Over the River
Page 9
A cash register, a telephone, and a rack of postcards, which I looked through while Miss McKenna finished Daddy’s map, covered a small counter.
Daddy drove around back and worked on loading the refrigerator into the truck, and I talked to Miss McKenna—or “Red” as she insisted on being called. She wasn’t a whole lot older than Aunty Rose, but she seemed a lot more worldly. I wondered how she kept her fingernails so smooth and shiny.
“You found a boyfriend in this town yet?” she asked me as she sorted through some invoices.
“No.” I blushed with embarrassment at her smile.
“Well, you will, with that hair,” she said. She tapped the invoices against the countertop, lining them up. “Look there,” she said, watching through the plate glass window. “It’s the Norman family, and I’ll bet they’ve come to get that new iron I’ve been hoarding.”
A family that could have been my very own came in the door—the man tall, in clean overalls, the woman soft and blanket-smooth around the edges like Nana. They had a boy about my age and an older girl with them.
Red sent me to the storage room in the back to get the iron.
The smell of newly sawed lumber tickled my nose. Daddy had a door to the outside propped open and was rolling a refrigerator across some boards into the back of the truck.
“You about ready to go?” he asked.
“Soon as I get an iron for Miss McKenna that some people are buying.”
The shelves in the back of Uncle Lesley’s store were lined with odds and ends, and I found the iron between an alarm clock and a pair of shiny rubber work boots. The iron weighed about as much as a baby pig, and I studied its on-and-off button as I carried it back to the front of the store. Could heating an iron really be that easy?
“You look like you can’t hardly bear to part with that,” Miss McKenna said, smiling, taking it out of my hands.
I smelled her Evening in Paris perfume and thought of the midnight blue bottle that sat on Aunty Rose’s dressing table.
A little later, Daddy and I drove through the countryside with its reddish soil. I helped watch for places where the highline was going in.
“Maybe that rancher there wants his place wired, Daddy,” I said, pointing to a sprawling ranch of weathered buildings where no power lines marched up the lane from the road.
“Too many outbuildings,” Daddy said, slowing down and studying it. “I need just a house for my first job. Maybe a house and a chicken house.”
I’d seen Daddy, back home, poring over a book called Farm Wiring for Light and Power, Prepared Especially for Home Study.
Well, I hadn’t started right off reading Wuthering Heights in first grade. I’d read about Dick and Jane back then. I watched the red hills roll by. That was what Daddy needed. A Dick-and-Jane wiring job.
* * *
That night, I sat on one side of the wobbly card table, writing to Aunty Rose on the Big Chief tablet we’d bought. Daddy sat across from me, working on Mrs. Stanton’s alarm clock.
Mrs. Stanton, our landlady, lived right below us, and we could hear her radio playing.
“I hate living so close to people,” I said to Daddy, laying my pencil down. “Hearing each little noise they make and smelling their food cooking.”
He glanced up from settling the tiny gears back inside the clock, then bent back over his work.
“Don’t you hate it, Daddy?” I insisted. Didn’t he want to go home too?
“You should try living on a destroyer at sea for months at a time,” he said, without looking up. “Now, that’s being close to your fellow man.”
The bright ceiling light threw my own shadow over the paper I was trying to write on. At home, I’d have just slid the lamp toward me.
I shut my eyes, letting the fan Uncle Lesley had given us blow across my face.
“I sure am glad you fixed this fan, Daddy.”
He nodded, balancing a small screwdriver in the depths of the alarm clock gears.
I went back to reading what I had written in my first letter home.
August 23, 1947
Dear Aunty Rose,
We got here about dark yesterday. Our apartment is shabby with hardly any furniture. But guess what it does have! Electric lights and a bathroom. I took two baths yesterday and two already today. I may take another one tonight. You would love the bathtub, Aunty Rose.
I’m glad Nana sent all the food, but we still may starve to death. Daddy just knows navy cooking. Tonight he made rice and raisins. The raisins swelled up and looked like Jacky’s ticks.
Also today Daddy bought electrician’s supplies at Montgomery Ward, which took most of our money. But we did get a pancake turner, a pan, and some silverware. I hope soon we can get some dishes. Already I’m tired of eating out of quart jars and at The Pan.
Tomorrow we’re having a sign painted on the truck.
… If I hadn’t died of homesickness by then.
Why was being away from home in the evening worse than any other time of day?
I steadied my hand so my writing didn’t shake as much as I was trembling inside.
Remember your promise to write every day.
Love, Willa Mae
P.S. Wish I could be there with you instead of on the other end of the earth. Maybe I’ll just walk home.
Could I walk home? I stared into space, seeing myself beside the highway, a sack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my hand, walking for days, dodging the army convoy trucks—walking back through the Ozarks and all those chenille bedspreads and across the bridge.
Mrs. Stanton’s alarm clock going off on the card table snapped me out of my daydream.
Daddy beamed across the table at me. “Fixed it,” he said, standing up. “Want to go with me to take it to Mrs. Stanton?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
Chapter 10
The next day, Sunday, we drove to Onatanka to see a sign painter who owed Uncle Les a favor. We found the man, Mr. Kincaid, up in the hills behind a sweet potato farm.
We pulled the truck into an open-sided shed, then followed Mr. Kincaid’s directions to a small green lake where Uncle Les swore there were fish so big, they’d bite off my toes if I didn’t keep my shoes on.
I had never fished before, and the smell of the bait and the flapping of the fish in Daddy’s hand as he worked the hooks free made my stomach roll. But I still kept throwing my line back in, hoping for a pull on it, because Daddy acted so proud when I caught one.
“They’ll taste good for supper,” he said, dropping a bluegill in the bucket and stringing another worm on my hook.
As the day wore on, the sun beat down on us and a breeze whipped little waves against the sandy bank. When we had a bucket of catfish and bluegill, we made our way back to the sign painter’s shed.
I wiped my fishy-smelling hands on the front of my clothes, thinking Nana would have a conniption if she saw the mud all over my dress and the rip from the barbed wire fence.
Mr. Kincaid, a wiry man with black hair that stuck up in spikes, leaned back with his elbows against his workbench as Daddy and I inspected the truck.
On the side, he’d painted a red circle with a yellow lightning bolt slashed through it. Then he had lettered
HAROLD CLARK, ELECTRICIAN
HOME, FARM, AND INDUSTRIAL WIRING
I looked at Daddy. Wouldn’t that show those Green boys back home?
“How much I owe you?” Daddy asked, reaching for his billfold.
“Not a thing,” Mr. Kincaid said, scratching at a dried smear of yellow paint streaking his cheek. “Just tell Les Clark we’re even.”
Down the road, Daddy pulled in at the sweet potato farm and bought a half peck of sweet potatoes from an old man with a glass eye.
“You like these?” Daddy asked, setting the sack in the seat between us.
“I like them at Thanksgiving, the way Nana fixes them,” I said, which made me wonder what Daddy and I would do at Thanksgiving, way out here in Oklahoma.
The truck growled as Daddy shifted into low for the switchback down out of the hills.
“You missing home?” he asked, glancing across the seat at me.
Daddy was getting pretty good at reading my mind.
I nodded.
“Me too,” he said, his voice sounding like he’d been running.
“How can you be homesick, Daddy?” I stared out the window, the feathery trees that crowded the side of the road so close, I could reach out and touch them.
“I know I’ve been gone a long time,” he said. “But in the service, even in wartime, they take care of you. A man doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal’s coming from. It may taste like old shoes, but it’s coming from the mess three times a day regular as a ticking clock.”
The words poured out of him. “A man doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going to sleep, or get his clothes, or anything except doing his job and staying alive. Now, when your mama lived.…”
His voice broke, and he stared at the horizon for a few seconds, then he went on, talking fast. “When she lived, I didn’t have a second’s doubt about anything. We were partners. We each took care of the other one. Now—”
When I glanced at Daddy, his face was all twisted up. I looked away, feeling it wasn’t polite to stare. Daddy made a funny noise, back in his throat. He looked at me, his eyes sparkling with tears, but then he grinned.
“You know what, Mae Bug?” he said, hitting the brakes and pulling onto a track that ran down to the river. “I think I’m mainly hungry.”
I hung on to the door handle as we bounced over gopher holes and head-high weeds scraped against the running boards.
Had Daddy gone crazy?
He rocked the truck to a stop on the flat stretch of gravel that ran along a slow, pretty little stream.
“We’ll make us a bonfire and cook these fish and sweet potatoes. Might even catch crawdads for crawdaddy stew.”
Daddy slid out of the truck and came around to my side, opening the door.
“Whatever we cook, it’ll beat sitting in a furnished apartment with no furniture and eating cold stuff out of quart jars that makes us homesick just to look at it.”
I felt all weak-kneed from the way Daddy was pouncing on the truth and laying it out in front of us. I guess that’s why I started crying. I wrapped my arms around Daddy’s waist, burying my face, feeling the racking of his body as he wept too.
When we were finally done, I listened to the quiet running of the river. Here we stood, hundreds of miles from home, with not much to our names but a truck with some fancy painting on it.
Daddy handed me his handkerchief. After I’d used it, I gave it back. His nose blowing scared a bird out of the bushes, which made us laugh as it went squawking off over the creek.
We walked along the bank, picking up driftwood. Then we started a fire, and while it burned down to embers for cooking our potatoes, we pulled off our shoes and waded in the shallow, sandy-bottomed creek.
As the cool water swirled around our ankles, I considered telling Daddy about Grandpa’s catching the water moccasin but decided not to. I asked about Mama instead. At home, she didn’t seem so … missing. But with Daddy and me off by ourselves, I thought about her a lot more.
“Daddy, do you remember marrying Mama?” I asked.
Daddy’s voice sounded funny when he said, “Sure, I do.”
“Would you tell me about it?” I asked, without looking at him.
After a while, he said, “Well, we got married at the church. Your mama’s friend, Marian, and my buddy from high school, Tom Luther, stood up with us. Old Bob Hewett performed the ceremony. At six o’clock in the evening.”
We had stopped walking and stood with the water’s current tangling our feet. I bent down for a bright blue pebble that winked in the water.
“What did Mama look like?” I asked, studying the stone, rubbing it with my thumb.
“Well, she looked a lot like you’re starting to look,” he said, putting his hand on my head. “She pushed her hair up real pretty, with flowers in it. She made me proud.”
Daddy bent down and picked up a pebble too. “Your mama always felt close to her family,” he said, his back to me. “So I kind of made them mine. Like I had two sets of folks.”
I rubbed my arms in the sudden late-day chill.
Daddy smacked his neck. “Mosquitoes are hungry.”
He looked at me then, and we smiled at each other.
“When you came along,” he said, “I thought Will and Mae would pop with pride. I think they would have given me the world. Just because I was your daddy.
“But love’s not always a good thing,” Daddy said, reading my thoughts. “Your grandpa loved Treva so much, he went crazy when she died. Did you know he wouldn’t let me see you when I came home?”
I caught my breath. “When did you come home?”
“After your mama died. As soon as they could get me off the ship. I was on a shakedown cruise up the coast. You didn’t know that?”
I shook my head.
“I rode the train for three days, about dead with grief. Feeling so sorry for you. And Mae and Will. But when I got home, Will wouldn’t see me. Wouldn’t let me see you. And about that time, the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, and all leaves were canceled. So I had to just get back on that ship and take my feelings out on the enemy. I couldn’t hardly raise a little girl on a destroyer in the middle of the ocean,” Daddy said. “And I knew you’d get plenty of love with Will and Mae.”
He was sure right about that.
“Why’d you come back now, Daddy?”
“Because the war’s over, Mae Bug.”
I made a sound, half laugh, half cry. The war wasn’t over. It was still going on right inside me. Grandpa in the north, Daddy in the south.
“I mean, why’d you come back for me?”
“Because it seemed right.”
I waited for more. That didn’t sound like much of a reason for turning a person’s world upside down.
“That’s the only way I know to explain it, Mae Bug.”
He stood there in the rippling water, his pants rolled up to his knees, looking at me with a plea for understanding in his eyes.
Maybe it did seem right. But it didn’t seem enough. I needed Nana and Grandpa and Aunty Rose too.
“And what about the baby?” I asked. “Why is he set apart like he doesn’t belong?”
Fierceness crossed Daddy’s face. “I swear I don’t know. I guess your grandpa just went crazy.” His voice whipped with anger. “But he sure shamed me. For two cents I’d just dig up that little casket and move it right over by your mama where it belongs.”
I cringed at the thought of the storm that would rip our family apart for good if Daddy did any such thing.
I heard him breathing and he said finally, in a calmer voice, “I guess we better clean those fish and get them in the fire.”
After our meal, as we lay on a flat rock and watched young hawks ride the updraft, I half shut my eyes and nearly fell asleep, finding it easier to sleep out in the open, with the water babbling around me, than penned up in the apartment.
“Sing about that gypsy, Daddy,” I said, staring at the first star in the twilight. I hated the idea of the blue-eyed baby being left behind, but I was starting to like the gypsy Davy and his big guitar.
Chapter 11
Early the next morning, with the hills purple in the gentle light, Daddy and I found our first house to wire.
Mr. and Mrs. Mullins, the old couple who lived in the little asphalt-shingled house where the dam road met Highway 56, kept chickens and had a big garden with hollyhocks that made me think of home.
“Leon and I want to die among a few modern conveniences,” Mrs. Mullins said, tucking threads of silver hair into her bun.
The whiff of panc
akes and bacon still hung around the screen door, and Mrs. Mullins handed me a big crockery cup warm with sweet, milky coffee. I sat down on the porch to drink it, trying to hear what the men were saying over by the truck.
Daddy had his back to me. “Take about thirty working hours,” he said to Mr. Mullins, sounding like we’d been in the wiring business since 1937 right along with the Green boys. But I saw Daddy squeezing the fingers of his left hand together as if he were pumping himself up.
Stroking the spine of the calico cat that came to rub against my legs, I held my breath.
“And I’ll need fifty dollars for the job,” Daddy said.
Would somebody really pay us that much money?
I could tell by the stiffness of Daddy’s back that he was holding his breath too.
Finally Mr. Mullins stuck out his hand to cinch the deal, and I exhaled slowly.
When Daddy looked at me, his face glowed like somebody had lit a Christmas candle inside him. He turned our truck around and parked it so anybody passing could read the sign on the side.
I helped him lug the blowtorch, the toolbox, and wiring materials onto the porch.
“You going to work with your daddy every day, honey?” Mrs. Mullins asked. “Do we have to pay extra for you?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m part of the deal.”
“She’s my apprentice,” Daddy said, glancing at me. The way he said it made it clear I was a real helper and not just a tagalong. “She’s a pretty good mechanic too.”
Mrs. Mullins leaned her head to one side, looking at me, and I felt embarrassed. Maybe Mrs. Mullins agreed with Nana that fixing cars and wiring houses weren’t fit pastimes for a girl.
I held the door open while Daddy carried inside two rolls of Romex electrical cable, one on each shoulder.
In no time, he was giving me a hand over the top of the ladder into the Mullinses’ hot attic.
“Stay on the cross beams,” he cautioned me. “Mrs. Mullins won’t want our feet sticking through the ceiling.”