Belinda started the stroller along the sidewalk toward the large blue awning with the Blaine’s Drugstore banner.
Suddenly, as she passed two large cedar trees, the carousel building came into full view.
It was the first time she laid eyes on the totally completed building, which now had a large sign curved over the front opening. Colorful and ornate, it read: The Winston Valentine Centennial Carousel.
Belinda stopped and stared. “Mama…”
“Surprise,” said Vella brightly.
Belinda’s gaze traced over the sign again, then downward to see the doors fully opened, revealing the carousel, with children climbing over a single wild wooden horse.
“All the carousel people had time to put on the carousel was that one horse,” said Vella, linking her arm through Belinda’s. “Come see the rest.”
The rest were photographs of Valentine down through the years, all from Winston’s and Vella’s collections, adorning the inner walls of the curved building.
And then a bronze plaque that read:
This building given by Vella and Belinda Blaine, in honor of their neighbor, friend and originator of the Centennial Carousel, Winston Valentine.
His motto: Psalm 30:5
For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life; Weeping may endure for a night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.
A shiver passed over Belinda as she read the plaque. “Oh, Mama, it is wonderful.”
“It is, isn’t it?” said Vella in a highly satisfied tone. “Charlene was talkin’ the other day about how she had ordered Winston’s headstone with Psalm Thirty, verse five printed on it, so I decided to note it here. I think Winston would like it—you know he said that verse a lot.” Then, “We got to talkin’ about it the other day in the store. You know why he said that?”
Belinda shook her head as she wiped away tears.
“A long time ago, couple of years after the war, Winston was thirty-eight or -nine, he ran over George Showalter’s little girl. Killed her. Right in the Showalters’ driveway, as he was backin’ out.”
“Oh my God.” A hard shiver ran through Belinda, and she clutched the baby’s stroller tight.
Vella nodded. “It was an awful time. He and George were runnin’ moonshine—Oklahoma was still a dry state then, you know, clear into the fifties, and Winston, and a whole lot of people, made a lot of money runnin’ booze in from Texas. He and George had both been out all night, drinkin’ and carryin’ on, and not payin’ attention. Winston was so broken up over what happened that he carried on even more for years. He told me one day that Psalm 30 had helped him, that his life had been like that.”
Taking hold of Belinda’s arm, Vella directed them along the sidewalk toward the large awning. “We got a tent all set up—a comfort station for mothers of young children, lots of complimentary products from the store….”
“Mama…I dreamed of Winston the day Sweetie Pie was born.” Belinda squinted and stuck on her sunglasses. She had to wipe away more tears that seemed to keep coming.
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. And I don’t think it was just a dream.”
“Ah-huh.”
“I think Winston was really there, talkin’ to me. He said, ‘PS 30, 5,’ and I thought he was maybe mentionin’ a schedule or a date. But I see now it was the Psalm, and I guess I need to read it. I think he was tellin’ me to forgive myself.”
“What for, sugar?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you the whole thing later,” Belinda said as she saw Jaydee approaching with long strides.
“Hey, Belinda…hey, darlin’,” said Jaydee, taking Vella by the hand. “Come on over here. Reba is askin’ for you.”
“Oh! All right! Sugar…you and the baby check out the mothers’ comfort station,” Vella threw over her shoulder as she raced off with Jaydee.
Belinda pushed the stroller leisurely along the sidewalk. At the drugstore awning, she found Oran and Fayrene sitting next to each other, and talking about the various photographs of the town and citizens that hung front and back on partitions. Belinda chatted with them and others who stopped in to get a look at the new baby, and to reminisce about old times.
Then Lyle joined them, and together they pushed Sweetie Pie, viewed photographs set up in other awnings and tents and visited with their neighbors—and strangers, too—talking about years past and years still to come.
“Valentine is a good place to raise a family,” Lyle said so many times to so many strangers that Belinda finally told him to stop it.
“Sugar, if all those people you have been invitin’ to move here actually do, Valentine will not be a nice little town anymore.”
The Valentine Voice Sunday edition carried full coverage of the centennial celebration in photographs. The entire run of papers for that week sold out, with everyone sticking the copies away to have for the next hundred years’ celebration.
A week later, Fayrene Gardner and Oran Lackey got married. Belinda and Lyle stood up with them. Sometime later the couple bought the house across the street from Belinda. In later years, Sweetie Pie took up saying, “Mamaw Fayrene and Poppy Oran.” It was twenty years before Belinda got Fayrene to give up the blue eye shadow.
Within the following month, Jim Rainwater joined Everett as cohost of the Wake Up show. Everyone was surprised at how clever and funny he could be. Within eighteen months, Jim had been lured away by a Dallas rock station, but the lifestyle and pressure so unnerved him that he was back home in six months.
Paris Miller lived with Belinda and Lyle for the next seven years, all the way through the hard struggle of college, which had been extended because she decided to get a degree in business law. By the time she came home to Valentine to take a top position in the Berry Corporation, she had become an ultra-conservative, wearing her amazingly beautiful brown hair in a soft blunt cut, only one pair of stud earrings in each ear and Ann Taylor suits. She bought her own home and did not marry until she was thirty-five. Her husband, an Air Force pilot, died while on a secret mission in Afghanistan. She never remarried, although one day she caught a boy trying to steal her car. She smacked him, took him home, made him take the earrings out of his ears and gave him a home until he graduated from law school, paid for by Paris.
Julia Jenkins-Tinsley and her husband, Juice, lived happily in their side-by-side houses for another twenty-five years, until Julia’s death while jogging. Julia’s house then sold to a widow, whom Juice married.
Inez and Norman Cooper joined a dance club and took trophies in competitions from Oklahoma to Atlanta. When Inez modernized their house, they added on a studio and ran a dance school. Several of their young students went on to appear and win on the So You Think You Can Dance television show. Norman continued to secretly smoke cigarettes and Inez continued to pretend she did not know.
John Cole Berry served on the Valentine city council, and was mayor twice. Emma Berry became a volunteer at the hospital. She made encouraging get-well and comfort cards, and advised many an anxious woman waiting with a husband having bypass surgery. Eventually, in collaboration with Naomi Smith, Emma wrote and illustrated a small booklet of tips for families of patients undergoing surgeries, and had it published and distributed throughout the hospitals of several counties.
Little Gabby Smith went away to Rice University and became a much respected and quoted anthropologist, although in physical stature she remained petite, a half inch shorter than Willie Lee’s adult height of five foot four inches. She and Willie Lee married, and the two of them traveled extensively in connection with Gabby’s research, speaking and teaching. Everywhere they went, even on airplanes, they were accompanied by Munro. The story was told that the dog was with Willie Lee until the day he died an old man, then disappeared.
Corrine Pendley married Larry Joe Darnell the day after her high-school graduation, when barely eighteen years old. At the age of thirty-five, Corrine returned to school to earn a degree in special education; she taught in the Valentine sch
ools for twenty-five years. She and Larry Joe bought one of the large, graceful houses at the edge of town, about halfway between the Holloway home and Larry Joe’s parents’ ranch. It had a wide expanse of lawn always filled with happy children. Often she and her aunt Marilee and her mother-in-law, Charlene, sat on the front porch with glasses of cold sweet tea. Other women would drive by, see them and stop in.
Corrine and Larry Joe were married for sixty-five years, had four children, eleven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Corrine only spent two nights away from Larry Joe during her entire married life, and except for one trip to Baton Rouge, for her mother’s funeral, she never went farther than thirty miles from Valentine. Corrine was as content as she had known she would be.
Vella Blaine became an Oklahoma congresswoman. Jaydee threw himself into being “the congresswoman’s husband.” After fifteen years together, Jaydee died, very unexpectedly but happily in Vella’s arms. She had caught him as he had hoped.
While cleaning out his belongings, Vella found a journal that Jaydee had kept for decades, recording secrets of people’s lives that he had learned as an attorney and then in their years in politics. She set out to write the story of Valentine, and ended up writing a book about half the state.
Belinda, who had never thought she would be a mother, found deep fulfillment in the role. She and Lyle had two more children after Sweetie Pie, a boy and then a girl. In addition to these, after Paris moved out, they took in three foster children over the years.
And between motherhood and running the drugstore, and having more and more people come to her for advice than to her aging mother, Belinda better appreciated what her own mother had gone through in the early years. And she became very close to her mother.
Belinda and Lyle’s son grew up and joined the Army and had a twenty-year career in the military police, eventually retiring and joining the Valentine sheriff’s department, under his father, who became sheriff.
Belinda’s daughters came to work in the drugstore. Very often, the three generations of women were gathered, hollering back and fourth over the shelves and partitions. Belinda found herself saying to her daughters, and to the audience of her About Town and Beyond radio program, many of the same things that her mother had said to her.
She thought of this and laughed some nights, when, after the death of her mother, she told the girls good-night at the drugstore and drove home alone through the twilight.
Often on pleasant late afternoons, she would detour to Centennial Park and past the Winston Valentine Centennial Carousel. As she watched mothers and children ride the carousel, she would remember how for many years she had brought her own children to ride it, and then her grandchildren, and how she told them all again and again the stories of the carousel’s beginners.
Sometimes as she aged, Belinda would ride the carousel alone.
Without fail she would note children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of people she knew.
“Oh, Winston,” she would say, “I hope you know what you left behind behind.”
Over the years, strangers would come to town, often in the early hours of the morning, either walking or driving in from the west highway. These strangers either kept on going, or took jobs and stayed awhile. Each had his own story; many did not tell it. At least two spoke privately to Fayrene, one saying Anton in Chicago said to ask her for a job, and another saying it was a man named Arthur in Las Vegas. If Fayrene could not give them a job, she sent them to the drugstore or the newspaper or the feed and grain.
More than one of these strangers over the years reported having thought they saw, from a distance down the highway, in the early dark hour before dawn, the carousel going with lights and music. When each man got up close to the park, however, dawn would be about to break, and the carousel building was dark, silent and locked. This strange and delicious tale was told and retold. Kids very often snuck out of bedrooms after dark and tried to stay awake all night to see the carousel go on its own. Some kids swore they saw it. Quite a few fell asleep under trees and bushes trying.
Everyone was teasing, of course, but it made for a good tale to say that, in the early hours, Winston Valentine liked to ride his carousel. That was one old story that never died, a hundred years after he was gone.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-4805-2
LITTLE TOWN, GREAT BIG LIFE
Copyright © 2010 by Curtiss Ann Matlock.
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