Long Road to California

by Myanne Shelley

  Chapter 7

  Vera Mae’s Dreams

  The rest home goes eerily quiet in the early afternoons. Ladies in wheelchairs are helped onto their raised beds for their naps. The staff take breaks, ducking outside for cigarettes or cell phone calls. More able people, like Vera, are free to roam, but there’s no place to go. Careful as she is, she has come to fear falling going anywhere alone. She can see, in the faces, the frail bodies all around her, that a fall would mean the end of any sort of mobility, of independence. The end of the end.

  She rests in her comfortable sloped back chair, the one brought from home, facing out toward the sunny back window. Her vision is poor, but she sees the green of trees, and some bright reds that might be fuchsia or hummingbird sage. Eyes half shut, she lets her mind fill in the rest of the scene. The details of the delicate leaves, the subtle shifts in color of the newer buds, the dappling of sun and shade below the broad leaves of the poplars above.

  Her view broadens. As if she could float above, she steers herself out and away, to the old house. To her garden. The last one, the most magnificent one from when she had all her long free days to cultivate and nurture. That lush and fruitful garden grew for almost thirty years at that house. The smaller house and bigger yard, that they bought towards Walt’s retirement, after the children were grown. She and Walt together had leveled the yard, built the terracing to keep it from eroding down the hillside, and put up the light mesh coverage to keep out deer. A happy time in their last years together, working quietly side by side. The children out in the world, involved in their busy lives, Walt still working weekdays, Vera happiest outside. Tending the chickens, growing vegetables. Though she didn’t appreciate it at the time, just being so comfortably alive in her aging but not yet old body.

  Gardens have always meant security to Vera. They had eaten fresh vegetables even as times got hard back on the farm. Later, in California, her mother always sought out a dwelling place that had a patch of dirt nearby, someplace where she could eke out a few greens. Even when they were all stacked like wood in a tiny shack, even when the jobs were gone, the family’s money tighter than tight.

  All those grandchildren, how they delighted in the garden. Awed as tikes by the sight of fresh food poking out of the ground. Later, what a kick they got of seeing the old Grannie digging in the dirt. Sure enough, they like to nibble on a fresh strawberry, or discuss the best variety of tomato for their salads. Heirlooms, fashionable foods. They smiled to see their grandmother happy outside gardening. They didn’t really understand it the way Vera did though, she was sure. They didn’t see the security it offered. From childhood, a garden was how she knew she could eat.

  But Vera’s mind drifts away from the hard times, from the bad years when it seemed like nothing would grow. In her mind’s eye she sees the family on the road, at the start, headed away from the drought and toward their new life. How tiny glimmers of joy began to emerge from all that sorrow. Losing Nellie. Losing the farm.

  At the start of the trip, they told and retold the stories they had heard of the glorious orchards to be found in California. Oranges growing at the side of the road, there for the picking. Cherries, peaches, grapes, rolling hills of fruit for as far as the eye could see. Cotton fields. Plenty of water, no dust storms. Jobs for all the men. Uncle Stan may have foreseen the soon obvious problem of supply and demand with so many families heading west, but even he assumed it was just a matter of driving farther along, continuing past the first wave of migrants.

  But bouncing along those roads – or better at the day’s end, when the bouncing stopped – how they would distract themselves, motivate themselves, with that talk. Night times, groups of people who had just met each other would build up a campfire, gather and sing together. Swap their stories of the places they had been, the poor life they were leaving, and of the eden to which they were surely headed. Every one of them, Vera thought, had such ambition.

  It makes her sad again, to think of all the ways they had been wrong. She wants no such thoughts in her happy garden. Instead she pictures little Frisky, the cousins’ tan and white terrier, romping around, a circle of eager children there to play with him. Vera Mae partly watches, and partly is there herself, giggling as a girl. He was a good dog, happier, they all said, to stay with Uncle Stan’s friends at the new campground than to keep traveling with them in the cars.

  They were right, the little dog probably would have starved or run off during the many moves in that first long winter. How the children had cried to part with him, though, she recalled. Times were different. It wasn’t like later, when people treated their pets like pampered children. Family had needed to put their own children first. Times were hard. Just remember the sweet pup. The lush flowers.

  Vera squirms on her chair, rising back out of her half awake vision. Too many sweet things are laced with sorrow, she thinks. So many happy times meshed far too closely with the anguish of a loss. The dog, the dog gone. Reno, of course. That dear laughing boy. Everything he had awakened in her, everything they had meant to each other. How when they worked side by side, even at the most menial tasks, time flew, and they delighted each other.

  Sinking back, she sighs aloud. Closes her eyes, wills him back. Reno, as in that picture on the computer, her young handsome man. Her barely grown boy really. Herself a still growing girl. The whispers they would exchange at the end of each row – he picking so fast, but still managing to catch her every few turns. Planning to sneak away together later, the exhaustion of those grueling days somehow departing their tired bodies at each tremulous touch.

  It’s fuzzy, nearly dark. She puts her hands out searching for him, feeling him nearby, her happy anticipation like a friend she’s following. But Vera can’t keep herself here. A few moments pass, and she’s sitting at a long ago dinner table, the family eating, the meal interrupted. The evening that was warm suddenly gone bone chilling cold, for their brother’s friend has come with the news: Reno and Smitty, both brothers were in an accident at the cannery where they’d been working. Smitty laid up, badly hurt, Reno dead. Killed instantly. A week ago, but they’re just getting word. Vera Mae sinks in her chair, the room spinning. She has not gotten a letter from him in at least ten days. They’ve been writing to each other, waiting until he has money saved… her brothers know, and Jed, sitting closest, catches her arm. Steadies her before she collapses and leads her out of the room to be alone with her grief.

  How they run along together like train tracks, these paths of pleasure and loss. She surely wouldn’t have given up their time together, in order to avoid the sorrow of losing him. “I’ll find you, Vera Mae, or you’ll find me. We’ll find each other again.” Those were the last words she heard spoken from him, all those years ago, before he left for the coast. His voice comes whispering them again before she drops off into deeper sleep.