Welcome Home

by Lucia Berlin

  Lucia, Mullan, 1941

  Molly Keith Brown, born October 6, 1941

  The walls weren’t painted, just wood, like the floors. I loved living in a wooden house, putting wood in the fire to keep us warm, looking out at the woods. The whole house smelled like wood.

  The crisp fragrance of pine hit you when you opened the door. Once you were in the actual woods, you didn’t hear the mine anymore. Everything grew quiet, even my steps on the silken needles. I would think I heard the breezes in the trees but when I stopped to listen there would be no sound.

  The kitchen floor really sloped. I spent hours rolling tin cans down to the bottom. Tuna beats pineapple.

  Just over our hill was a valley and another hillside where all the trees had burned down the year before. When I first saw it, the entire expanse was blanketed with scarlet Indian paintbrush. A vast blaze of red, alive and vibrating with the hum of bees.

  I made a friend. Kentshereve. His house next door was just like ours except there were six children. They were very poor and the father would get bags and bags of old bread at a bakery in Wallace. For breakfast they ate soppings, bread soaked in gravy made of bacon drippings and PET milk. Once it was freezing cold and they had no coal or wood. The father kept filling the little stove with bags and bags of stale bread until finally everybody was warm, gathered around. The Lord’s Prayer takes me to that kitchen.

  My sister, Molly, got pneumonia and spent two days in the hospital in Wallace. I stayed next door where the children slept on hay in a loft. There was oilcloth nailed up instead of a window. Kentshereve and I took turns putting one eye to a hole in the cloth to look at the night sky. The hole seemed to act like a telescope, framing and magnifying the blinding array of stars.

  Sunshine Mine, Idaho

  Lucia and friends in Mullan

  I was happy lying between the children on the hay bed, happy to smell them even though they were bad smells, I suppose, urine and sour milk, dirty feet and hair. We nestled together, nuzzling like puppies as we fell asleep, all of us sucking our thumbs.

  Kentshereve and I started first grade. It was far to school … up a high hill and then far down, up another hill and into town. After school we got rides home from Murphy’s bar, where all our fathers went after their shift. The miners always toasted the first drink: “Shall we work? Hell, no! Shall we strike? Hell, no! What shall we do? Drink! Hooray!”

  We loved going to school. There was only one teacher, Miss Brick, who was a fine teacher. We were each in different groups for different subjects. I was with the little kids for numbers and writing, with the big kids for reading and geography. Kentshereve was just the opposite. He was the smartest in the whole school. He knew all kinds of things, like when you chop open a tulip bulb there is a miniature tulip inside it.

  Soon after Pearl Harbor my father went overseas. He had been in Navy ROTC, so he went to officer’s training to become a lieutenant, then to the Pacific on an ammunition ship. We went to Granpa and Mamie’s in El Paso, Texas.

  This all happened very fast, a few days before the Christmas pageant, where Kentshereve and I would have been magi. (His name was Kent Shreve, but I didn’t realize this for many years.) For the next long horrible years, I yearned for him and my father.

  They call it heartache because missing someone is an actual physical pain, in your blood and bones.

  My father took us to the Davenport Hotel in Spokane and then he drove away. We spent the night and took the train to Texas the next day. My mother and I each had a bed with ironed sheets. My sister slept on pillows in a drawer from a chest in the room.

  Lieutenant Ted Brown, U.S. Navy

  My mother took the drawer to the train, with my sister in it. I was scared and shocked because she had stolen the drawer. She said, “Would you shut up about it?” and slapped me, and everything went wrong after that.

  Southern Pacific Railroad, Spokane–El Paso

  Except for a bunk aboard a ship in mid-ocean (in a calm sea) there is no finer place to sleep than in a Pullman car berth, rocking gently along an American plain.

  There is an elegant little lamp above your head, that you can turn on or off without getting out of the rough warm covers. Beneath the windows stretches a long net bag where you can put your things away but still see where everything is. I kept my barrettes, shoes, crayons, Skippy, and an Old Maid deck in it.

  The window shades slid up and down effortlessly. I lay in the dark and looked out on clouds passing over the moon, a farmhouse with one person awake in the kitchen. I turned on the light with the curtain open, then waved and smiled in case there was anybody out there in the woods. The porter came and whispered, “Is everything all right, miss?” It was nice, safe and buttoned up, knowing he was watching out for me. And the conductor was, too. When we stopped in little towns, I opened the shade a little. Once I saw the legs of two men in boots and overalls, a lantern swinging between them. They spoke easily, laughing, and then the ironed blue-black pants and shiny black shoes of the conductor met them, and all of them talked and laughed in a good way—not laughing at a joke or a person, but as if things about the world were funny.

  Colts running in pastures, a little town waking up. A woman in a farmyard hanging sheets on the line. She opened a clothespin with her teeth and waved at the train.

  The Pullman bed folds up even tidier than a Murphy bed and it has two beds inside, an upper and lower berth. The upper berth is good when you want to really be in a train and concentrate on all its noises or when you want to feel alone. You will sleep more since you won’t be looking out the window.

  Terrifying, the wind and loud space between the cars.

  The doors were heavy and hard to open, but it was fun to go through all the cars and drink cold water from the white cone cups. The club car was full of servicemen and smoke, the wrong laughter.

  The dining car was the finest place I had ever been. The elegance of its sparking-shocking carpet, high-backed chairs, the linen cloths and napkins. The pewter plates had lids on them; they and the silverware and pitchers were heavy and important. Sugar in cubes, served with tongs. Finger bowls with a slice of lemon in warm water. Everything about the dining room was solid and gracious, especially the waiters who were tall and gray-haired, dressed in black with long white aprons. They were soft-spoken and kind to me, to everyone. In a kitchen about two by three feet wide all the food was cooked by two really old men who talked and laughed the whole time they worked.

  The best part about the bathroom on a train was that the toilet opened onto the grass and the railroad ties beneath it. I still don’t know, and am embarrassed, at my advanced age, to ask if airplane toilets are the same. Is all that personal waste matter dissipating into the atmosphere? And if so, isn’t there a lot of it? If not, where do they store it? I liked gazing at the ground flying past beneath the train toilet. A few times my mother threw up and I held her head, counting ties. She spent most of the trip reading in the bathroom, where there was a couch and chairs. She smoked, fed my sister, and drank whiskey with another woman until they had a scary argument. The conductor made the woman get off the train in Utah. Later that night, the porter came into the bathroom. I was holding Molly; my mother was asleep. He said that my berth was made up: “Go on to bed, don’t you worry none.”

  Mary Brown and Lucia, El Paso, Texas

  El Paso, Texas

  When we got off the train, it seemed as if something had happened to El Paso. Surely there were trees but I didn’t see any, just sun-bleached sky stretched way out in every direction above and all around. The air was heavy, slurred with heat and smelter fumes, caliche dust.

  Mamie and Granpa lived on Upson Avenue, close to the smelter, so day and night the skies would suddenly grow dark with smoke. Dark cascading waves, eye-stinging and nauseatingly strong with sulfur and other metallic fumes. Lovely, though, because the sun glinted into the smoke, highlighting a billowing, iridescent kaleidoscope of colors—acid green, fuchsia, Prussian blue.

  L
ike all the houses on that side of the street, theirs was built upon a hill, so there was a high staircase to a yellow yard, a Spitz dog named Linda tied to a spindly chinaberry tree. A wall of fragrant pink oleander bushes blocked the house next door. I went over to smell them, but Mamie said to take care now, they’d kill me ifen I etem.

  Inside, it was surprisingly cool. The house was dark, the windows tightly closed to keep out the heat and the smelter dust. Dunes of dust were on the furniture and the floors.

  The house smelled of sulfur, wet dirty laundry, cigarettes, whiskey, Flit, food gone bad. There wasn’t a refrigerator but an icebox that always had something rotten in it. The pantry had good smells of vanilla and cloves but also potatoes or onions that were rotten, and dead mice.

  El Paso, 1943

  My grandmother was a poor housekeeper because they always used to have servants, my mother said. My mother didn’t clean Upson either. My father had cooked and cleaned most of the time. In Texas we always had a pot roast on Sundays.

  The rest of the meals varied from pork chops to peanut butter sandwiches or tomato soup unless Uncle John was home, and then we had rice and beans and tortillas, enchiladas with an egg on top, tacos, or menudo.

  Everyone was always spraying Flit at cockroaches or mosquitoes. When you turned on a light at night you surprised thousands of cockroaches that clattered away. The bathroom reeked. The linoleum was all worn away, and when Granpa peed, he mostly peed on the floor. He bathed every day though, and wore starched white shirts and fine suits with vests even in summer. He smelled of Camels and bay rum and Jack Dan-iel’s. My mother smelled of Camels and Tabu and Jack Daniel’s. Uncle John smelled of Delicado cigarettes and tequila.

  Mamie had many smells, all of them suffocating, as I fell into her in the middle of the big bed in the center bedroom. Her skin itself was white and moist, the exact texture and temperature of Ethiopian bread.

  Lucia and Molly, El Paso, 1944

  She rubbed her poor feet with Absorbine Jr. every night and put strong-smelling medicine on her corns. Granpa was a dentist and she worked as his assistant, standing for long hours in her tight corsets. At night I’d powder her back with talcum and help her take all the pins out of her hair. I loved to brush her hair. Still black, thick and soft, it reached to the back of her knees. When she was in her nightgown she would braid her hair into one long braid. As she knelt to say her prayers she looked like a young girl.

  There were oriental carpets in the living room and dining room. Both rooms were crowded with furniture, like a store. They were precious antiques, kept after they lost their home on Rim Road. Granpa’s money went during the Depression; his drinking had hurt his dental practice. Although she never swept, Mamie polished her mahogany and marble-topped tables and dusted carved sideboards, polished silver for hours at a time.

  There were two huge leather rocking chairs for Granpa—one by the potbellied stove in the dining room, one by the big radio in the living room. Sometimes he would catch me and make me rock in his lap even if I cried. After work he would rock and smoke, listen to H. V. Kaltenborn, and read the paper, which he burned page by page in a big red ashtray. Sometimes he would listen to the radio in the evenings. Mamie would too, with my sister beside her and her Bible in her lap. Most evenings he was at the Elks club and my mother was at the Pomeroys’ playing bridge or in Juárez. The two of them ate in their own bedrooms and never spoke a word to each other. Mamie and my sister ate in the kitchen. I ate at the Duncan Phyfe table in the dining room, reading Emily Post and Bartlett’s Quotations.

  Uncle John would come home from Mexico or other Texan towns. He said he was wrangling cattle, which may or may not have been true. He’d repair antiques in a shop set up in the shed, working in the backyard. He slept in a sort of bedroll of old quilts on the back porch. Every day the first thing I did was check and see if he was still there, or back yet.

  Everything was all right when he was at home. He made each of us laugh, and he was the only one we all talked to, who listened to each of us. He took me to cabooses and Juárez and the zoo. At night I was afraid to go down the dark hall to the bathroom, afraid of unseen ghosts and of Granpa and my mother, who would often burst from their doors like deranged cuckoos. John told me to pray, “God will take care of me. God will take care of me,” and then run like hell. He’d come home drunk too at night, but sweet, teary drunk. He woke me, made me puffed wheat with vanilla and sugar. He’d ask me things and tell me things. I talked to him about Kentshereve and my father. He told me about how Dolores broke his heart. Uncle John could really cook. If either of us was sad or afraid, he’d say, “This situation calls for enchiladas.”

  Uncle John and his dog, Linda

  Patagonia, Arizona

  The Trench Mine was an hour drive into the mountains above Patagonia. My father became the superintendent there soon after the war was over.

  Is it possible that we were all happy every day that we lived there? Each one of us always remembered it so, especially my mother. She didn’t drink there, wore pretty clothes. She made things to eat from The Joy of Cooking, even devil’s food cake.

  The mill superintendent, geologists, another engineer, and their wives lived in other houses on the hill. One other couple had children, one of them Billy, who was as close to Molly as Kentshereve had been to me. The two roamed all over the hill, each carrying a docile cat and pulling a wagon to carry things they found.

  Trench Mine, Patagonia, Arizona

  Lucia, Patagonia, 1947

  The couples on the hill became good friends, played bridge and poker and canasta, had picnics and potlucks.

  It was my parents’ first real house. They painted the living room apple green and Molly’s and my bedroom peaches and cream. They bought furniture in Nogales and found a cowboy painting in Tucson for over the couch. My father mowed the grass, grew vegetables and roses, tulips and hyacinths in the spring.

  Molly and I went to the one-room schoolhouse in Harshaw. The window by my desk looked out onto the Farrells’. They bred palominos and had an apple orchard. I fell in love with Ramona, a palomino filly, watched her canter through showers of blossoms. She kicked up her heels. Interesting how often people use that strange expression. Have they all seen colts playing in a field?

  After dinner, at the Trench, we’d take out the garbage. Out to the edge of the rocky red cliff behind our house. All the food went on the compost. Cans and bottles I got to toss over the ledge. Cardboard paper we burned in a rusty old incinerator. This was the most pleasurable ritual, maybe the only one we ever had as a family. The Arizona sky was always beautiful, clear with voluptuous cumulus clouds, orange and red, as the sun set against the crags. We could see far around us and down across the valley to the jagged purple face of Mount Baldy. Sparks from the fire lit up our faces while we stood there in the growing darkness. Mabel the dog and Molly’s cat, Ben, curled up in the grass, nighthawks circled above us as the evening star appeared, bats streaked past. We always watched for the very moment when the evening star came out or grew bright but it simply happened.

  Deer came close to us often at the mine. Porcupines and coatis on their way down to the stream below us. Each of us saw mountain lions several times, their graceful power streaking with a whisper through manzanita bushes.

  Ted gardening

  Molly and Lucia, Patagonia

  Hernando de Aguirre 1419, Santiago, Chile, S.A.

  A two-story Tudor house on a large corner lot. It had lawns, a garden—especially fine in spring, with rhododendrons and azaleas, wisteria and iris. Fragrant fruit trees and daffodils were followed by sweet peas, stock, delphiniums, lilies, and roses all summer long until autumn’s dahlias and chrysanthemums arrived. Mañuel took care of the garden, his little boy snipped off dead blossoms all day long.

  We lived near Las Lilas Avenue and the starkly modern El Bosque church. This was a beautiful part of Santiago then, near Santiago College, where Molly and I went to school.

  The house was small a
nd elegant, with French doors opening to the garden. It had parquet floors and a marble fireplace. Our bedroom window opened to the clear blue sky and the snow-covered Andes, looked down onto the tree-lined avenue. Our room always smelled like hyacinth, although this must have only been for a few weeks.

  The Andes seemed to have no foothills. Aconcagua shot straight up, incredibly high, into jagged regal peaks, the snow changing colors all day, flaming each evening into magenta, red, coral, or soft yellow.

  The furniture was garish “antique” French. My mother wept when it arrived. “Oh, I knew it was all wrong.” The paintings were all wrong too, but in a nice way, sort of out-of-focus Corot. There were many gigantic gilt-framed mirrors because she was so nervous about choosing paintings. Chandeliers blazed in the living and dining rooms, terrifying with their crazed tinkling during the frequent earthquakes.

  Maria and Rosa slept in a tiny room off the kitchen. My father told them what to do at first, but as I learned Spanish quickly it ended up that I took over the household, gave them orders, chose the menus, gave them money for shopping, checked the receipts, scolded them.

  On the way to Santiago, 1949

  I couldn’t get Maria and Rosa to use the washing machine in the garage so I did the washing and they hung the clothes to dry. There was no Kotex in those days so like all the other maids they would spend hours sitting on the lawn with a tub and a hose, washing bloody rags.

  There was a bell on the floor under the immense dining room table. I ate there alone; I loved to ring for each course. My father dined out, or was traveling to mines in Bolivia or Peru or northern Chile. Molly had dinner early with Maria and Rosa in the kitchen, and Mama always ate in bed.