1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/MUDDY CALF

We were tromping around in the pasture in front of the house, and  what we found that day stunned me and made my heart ache.  The wind was bitterly cold,  and I was bundled in a heavy coat, an ancient houndstooth that belonged to Mother, long retired, badly scuffed boots three sizes too big for me, dirt caked gloves, and an old wool scarf tied tight around my long brown hair.  Light rain blown hard by the wind stung my cheeks.

Nothing fit because I never prepared to be outside in the freezing weather, just grabbed whatever I could find off the large wallhooks on the backporch, where lots of old coats and other winter wear hung like abandoned carcasses during the summer, and  moved from hook to hook during the winter, simulating some type of rejuvenation or reincarnation.

Stephen and I were headed toward the creek where a mother cow stood bawling on the opposite bank.    We had just kicked out 25 bales of hay from the back of the old blue pickup after I pushed them out of the top of the barn and he loaded them into the bed of the truck.  The herd had  thundered up to eat, with the exception of the bawling heifer. 

He strode ahead of me. Keeping the boots on my feet was a continual problem,  and I was having to stop every few feet to pull one or the other up.  He focused on the mama cow, making his way straight toward her. 

"What's the matter, mama?" he said loud enough for me to hear above the shrill wind.

'I hope it's nothing bad," I muttered to myself, feeling an uneasiness about why she stood there like a bawling statue.

He was almost even with her now, standing on the edge of the opposite creekbank.  In the summer, the creek was often dry, except for the few deep holes that retained water between rains.  In the winter, depending on the amount of rain we had, it could have a low flow of about two feet in the main channel, with sand bars cropping up every 20 or so feet.  Rarely, it overflowed the banks, flooding the pasture for a quarter mile and on down its length, the gravel road leading to civilization, blocking us from passing through for school.

Stephen was looking at the mother cow, but I caught movement in the creekbed. 

"What is that?" I yelled over the wind, pointing down.  It looked like a muddy stick moving back and forth. 

"Uh oh," I  saw him mouth under his breath.  "It's her calf."

Looking more closely, I felt a deep sob come up through my throat.  The little calf had evidently fallen from the creekbank, about fifteen feet above, into the muddy bottom.  It was caked in mud and thrashing about,  though you could tell it was weakened. 

"No telling how long it's been here," Stephen yelled.  "I didn't hear her bawling earlier, though, so maybe it hasn't been a long time."

"It's coated with mud, though," I said loudly, almost crying.

"Yeah.  We've got to get it out of the wind and rain."

"How?"

"I'll go get a toesack at the barn.  We'll get him on it and take him to the barn.  The mama can get in the barn with him too.  She'll probably follow us."

I wasn't scared of cows.  I seemed to be scared of everything else, but somehow, I was never afraid of them.  I watched the bulls carefully, but I would just walk by them or run toward them if I thought they didn't move out of my way fast enough.  The mama might get mad at us, but somehow I thought she would know we were trying to help her, and she did.

I sadly watched the little thing thrashing and bawling weakly while Stephen walked  the hundred yards to the barn.  He soon returned with the toesack, and we clambered down the bank.  Once down there, we lifted the calf a little at a time until we had the toesack completely under him.  Then Stephen pulled and I pushed, keeping the calf safely on the sack, until we got him up the side of the bank.  Stephen went and got the truck, and we laid him in the back, then drove slowly to the barn where we unloaded him onto a bed of soft hay out of the cold wind. 

We went back to the house and got warm water and rags so we could clean him up some, but we figured his mother would work on him too since she had followed the pickup to the barn..  We called Daddy, and he told us how to mix up some milk and syrup to feed it.  I made several trips back and forth that day, trying to get the calf to eat, cleaning his hide some, drying him, making sure he was warm.  But despite my intensive efforts, around sundown, he took his last breath.  I was heartbroken. 

It was my grandmother's cow, so I had called earlier to tell her about the events, and she wanted to be kept informed. 

"Nettie," I blubbered into the phone, "the calf died.  I did everything we were supposed to do, but he died anyway.  It's so sad.  His mother is just bawling."

"Honey," she said.  "Ya'll did all you could do.  Nature is just harsh sometimes.  I'll give you another calf to replace that one.  Tell your Daddy.  He can brand one for you next time they work cows."

"Okay," I snubbed.  "But it sure was sad."

"I know, honey.  I know," my kind grandmother said, her voice soothing. 

True to her word, she gave me a calf.  I let it grow for four or five years, and when I married at age 20, I sold it to make the down payment on a cobalt blue 1971 Ford Maverick, the first car I ever owned,  and our first purchase as a couple.

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/SLICK GRAVEL

After Nilene's heroic driving skills taking Neila to the hospital, I didn't worry too much about the way she handled a car.  For sure,  we were all far too young to be driving at 14, but it was the law.  We could, so of course we would. 

Several of us had been involved in a wreck the year before in her convertible.  The top was up.  It was an old off-white  1953 Nash Rambler.  We weren't really going fast, but we were talking, and I believe the other car ran a stop sign.  Or maybe we did.  My dad seemed very interested in the details which were of no significance to me.

Just after earning my license, I had been an involuntary participant in two other fender benders that summer, one in which I was driving and an elderly woman ran a yield sign and hit my car.  It didn't do any damage to the car, and she didn't want to call the insurance, so I didn't bother to tell my parents.  A year or so later, when I slipped up and told them, they were appalled.

 I told them I was afraid they wouldn't let me drive any more and  said reasonably "I've been driving another year without an accident, so it would have punished me for something I didn't need to be punished for."  I gave them so little trouble as a teenager, they simply looked at each other and by tacit agreement didn't challenge my assertion, even though their looks told me they didn't agree my handling of the incident.

The other wreck had happened much the same way, only my friend Nancy was driving, and again an elderly woman ran a yield sign and hit us.  We 9th graders were like magnets for white haired females driving big lumbering cars. 

We had to call the police because of the damage to the car, but we weren't hurt.  My father got a little more upset each wreck I was in, but even though our family had suffered the ultimate tragedy a year earlier when Susan died as a result of a car wreck, I guess I still felt invincible.  I tried to reassure him that everything was all right, and would have again protected him from the knowledge, but the police insisted on notifying him.

But on that bright spring day of the wreck with Nilene, a day so pretty it'd make you cry, Nilene slammed on the brakes, and we skidded on the gravel street right into the passenger side of a car containing a schoolmate, a boy we all liked.  None of us were hurt seriously, but images of  the look of surprise and dread on his face haunted me for weeks after the wreck.  His older sister, the driver, calmed us all down and called the police.  Miraculously, no one was hurt.  Our friendship continued unabated and we still spent lots of time together.

Nilene came to visit one clear April day in her car,  fairly flying over the cattle guard,  hitting the first pothole  in the driveway with a loud bump; the second pothole bouncing her car up like a bucking bull.  As she neared the house, I walked out on the porch to meet her and saw her face, grinning crazily,  through the windshield.

 Jumping from her car and assuming a roping stance,  she yelled, "Ride 'em cowboy!", swinging an imaginary lasso in a circle with her right hand.  "Woohoo!" 

I laughed appreciatively.  "You could hit those holes a little slower, cowgirl," I said, teasing her.

"No, I enjoy the ride," she returned, her good humor apparent.  "Course my daddy's gonna have to buy me some new shocks pretty soon if we stay friends."

We spent the rest of the day talking, calling people on the phone, making plans for the summer and cooking fudge,  a favorite thing we did with friends. 

"I want to go to a lot of baseball games this summer," Nilene said, licking a spoon of dark chocolate.  "All the cute boys play baseball, so we can see a lot of them at one place."

"Sounds like fun to me," I said.  "We need to spend a lot of time at the pool, too.  Not as many there because a lot of them will be working, but still some."

Jan came in with the guitar and wanted to play a folk song for us she'd been practicing.  It had 3 or 4 chords and she'd mastered them pretty well.  She sang along with the song, but faltering for the words, had to run back to her room to retrieve the lyrics which were printed out on a piece of typing paper.  There were seven or eight verses, all with  repeating chorus and melody. 

"I've got to go," Nilene said all of a sudden, glancing outside.  "It's starting to get dark.  I told my Daddy I'd leave before dark.  I need to call him.  He's going to meet me on Highway 31 at the drive-in."

She left hurriedly after calling her dad, waving cheerily as she left.  She had put the top down a little earlier in the afternoon, so her blonde curls were blown about by the wind as she drove down the long drive toward the gravel road.

Jan and I were in the living room, doors and windows open wide to take advantage of the cool spring weather, about to practice some harmony on the folk song, when we heard an odd sound.  It sounded far away, but not too far.  I described it as sounding like the release of a giant spring.  Kind of a "sproing" sound.  We discussed it, but couldn't come to any conclusion what it was.  It was only about 10 minutes, though, till we knew exactly.

During the fourth stanza of  our best harmony blending rendition of Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley, we were startled to see someone coming up the dark walk.  Night had consumed the front yard.  We rose almost reflexively to close the door, fear crossing our faces briefly until we realized  it was Nilene,  holding her left arm like it was a baby, limping, and crying.

 "I ran off the bridge," she wailed.  Her demeanor, so changed and uncharacteristic, ignited terror in my heart,  my breath seeming to stop momentarily.

There were two bridges between our house and the farm to market road.  A small bridge, formed by a culvert placed under the road, and a big bridge that crossed a creek that ran about eighteen feet below the road.

"You ran off the little bridge?" we asked in unison, unable to comprehend anything worse.

"No, no.  The big bridge," she whined.  "My daddy will be waiting for me.  He'll be worried.  I think my brakes locked , and I skidded down the bank.  I had to climb up to the road.  I think my wrist is broken."

I could think of nothing but the terror of the inky darkness and the added terror of snakes of all kinds that I knew lived in that creek, water mocassins and copperheads at the very least. 

Mother arrived home about that time, and we quickly loaded Nilene in the car, she the patient this time rather than the driver, and took her to meet her dad at the drive-in.  He in turn headed to the hospital where they found out her wrist was indeed broken, and she was given a clean white cast.

 Within a few days, she realized she had climbed through poison ivy on her trek out of the creek, and the vicious rash tortured her beneath the cast.  She made her own "scratcher" out of a coat hangar, which she carried to school in her notebook.  We laughed watching her frantically scratching under the cast, often ending the frenzied activity with a long, loud "ahhhh", a look of satisfaction coming across her face, irregular red marks showing through the thick freckles on the ivory skin of her arm.

Later that spring, in May, she introduced me to the boy I would marry, though neither she, he, nor I would have guessed it at the time.  I was nearly fifteen, and just able to begin car dates.  Her date was a boy named Roy and mine had the unusual name of Coy. 

Though Coy and I dated all summer, we only shared that one date with the other couple, our ways diverging sharply as we entered high school.  I still spent summers at Camp Wanica with Nilene, but she married at the end of our senior year, and though I visited her in her cute little house, I left for college and we drifted apart.  Roy moved to the Houston area with his family,  and we heard through the grapevine that near the end of his high school career, he killed his father in order to protect his mother.

Things just happened to people.  Coy and I talked about it a few times; I wondered privately about it; we went on with our lives.  But it was odd how you could be close to people, then their lives turn so abruptly in a different direction.  You'd wonder if you could have stopped it if you'd stayed close to them, but it didn't really make any difference.  What happened, had happened, and you couldn't change it. 

I always kept a soft place in my heart for Nilene, though, because she made me laugh, and years later she'd enter my life again, but an underlying sadness would replace the joy we had known in our relationship when we were younger.

"Au reservoir," I'd call to her some days when we parted,  waving goodbye, poking fun at my study of French.

"Well Boulder Dam to you ,too!" she'd laugh, hopping in her car in that jerky way she had, spinning out slightly, throwing up just the tiniest bit of gravel.

I wanted to anchor her, keep her safe, but she was like a brightly colored hot-air balloon untethered from its moorings.  The flight looked deceptively harmless and calm, but as she floated higher and farther from base,  all I could do was watch until she drifted out of sight.

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/TRUMPET EXPOSED

I mean, we all knew the Trumpet saga couldn't last forever, but we enjoyed getting one over on the boys. 
Trumpet, you see, was an elephant, and he lived on our land, 500 acres more or less of grazing and trees for hiding.  The story evolved during a slumber party in 6th grade, when we wanted to have something really fantastic to tell the boys, something they couldn't "one up". 

Boys aren't all that smart in 6th grade.  For instance, one of the boys, bragging that he wasn't sensitive to poion ivy,  had   rolled in it. on a dare from a friend.  Too late for him, he found out that he was allergic to it after all.  He missed two weeks of school and swelled up like a toad according to the boy who made the dare.

 So they didn't seem to quite believe us, but they had no way to prove it wasn't the truth.

They couldn't drive the 10 miles to my house, and the girls agreed to present a united front.  They couldn't crack it. 

Until they decided to take it to a higher power.

"Felisa," Mr. Mullins, our principal, approached me pleasantly one day after lunch. 

"Yes sir?" I answered like he'd asked me a question, which he hadn't--yet.

"Some of the boys tell me you have an elephant at your place."  I gulped, mentally arranging my thoughts and a possible answer.  "Is that true?"

If he'd asked any other way, asked another question, maybe I could have avoided telling the truth, but it was always known in my family that I'd squeal like a spy with bamboo shoots under her fingernails.  I squirmed, looked toward the cafeteria tables filled with boys and girls my age, all in my imagination, looking directly at me, the girls shocked, the boys spurious.

"No sir, we don't really have an elephant.  It was just a madeup story to fool the boys.  Did they tell you?"

He smiled.  "Oh, I see."  That's all.  He saw.

 Of course I now felt like a spy who'd spilled her guts.

And Mr. Mullins would probably think "liar" every time he saw me now.  It was not an auspicious feeling.  I slumped a little, drug the heels of my loafers as I walked slowly out the double doors to the playground. 

"What did Mr. Mullins want?" Nilene asked me as soon as I exited the cafeteria. 

Blinded by the sunlight and the bright flash of her silver braces reflected from her teeth, I hesitated a second.

"What did he say, what did he say?" she wheedled.

"Give me a minute," I said, stalling.  "Well, he asked about Trumpet."
. 
"And?.........  Did you tell him the truth?"

"Yes, I had to," I said, defending myself quickly against another onslaught of questions and accusations.
"I couldn't lie to the principal.  And anyway, if I had, he'd have just called my parents, and then what trouble would I be in?"

She considered this for a second, and in her usual good humor, scoffed, "Well, it was good while it lasted.  We got those stupid boys.  I can't believe they even fell for it.  It was so unbelievable."

"Do you think anyone else will be mad at me for spilling the story?" I asked, slightly unsure of myself.

"Heck, no.  They were just glad you went along with it.  Nobody else would have done it.  It was fun-now on to other things," she said, lauging, running wildly away, swerving this way and that, her blonde curls making tight rings on her head,  sweat soaking them.

Other girls came out on the playground, and one by one, they were informed that our ruse was up.  While disappointed, they didn't blame me.  In fact, they all said they would have done the same thing.  But later that afternoon, when the boys tried to take pride in the fact of exposing our little story, the girls joined ranks like I had never seen, and to a girl, they put the boys down in a way that practically  made them squeak.  Trumpet was never mentioned again after that day, certainly not by the boys, and only by the girls at slumber parties when we considered whether we could ever pull off a lie as seamlessly as we pulled off that one against the boys.

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/CREEK RISIN'

Mr. Riley, the bus driver,  probably secretly hated my mother.  At least on days it rained.  He was one of the quietest men I had ever met.  My daddy and brothers talked fast and loud.  Not Mr. Riley. 

 He drove the bus every day and taught math at the junior high I attended.  He was softspoken, and he spoke to us when we entered the bus and when we exited.  That was all.  But he was pleasant and careful.  He never drove too fast.  But rainy days probably taxed that quiet resolve, and I imagine if he knew any curse words, they may have bounced around in his head on those wet days even if they never passed his lips.

The problem was that Mother had a lot to do.  She had the three of us girls, and Daddy was working away all the time now.  She cooked breakfast every morning,, and it was not something fast.  She cooked bacon or sausage, oatmeal, eggs, biscuits or toast.  We all ate together, and then everyone got ready for school.  By 7:30 a.m., we had headed out the door, walked the 30 yards to the front gate at the road to wait, and the big yellow bus usually got there just a few minutes later filled with kids staring morosely out the windows, joyless, looking like they were bound for the worst fate in the world. 

Most days we got on the bus without incident.  He turned around at our stop, backing the big bus around at the entrance to our driveway, moving it onto the dirt road that turned at a ninety degree angle from the gravel road on which he'd come, backing up several times, then forward, then finally taking off with a small kick of gravel to retrace his route.  The mile trip down to our house from the farm to market road was just for us. No other kids lived on the road.  We were effectively one mile from anything.

Mother  got up very early every day, cooked, cleaned, picked up the house, maybe did laundry.  It wasn't that she didn't get up early enough.  She just tried to do too much in the time she had.  Most days it was up to us to walk the 30 or so yards to the front gate, nimbly walk the metal poles of the cattleguard, and wait beside the road.  She didn't have to be involved in actually getting us to the bus.  So that is why rain days slipped up on her. 

At work, they were used to her skidding into her parking spot, running quickly up the stairs, and showing up about 15 minutes late most days.  I could never figure out why she didn't get  in trouble for that,  but I think it was because once she actually got there, she had tremendous powers of focus, and she worked like a person possessed.  A bookkeeper, same company, E. W. Hable Construction, 22 years.

On rainy days, the road, which was gravel, got very slick.  But even more dangerous, the water in the creek often rose and sometimes  lapped just under the edge of the bridge.  At times, it covered the bridge.  My dad had forbid her to drive over it with us in the car if it lapped the bridge, so she didn't do that, though I imagine she would have tried it if he had not been so forceful in his warning. 

At any rate, when it was rainy, we tried to meet the bus one mile away, at the farm to market road.  If we left early enough, it was lovely.   If we didn't, and we often didn't, it was terrible, and awkward, and embarrassing.

"Let's hurry, Mother.  It's raining." I said one morning.  "We're all ready.  We need to go.  The bus will start down the road.  Mr. Riley won't say anything, but he'll be irritated at us.  Let's go, please."

"Just a minute," she said.  "Let me run get my purse. I think we have plenty of time."

"No, we don't have plenty of time.  Let's go."

I was right.  She was wrong, as was often the case about time issues.  She always thought she had plenty of time. 

We all rushed to the car, she backed fast out of the garage, then slammed the car into low and took off toward the cattle guard and gate.

 "I sure  hope all the dogs and cats are out of the way," she said half teasing, while we grimaced. 

 Then she tore out of the driveway, drove faster than she should have down the gravel road, and slowed only slightly at the creek bridge.  Just past the bridge, which was one-half mile down the road and around a curve, we started screaming.  "There's the bus, there's the bus."

There was no place to turn around, for her or the bus.  Through the large windshield, we saw Mr. Riley's patient face turn sullen .  He made no motion toward Mother,  simply stopped the huge yellow vehicle, looked to his right, reversed the bus, and began backing.   Mother followed slowly, car and bus nose to nose, as he backed one-half mile up the rainslicked gravel, including a big hill in the last quarter mile. That half mile seemed interminable as I imagined everything he was thinking and wanted to say but couldn't. 

 Mother stayed right with him as she said so we "wouldn't delay the bus", so when he reached the farm to market road, he backed around, pulled the metal handle opening the bus door, and we piled quickly out of the car, saying goodbye to mother and hello to Mr. Riley as we ran up the bus steps, looking apologetically at him.   He was tightlipped, but nodded at us.  The other kids were very quiet.  But as soon as the bus got going at regular speed, and the noise of the motor made you have to shout to be heard, some of the boys started teasing us and laughing about the situation.  One look in the overhead mirror from Mr. Riley and they stopped.

I wanted to apologize for her, but somehow it seemed disloyal.  We just made sure we were extra nice to him the rest of the week. 

"Have a good day, Mr. Riley," Susan said as she got off at the junior high.

"See you this afternoon," I said shyly, while Jan smiled and waved at him as we exited at Bowie Elementary. 

He said goodbye to Susan and mumbled ok to me, and gave a slight wave to Jan and a half smile.  In my heart I felt his day might not go very well, but I hoped he wouldn't hold it against Mother.  She really didn't mean to always be late.  I thought if he saw how much she had to do, how she ran us everywhere, checked on my grandmother, mowed five acres, cooked two large meals everyday and did mounds of laundry, all while working a fulltime job, he might not think poorly of her. 

That night I asked, "Is it supposed to rain tomorrow?"

"Oh, I don't know.  Why?" she said cheerily, oblivious to my angst. 

"No reason," I said, "but if it does, let's just have cereal.  That way we can leave the house earlier, okay?"

"Okay," she said, shoveling clothes into the washing machine.  "I guess it is pretty hard backing that bus up that hill."  And then, troubling to me, I heard her giggling.  

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/STRAWBERRY TWISTS

Neila kept her horse at Corbet.  In the summer, when she was not teaching school,  she sometimes came down from Dallas.  That Thursday in August,  she came,  visited with us, then decided she wanted to ride Strawberry.  She was  the only one of us girls who was brave enough to ride without Daddy around to help.

She was teaching school in DeSoto, Texas about 50 miles away, just south of Dallas.  We were busy in the house, so we didn't go out with her when she went to saddle her roane, who had recently become a mother to a colt, Patches.  Strawberry had always been a little contrary, but we saw her trot by in front of the house, Neila sitting solidly in the saddle, Patches following them like a small horse puppy, her legs still rubbery looking.  Jan, Nilene(a friend of mine), and I ran to the picture window to watch them.

"Look at Patches," Jan said animatedly.  "Isn't she cute?  Look how she runs on those wobbly legs."

"Neila's not afraid of horses like we are.  I like them, but I'm always afraid of what they're going to do," I said, like admitting my fear would change anything.

"Aw, horses are so nice.  They won't do anything." Nilene said almost simultaneously to Strawberry's apparent decision to throw Neila off her back.  Suddenly, she started bucking, one, two, three times.  The third time Neila sailed off to the side and fell on the hard dry ground.

The three of us almost ran over each other getting out the front door.  We sailed off the front porch, through the gate, and ran across the gravel driveway to the pasture where Neila had already pulled herself to a sitting position.  Strawberry was running for the barn, reins dragging in the sand, Patches following with her awkward gait.

"Are you okay?" three voices chimed breathlessly.

"Yeah.  I'm okay.  I guess she's a little nervous because of the colt.  I have to get back on her though."

"Why?" one of us asked--the city girl.  Jan and I knew.  Cardinal rule of our dad and as far as we knew of all horseriders.  Never let the horse have the last say.  Get back on.

We followed Neila to the corral this time.  She was irritated with Strawberry, but understood why she might be acting the way she was.  Still, she had to let her know who was boss. 

Neila's sister-in-law Jean was also visiting today and she was  22 years old, two years younger than Neila.  Jean had witnessed  the disturbance and followed the horse to the barn.  Her very quiet nature had allowed her to approach the horse and eventually get control of the reins.  She was talking to Strawberry in a much kinder way than we thought the mare deserved after what she did to our beloved sister.

Neila took the reins  from Jean, and Strawberry immediately backed up fast, almost tearing the reins from Neila's hand.  Then she tried to rear up, but she was under the edge of a low shed near the corral that was used for storage of fencing materials, so when she reared up, she hit her head.  The whites of her eyes were showing, and we three were looking at each other with unvoiced questions. We kept a respectful distance between the horse and us.

Neila spoke quietly but firmly to Strawberry.  She led her a little way out into the dry brittle brown grass of the pasture.  After petting her for a while, she put her left foot tentatively into the stirrup.  Strawberry seemed skittish, but Neila kept talking to her, stroking her neck, and as she did so, she swung her right leg over  the horses's back and sat in the saddle.

 Strawberry reluctanly took about ten steps, then we saw her tense, her back rising up in the middle like the scooched up back of a caterpillar, and with that movement, she jumped straight up, then started bucking and running in a circle, both designed to get Neila off her back.  She was successful, and as we three ran to Neila and Jean ran to the horse, we noticed that Neila didn't sit up this time.

When we arrived at her side, she groaned quietly, as though holding back.   My heart sank.  I'd never seen her any way except upbeat, happy and healthy.  I had no idea what injury Strawberry had inflicted. 

"Ooooh, " she breathed out the pain,  an understatement,  I was sure, for the injury.  "I'm hurt.  I think my collar bone is broken." 

I glanced behind us.  Jean had Strawberry taking her toward the corral and barn.  The colt was meandering along behind.  She would see to  them,  but we had to take care of Neila. 

"Um, what should we do?" I asked her, still looking to her for guidance, unable to grasp the role I needed to assume.

"You need to get me to the emergency room," she said calmly, gritting her teeth. 

With that, we sprang into action.  We had turned 15 that summer, and unbelievably been driving for nearly a year.   Nilene was the only one who could drive a stickshift with any fluidity,  and we had to drive the white Chevy pickup, which was a standard.  Nilene ran back toward the house across the tank dam, opened the door of the truck, jumped in and spun out, throwing sand and gravel in the air as she gunned the motor moving the truck rapidly toward us.  She slammed to a stop ten feet from where Neila lay in the dirt, her head held gently in Jan and my hands. 

We all wanted to cry, but we couldn't.  Too much depended on us right now.  Portia, Neila and Tom's giant German shepherd had run over to get in on the commotion, and she sat silently as close to Neila's face as she could get and panted, dripping saliva on her occasionally while we tried to shoo her away.  She had been busy chasing and "cracking" the shells of the abundant armadillo population when Neila was bucked off. 

With great effort, Neila got to her feet, holding her left hand over her right collar bone as if to hold it in place.  She looked pale when she stood up and we were afraid she was going to faint.  We somehow all got in the truck except Jan , and Neila lay down with her head in my lap.  Jan ran to the house to call Mother and Daddy and Neila's husband Tom, who was at work in Dallas.

"Slow down," I told Nilene.  "She's going to be okay.  We need to get her there in one piece."

"I know, I know," she said, staring straight ahead at the highway.  "I can't let myself look at her or I'll just drive faster and faster."

I can hardly remember anything more except that we got to the ER at Memorial Hospital in Corsicana, and I felt a big sense of relief once the nurses and doctors took over.  An even bigger weight was off my shoulders once Mother and Daddy arrived.  The collar bone was broken, and Neila had to have surgery the next day.  Tom got there a few hours after we called him, so he took over staying with her.

"Why did  the horse throw her?" my dad asked later as we sat in the hospital waiting room, like I could read a horse's mind.

 "I don't know why," I said a little sarcastically, "but it threw her twice, and it was the second fall that hurt her."

"Twice?", he asked, seeming puzzled.

"Yeah, you know you always told us to get back up on a horse that threw us, to have the last say."

  It was hard to interpret the look that crossed his face then, wistful, sad, regretful, I wasn't sure.  "Oh," is all he said.   With that, he looked away, reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and started puffing slowly on it, staring into space.

I think Neila fed Strawberry for several months after she recuperated from the surgery, but the relationship was never the same and eventually she sold her to someone else, along with her bumbling colt.

 My experience with horses with fractious personalities is that they don't stay anywhere too long.  They move around because initially the owner thinks they can correct the problem, make friends with them, be kinder to them, understand them better than the former owner.  But in the end, the horse isn't going to change much, so they wear out their welcome and have to move on.  We had several like that.

Once,  my dad had all but sealed the deal on the sale of a horse he had raised from a colt that ended up being one of those "difficult" horses, when my mother breezed into the den. 

The potential buyer looked at her, tipped his cowboy hat, and drawled, "How 'bout that horse, Miz Skiner?  Can I ride 'im?"

"Oh, yeah, he's great to ride," my mother effused.  "You'll just probably have to use a twist to get him to stand still for you to get in the saddle, then he's great! And isn't he pretty?"

My dad shriveled in size; the man looked at him with eyebrows raised, snorted, and stood up.   "Waaal, Mr. Skinner.  I reckon I better think 'bout buyin' that geldin' a little longer.  I'm not sure I know how to handle a twist."  We watched him walk down the sidewalk, his shoulders shaking just the slightest bit, head down.  My father's face was beet red, but when Mother turned and he started his recrimination, she just looked at him, confused. 

"I just told the truth," she said in her own defense.  "Don't say any more about it."

My dad apparently found a buyer who wasn't afraid to use a twist (a rope that is placed around the horse's nose and twisted to control him), and one more animal with a troubled personality left the property.

There seemed to be no end to them, aberrant horses, dogs, cats.  Finally Daddy stopped having Sugar, our mare,  bred, to stop the procession of ill behaved colts, and we just lived with a sweet and lazy horse who lived a good, long, life. Occasionally she humored us by allowing us to  ride even if we had to keep prodding her with our feet just to keep her at a slow walk.

She never failed to come to the fence to be petted though, and that won her points with all of us as sometimes that's all someone visiting wanted--to pet a horse.  She outlived my dad as it turned out, and when she died, at age 28,  a kind man from my mother's little church came and dug a big hole with a backhoe and buried her.  Mother had a small headstone made for her and placed it behind the tank dam where she was placed for burial.

 And that was the end of her pets.  After years of animals hanging around, the only ones left were cows.  It seemed a little sad, the ghosts of all those animals still hovering around in my memory, trying to correct history and somehow make themselves seem normal.

"Comic relief," I thought.  "Who wants perfect animals who always do what's acceptable and expected?  Not us.  No good stories in that!  And how would we ever have learned to deal with the unusual people in life?"



 

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/ BURNIN' FOR A GOLD STAR

Neila had been Gold Star girl; Susan had been Gold Star girl.  That was the top honor in the county in 4-H.  But I just didn't have it in me.  I thought about it. I really tried for a few years to get interested in all things 4-H. 

One year Belinda and I did a demonstration of how to cut tomatoes and fill them with tuna salad.  We must have cut up a hundred tomatoes, coring them, slicing them precisely, practicing how to do this neatly and perfectly without nicking our fingers.   One of the few foods that I hated was tomatoes, so it was hard to get excited about it.  I guess our mothers chose that particular food because there wasn't much we could mess up in demonstrating it.

Susan, on the other hand, made braided egg bread with a butter coating, blue Easter eggs nestled snugly in the heavenly smelling loaf.  It was gorgeous, the beautiful perfectly browned crust contrasting with the bright turquoise eggs, and it tasted so good you wanted to eat the whole loaf, not worrying if you saved any for anyone else in the family. 

Food Demonstration Day came and went.  We won a red ribbon on those ghastly tomatoes, so the next year I decided to do safety.  We pulled a lever causing a small plastic man to fly out of a plastic car that shot from one side of a board to another.  Seatbelts had just come into our realm of knowledge, and we were showing the danger of not wearing them.  I don't believe I knew anyone who wore a  seatbelt at that time, and not many, if any, cars even had them.

4-H had been a big part of our lives when we lived in Purdon.  Besides things at church, it was about the only thing offered for kids besides sports, and you couldn't play those until high school.  But now that we were in Corsicana, I was getting bored with 4-H. I had joined Camp Fire Girls and found it socially more enticing.

 I was even tiring of going to 4-H camp at Trinidad where we did educational things during the day and danced at the big pavilion at night, doing group dances like the Jesse Polka.  None of my close friends went to 4-H camp because they weren't rural kids.  All my best friends now were city kids.  Not big city kids, but not rural kids for sure.

Toward the end of my 4-H participation, I agreed with Susan that I would help her and the assistant county extension agent, who got stuck working with all the 4-H kids, put some quail out in the woods near the house.   We loosed the birds one pretty spring day, and they ran off to make a nest, I suppose.  I never saw them again, and my dad said the wolves probably got them.  He was never one to sugarcoat things for me.   When I started crying, he changed his story, though, and said they were probably just hiding in the woods since it was quail season.

The last year I went to 4-H Camp, I had an unspoken crush on Bill, a raven-haired boy several years older than I who never gave me a second glance.  The big deal there for the teenagers was walking the one mile back to the camp from the pavilion where we had night activities.  They held hands, but there wasn't any real chance for anything more since two hundred kids walked enmasse and stragglers would be swept up by the agents who walked at the very back of the pack.  I think Susan walked with someone a night or two, but she didn't want me hanging around, so for once I took the hint and went on with others my age.


The big dorms meant you had to take short showers, sleep next to people you didn't even know that well, and generally get along the best you could.   But most of the kids there were good natured, and hardly any of them were spoiled, so there wasn't a lot of bickering or complaining.  They were country kids, like us, who were pretty easily entertained.

One of the boys my age, Dave, who was sort of quiet at school, seemed to be a leader here.  He taught us all to cast one day.  I wasn't very good at it and had to pick a hook out of a screened door after one wild  cast.  He was a gentleman about it, didn't make fun of me, and  helped me get it loose. 

I remembered that the next year when we got to school and he was again so quiet.  I tried to remember to speak to him every time I saw him and told him I'd been practicing my casts on a screen door.   He grinned when I said that.

The camp, sponsored by Texas Power and Light, at their camp facility near the generating plant, had  Reddy Kilowatt as the unofficial mascot of the camp.  We got to wear little Reddy Kilowatt pins on our clothes, and his picture was on a lot of the papers we got and the little light green songbooks that were made for us. 

Singing was a big part of things at meals and at night.  Sometimes in the day sessions, we learned the songs we'd be singing that night.  Most of them had motions, and by the end of some of them you'd be laughing, as the motions got faster and faster.  I liked the eskimo song with its weird words.  I enjoyed the way they seemed to be in a different part of my mouth than English words.  Sort of guttural, like ack, ack, ack.

The year I turned 12 was the last year I went to camp.  Several summers later,  when I was 15, I briefly toyed with the idea of trying for Gold Star Girl.  I thought I had a unique project.  Each person who got that award had to perform a big project.  I thought mine could be labeled "Home Improvement."  My plan was to tear down several old buildings around the back of our house.  They annoyed me because they looked so bad, their weathered wood unpainted and ridged by the elements.

There was an old chicken coop, out of use for years and  a toolshed that was so weathered the wood had holes all the way through and one could see light coming in from outside, even with the door closed.  An old garage barren of paint, with a dirt floor, and intriguing rusty iron things hanging on its walls,  practically begged to be pulled down.

The dog pen looked bad, but it was still in use, a nice strong fenced area attached to an old beatup  building that served the hounds well enough.  Most of the time they just ran loose in the yard, at least the older ones did.  The puppies had to be fenced.


One hot day, I tore all the sheets of tin off the chicken coop, then the chicken wire, and last the weathered wooden boards that formed the structure.  It really wasn't too hard. 

Next, I tackled the toolshed.  I started tearing weathered boards off until the structure started to look unstable.  I wasn't sure how to get the rest of it down without killing myself, so I decided to tie a rope around the wall.  Then I went to the barn and saddled Sugar, our lazy quarterhorse.  I rode her to the backyard, got down and picked up the other end of the rope and attached it to the saddlehorn. 

Unsupervised teenagers are a danger to themselves and others, even the animals in some cases, but I got back in the saddle and clicked at Sugar, gouging her a little with my tennis shoes and she moved forward reluctantly.  I heard a noise behind us and looked back in time to see the wall fall with a whoosh.  Sugar had a slightly wild look in her eyes, but the noise was over quickly, and she settled down.  I untethered her from the wall at once.  I was pretty proud of having accomplished the destruction of the building.  In a few hours, my pride would turn to terror.

I had to go put Sugar up and take the saddle off, a lot of trouble, but she had made short work of dismantling the last wall.  After that, I spent at least three hours taking all the wood and piling it up.  I'm not sure why I decided to pile it near a huge oak tree, the only one in the back of the house, but I did.  Then, I'm not sure why I decided to set the wood on fire, but I did.  And I really wonder why I decided to use gasoline as the accelerant since my parents cautioned all of us often about its dangers, but I did. 

By the time Daddy got home from work that day,   a huge fire was blazing beneath the oak tree, and it had quickly become scary.  There was a water faucet there, but I couldn't  get to it since I'd covered the faucet with wood which was now ablaze.  I was  frozen in place, staring at the flames, realizing for the first time that not only had I lost control of the fire, but it was starting to burn the leaves and branches of the oak tree, the 150 year-old tree that had been there for as long as anyone remembered.

Daddy saw the fire from the road as he drove in and came rushing from the house  with a 5 gallon bucket of water.  Then he sent me to get one myself and told me to bring the hose from the house.  He didn't even seem mad, just shocked.  It didn't help too much that Daddy was just three months out from his first heart attack.  He wasn't supposed to have much stress. 

 It took both of us working hard for about 15 minutes, but we got the flames beat back so the fire was small and contained and the old tree was no longer burning on the underside of its canopy.  I dreaded what Daddy was going to say once things settled down, but I think he was just so grateful I didn't burn the entire county that he didn't say that much.  Just, "stay with the fire, let it burn on down and then we have to make sure it's out." and "why in the world did you set that fire so close to the big tree?"

My answers, "okay," and "I don't know."  When you do something that's so stupid it defies logic, it has to be that you don't know why you did it.  I know I didn't expect the fire to burn so hot or so high.  First, I watched with interest as it withered the leaves, and by the time they burst into flame, I was incapable of action.  I shudder to think what would have happened if he had not come home then.

Mother came out a little later while I was still tending the fire.  She didn't scold me at all, just suggested that we could roast marshmallows if it was still burning after supper.  "You may be out here a while.  Can you still count all this as part of your home improvement project?  Of course I guess if the tree dies, ..." she caught herself and didn't continue, seeing my face contort painfully and tears well up in my eyes.  "I'll come and watch the fire in a little while so you can eat," she added helpfully, trying to soften what she'd said.

It was ten o'clock before the fire burned out, and we put extra water to make sure it didn't flame up during the night.  I slept fitfully and realized that my half-hearted dream at competing for Gold Star Girl was officially dead, the post mortem written on the burned bark of the oak. 

Somehow, the fire made me lose my zeal for the outdoor projects, which were supposed to include tearing down the old garage, but the next day, I had a new idea.  What about home improvement on the inside of the house?  I got some Home and Garden magazines and looked through them at small do- it- yourself projects.  Two caught my eye.  The first was simple.  You simply glued two clay pots together, one upside down on the other.  Then a large bottle with a long neck was glued atop the second pot.  The whole contraption was painted with spray paint, and voila, a unique flower vase.  I painted the two I made olive green, a popular color that year.

The second project required more time and was more complicated.  It was a door painted to look like a stained glass window.  I carefully taped a pattern of rectangles and squares to the door with cloth tape.  My door, at the end of the hall, was easily visible from the living room.  I was satisfied so far.

The problem came when I went into the garage searching for paint.  There were no colors.  Only black and white.  I gave it ten seconds thought and adapted the plan for a black and white stained glass door.  I had it painted in about an hour.  Not quite like the magazine picture, but it looked okay.

I did remember then that I forgot to ask for project approval,  especially since it could be seen from other parts of the house.  I met Mother at the back door when she returned home from work.

"Hey," I greeted her, kissing her on the cheek, "I made some stuff today."

"Oh, really?  What did you make?" she asked amiably.

"Two olive green flower pots out of stuff I found in the old garage out back.  And I changed my bedroom door.  It was supposed to be multi-colored like a stained glass, but we only had black paint and white paint, so it's black and white."

"Hmmm," she said, following me.  "Well, show me."

"Okay," I said lightly to hide my slight  feeling of apprehension.  "I think it would look better if it had been several colors, but these were all I had."  We had reached the door at the end of the hall.

Mother surveyed it quickly and never missed a beat.  "You must have worked really hard on that.  I like it."

The rest of the family, including my dad, were not so enthusiastic.  Some suggested I paint over it, Daddy just looked incredulous until he got a look from my mother that told him what he was supposed to think.  I even wished I hadn't done it at one point, but it was too much work to change it.  

And painting over the material I used to separate the squares and rectangles would have left the door looking even worse.  Jan must have liked it or at least liked the freedom she now had to decorate her own door.  She decided she'd decoupage a potpourri of pictures, depicting her life,  into the three panels of the old door. 

She painted the door a vivid red, and most of the things she put in the panels were black tinted, so it was even more bold than mine.  She covered it all with a slick shiny coat of varnish. Mother expressed her support of Jan's door as well.

 As we got older, we were a little embarrassed by our juvenile artistic attempts, but the doors stayed in place.  I even asked Mother to replace them at one point, but she was adamant.  "I like them," she now proclaimed.  "We don't need new doors," she laughed.

By September, I was involved in high school again, Future Teacher's of America, student council, the horseriding club, National Honor Society, A Capella choir,  and Blue Gold Brigade, the fledgling pep squad.  My brief dream of being Gold Star Girl dissipated in the cool fall air.  Somewhere out there was a girl who actually deserved it, one who could do things right, not make her daddy nearly have another heart attack. 

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/SPIDERS AND FUDGE

I wasn't afraid of the spiders, not that I wanted to push my luck or anything, but I rather enjoyed sitting on my bed by the window and watching the huge black and yellow arachnids spin their webs on the little porch adjoining our room.  We lived in the west end of our current house in what had been the front part of Mother and Daddy's first home.  That's why there was a  porch. 

Our room had been the living room of their house.  This was the house that made the three mile trip on a truck to arrive here-the trip that almost made my dad have his first heart attack.  That would come later.

Friends who visited from town didn't really enjoy watching the spinners  like I did, and they exclaimed about the size of both the spiders, which were about 8 inches leg tip to leg tip, and the webs, which were easily 18 inches across.  The insects usually attached their thread up in the corner of the porch and then stretched it to the support post. 

"Don't worry," I told Janey one day when she refused to look at them through the large plate glass window in the door.  "Daddy's going to close in this porch and make an alcove with a closet for us.  He just hasn't had time." 

"What's an alcove?" she asked. 

"I don't know.  I doubt my dad does either, but Mother told him to make one, and if she said it was a word, it is.  Anyway, it'll be nice to have a closet.  And to get rid of the spiders."

"Those spiders are creepy," Janey remarked.  "I have never seen a spider that big!"

"Mother said they're not poisonous," I said, looking fondly in the direction of the bumblebee colored  insects.

"She said they're just garden spiders and nothing to be afraid of," Jan piped up from where she was sitting on the twin bed across the room. 

"Well, I couldn't sleep at night knowing they're right outside the window," Janey said, shuddering slightly. 

"Let's make some fudge," she said suddenly.

"Okay," I said, taking off for the kitchen, Janey running right behind me. 

Jan hopped off the bed to follow, running down the hall, through the living room, leaping like a deer as she reached the big picture window, checking out her image in the reflection from the glass. 

Susan heard us rattling the metal pans and came in to help.  Somewhere between pouring the sugar into the old heavy metal pan we alway used, a former pressure cooker, and testing the candy to the soft ball stage, Janey got miffed at me.

 I wasn't sure if it was because I called her a baby for being afraid of the spiders, or because I threatened to push her out on the porch to get to know them better, but she left the room for a few minutes while we stirred the sugar and cocoa, inhaling the pleasant  aroma.

We had poured the dark sauce into four bowls and were waiting impatiently for it to cool, when we heard a car honk out front.  Before we knew what was happening, Janey grabbed two of the bowls of fudge and ran from the kitchen and out the front door to the waiting car.  I doubt she told her mother what had transpired--her part or mine. 

"What's wrong with her?" Susan asked, genuinely puzzled. 

"I have no idea," I answered offhandedly.  "She's a big baby.  She's spoiled.  And she is scared of everything.  I'm not gonna ask her over anymore.  I just hope she doesn't talk bad about me to her mother."

"She's mad because we didn't let her pour the cocoa in the pan," Jan offered with authority, but I thought that seemed too simple.

"Oh, well.  I think the fudge is ready."  Susan  slid the silverware drawer out,  retrieving three spoons.  "Want some? We only have two bowls for the three of us now," she said, laughing a little.  "We'll have to split this one into two."

 We ate the gooey stuff,  and drank milk  until we felt sick. 

Susan was apparently still perplexed about Janey's departure, which was not troubling  me at all. 

"Good riddance," I thought.

"Why do you think she called her mother?  Did you do something, say something?"

Really, I didn't want to take the blame for this.  She wasn't my type of friend anyway, so the fact that she ended it was better than my having to make up excuses why she wasn't invited over or why I couldn't go to her house. 

"I just don't really know," I said nonchalantly.  "Maybe she doesn't like the moss in the bathwater."

At that, we all burst out laughing. 

Janey's mother never called and squealed on me if Janey told her anything.  And when I saw Janey at Robert Earl's store with her grandmother, she  just looked at me with a weak smile, waved halfheartedly and said "Hi."

I said "hi" back, but I didn't  try to make small talk.  It was better this way.  We just knew her because she visited her grandmother who had wanted us to be friends because she "thought we were nice girls" per Janey.  I wondered what her grandmother thought now.

I had never thought we'd  be close friends, and it was awkward not to ask her why she left, but Susan told me I should "leave it alone--please".  And I promised her I would not ask Janey further about it.  That day at the store I almost asked for our bowls back because we'd have to get some more at Safeway, but then I remembered the look Susan had given me and it wasn't hard not to ask. 

A few months later, Daddy and some of the men from the gin took in the porch and made a closet and an alcove with bookshelves.  No more spiders. 

But I didn't think the changed look of our bedroom would have salvaged my friendship with Janey, not really.  I think our chances for sustaining a longterm friendship were about as likely as one of those big "porch webs" surviving a tornado. 

Bye bye spiders.  Bye bye Janey.

1950S SMALL TOWN LIFE/CHANG SINGS AT CHURCH

God must have had a special concern for Chang, letting him end up at our house.  If he had shown up a few months earlier, before Julie died, we would have loaded him up in the pickup and taken him to the animal shelter right away.  As it was, he showed up, acted really tacky to all of us, growling, stealing the hounds' food, barking at us in our own driveway, and generally making himself unwelcome, and we still let him stay. 

He was a chow, who had thick golden fur that stood out around his neck like a fluted collar.  His walk was more of a strut, but he ran if someone approached him, and you could tell then, by the way he put his head down, that someone had been mean to him.  He had a secret he couldn't tell us in words, but his behavior spoke for him.

I had tried for several weeks to approach him.  Eventually, he let me come closer, with  dogfood.  One day, as he ate, I moved near him and gently reached out, touching his fur.  He kept eating.  I stood quietly.  When he finished, he didn't run away, just walked away regally with his fur neckring sticking out like a hedge of protection. 

That was the beginning of an uneasy relationship that lasted several years.  It also marked the first time that I became strongly aware of my tendencies toward obsessive - compulsive actions, especially as they related to germs. 

Chang had only been hanging around the house two months or so when his lovely fur started dropping off in hunks.  I first noticed it one day when I fed him, and within three days, he had lost most of the fur on the left side of his body.

"Mange," Daddy pronounced when he came home from Lubbock on the weekend.

"What do we do?" I asked, feeling like I wanted to cry.

"That dog is mean.  I don't know how anyone is going to get to him to treat the mange.  We probably need to get rid of him."

"No," I begged.  "Let me keep him.  I'll put the medicine on him.  He'll let me."  I acted more sure than I felt that the dog would let me touch him.  He had let me pet him at times, but I had to approach him very carefully, and he stayed in control, not me. 

Daddy got the medicine on the weekend, and I started the treatment on Monday after he'd left for Lubbock.  Thank goodness he didn't see what it entailed. 

First, I had to feed Chang, but not really let him have the feed in the usual spot out by the garage.  I had to get the feed and lure him into the fenced yard, at the front of the house, through the gate, topped by two small gray metal lions, a small fancy decorative item on an otherwise plain chainlink fence.  Once I got him in the yard, which was no small feat, I had to actually let him eat his food.  Otherwise he'd never trust me again.

When he was nearly through, I slipped onto the high concrete porch and retrieved the "treatment" which was liquid thankfully and prepared in a used liquid dishwashing bottle.  I edged near him and poured a little of the mixture on the raw skin.  As soon as it hit his skin, he was off, running toward the gate, which I had smartly closed. 

When he realized I had tricked him, he ran east until there was no more yard, only fence.  When he turned north, I was there ready and shot a stream of medicine at his pitiful coatless body.  He ran west then and I patiently waited until he had to come past me once more when I squirted the rest of the treatment toward him.  Then I opened the gate and let him out.  He ran, shaking as hard as he could, drops of medicine glistening in the sun like tiny diamonds. 

I could hardly believe it, but each day we repeated the ritual.  I felt he was wise to me, but he never let on, entering the gate skittishly each day just as he had the day before.  Running from me every day like the day before.  Eventually, his mange cleared up and his lovely thick coat was restored like new.

Only as his mange got better, my obsessive compulsiveness got worse.  In treating him, I had become terrified that I would get mange.  I envisioned clumps of hair falling out, my raw skin, rough and scaly, revealed at school to disgusted schoolmates who pointed and jeered.

To counteract the terror, I  developed a very intense cleansing ritual for my hands and arms.  After each time I put medicine on Chang, I washed my hands with soap, dried them carefully, washed them again, dried them, then applied pure alcohol to each hand numerous times.  Sometimes, if I still "felt" the germs on there, I had to go through the whole process again.  It could be burdensome.

Chang wasn't really any problem except when he got into a crisis where he needed help.  Then no one could do anything with him at all, and it became an embarrassment.  Thankfully, the one time we needed to take him to the vet after he got bitten on the nose by a copperhead or watermocassin, causing his nose to swell up, he was too sick to care as we loaded him up in the floorboard of the car and took him to Dr. Harper for a shot.  Normally, though, no one could get him to do anything except what he wanted.

A few weeks after Chang had mange,  my dad decided to ride Sugar, our horse, to church.  I'm not sure what the impetus for that was, maybe the beautiful spring day, with its clear sun and cool breeze.  He never did it before, and after what happened, he certainly never did it again, but he saddled up. And since Mother and we girls had gone earlier to Sunday School, we watched in consternation as he trotted up, riding high and proud in the saddle, his white cowboy hat bouncing up and down with every step.

We attended literally a one -room church.  No bathrooms, except some old ones outside that no one would use unless it was a dire emergency.  No air conditioning.  The front doors (which were at the back of the pews) were the only doors, and the wooden doors stood open, leaving the screened doors to let in the breeze. 

Our friends giggled, and so did we, as Daddy tethered Sugar to the metal handrails by the steps.  I looked toward Mother and saw her glance out the front door and have no reaction, like it was the most natural thing in the world.  At the break between Sunday School and church, all the adults slapped Daddy on the back and acted like it was the greatest thing ever that he rode his horse to worship.

Brother Johnny led the singing on Sunday,  and we sang a variety of songs, but almost every week, we sang "At Calvary."  He stepped up behind the pulpit and after a brief piano intro, launched into the song.  "Years I spent in vanity and pride," he sang, swinging his arm in time with the music. 

"Aaaauuhrrrrr," a terrible high pitched sound came from the doorway.  "Aaaauuhrrr, aaaauuhrr."

It seemed like slow motion as just about every head in that small congregation turned back toward the doors.  There, with his nose pointed straight up, like a coyote howling at the moon, sat Chang, making weird and unusual noises,  accompanying the hymn. 

Daddy, realizing Chang had followed them like a private detective, keeping his distance so as not to be seen, got up and went back and tried to shush him, but of course he wasn't having any of it and seemed to get louder and more insistent.  The sound was sad and mournful, but everyone was laughing.  Finally, Brother Johnny finished two verses and said, with a dour look ,  that was all we'd sing for now.  All we kids had hung our heads and were giggling, punching each other, and shaking with suppressed laughter. 

Daddy slipped out and untied Sugar, and the entire congregation watched him through the south windows as he rode toward home.  It was only a mile.  I'm not sure, but it didn't seem like he was sitting as high in the saddle on the way back.

 He never liked Chang, and that episode sure didn't endear him.  A few weeks later, we arrived home early from church and found a friend of dad's with a rope around Chang trying to get him in a truck.  We were never sure what that was about, but had a pretty good idea.  Of course Jan and I staged a duet, a screaming, crying fit,  and once more Chang avoided capital punishment.

 He lived several more fairly happy years with us, teaching us lessons about dealing with difficult personalities.   I was never sorry he experienced some years of kindness, which he did, with the exception of the rope incident.  Even that day,  he saw how we would stick up for him even if he was hard to deal with, though  he never did anything to demonstrate he was grateful.   We all cried the day he died, hit by a car he was trying to bluff into stopping,  and though I didn't want to admit it,  there was, with my shock and sorrow,  also a sense of relief. 

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/JULIE GOES AWAY

"Honey," Aunt Kate said, her honeysweet voice kind and soothing.   "If there's a dog heaven, I know Julie's in it."  She wasn't our aunt, but she wanted to be called that.  And her voice always sounded the same way:  sweet, smooth, unruffled.  I knew Aunt Kate, a pillar of the tiny church we attended, didn't believe that animals went to heaven, but she said it to try to make me feel better.

At that, I burst into more tears.  My face was red and splotched.  I didn't "cry pretty" like some people.  It was an ugly sight.  My nose stopped up, my eyes swelled, and I looked a mess.  I wished I could cry like the women in the movies who dabbed at their eyes and noses, their facial features unmarred and perfect. 

"But I didn't get to say goodbye to her," I wailed.  "They took her to the vet, and they never brought her home.  They didn't even ask me!"  There was a brief lull as I thought of more indignation and hurt.  "And she was just staring at me when she left with them.  Just staring at me from over the back of the tailgate like she didn't even know me," I sobbed.  "She was droolin' real  bad."

"Honey, she had sleepin' sickness.  There's no gettin' over that.  Your mama and daddy did what they thought was best.  They knew she wud'n gonna get well.  It was for the best."  She took my snotty hands in her soft, plump ones, held them both in one and patted with the other. 

"Why don't you try some of this coconut cake Aunt Kate brought ya'll?  I made it this morning when I heard about Julie.  I know you loved that puppy.  She was a real sweet girl."

I had cried so long I'd about made myself sick.  To date, Julie's death was the most grievous thing I had ever experienced.  Julie didn't demand anything.  She played if I wanted to play, rested if I wanted to rest, and Jan and I had her chase us just about every night that she lived, growling, shaking the llama houseshoes we ran in, like her life depended on killing them. 

I loved sneaking to the door every night to let her in, and the light pressure of her body as she jumped on the foot of the bed and settled down on the tops of my feet. Her light snoring and tiny grunts and yelps were comforting night sounds.  Occasionally, when she slept during the day, we laughed at her little yips, like she was having a bad dream.

Mother came into the kitchen about that time.  She'd been doing something, but I wondered what, since she always spent time with Aunt Kate when she visited.  She'd helped her up the front steps, since Aunt Kate was round and elderly.  She'd taken the cake and put it in the kitchen-then she disappeared for about five minutes.

Aunt Kate, with her twisted gray hair and perfect powdered face, looked like she could have come out of a tintype formal portrait.  She always wore a dress; her soft hairdo swept up and framed that face, that  etching of  human kindness.

Mother didn't like for her children to cry.  Maybe that's why she so rarely told us no, or don't, or stop.  It made her uncomfortable.  She wasn't one to dig deep into the emotions.  Pragmatic, she just thought people, including children,  had to buck up and deal with whatever came their way.

 My grandmother Nettie told me once it was just mother's way, not necessarily a bad way, just her way.  She'd grown up with a mother who wouldn't sign her report card, making her wait till her dad could do it.  Since he worked the evening shift, the kids always had to take their cards a day late.   "Kids don't understand mental illness,"  she'd said, so they just had to find ways to make it okay.  Mother's method was just to ignore it and push on .  It worked pretty well for her, but I needed more. 

I know Mother would never have called Aunt Kate to talk to me, but since Aunt Kate had shown up, she just more or less let it happen.  And it worked.  I sniffled a few more minutes, but I felt encouraged that Julie had made such a good impression on her.  And I accepted her assessment of sleeping sickness.  Julie couldn't have lived drooling like that and staring at people.  It would have scared them. 

Aunt Kate slipped the knife  through the three layer cake and placed her scrumptious creation on a dish Mother had bought at Safeway.  It was blue and white and featured an idyllic country scene with a picturesque house.  "Here, sweetie," she said kindly.  "Eat this.  You'll feel better."

Going against what I believed to be true, I allowed myself to picture Julie running on top of a puffy white cloud, bounding  forward awkwardly  like she always did.  Abruptly I saw her stop, front legs splayed, and there in a little indentation of the cloud was a llama houseshoe.  If there was a dog heaven, she would be happy there.

I took a big bite of cake, savoring the rough texture of the coconut and the sweetness.   Sudddenly I felt certain I could be me again, stop crying and move forward.

 "That's better, isn't it?" Mother asked me, but I think it was more of a statement.  She didn't wait for an answer, getting saucers for herself and Aunt Kate.  "Want some coffee, Kate?" she asked, already gathering the cups.   

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/THE RUNAWAY

A few years after we moved to Corbet, I ran away from home.  Well, to be  exactly accurate, I didn't actually do it, but I intended to. 

I almost never got mad at Mother, but I think we were talking about when I got to do certain things that made me feel more grown up, and we did not agree about the when of things.  Apparently it affected me much more than it did her, for even though in a childish rage I pulled out all the drawers in the dresser and left my clothes hanging haphazardly out of their normal places, setting up a scene that would instantly relay to her that I was gone,  she never came to our end of our long ranchstyle house to check on me.

Standing waiting behind the door lost its appeal after about ten minutes.  I had  hoped to hear her open it and lament loudly (maybe even cry ) about my having run away.  I had planned to step from behind the door, reassure her that I was no longer mad (now that she was properly upset about my absence), she would say she was sorry, and all would be well again.

Eventually, I refolded the clothes, put them back in their proper places, gently slid the drawers back in place, and opened the bedroom door into the hall.  My anger, now a sputter replacing an open throttle, left me mopey, but chastened.  I drug my loafers on the carpet with each step, scraping minute bits of black suede off the toes onto the champagne colored carpet.  I expected Mother to be in the kitchen, because after all, what parent would leave the house when their kid might be running away?

Jan was sitting at the kitchen table eating a piece of chocolate cake.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked, but I wasn't sure if she really wanted to know or was just making a comment about how morose I looked.    

I contemplated how much to tell her.  Maybe I should just keep it all to myself-- but I couldn't.  I never could keep things to myself. 

"Well, I was going to run away from home--I sort of did -- but Mother didn't even come to check on me," I groused.

She observed me for a few seconds, about like you'd glance at a sewage plant pointed out on  a lake tour.  "Why'd you do that?" she asked,  nonchalantly, focusing again on her food, cutting a big bite of cake.

Suddenly all the drama I'd felt and enacted seemed petty and stupid.

"That's pretty stupid," she said as if reading my mind.  "I hope you straightened up your side of the room," she laughed.

We shared a room with twin beds, and it was like it was divided by the prime meridian, her side messy, mine neat, except for the slightly grimy spot where Julie slept each night at the foot of my bed.

"Where's Mother?"  I wanted to know; I just wasn't sure I wanted to see her right now.

"Oh, she's outside on the patio reading the paper.  She said it was such a pretty day she didn't want to waste it all inside.  She'd always rather be outside than in, you know that.  She's sitting out there by that big tree trunk you made Daddy drag up there."  Jan wasn't a fan of my crude home improvement projects.

"That's the fish cleaning table," I huffed.  "Mother really likes it."

"Well, anyway, she's out there.  Nettie's out there too.  She just drove up."

I took a deep breath and went outside, edging around the corner of the garage and under the shade of the large oak that grew just a few feet from the house.  Mother and Nettie were seated in lawnchairs, talking.  Nettie looked up and smiled, and I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. 

"Hi," I said without much enthusiasm. 

Mother smiled at me and kept on talking about Muleshoe, Texas where Daddy was working now, near Lubbock.  Then she went on about what Neila was doing in Austin and the fact that Elton had started working as the produce manager at Safeway.  You couldn't tell there had been any conflict between us earlier in the day, and I knew she'd never mention it to Nettie or to me, but I wanted to ask her why she never came to check on me, so I sat listening to them, trying to let go of my anger. 

I looked over at the fishcleaning table/treetrunk.  I had dug a hole, then begged Daddy to get the tractor and drag the partial trunk over.  I pictured it having pots of varicolored blooming flowers sitting on it, but in our family pragmatism usually won out over aesthetics, so it became fish over flowers. 

I didn't even like to eat fish.  It smelled too bad, but Mother would stand at the treetrunk, cut their heads off, gut them, scale them, then march inside and cook them.   The death and the eating were way too close in time to each other for me. 

Nettie decided she wanted to fish, so she asked me to get a cane pole from the garage.  She had brought some minnows, which were sitting in a gray metal bucket in the shade under the tree.  She walked slowly out toward the tank in her Daniel Green houseshoes, wearing her huge large brim hat, something like a farmer's sombrero, carrying the pole, while I ambled along with the minnow bucket.

"I'll clean whatever you catch," Mother had called out as she went inside to prepare lunch.

"I don't like to fish," I told Nettie as I tried to trap one of the fast moving minnows for her.  Handing one to her, I watched, wincing as she slipped the hook through the minnow's back.

"Why?" she said, holding the pole up straight, then slinging the line over her head and forward, letting the little minnow land with a "plop" in the dark mossy water.  We watched the red and white cork bob languidly.  Nettie sat down in a faded green  metal lawnchair that we left out by the tank summer and winter.  I pulled its rusty twin beside her though it was heavy and took some effort, dirt and leaves clinging to the curved metal legs. 

"First, I think it's too boring--unless the fish are really biting.  Second, Daddy doesn't ever want us to talk or move around.  He always thinks the fish can hear all the noise and won't bite.  I don't think they're that smart.  And third, I feel sorry for the minnows and the fish.  They look so pitiful, hooks hung in their lips, trying to breathe when they're out of water."  I noticed that I was saying that a lot now--I felt sorry for this thing, that person, that situation.   

"Well, I like fishing, myself, and I didn't even know they had lips," Nettie said, staring placidly at the calm water.  "I don't think the fish feel as much as you think.  Th' end justifies th' means."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, fish are for eatin'.  We have to catch 'em to eat 'em, don't we?"  She laughed her quiet chuckle.
"Ooh, I'm burnin' down!"  She always said that when the rest of us said "burning up". 

A warm breeze wafted across us, but our sweaty shirts stuck to the green paint of the chairs as we leaned forward to watch something nibbling  at Nettie's hook, causing the red and white cork to bobble.  Her knees creaked and popped as she stood up slowly, getting ready.  One, two, three bobs of the cork, she jerked the line to set the hook, then she raised the pole straight up and swung a small bass around and onto the ground. 

"Get the stringer," she instructed as she removed the hook from the fish's lip.  A few drops of red blood spread across the scaly skin like red food coloring.  I looked away.  I pitched the stringer to her, but found some reason to look toward the bawling cows in the pasture.  Then I busied myself groping in the bucket for a minnow which I knew she'd need in a few seconds.  Handing the tiny fish to her, I suddenly decided to go inside and trotted off toward the house. 

"Come inside soon," I yelled back over my shoulder at her like I was her mother.  "It's really hot out here." 

She didn't answer, just sailed the string, the sad little minnow hung  to the hook by its backbone, and the cork, into the water with a tiny splash,  her big hat moving this way and that, trying to keep up with her arm movements.  

Then under my breath, I whispered, "Yeah, I know, I'm burning down." And I laughed all the way to the backdoor.   I took the two steps in one stride opening the screened door simultaneously, bursting through the utility room  into the kitchen.  Mother was standing with her back to me, peeling potatoes.

"Where's Nettie?" she asked, without looking around.

"Out by the tank fishing."

"Catching any?  We could have them for lunch."

"One little one."  I started to say I felt sorry for it, but Mother wouldn't understand that.

 "Mother, I probably wouldn't have run away, even if you had come to look for me," I started. 

"What?" she asked absentmindedly, reaching into the cabinet for salt.  "What are you talking about?"

"Umm, nothing," I decided to say nothing further about it.  I doubted Jan would think it important enough to mention to Mother what I had told her earlier. 

"Okay," she said, still concentrating on the potatoes and reaching to turn on the gas burner. 

That was the day I decided that theatrics didn't work in our family.  No one paid attention to drama, and  if they did, they would just think it was stupid.  I had to come up with a new plan for  getting my point across. 

Mother would listen to Jan because she was the baby; Neila because she was the oldest; Susan was calm, smart, and logical.  I needed to find an ally.  Someone older, someone who would take my part no matter what.  Who was I kidding?  Well, an ally at any rate.

"Well," I thought, "I'm burning down today."  And I headed back out to the tank and took a seat beside my grandmother.  "How old were you when you started going to dances?" I asked, hoping against hope that she'd be truthful.  "And what about wearing makeup?  And shaving your legs?"

At that, she looked over at me with a questioning look and a small grin and settled back into her chair. 

"Oooh, now let's see.  Give those to me slower.  I'm burnin' down."

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/DUCKS, DUCKS, AND MORE DUCKS

DeWitt's story about the duck being wrapped up by a snake, though odd, was just one of many stories about what happened to them once they were in our care.  I felt bad that our home didn't  end up being a safe place for them, but when we decided to get them, we had no idea how often they reproduced, nor did we understand their pushy and inquisitive nature.  Those two traits combined after a while to make them almost unbearable pets.  We just envisioned cute little quackers, floating sublimely and peacefully on the tank, providing photo ops, not the thunderous herd that ran quacking from the tank to the back door angrily demanding food every time we stepped outside.

I'm sure either Jan or I started the appeal for ducks.  Our father liked animals, and certain animals were more than welcome at the ranch, but others he instantly vetoed.  He would have vetoed ducks, but he was gone more of the time than he was home now, traveling for Murray Gin Company, so we didn't ask him. 

Mother became even more independent, and we three girls became more brazen in our requests, knowing that unless it involved bleeding, hurting someone, or setting something on fire, she would usually let us do it. 

"The Georges have the cutest little ducks," Jan said.  "They quack and waddle." Jan was priming the pump.  "So we were thinking...you know.....that maybe we could  just get two or three and put them on the tank to watch them swim and stuff."

"What's the 'and stuff'"? Mother asked.

"Just watch them swim really.  That's all." Susan said, interjecting herself into the conversation.

It was magic.  We were always slow to realize it though.  We often forgot to use Susan, our secret weapon.    Mother would give in to her without even a frown, almost every time.  Maybe it was because she rarely asked for anything, and if she did it was actually logical and sane unlike the requests of a few of her siblings. 

So that was how it was that we traveled the winding  backroad to the George's home four miles away late one fall afternoon.  Mother stayed home doing the million things she now had to do since Daddy had started traveling.

We took a shoebox to put them in .  Susan drove.  She was fifteen and had been driving for about a year.  Franny George was in 7th  grade with me at school, and she chased the ducks until she caught them one by one.  She handed the first one to Jan, who cradled it against her plaid dress.  The second one was mine, and Susan deferred, so the third one was mine too.  I realized then that Susan had no interest in the ducks, but had merely intervened with Mother to help us get what we wanted. 

We transferred them to the shoebox in the back floorboard, and Jan and I crawled in the backseat, leaning down trying to keep them from hopping out of the box.

"I can't wait to put them out on the tank," Jan enthused.

 "You'll have to wait till tomorrow," Susan said quietly.  "Something would get them tonight right away."

"I never thought of that.  We can put them in the coop we used for Julie.  It's made for chickens and ducks, not puppies," I said, remembering Julie's near-death experience, hanging herself in the coop door.

We had turned from the farm to market road onto the dirt road that led back to our house.  About a mile and a half down the road, just around the curve that led to Ventura's house, our car started limping. 

"Oh no, we've got a flat tire." I  heard something in Susan's voice.  I wasn't sure what it was.  The sky was  like gray marble, and night came quickly when it looked like that.

We knew the lady who lived in the little house we were approaching, the only one for at least two miles either direction.  Ventura was a lady who had come from Mexico after  marrying a man from Corsicana.  She raised goats, and often stayed in her little home alone since her husband drove a truck.  At night it could be deathly quiet.  She did ironing for us since Mother didn't have time, and I had often wondered if she was ever scared by herself on that deserted stretch of road. 

"Maybe Ventura is home," Susan said hopefully as she pulled the car as near the ditch as she could get it and turned off the motor.

"I don't see any lights," Jan said.  "I don't think the goats are gonna let us up on the porch to knock on the door."

Susan got out of the car and peered toward the house.  "She's not home," she said authoritatively.
"We've got to walk home."  Jan and I stared at each other.  It was almost dark.  Our house was at least two miles down a dark, treelined road with no houses between Ventura's and ours.

I'm not sure if I really wanted to protect the ducks, or if I just felt safer staying put in the car, but I made a quick, panicky, decision.

"I'll stay with the ducks," I said forcefully.

Susan considered it.  "We've got to get going," she said to Jan.  "It's getting dark fast."

Jan hopped out of the backseat, casting a glance back at the ducks.

She and Susan started walking south on the road at a fast pace.  They didn't  look back.  I squeezed over the seat and locked both the front doors, then crawled over the seat again and locked the back doors.  I rolled up the windows, leaving only a tiny crack at the top of the window on the ditch side of the car.

The darkness seeped around the car like thick smoke, and the darker it got, the more rigid I became.  The ducks scrabbled around in the shoe box and eventually escaped, but I could hardly watch them.  I now had to watch the road south where Susan and Jan had been swallowed up by the darkness, and east, where it curved around where we had come from.  I kept praying that Ventura would show up. 

"Surely she'll be home soon," I thought to myself.  She wouldn't leave the goats very long by themselves.  They'd eat the siding off her house. 

The fear that rose most in my mind was that someone would come along and try to help, and I wouldn't know whether to let them or not.  Most people in the country were good people.  And they especially liked to help people with car troubles, but I wanted to wait till Mother came and said what we should do.

 I was more afraid just of the dark itself and what imagined thing might come out of that forbidding darkness.  I could envision monsters of varying shapes and sizes.  The trees swayed and I could make a different scary shape out of each wave of the branches.  They looked like giant fingers ready to reach down and snatch me.  No, it wasn't people I was scared of;  it was something else, something my own mind invented.

An eternity passed.  How long could it take them to walk two miles?  The ducks were running all over the back floorboards.  I sat rigidly looking south, then east, and occasionally turning toward Ventura's house, hoping against the odds that I'd see a light and discover she was home after all.  Finally, a light was coming slowly down the road toward the car.  It wasn't our pickup, though.  It was someone else. 

What should I do, I wondered, feeling more and more anxious.   What if it was someone I didn't know?  The pickup pulled directly in front of the car, grill to grill.  A man got out.  I couldn't see him in the darkness.  He approached the car, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered into the front seat of the car. 

The anxiety that had risen into my throat rushed out in my cry, "Robert Earl!"  He saw me in the backseat then.

"I'm going to fix the flat.  Your mother called me.  Then I'll drop you by the house--you and the ducks," he said.  He seemed like he wanted to laugh, but he didn't.  He was a very serious person, nice, businesslike, but he didn't laugh much.  I guess running the store kept him with a lot on his mind, especially when people like my mother called him out at night.

When I got home, Susan and Jan told me about the walk home.  They started out, feeling brave, then became increasingly afraid as they saw the shadows of the trees, heard the low moans and groans of the country, the screeches and howls of animals, and thought of snakes and other animals that crossed the roads at night.  So one of them suggested they sing, and they skipped arm in arm down the dusty road singing at the top of their lungs a favorite song from the musical "The King and I". 

"Whenever I feel afraid, I hold myself erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I'm afraid.  While quivering in my shoes, -----I strike a careless pose, and whistle a happy tune, so no one ever knows I'm afraid. The result of this deception is very plain to tell, for when I fool, the people I fear, I fool myself as well."

They sang this, lungs stretched tight, trying to make all the noise they could.  I wondered who they thought they'd fool.  Probably only themselves.

"Mother seemed surprised to see us!"  Susan laughed, thinking of it.  "Like she'd forgotten she had any kids or that they were gone anywhere.  She was washing dishes in the kitchen, singing, with all the lights on in the house and all the windows wide open.  Then she got kind of worried, thinking what she needed to do, but she called Robert Earl, and he said he'd come right on, especially when she told him one of the kids was in the car over there guarding some ducks."

The little ducks were put to bed in the coop for the night, while we slept under the lovely vibrating noise of the huge attic fan.   Early in the evening, it drew warm air through a  large vent in the hall, sucking it through all the bedroom windows, but later, as the temperature eased down during the night, we'd often draw a light blanket up over us, snuggling down, retreating from the cool air.