfire in the hem of my dress.

  Soon the shadows grew long in the woods and the light started to thin and fade. Jack began cooking the fish, and she had to kill the frogs because I didn’t know how to, and then she cut off their legs and put them on a stick to roast over the fire. I didn’t think that this was how Grandmother’s French cookbook at Windy Ridge said to make them, but I didn’t say anything. We put the snails in a pot of water and boiled them over the fire, and Jack roasted the mushrooms too. Then I went up into our boarders’ shack with the red curtains and pulled out some of our practical-travel things to make a beautiful forest-floor picnic.

  Jack looked at our silver glistening there on the dirt.

  Are you rich? she asked me.

  We were once, I said. But not anymore. I think we’re pretty poor now. We had to sell our house.

  That’s too bad, said Jack. We’re poor too.

  I asked her if she and Dorothea minded not having any running water in the house, and Jack said that no, they were used to it.

  We could live with my grandparents if we wanted to, said Jack. They have a house with water, and lights too. But my mother likes living out here in the woods. She doesn’t like being told what to do by anyone, and we have everything that we need. It’s home.

  My mother says that everything in life is a choice, she added.

  Well, I thought about that for a minute, and I decided that I didn’t know if I thought Jack’s mother was right about that. It wasn’t Aunt Constance’s choice to sell off Windy Ridge and all of its contents to Tipsy Lipps, for example. And it didn’t seem that I’d been given any choice about coming along on this trip. Not that I was complaining; I liked being in the car and seeing all of these new places. I might even be getting smarter than Belfry with all of this travel. But no one had ever asked me if I wanted to go.

  By then the feast was ready, so Jack and I went up to the house and got Aunt Constance and Dorothea and the baby, and we led them down into the woods. I had put out all of our silver candlesticks along the path and luckily it wasn’t windy in the woods, so the candles flickered prettily in all of that blue evening light. Aunt Constance and Jack’s mother gasped when they saw what we’d done.

  This is what God’s table must look like in heaven, said Jack’s mother.

  Fat fireflies came and hovered around us, and we all sat down on the Windy Ridge Oriental carpets I’d laid out on the moss and ate the forest feast. Jack’s mother rocked the baby in her arms when we were done eating and sang her a lullaby:

  “Summertime

  And the livin’ is easy.

  Fish are jumpin’

  And the cotton is high.”

  The moon rose and we could see it through the tree-tops, and it shone in silver streaks on the stream. It was too beautiful to go back inside, so Jack’s mother sang more lullabies to the baby, and it must have hypnotized everyone, because all five of us slept out there on the banks of Paw Paw Creek that night, the fire crackling quietly until it smoldered out and the stream keeping up the lullaby after we all fell asleep.

  Not only did the Paw Paw gas station man fix our car, he somehow made it go higher up off the ground so Aunt Constance could run over holes in the road without making black smoke come out from under the hood. He loaded up our trunks onto the car, and we said goodbye to Jack and Dorothea and the baby. I turned around and watched them as we drove away, and suddenly I realized that I was jealous of Jack, even though she barely had anything in this world, not even a toilet or a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen. Nothing. But I was jealous anyway, because Jack had a mother and a home, and I did not. And then I started to think about how Dorothea thought that everything is a choice in life.

  Aunt Constance, I said.

  Yes, Julia, she replied.

  Why did you decide not to have your own little girl? I asked her.

  Aunt Constance didn’t say anything for a long time. I expected her to tell me that Lancasters never asked such personal questions, it was rude to do so, but instead she said this:

  It wasn’t really my choice. I stayed at Windy Ridge to help take care of the house, and then suddenly Grandmother was old, and I had to take care of her too.

  So, I was right, I said to myself. Not everything is a choice. Out loud, I said:

  But who will take care of you?

  I will have to take care of myself, said Aunt Constance.

  It was quiet then for a little while, until I asked her:

  And will you be taking care of me too?

  Then there were only the noises of the car engine and the whoosh of air outside the window and my own heart beating as I waited for the answer to my question.

  For now I am taking care of you, Julia, she told me finally.

  Why only for now? I asked, because now that Grandmother was gone and my mother was gone too, the list of other people to take care of me seemed pretty short.

  Because I’ve never been a mother, and I’m not sure that I’d be good at it, Aunt Constance said, and seemed very uncomfortable, like she did when she had to talk about money.

  Let’s just enjoy the scenery now, she added, and because she looked like she might cry, I didn’t ask her any more questions, even though the cloud-over-sun feeling had come back. So I stared out the window at the blur of pine trees whizzing by, trying to count them, until I fell asleep.

  It took us many days to get from Paw Paw to New Orleans. We had to drive down, down, down through Kentucky (lots of horse farms) and then through Tennessee (very green). When we got into Mississippi, we drove along the bluffs of the Mississippi River and we had to stay at more boarding houses along the way, because none of the tiny river towns in Mississippi had hotels in them. I showed Aunt Constance the map and told her that there were lots of big cities in Mississippi that probably had hotels, like Jackson and Hattiesburg and Oxford, but Aunt Constance wouldn’t go near a Mississippi city.

  Those towns are simply too dangerous because of the violence over giving Negroes the vote, she told me. And I don’t fancy getting caught in the middle of a big riot.

  Especially with all of our Windy Ridge finery, she added.

  I asked her why white people in Mississippi were against giving Negroes the vote.

  Well, there’s a lot of ignorance down here, she replied. And ignorance mixed with too many guns is like a badly mixed, too-strong gin and tonic: it’s best to just leave it alone.

  She got so worked up that I was worried she would drive over another hole in the road, so I stopped talking to her about the vote. I think she was very relieved when we finally got into Louisiana and then to New Orleans, and we pulled up
in front of a big mansion in the Garden District where we’d be staying:

  For the first time since we left Windy Ridge, Aunt Constance could take a little break and not think about hippies or city violence or broken-down cars, and instead she could think about the things she used to think about at Windy Ridge, like teatime and white gloves and when to say who instead of whom.

  She slept for about three days straight.

  For the duration of our New Orleans visit, we were the guests of a lady named Prunella Foxworth, who had gone to Miss Horton’s School with Grandmother about a hundred years ago.

  Now, Julia, there’s something you should know, said Aunt Constance when we had first pulled up in front of the house. Mrs. Foxworth is an old-guard New Orleans grande dame—so while we’re here, you must behave accordingly.

  What’s a grande dame? I asked her.

  A rather flamboyant older woman of means who has lots of opinions, replied Aunt Constance as she straightened her hat in front of a mirror.

  This didn’t make things much clearer to me, but when I saw Prunella Foxworth for myself, I decided that old-guard New Orleans grande dame meant an old lady who was quite fat and wore lots of face powder and big hats and flowered dresses and kept a little servant-summoning brass bell attached to her wrist with a silk ribbon.

  Aunt Constance told me not to mention anything about voodoo to Mrs. Foxworth; it might upset her, she said. After all, Mrs. Foxworth was a proper old lady who played bridge. And then she instructed me that Mrs. Foxworth was also not to be told that my mother had run off to become a hippie who then came to New Orleans to learn about voodoo.