Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  In my dream, I held on to Vicki, the most precious thing I had to protect.

  Mama did not come back for us that summer.

  I do not remember anyone telling me why, or where she was, or what had happened to our sister, Patricia. I have no memory of Mama ever calling us on the wooden wall phone; I remember only the postman delivering a few cherished letters. Mainly, I remember kissing Mama’s picture night after night, asking her to please come back.

  While I had grown to love Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad, the face imprinted on me at birth was the face of my mother, the face in that Polaroid picture. If forced to choose between morning glories and moonflowers, I would have to choose the moonflower, even if it meant blooming in darkness.

  BY LABOR Day, it was clear that we were staying. Vicki and I began our first of many two-mile walks to attend school together at Elm Grove, a tidy, white, one-room country schoolhouse complete with an outhouse, a water pump, and a wood-burning stove. Approximately one and a half dozen students, ranging in age from five to thirteen, took their seats in wrought-iron and wooden desks to learn under the tutelage and gentle guidance of Mrs. Cowden, enthroned behind an oak desk that paralleled an oversized black chalkboard in front of the room.

  Sunlight spilled through the large windows as students shuffled in, whispered, and looked about, sizing up their classmates. The room smelled of chalk dust. An American flag dangled near Mrs. Cowden’s right shoulder, while above her head the hands on the clock told the time, which I couldn’t yet decipher. I studied the unfamiliar landscape and imagined that every child in the room had a loving mother at home, which left me feeling as empty and cold as the black potbellied stove in the corner opposite the flag.

  Was Mama ever coming back?

  I had turned Mama’s picture over and decided not to kiss it for a week or more. But, one night, twiddling Vicki’s back until she fell asleep, I imagined Mama being sad. I crept out of bed and looked at her picture in the moonlight.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I reminded her that summer had ended and Vicki and I had started school.

  The days grew into weeks. By the time the potbellied stove had been stoked and had warmed our classroom on a cold, blustery day in October, I had fallen in love with both school and Mrs. Cowden. Mrs. Cowden, whose hand had patted mine more than once, afforded me a gift equivalent to Prometheus’s gift of fire to mortals. She taught me to read.

  Through some magic of the brain, a stack of Dick and Jane basal readers, and something called phonetics, Mrs. Cowden and her bony forefinger helped me decipher lines on a page into words.

  I was both insatiable and incredulous. “You mean to tell me I can learn to read every book in that bookcase?” I asked, pointing to the bookshelves at the back of the room.

  Mrs. Cowden smiled and nodded.

  In an instant, reading every single book became my mission. That mission may have dampened had I been standing in a library with rows upon rows of books. However, Elm Grove did not have a library, only the one bookcase. Mrs. Cowden had no need to arrange the books according to the Dewey decimal system. She sorted the books according to student height and ability. The younger, beginning readers looked for their books on the lower shelves, and each grade worked its way to the top.

  Thankfully, Mrs. Cowden never put a cap on how high up you could read. She gave us carte blanche. Shortly after finishing the Dick and Jane series, I began reaching for books on the higher shelves. For me, who dreamed of flying, books were my magic carpet.

  I worked very hard at penmanship and printed my first letter to Mama asking her when she was coming back. When no answer came, I found comfort and solace in reading books. When I read Lassie Come-Home, I cried through most of the book, wondering if I had the strength to keep reading. I longed to hug Lassie’s neck and tell her I loved her, that I, too, hoped to find my way home to Mama someday. I felt the same way about Black Beauty. I loved the ending, when Black Beauty said, “My ladies have promised that I shall never be sold, and so I have nothing to fear; and here my story ends. My troubles are all over, and I am at home. . . .”

  BY DECEMBER, the weather had turned frigid. Vicki and I traipsed back and forth to school through snow and mud puddles in black rubber galoshes that fit over our shoes. One afternoon, I spit out my gum—a dry, brittle weed that Grandpa had taught us to chew—near the mailbox. As usual, Vicki and I turned to walk up the sidewalk to the farmhouse. Just as I reached for the doorknob, the front door opened. My eyes widened. In front of us stood an older woman I had never seen before.

  “Who are you?” she asked sternly.

  “Terry and Vicki,” I answered.

  “Who?”

  “Terry and Vicki!” Vicki shouted in her high-pitched voice.

  “Nobody lives here by that name,” the woman said.

  I looked around to make sure we were at the right house. We were.

  “We live here with our dad and grandma and grandpa,” I told her.

  Her next comment caused my stomach to turn.

  “They don’t live here anymore,” she said. “I do.”

  That can’t be, I thought. Why wouldn’t they tell us? Or take us with them? Then I thought about Mama leaving us there and not coming back. Maybe Grandma and Grandpa did move. Instinctively, I curled my arm around Vicki’s shoulder and turned my back to the woman.

  “Come on,” I told Vicki, who hung her head, “I’ll take care of you.” Still in our galoshes, we left the sidewalk and stepped onto the muddy road in front of the windmill.

  “Wait!” the woman shouted, and started laughing. “I’m just teasing.”

  That is how I came to hate Aunt Mildred, my grandma’s sister.

  “It was so darling,” Aunt Mildred later told Grandma, “when Terry said, ‘Come on, Vicki, I’ll take care of you.’”

  I have no idea where I thought Vicki and I would go when we turned to leave the farmhouse, but it was within my realm of possibility that you could go to school one day and come home only to discover your family had moved without telling you.

  Aunt Mildred had come that December to babysit us. Grandma and Grandpa had been offered a free ride to California in Uncle Owen’s Buick to visit their daughter Helen. During Grandma and Grandpa’s absence, Aunt Mildred, also a seamstress, made me and Vicki winter coats. While I did love the red wool muff Aunt Mildred made that kept my hands warm and made me feel like Shirley Temple, the cost had been to lose Santa Claus.

  “You know Santa Claus doesn’t really exist,” she mumbled with a mouth full of straight pins as she tugged and pinned up the hem to my coat. “You’re old enough to know that,” she reasoned.

  I wanted to pretend I hadn’t heard her correctly. But, as Grandpa used to say, “You can’t unfry an egg.”

  Still, Christmas was not a total disappointment. Aunt Mildred went back home and Mrs. Cowden finally acquiesced to my ardent plea to “Please, please, please let me be the angel in the Christmas pageant.”

  At the pageant, I saw Dad holding Cathy’s hand. Evidently he had also asked for it. I later learned they were to be married. According to Dad, Cathy was to become our new mom. Unfortunately, I did not have a vacancy for that position. Everyone, except me, seemed to have forgotten that Mama was coming back.

  AFTER THE wedding, Dad moved into Cathy’s apartment in Omaha so they could remain near Cathy’s office, thirty miles away. It didn’t matter so much to me that Dad was gone because Grandma and Grandpa were the pillars of my well-being. On most weekends, Vicki and I visited Dad and Cathy in Omaha or they drove to Grandma and Grandpa’s to see us. The majority of our days continued to fold unremarkably into one another, until the day I hugged a German shepherd.

  At school, one finger raised meant you needed to pee in the outhouse; two fingers meant you might be taking a little longer to do your business. That day I raised one finger and Mrs. Cowden nodded. I hated to go because I was in the middle of taking a spelling test with the third graders. Sometimes I forwent recess with my younger classm
ates to take the spelling test, even though I was a kindergartner and my score would not be recorded in Mrs. Cowden’s book. Reluctantly, I put away my tablet and ran knock-kneed to the outhouse.

  Once I had taken care of business, I decided to remain outside for the rest of our recess. Some of my classmates sat in a circle playing Duck, Duck, Goose, but several others had gathered around a tawny German shepherd wagging his tail in the school yard near the water pump. All dogs were Lassie to me. I approached the dog, kneeled beside him, and petted his head. He panted warm breath next to my ear and his wet, rough tongue licked the side of my cheek.

  Then, without warning, the dog growled and lunged for my face, taking my mouth into his mouth. I reeled backward, unaware that he had torn open the entire right side of my bottom lip. Warm blood oozed from a ragged flap of skin.

  In a senseless gesture, I cupped the blood in my hands, only to empty them and start over again. I did this over and over as I walked briskly into the schoolhouse, where Mrs. Cowden sat pronouncing the spelling words for the third graders.

  I saw her face contort into a look of horror as she rose. Everything happened in slow motion. Mrs. Cowden flowed toward me like water, mouthing words I could not hear. I wanted to tell her it did not hurt, but words would not come out of my mouth. I felt only the warmth and thickness of my blood dripping through my fingertips.

  Mrs. Cowden led me by the shoulders into the back room where we stored well water in a large earthen jug. She dipped a cloth into the cool water and pressed it against my mouth. I felt very still and calm, as if I were the eye of a hurricane, while Mrs. Cowden, the students, and the room swirled around me.

  I watched Vicki jumping up and down crying and screaming, “Please don’t die, Terry. Please don’t die.”

  Mrs. Cowden rushed me out the door toward her car. She yelled something to the other children. I didn’t hear what she said. My world was going black around the edges.

  Vicki says she held my head in her lap while I pressed the bloody cloth to my face. Mrs. Cowden sped down the gravel road toward Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

  Grandma and Grandpa were visiting relatives and had asked Aunt Dixie, my dad’s sister, to stay with us. Vicki and I loved Aunt Dixie and her two young daughters, DeEtte and Deanna. They peeked out the door that day when Mrs. Cowden lay on the horn. Aunt Dixie, covered in blood and feathers, rushed toward the car. She had just killed two chickens for dinner.

  Mrs. Cowden told her I had been bitten, but she couldn’t drive me to town because she had left the other children unattended at school. Aunt Dixie didn’t know how to drive, so she asked Mrs. Cowden if she could at least drive us to the closest neighbor’s house, which she did. On the way into town, in the neighbor’s speeding car, I overheard something about bleeding to death.

  Later that afternoon, I woke up in Dr. Harmon’s office. My jugular vein had been spared by only an inch, and it had taken nearly two dozen stitches to piece my mouth back together. “You’re a lucky young lady,” Dr. Harmon said to me.

  IT SEEMED to me that several good things could come from the attack by the German shepherd. Since my mouth was stitched closed and bandaged so tightly that only a straw could fit between my lips, breakfast, lunch, and dinner consisted of milkshakes—strawberry, chocolate, or vanilla. I estimated that I would not tire of this fare for at least twenty years or more. Thankfully, Grandma never thought of juicing carrots or watercress, although if Aunt Mildred had been around, she surely would have tried celery broth.

  The first day after the attack, I reclined in bed, my back propped up by feather pillows. A glass of frothy ice cream and milk rested on a saucer by the bedside. I lightly tapped my fingers against the gauze and felt a slight pressure on my skin. The pain was sharp and hot.

  Mama’s Polaroid picture was on the dresser.

  “Is somebody going to tell Mama that the dog bit me?” I asked Grandma as she tidied up the chenille spread.

  “Why, yes, I reckon so,” she said.

  I was sure that once Mama heard how badly I had been bitten—that my juggler vein had been missed by only an inch and it had taken nearly two dozen stitches to sew my mouth together—she would put down whatever it was that kept her from jumping into the car and driving back to Iowa for me and Vicki.

  I still remembered how Mama held vigil outside my oxygen tent when I was five years old. I had been with a babysitter all weekend. By the time Mama returned home from wherever it was she disappeared to from time to time, a cough racked my fevered body. Mama lifted me out of bed and drove me to the hospital. I had pneumonia. My memory was that having pneumonia was not so bad. Every time I woke up, I could see Mama’s attentive face outside the clear plastic tent. She would reach in and squeeze my hand. I felt loved beyond measure; I could not help but smile.

  That is why I was certain Mama would return once she knew about the dog bite. I thought it might take a week, two at most.

  Mrs. Cowden stopped by to check on me and to bring me letters and drawings from all my classmates, even from the older kids who never paid much attention to me. Everyone basically repeated the same sentiments: I’m sorry about what happened. Get well soon. I hope to see you again at school before it lets out.

  Mrs. Cowden pulled Grandma aside and told her that a boy named Billy had yanked the German shepherd’s tail. The dog had reacted to this assault by biting the person closest to his mouth. Me.

  In today’s world, the dog might be quarantined and observed for rabies, but back then the general consensus was If you pull a dog’s tail, he’s likely going to bite you. No one seemed concerned about rabies or the dog attacking anyone in the future. He continued to run free.

  After Mrs. Cowden left, I reread the letters, slurped my chocolate milkshake, and studied Mama’s picture on the dresser. For a short while, I thought Billy might have done me a favor by pulling the dog’s tail. But when the bandages finally came off and the puffy, swollen wound began toughening into a jagged red scar, I realized three things: Doc Harmon was not as good a seamstress as Aunt Mildred, Mama would not be rushing to my bedside, and Billy had done me no favor.

  Another summer came and went.

  THAT FALL, Mrs. Cowden talked to Dad and Cathy about my skipping first grade and entering second grade. She said I worked above my grade level and that Mama should have enrolled me in school before I came to Iowa. Mama’s delay in sending me to school remains a mystery. She may have wanted me home to be a diversion for Vicki and Patricia, or perhaps a daily school schedule chafed against Mama’s laissez-faire attitude.

  Whatever her reasons, I skipped first grade and became a second grader at Elm Grove rural school. My second school year differed only in that my home life had changed. Dad and Cathy could no longer afford the Omaha apartment. Dad’s farm and construction work was seasonal and Cathy was pregnant. The “glow of pregnancy” did not describe Cathy’s experience. She never stopped vomiting and her knees often buckled beneath her, which is why she quit her job at Mutual of Omaha.

  To accommodate two families, Grandpa and Dad, without consulting Cathy or Grandma, decided to create a three-room apartment on the second floor of the farmhouse, complete with a makeshift kitchen. Grandpa told Dad that he and Grandma would move upstairs to give Dad and Cathy enough room for me, Vicki, and our soon-to-be baby brother or sister. Cathy didn’t want to move in and Grandma didn’t want to move out. Grandpa and Dad built a door off the staircase to create a private entrance, which buffered the growing divide between Grandma and Cathy.

  I didn’t want Grandma to move out, either. Even though she’d be only a flight of stairs away, I’d miss the constancy of her rhythm in my life. Vicki and I often asked to spend the night upstairs in the same room with her and Grandpa instead of sleeping in our big bedroom downstairs. Grandma never said no.

  Under the new arrangement, Grandma routinely opened her window and tossed Vicki and me pieces of candy as we stood on the sidewalk below on our way to school. And sometimes, if we were alone with Grandma, s
he whispered, “How are things downstairs with Cathy?”

  When it came to being a stepmother, Cathy didn’t get my vote, though she was a good mother to her son, our new baby brother, Lanny. The first strike against Cathy was simply the fact she wasn’t my mother. The second strike was that she tried too hard to force me and Vicki to be model children to prove her competence as a stepmother. The third strike was her long list of rules and the spankings that followed if those rules were broken.

  Our chores increased in size and number at first because Cathy’s pregnancy was so difficult and later because taking care of a newborn required much of her time and focus. I went from believing I could do nothing wrong in Grandma’s eyes to wondering if I could do anything right in Cathy’s. We were spanked if our grades were less than A’s, if we dirtied our shoes, made too much noise, or wasted food.

  I fretted more than I ever had, fearing Vicki and I would get into trouble. On the way home from school one day, Vicki and I encountered the most dangerous of all beasts—the dreaded loose cow. The cow dawdled in the middle of the road, idly chewing her cud, a fugitive from a nearby pasture. Her long-lashed eyes studied us while her tail swished at the black flies trying to bite through her hard brown hide.

  When she took several innocuous steps in our direction, Vicki and I dove between clumps of weeds.

  “What should we do?” Vicki asked, crouching next to me.

  I surveyed the surrounding area. “We’ll just have to wait.”

  A red-winged blackbird flitted from post to post along the rusted barbed-wire fence. The red on her wings appeared and disappeared like the folding and unfolding of a fan. One option would have been to climb through the barbwire and walk through the field, but Cathy would be mad if we got our school shoes dirty. Better to wait.

  My thighs hurt from squatting, so I plopped cross-legged onto the ground. The cow continued to gaze intently at nothing, her calendar evidently clear. Vicki had slipped into Neverland to build a house for her imaginary little people. Her miniature Habitat for Humanity project made use of grasses, leaves, and sticks.