Here are a few of the things that were different when we moved to Corbet. Mother acted like these things were just as ordinary as could be, or if pressed, an adventure, so we never questioned anything. But sometimes someone coming to visit said something about the way things were, and we usually ended up making fun of them after they left and wondering why they were so "picky".
Change #1 This was not bothersome to us at all. We had no living room furniture. We didn't care since we had a well-furnished den, and that left the living room, with its large picture window for us to give nightly performances. Jan and I liked to sing and do our imaginary soft shoe to "Me and My Shadow", observing ourselves noncritically in the clear reflection of the window. Othertimes, when friends were over, we lined old mattresses made of ticking stuffed with cotton, end to end across the width of the room, then all ran rambunctiously somersaulting and cartwheeling across them. (I had finallylearned to cartwheel ; I was no longer a dance outcast.)
Change #2 We were one mile from any neighbor, whatsoever. The gravel road ran exactly one mile from the farm to market road to our house and you could come right on across the cattle guard into the driveway which made a circle in front. The only other option was to turn left at the cattleguard onto a dirt road, which was okay when it was dry, but a big mistake when it had been raining, which a lot of people thought about too late. They would show up at the front door wanting someone to pull them out with a tractor. If it was on the weekend, they were in luck, as usually some of the male members of the family obliged. If it happened on a weekday, we offered them the phone, and they usually had to make an embarrassing call to someone to come and get them. The car was left till things dried out a bit.
Change #3 Even though in Purdon, we thought the telephone operator occasionally listened in on conversations, we were now on an 8 party line. Eight families!! Even though my parents had to pay $500 just to get a phone line run to our house. There weren't any other houses down that way, and the previous people who lived there, DeWitt and Mattie Wallace didn't have a phone. My granddad Skinner gave the land easement for the county road even though it split out about 85 acres of his land from the rest. But the phone people weren't coming down there without payment. They didn't really care that my grandfather cleared the way for them to make more money.
Change #4 We had to use tank water for the time being to bathe in. It had a light green color, not really unpleasant, but sometimes there were small pieces of green moss floating in it.
.
Jan and I approached Mother together the first night we had to bathe in that water. "There are little things in the water. We don't want to bathe in it."
"Well, I sure hate for you to go to school without a bath--ever," she laughed. "Let me see what it is."
She walked into the bathroom and peered into the tub. "Oh that's just a little moss. It's probably good for your skin. It certainly won't hurt you."
So we stopped complaining. I never thought about getting a disease, even when I saw the cows tromping around in the water, slobbering away, their red hides wet and dripping. We all remained extraordinarily healthy. Maybe it was the moss.
Not too much later, my dad had us help him build a filter system that used gravel and a holding tank. It didn't work very well, and eventually stopped up (I'm sure it was the moss), and quit working at all. Then it was a matter of his trying to get city water out there, which eventually happened.
Our Aunt JoAnn was the most vocal about the water. I think she took a shower when she visited, but she would not have run bathwater. She seemed horrified. That describes how she felt about the water situation, but Mother acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, and no, she was not at all worried about the children when JoAnn asked.
"It's not going to hurt anyone. It's just water with a little moss in it."
Change #5 Mother had gone to work fulltime.
She had gone to work for E.W. Hable and Sons Construction Company as a bookkeeper. The office personnel worked all week and a half day on Saturday. The company built highways mostly, and she liked her job and all the people with whom she worked.
"I think I would be bored doing your job," I told her one day, with the thoughtlessness of a child.
"It's not boring at all," she said. "It's fascinating, like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle. Each little piece doesn't amount to much, but when you get it all put together, you can see what the pieces represent-the big picture, so to speak."
Lots of Saturdays, since Daddy wasn't home to make us get up, we all slept till noon. (His idea of a fun Saturday was a 6 a.m. start for a cattle roundup.) Sometimes, Mother would be whizzing into the driveway (she drove a little too fast most of the time because she was always in a hurry), and one of us would yell, "Here she comes!!"
Pajamas, blouses, shorts, and jeans, went flying in all directions in the bedrooms, and by the time she pulled into the garage and entered the kitchen through the backdoor, all three of us had zoomed into the kitchen, where we met her like we had been up all day.
"Hi Mother. Do we need to get groceries out of the car?" Susan asked.
" Anything we can help with?" I asked, trying to seem sincere.
"What's for lunch?" Jan piped up. We both gave her dirty looks.
I think she knew our deceit, but she never called us on it. Once I had confessed to her that we probably should do more at home, but she said, "You're only a kid once. There'll be plenty of time to do all that other stuff once you're grown."
In the summers, though, Neila came home from UT where she had lived in Halstead House, a girls' co-op, where they all shared duties, and she organized us in the same fashion in order to help Mother.
It was the first day of June 1960, and Neila made and distributed the schedule. We were all silent as we studied both the chore list and every place that our name was written in the small squares on the notebook paper. We would do chores five days per week. We got a reprieve on weekends.
My most hated chore involved water. Since we did not have any purified water coming in through the faucets, only tank water, we hauled Corsicana city water in a huge reservoir from my grandmother's house. It had to be transferred for drinking water use into a 30 gallon Igloo water cooler which sat on a stool next to the sink in the kitchen. Filling the cooler was accomplished by carrying a metal two-gallon pitcher of water fifteen times from outside at the galvanized tank to inside, where the cooler sat, reaching up and dumping the contents with a large splash.
Vacuuming, mopping, cleaning the bathrooms, and dusting comprised the remainder of the chore list. None of us had to cook. We all knew we didn't want to eat our own cooking, and we looked forward to Mother's meals anyway. Neila didn't like to cook very much either, so thankfully she didn't insist on that being one of the chores.
Simultaneous with the appearance at the front door of one of my dad's good friends, the man who formerly lived in the house that was now our den and kitchen, I burst into tears as I realized that the schedule was definitely not fair. I curled into a fetal ball in an old comforting brocade rocker, crying and rocking myself.
"What's the matter, honey?" DeWitt Wallace asked me, coming over to the chair and leaning to pat me on the shoulder. His quick, wiry movements belied the white hair that formed a ring around the base of his head. He was short and there was no fat on him at all. His arms still had muscles that you could see when he flexed them to do something. I never knew how old he was. It didn't seem to matter. He could do anything men much younger could do, and probably lots they couldn't.
"We've got chores assigned," I wailed. "And I have more than anybody else." It wasn't true, but I had developed a martyr complex, and when it kicked in, I just had to release myself to it. I wasn't a drama queen; I really believed myself, but I was chagrined that DeWitt had caught me in my little tantrum.
He looked at Neila, who seemed slightly embarrassed at my behavior, and he smiled, chewing the end of his cigar.
"Well," he grinned, his raspy voice kind, "I'll bet your big sister will fix it all fair and square for you."
At those words, I looked up questioningly at Neila, more tears forming and ready to spill from my eyes like miniature waterfalls.
"It's exactly fair," she said reasonably. "You're reading it wrong. I'll show you in a minute."
I sighed. She was usually right. I was interested in what DeWitt was telling now, so I momentarily forgot my despair.
"I just wanted to tell you what happened to one a' them ducks," he laughed.
He had fed our ducks while we were gone for five days.
"One of 'em was missin' fer three days, so I decided I'd look a little more for it and went behind the tank dam. There that duck was with a water mocassin wrapped around it." He regripped his cigar in the left corner of his mouth. " I killed the snake, and the duck waddled off, a little woozy, but all right."
"Dangedest thing I ever saw," he laughed. "Nobody would believe that, but it's the truth."
We knew it was true, though, because DeWitt said it.
We saw water mocassins all the time in the tank 30 yards from the house. One day I had run barefoot across the tank dam to the barn to turn on a faucet to run water for the cows in the corral. As I ran back across the dam toward home, I suddenly saw an old black bicycle tire and hopped nimbly over it, only to realize it had not been there on the way over. Still running, glancing back over my right shoulder, I saw it slither toward the murky water and slide beneath the green moss.
The shivers seemed to start at my shoulders and work their way up my neck until the entire back of my head felt like an electric shock had been applied to my scalp.
"Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh," I grunted loudly, now leaping like a gazelle, putting distance between myself and the snake. "Oooooh, that makes me sick. I'm scared to death of snakes." I'm not sure who I was talking to, just myself, I guess. No one was around.
After DeWitt left, Neila interpreted the schedule for me and I was pacified. Then she announced to all of us, "In addition to the regular schedule, we are going to paint the outside of the house." The house was a long white frame, about 2500 square feet with a large two car garage. I was all out of tears, so I just sat in stunned silence. Susan and Jan didn't say anything, so I wondered if they were even planning to help.
Actually, it wasn't so bad. Every morning, we went out before it got hot and painted a section. And once she knew we were going to take part, Neila told us that we'd be paid a little each week. For some reason, Jan didn't get paid. I guess the contributions of a four foot tall seven year-old didn't add up to much.
It was okay, until the day I asked Susan, as we stroked paint onto the worn boards, "How much will you make this week? How many hours have you worked?" I hadn't been let in on the secret that Jan wasn't getting paid.
She looked up at us from her decidedly lower vantage point, and I saw her ivory skinned face flush with anger. She didn't say anything, just stood up, put her brush down on the lid of the paint can and stomped off. her blonde hair bouncing as hard as hair can, against her shoulders.
Later, when we came in the house for lunch, she said defiantly, "I may be seven, but I'm not stupid." It was nearly the end of the summer anyway. I figured Mother would give her $5 when she found out what had happened.
Before long, it became a challenge to see if we could finish, and eventually, we got the whole thing painted, and I remember feeling very proud of accomplishing that, though I doubt I shared it with any of my friends. I wasn't sure they'd be impressed. Maybe they'd feel sorry for me having to work so hard, or maybe they'd think I was stupid to be proud of doing it. Neither appraisal appealed to me, so I just secretly thought of it and how good it made me feel, but I didn't talk about it with any of the kids once school started and I entered fifth grade.
Neila left for college in Austin and poor Mother was on her own again for the household maintenance. I know neither Susan, Jan nor I kept up the chore chart.
"Well," I rationalized, at times when I thought I should help Mother more. "I'll have plenty of time to do all that when I'm grown up. Hadn't Mother said so?"
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