1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/ JOE AND THE INDIAN PRINCESS

It was getting harder and harder to stay up with Susan's reading choices. Well, honestly, I couldn't keep up. That was the frustration of it. She read constantly, before school, after school, at night, on the weekends. I definitely did not read on the weekends. Weekends were for spending the night with friends or going to the movies, riding bicycles, or just doing things I enjoyed. Also, the vocabulary was beginning to be over my head.

The latest book was Franny and Zooey, and I didn't even understand what it was talking about most of the time. I'd read little parts of it in a hurry, but lots of the words meant nothing to me, so I couldn't figure out the meaning of certain key sentences, rendering entire pages meaningless. I wasn't sure how long I could keep this up. Or if I wanted to. She showed no signs of slowing down, and I felt like I was reading a foreign language. When did English get so hard?

Lately, I had noticed she and Mother would discuss the books, but they got quiet when I came around. When I tried to join the conversation, mostly by asking a lot of pesky questions about the books, they exchanged looks, then changed the subject.

I knew the latest book dealt with something secretive that I wasn't supposed to know about, but I quietly slipped back near the bedroom door and heard them discussing why one of the characters in the book "committed silverside". That word related to nothing I had experienced or heard.

We had silverfish that made their homes at times in the chest of drawers. They were irritating, but as far as I knew harmless, as they darted swiftly out of sight when you opened a drawer where they were hiding. There were minnow-like fish that Daddy called silversides, I thought. But how did you commit a silverside?

My head hurt. It was just too much for my tiny brain. Susan's brain must be oversized, I decided because she seemed to absorb more and more information while I struggled to unravel the secret words contained between the bookcovers.

I heard the phone ringing and ran to answer it in the hallway that led to our bedrooms.  Jan had beat me to it and answered it in the kitchen.  I listened for a few seconds.

"Mother, it's Uncle Joe.  He's calling from Houston.  He's married an Indian princess and wants you to talk to her," I yelled.   I could hear Jan talking to someone with a slight accent that I couldn't readily identify. 

Mother emerged from the master bedroom, looked at the phone I was extending to her, and rolled her eyes.

"Hello," she said, friendly enough, but not smiling.  "Yes, I'm Joe's sister.  It's nice to talk to you, too.  How do you know Joe?"  A slight hesitation.  "Oh, I see."  She motioned toward the kitchen and whispered to me to get Jan off the phone.  "Yes, yes, he's a great guy," she said, not sounding very convinced.  "Where is Joe?" she asked.  "Yes, I'd like to talk to him.  Can you put him on the line for me, please?"  She would never be rude to someone she hadn't properly met.

"Joe, how are you, honey?"  He was her brother,  eight years younger than she, and since Granny Newlin had gotten tired of raising kids by the time he was born, Mother and her older sister Pat felt a lot of responsibility for the four younger boys.  They still had a really swell dad, but there was a deficit in the mother department. 

There was also Bud,  a fifth brother, who was between the two girls in age, but as far as Mother was concerned, he was on his own.  They were close enough in age to fight with one another as kids though as adults they enjoyed one another's company.

"Joe, where are you today?" Mother asked in a reprimanding tone.  "Yes, that's what I thought.  Well, did you marry this Indian princess?  She sounds like a bar drunk to me."  I could hear Joe's prostestations. 

"Libby, she's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time.  She's a real nice girl."

Joe had problems that seemed to start at least as early as first grade, when he came home crying from the first day of school, declaring that he just couldn't go to school with those other children because "they were too ugly."   He had taxed Granddad's resolve.  He started college at SMU, but never got far, wrecking cars and motorcycles till he was finally cut off financially.  His struggle with alcohol began early and never left him, but he still had a lovely personality, intelligence,  thick curly dark hair, little gold rimmed glasses and an appealing face.  I could see why women fell for him.  And he could tell the best stories and make everyone laugh. 

Once he told us about falling off a destroyer during World War II.  He said he was going to throw himself into the propeller, but my grandmother's face appeared in the gray mist and caused him to hesitate.  At the same time, someone yelled "Man overboard" and he was soon rescued.  We weren't sure if the story was true, but if he hadn't come home from the war, that would have meant Mother would have lost two brothers, since Johnny, the brother next to her in age,  was a navigator on a plane that never returned from a run in the Pacific.

I think Joe had been married a couple of times,  and he was always madly in love by the time he introduced his ladies to Mother, but this time she wasn't accepting it. 

She motioned to me to go away and then partially covered her mouth with her hand and whispered into the phone.  "Go home and sober up, Joe.   Can't you find something else to do on holidays?  It's Thanksgiving weekend for goodness sake.  We want you to come here at Christmas.  Would you do that?  Okay---okay.  Think about it.  I'll send you a bus ticket if you'll come."

 I saw her place the phone slowly on the hook, turn like she'd aged a thousand years in the last minute, and walk with leaden feet toward the kitchen.  By the time she reached the door to the kitchen, though, she perked up, looked at Jan and laughed, shaking her head with a rapid back and forth motion like dogs do when they shake off water. 

"Indian princess, my foot," she said with disgust.

Then she simply walked to the cabinet, got out some corn meal and started making supper.

Joe's relationships never lasted long, so we never got to meet the Indian princess even though he decided to come and visit us that Christmas.  She didn't come with him,  he didn't mention her, and we didn't ask.   His life was a series of people, jobs, and places- -nothing stable save the love of his longsuffering family.  And at the end, someone would notice that he hadn't been seen for a few days, and his kindhearted siblings would make arrangements for him to be interred in a cemetery in Dawson, under a huge oak tree, near some of our family, as he had requested. 





Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/ CORBET, OUR NEW REALITY

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?"


Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: CHANGE, CHANGE, CHANGE

Once I saw Dallas Love Field airport, it became clear to me that it was a picture of our household. Planes coming in, planes going out, people trying to create order, loud noise, lots of people,  doors opening by themselves, hot air swooshing past outside,  passengers hurrying in all directions, rushing here and there,  others ambling slowly toward their target,  and people greeting each other with big smiles, hugs, and kisses, like they hadn't seen each other in years.

Surely someone was in charge at the airport, but I never saw that person.    My mother clearly filled that managerial  role in our family.   Daddy could have fixed the planes, or directed them how to park within an inch of the gate, but we all knew it was Mother who made the critical decisions. Sometimes she let him think he was in charge. That kept down conflict.  But she kept everyone on schedule, made things work,  kept things spit clean and tidy, made the amblers speed up and the hurriers slow down, and greeted everyone with a kiss like it'd been a long time since she saw them, even if it had just been overnight.

And if there was a difference in opinion between our parents about something we wanted to do, we always knew we'd get our way, within reason, by appealing to her.
She was the arbitrator, the fair appeals court judge who overturned the whims of the Daddy judge, who usually acted on emotion and sometimes selfishness. She would make sure things came out in favor of  the plaintiffs, otherwise known as the children.

The constant activity in our home was like the comforting activity of an airport. We felt secure and loved. Everything done in and about the home was for the purpose of keeping  things running smooothly.

Daddy went to work each day, his khakis neatly pressed, his cotton shirts ironed and starched. We kids traipsed off to school, hair combed, teeth brushed, handmade dresses worn as proudly as purchased ones.

Our day always started with a huge breakfast, usually eggs with bacon and toast or biscuits--sometimes pancakes.  Every meal had some form of meat.

Being the fifth of six kids, I tried to copy my older sister Neila. All three of us, "the little girls" as we were dubbed, did. We watched how she dressed, how she treated other people, how she behaved,  how she handled Daddy, and how she did in school.

And above that,  I didn't want to disappoint Mother. None of us did. She was the absolute authority. She ran her own crazy version of an airport, and we liked her being in charge.  

Still, somehow everything got done, even with all the noise and confusion. There was so much going on every day, it was just hard to take it all in.

While we were at school during the day, once everyone had reached school age, Mother finished things at the house, fixed lunch for Daddy, and started supper for the rest of us. All the floors had to be mopped. There was no carpet, only linoleum. She also sewed many of our clothes, and always made our costumes for dance recital. Laundry was hung outside on the line, and there was sure lots of it . She helped with 4-H, school events, and church activities.

She didn't seem like a one dimensional Susie Homemaker, as she rode horses, mowed the yard, helped Daddy repair fences, and read. She read most nights, books that interested her, lots of different genres. Sometimes she read what the older kids were studying in English class. She had started studying law at a night program at the YMCA in Dallas, but quit when she married my dad.   And she read the Bible.  She wasn't showy about her faith, but it was solid.

She just seemed like a giant rock that waves crashed against but couldn't move, or a deep cave that you could hide in looking out at a storm, watching it pass, knowing you were safe. Life was simple and secure with her as the buffer between me and the world.  That was Purdon.  That was my first nine years.  The next nine years would chip away at that security and put my mother through tests of faith.

In 1959, we left Purdon and moved to the outskirts of Corbet, a tiny community (even smaller than the one we left).   We lived on a cattle ranch a mile from the Bittner's general store which  along with the Corbet Gin was about all there was to that little outpost.

The  Purdon school closed, and we attended  a much larger school district in Corsicana, a town of about 20,000 twenty miles from Purdon, ten from Corbet.   Instead of walking to school, we now rode the bus.  Instead of 4 students in my grade and 10 in the two grades that occupied the same room, there were about 25 students in my fourth grade classroom.  And there was a second class of fourth graders, too.  I'd never known there could be so many kids my same age.

My oldest brother had married two summers earlier, and I became an aunt this year on June 13th, when my niece Janet was born.  Neila had moved to Austin to attend college at the University of Texas, and Stephen had started staying in Corsicana with Nettie, our grandmother, the previous year so he could attend Corsicana schools when he started the 10th grade, his first year of high school.   Once we moved to Corbet, he stayed with us some of the time, but still stayed with Nettie when he wanted, which seemed to be more often than not.

There were other changes, big ones, but my parents talked about these in whispers, and we weren't included.  My mother would be going to work at a fulltime job for the first time since we kids had been born.  She had always helped with the bookkeeping during ginning season, but she was never gone all day every day like she would be now.

 I cried when I realized she wouldn't be home when we got in from school.  I don't remember anyone else crying about it though they may have.

"But you won't be here when the bus lets us off," I wailed.

 Mother tried to minimize the change.  She was uncomfortable seeing her kids cry, and I seemed to be the main one who did.

"Well, that'll give you time to dance with American Bandstand, and by the time you finish that, it'll almost be time for me to be home," she laughed.

My dad would be working for Murray Gin Company during the off-season.   They had sold the two gins at Purdon and Corsicana, but still had the Corbet Gin in partnership with my dad's uncle Sam Skinner.  Pretty soon, though, that gin would no longer be enough to support a family, and my dad would be off working "on the road" for Murray, "troubleshooting", as he called it, repairing gins and installing gin machinery all over Texas.  He'd be gone for weeks at a time, home on weekends sometimes.  In the summer, we'd make trips to see him wherever he was.  That was as close to a family vacation as we ever got.

They sold the cabin at Lake Whitney, the boat, and the fancy Buick and bought instead a stripped down new car, a 1959 Chevrolet with "fins" that had no heater, no radio, and no armrests. 

I could tell all this was a huge change, but I didn't really understand what was happening, or why.

My dad had his own flaws, but he was a man of his word.  And he was generous.  I overheard him talking to my mother about a man whom he had admired that loaned them money to run the gins.  It seemed that they owed the man's company a great deal of money, now that much of the cotton acreage had been taken out of production by something called the Soil Bank.  All I understood was that the government had something to do with it.

"There just won't be enough cotton to gin around here to make a living," my dad told her one evening.
"Bill promised me that they would assume their share of the loss," my dad in an oddly sad voice.  "Now they aren't going to do it." 

"What will we do, then?" my mother asked.

"We'll pay it all off," he said.  "It'll take a while, but that's what we have to do.  We'll pay it all off."

And that's what they did.  Declaring bankruptcy was never mentioned.  In those years, it was the ultimate admission of failure. as a provider.  My dad was a "man's man".  He didn't cry, whine, or point fingers.  He got busy and did what needed to be done to dig out of the financial hole in which they found themselves.

For the next six years, it was mostly Mother and "the little girls" living on the ranch at Corbet while my dad travelled, home on weekends, but not every weekend.  Stephen was in and out and Neila was sometimes home in the summer.  It was a big change.  A monumental change.  But we adjusted and found that we liked school in the larger district.  And now, we had a new baby to play with, Janet.  Elton and Deanna brought her out to see us often, and I was still getting invited to their house to spend the night, so I looked forward to spending time with the baby then.

One day we had put Janet on Susan's large bed to play with her.  The family probably trusted us more than they should have, or perhaps they trusted Susan, but somehow, she either became inattentive for a few minutes or left the room.  The house was large and long, so the bedroom where we were playing was a long way from the kitchen, where the adults were gathered.

 I was trying to make Janet, who was about eight months old, and sitting up well by herself, laugh.  She was stationed in the middle of the bed, and I would run across the room, hop lightly onto the bed, and say something original like "peep eye, boo!", causing her to giggle uncontrollably.

 When she stopped laughing, I rushed back across the room, then ran toward her again, jumping up on the bed next to her.  In all the jumping on the bed, I suppose she bounced each time I landed and slowly, without my realizing it, she had moved over about a foot on the bed,  closesr, much closer, to the wall.  On my next bounce, she chortled happily, bounced up a little, fell over, and fell face down into the ten inch space between the bed and the wall.

 I momentarily panicked, but wiggled down in the crack and retrieved her..  She looked a little scared, eyes wide, not sure what to do, but she wasn't crying.

 "Boo!" I said,  lifting her into my arms, and she started cackling.  I don't think I ever told the adults what had happened until many years later.  She seemed okay, and why worry them?




Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS

My oldest brother Elton married on a hot July day just after  turning 18.  My parents, of course, probably thought he was too young.  It should have counted for something that Deanna was already 19,  a year older than he, and exactly the same age as my parents were when they married. 

My brother seemed  hyperactive, but quite mature.  He liked to amuse us, saying things like, "Daddy says-me king, you slave,"  laughing hysterically, and causing us all to do the same, acknowledging our shared  opinion that our dad thought children were miniature workhorses, made to do his bidding.

Elton's middle name should have been "work".   Once he was old enough that Daddy didn't worry about his getting hurt on the machinery, he became a regular gin hand when he wasn't in school.    Neila still held bad memories on her own and Elton's behalf about another job, the cold, messy and just generally awful work Daddy made them do taking care of the ill-fated mink operation when they were not even ten years old.

 Elton never said much about it.  He moved perpetually and endlessly, so maybe cutting up and grinding frozen meat for the vicious furry animals was just one more thing to take up his time and energy.  At any rate, this all took place before I was born,  and he got his picture in an agricultural magazine with  Daddy, smiling like he enjoyed the mink project, though that was far from the truth.  We could get Neila started on a righteous tirade about child labor just by saying the word "mink", which we did on days when we needed stimulation or wanted to get her riled up.

Ever since the older kids  fended for themselves two years earlier while our parents and the three younger kids went to California for the summer, Elton had seemed like a grown  man. 

I saw him so little his senior year in high school, I almost forgot he lived with us.

He rushed into the house at sporadic intervals, grabbing food on the run,  changing clothes, hurrying either to work, to get Deanna for a date, or just to her house to visit.   Sometimes he'd kiss Jan and I on the head as he passed, or scoop one of us up for just a few seconds and squeeze us affectionately. 

"Gotta go," he'd tell Mother, who more often than not, was standing in front of the stove cooking.  "Be back later.  Not too late."

Mother might not always agree with him, but she knew he was as headstrong as she, and whatever he decided, he would do.  So, when he graduated high school, he immediately got a job at Chattanooga Glass Factory, where he earned a decent wage working in temperatures that were not for weaklings.

He somtimes brought us glass Coke bottles that had been purposefully misshapen in the production process.  Some had long looped necks, others looked like a squatty version of the real thing, and still others were enormous, at least three times the size of a regular bottle.  The production line turned out thousands of coke bottles every day.  It was hot, gritty work, but Elton seemed to thrive on it; I thought he liked it because it kept his energy properly drained to a normal level.

Once he had a job, talk of marriage was not far behind. 

Everyone dressed in their Sunday clothes, except Stephen, who dressed like a rural Elvis, and on that blistering July day, we drove to the Fulton's house, the whole family.  The preacher was there, and Deanna wore  a lacy white dress that accented her tiny waist and  slender frame and a dainty little hat, of a popular style.   Happiness made my lungs feel tight because I felt like  another person was being added to our already large family, and I was thrilled.

 She was an only child, whose parents seemed to never speak above a whisper, but she didn't seem too shellshocked by our robust family.  A Purdon girl,  she had attended school and church with us for years, so she knew pretty much everything about us.  Once they settled into their apartment, they promised me that I could  come and spend the night with them.  I knew not to ask if I could go with them tonight, but I hoped it wouldn't be too long.

They stood holding hands in the Fulton's living room,  their soft  vows carried through the open windows on the breeze that gently stirred the lace curtains.   The drone of buzz fans masked the outside sounds of crows squawking  and cars speeding down the dirt road in front of the house, spewing dust  behind them like tornado tails. 

The fans' sound was familiar,  hypnotic.  It was the background hum to all the vows pronounced that day by the preacher and  the  participants.   And it was a good thing the  ceremony was short,  because I started getting really sleepy just before the preacher said "you may kiss the bride."  I perked up at hearing those words;   I sure didn't want to miss that part.  We ate wedding cake and drank punch in the dining room, and later, everyone gathered for pictures in the front yard. 

Shortly after the pictures were taken,  Elton and Deanna got in his, now their,  1949 Plymouth coupe, and sped away toward their new life.  A few months before,   practically the whole town gave them  a huge wedding shower held in  front of the Purdon School on the lawn, with folding chairs lined up for what seemed like blocks.  But today, it was only family and a few friends to share their joy.  I never thought of it as them starting their own family.  It just seemed like ours got bigger, and that suited me fine.

Today was only the second wedding I had been invited to,  having attended one in Smithville, Texas a few months earlier, in March,   when my uncle, Bo Newlin, married JoAnn Hart.  He was my mother's baby brother, twelve years younger than she, and had graduated from Texas A & M,  a member of the respected Aggie Corps, then enlisted in the Army, where he became a helicopter pilot.  My mother worried some about this.  Their brother Johnny was a navigator aboard a plane in World War II that never returned from a mission in the Pacific. 

The family piled into two cars for the trip south, and when we got there, Mother let us go in and see the bride, who was getting dressed in her lacy dress and veil.  Mesmerized would be the right word.  I had never seen anyone who was going to get married in a church, much less in a "real" wedding dress and veil.  Mother shooed us out soon enough, and we left our soon-to-be aunt alone to finish her preparations. 

My Granny Newlin, my mother's mother, had arrived and was getting out of their light green Chrysler.   I wondered if my soon-to-be-aunt had noticed how quiet she was or that she sometimes just smiled at you when you asked her something, never answering, making you wonder whether she heard you or just didn't care to respond.  It confused me, but I'd learned not to ask her any questions.  I just kissed her on the cheek when I saw her and  tried not to bother her further.

"Hi Granny.  Glad you got to come." we each said, standing in a line of three to kiss her on the cheek.  Me first, Susan, then Jan.  Kiss, kiss, kiss.  She stood smiling, looking not at us, but at some unseen place beyond our shoulders, a  place we would never share with her.

"Granny," I offered, trying to make small talk, "I'll turn "Lassie" on for you after the wedding when we come back to the house."  I knew she liked to watch Timmy and Lassie.  I then remembered it wasn't Sunday, though, and "Lassie" wouldn't be on, but I didn't say anything to anybody.  Maybe Granny would forget by the time the wedding was over.

"Let's go, Mother," Granddad said in his mellifluous voice, taking her small hand gently and guiding her toward the church.  "It's almost time for the wedding."

As it turned out, our uncle, whom we all loved dearly, had chosen a girl who liked little kids too, and pretty soon, Susan and I were being invited to spend time with them in Mineral Wells, Texas which seemed like exotic territory to us.  We felt so fortunate to get to visit with them.  Jan was too little to come.They  made each visit special by taking us skating, to play miniature golf, out to eat,  or to buy ice cream or  another summer treat.

 In the same way we had drawn the questionable White family's kids in California to us--  like snake charmers, we managed to attract a couple of girls who wanted to play with us within hours of landing in my aunt and uncles' home in Mineral Wells.   My aunt let us visit them, but spent the next five days making them get away from the screen door where they pressed their noses each morning until she let them in or made them go home.

She expressed  surprise at how we attracted kids like magnets. "You girls haven't been here 24 hours and you've already made friends," she said, glancing toward the screened door where the two Hedspeth girls peered in.  "Do you want me to let them in?"  We bored of them quickly and preferred to play with each other, so we didn't care if she made them disappear.  We got where we'd run to the bedroom and hide till they went away each day.

 I should have warned her.  At home, there were always kids in and out of our house.  It was like a clown car house, with no end to the number of kids coming out on any given day.  No one ever seemed to know where they all came from, how they got there,  who invited them, or when they'd stop coming.

All in all, the weddings came out in my favor and provided me with more activity, places to go, and people to impress.  Failing impressing them, I just tried to be on good behavior so they'd invite me over to their house again.  Those invitations usually meant I got taken for some sort of special activity or treat.

I was going to talk about funerals, but although my parents faithfully attended visitation times for families who had lost someone, and usually the funeral too, we never went, at least Susan, Jan, and I didn't.  I think the older kids went to the funerals of our neighbor Evelyn's boys, both of whom died tragically in accidents. 

But we, the "little girls",  were shielded from those events, and somehow by the time we moved from Purdon several years later, we still had not attended a funeral, something my dad thought was a rite of passage and my mother wanted us to avoid as long as possible.  My parents could see some good in everyone, and they attended the services for the errant among the Purdon population as well as the saints, always finding something decent to say about the deceased.

Elton and Neila sometimes mimicked Mother's genuine, sometimes slightly odd, expressions of concern.

"He wasn't mean when he was drunk," Elton said, patting an imaginary shoulder.

 "And he was really funny, even when he was drunk." Neila piped up, taking over imitating our mother.

"Yes, yes, I know," Elton said, nodding slowly, now playing the role of the deceased's relative. 

I never wanted things to change.  I wanted to remain anchored in place, but even though the weddings were welcome events for me, they reconfigured my world.  My brother would leave our family and start his own;  shortly, my uncle and aunt would move far away to Washington state. 

Neila would soon leave for college, and who knew what other changes would happen?   I just prayed my place remained secure.  I had layers of family around me, and I liked it that way, wrapped in a family cocoon, spun by countless threads: years of visiting one another, caring about one another, celebrating births, birthdays, weddings, hospitalizations, traumas, knowing one another in that raw way that families do.   I was content to remain a worm as long as I had that security.  I had plenty of time to break out on my own and become a butterfly.  Much easier to stay here protected and shielded.

There were dark moments-my dad's temper sometimes flared, and we skittered away like  rabbits running from the headlights of a car.  But we were never afraid of him.  In fact, we knew his tantrum would just run its course and flame out , a short rope burning on gravel, curling up harmelessly, blackened and damaged,  causing no serious harm.    We just tried to stay out of his way so we wouldn't have to deal with it at all, sometimes laughing among ourselves behind his back about the trouble he caused himself through his little fits.  And through everything, we had that cool, serene, calmness and strength that was mother.  And it was enough. 



Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: STATE FAIR OF TEXAS

 Big Tex, a 52 foot tall cowboy dressed in Dickies blue jeans, a red  shirt ,  a gigantic cowboy hat, and bright red boots,  always greeted us in the best Texas fashion when we skipped through the gates at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas.  We anticipated  the daytrip, a yearly tradition, as soon as the leaves started to change from green to yellow and red in the fall.

"Howdy folks" he'd boom in his lilting baritone, smiling down benignly on us as we hurried into the fairgrounds.

"Welcome to the State Fair of Texas. Have a gooood day." His voice followed us even as we three girls zipped past, trying to get out of range of his all-seeing eyes.

"He started out as a papier mache Santa Claus made in Kerens, Texas," my mother told me one October day as I ran past him, fearing he'd topple over.

"Then he became Big Tex," she finished, her long strides allowing her to catch up with me, "so he gets a lot more exposure this way. Besides, it's too hot in Texas at Christmas to wear that Santa suit all of December. This is definitely better for him." The way she talked about him, you'd think he was her kid brother.

My dad liked to tell about the time he took my mother to the fair for the Centennial Celebration in 1936, sometimes known as the first world's fair south of the Mason-Dixon line, and  she nearly got arrested for picking a flower from the large landscaping display at the entrance, even though my dad warned her sternly not to. She loved beautiful plants and wanted to take just one petaled flower so she could figure out what it was and buy the species to grow for herself. "What will it hurt?", she argued with my dad., though they were newly dating.

 They had met at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Ennis, her hometown, where his band was playing at a dance she attended.  She had been home for the weekend from Dallas, where she was living and working after graduating from high school. Because she loved to dance so much, and some Baptists apparently thought you shouldn't,  later, she'd tell us kids, "I'm a Baptist, but I've got a Methodist foot."

The policeman who spotted her bending over and plucking the pretty bloom took it seriously, blew his whistle, stormed over, and gave her a withering tonguelashing. My dad turned away, suppressing a laugh, but Mother was properly chastised. The officer threatened to arrest her when she kept talking, trying to win him over to her way of thinking.

"Lady, if 50,000 people attend the Centennial today,and they each pick a flower from the displays, the fair would be bare of color and plants," he had snarled, turning on his heel, crushing the tiny bud under his substantial weight.

As soon as the policeman left, she sniffed, "Well, I don't know why he got so mad over one little flower." And she picked up the tiny petal, now lying crumpled forlornly on the pavement, and dropped it quickly into her purse.

My dad opened his mouth to respond, but she ignored him and was already walking quickly toward the Women's Building to see the crafts and clothing. He probably should have realized what a strong personality he would be up against, but he liked her energy and optimism, so it would not be long before he proposed.

We looked forward to the food at the fair,  and as was always true, my dad put no restraints on us.  Just about anything we wanted to eat, he'd buy with no complaint.  My mother didn't like our eating all that food.  "You'll founder," she said laughing, knowing we'd realize she was talking about what horses do if left alone with too much food, but we ignored her completely on this day and ate everything we wanted, or thought we wanted. 

There were perfectly fried corn dogs with mustard, beautiful red candied apples, rich brown carameled apples, pink cotton candy, multicolored and flavored salt water taffy (we always talked Daddy into buying several boxes to bring home with us), fried chicken, hot dogs,  and other enticing treats.  We ate, rode wild, spinning rides, then ate some more. 

We must have had stomachs made of castiron, for we never got sick like some people who hurled their recently consumed treats upon other patrons of the rides and those below on the midway.  The most spectacular examples of this were often those on the top of the huge ferris wheel who were unable to wait to be sick until their car made the gentle ride down to the asphalt below.  They could be seen,  heads hanging over the side of the car, while unsuspecting fair attendees below wandered aimlessly, unaware that their day was about to be ruined.

Once, while riding between Susan and I on the Octopus,  a spinning ride with seats at the end of extended metal arms that resembled the sea animal, Jan decided she wanted off, and each time we passed the man operating the machine, she yelled "Stop right now.  I want off!!"  She wasn't sick, she just thought it was going too fast.  The man looked at her like she was invisible, and he certainly made no move to stop the machine.  It spun and rotated madly, pressing us hard against the side of the car and each other. 

"Get off me!!" I yelled at both of them like they could help it,  as the centrifugal force pressed us all against one side.

Susan and I alternately laughed and gritted our teeth,  hoping just like Jan that the ride would stop, but too controlled to scream out or show our abject fear.

"Why didn't you stop?" Jan whimpered quietly in the operator's direction as we exited the ride. 

He glanced at her, a cigarette drooping loosely from the side of his mouth, the tattoes covering his arms and chest visible around the boatnecked sleeveless undershirt he wore.  My dad wore the same kind, but much cleaner.  We were scared to look at his tattoes too much, with too much interest, though we wanted to read them.  They made him look hard and dangerous.  We ducked our heads, glad to be off the ride.  Taking up our concerns that he didn't stop the ride soon enough, somehow didn't seem quite so important now that we were on solid ground.

"Let's go to the 4-H Styleshow," Susan suggested.

Jan and I agreed, but only on the condition that we not stay very long, and that she go with us to the showbarns to see the animals afterward.  She reluctantly agreed.  Those smelly barns were not her idea of a good time, as watching the style show was not mine. 

"I pledge my head to clearer thinking," I began, mimicking repetition of one part of the 4-H pledge. 

"That's not possible," she said, dismissing me with a wave of her hand. 

Sometimes on the Midway, you had to hold hands, and push hard to stay with each other because of the crowds.  There were always carneys trying to get you to come in and see the smallest woman in the world, or the bearded lady, or the blue man.  It was always tempting, but there was a lady in Purdon who had a pretty advanced beard, and we didn't even have to pay to see her.  Besides, that wasn't too appetizing, and we were focusing on eating, trying our best to "founder".  I wondered if my toenails would come off like I heard horses' hooves did after they overate. 

We managed to push our way until the path cleared a little going toward the 4-H Styleshow.  We walked into the cavernous building and seated ourselves on the metal bleachers up about six rows.  We could easily see the young girls enter, model their sewn creations, and hear the moderator's dull comments.  Most people sat at attention, but you could tell they were bored lifeless.  I thought we could have done a better job of announcing, creating a little excitement. 

"See, here is Jodie in her summer sundress, all ready for vacation," the moderator intoned dully.

"See, here is Jodie," I whispered,  leaning against Susan, "all ready to prance around in front of the boys showing off her..."  Susan gouged my leg hard with her sharp nails. 

"I just thought I could liven it up a little," I pouted, already bored beyond my capacity to tolerate. 

The girls entered in denim jackets, pink seersucker shortsets, frilly blouses, cotton plaid dresses in pastel colors, and dressy organza Sunday school dresses that must have taken hours to make.  I wished the emcee would tell how many times each girl had to rip out the side or shoulder seams, and how many fights she and her mother had before she got the zipper in right.  They should also really tell if the mother or someone else actually put in the zipper rather than the girl modeling the clothing.  That would have disqualified them though, so it was sort of like scout's honor, only it was 4-H honor , that the kids were supposed to do the work themselves. 

Susan had gotten a red ribbon for the dress she entered in the Navarro County 4-H Styleshow, but she didn't advance to state.  She did a good job of modeling at the local contest, coming to the front of the stage, hesitating, and turning around and walking back like a queen.  I don't know who went on to state from Navarro County, but I would bet it was some girl whose mother stood over her for months and made her redo every seam and zipper three or four times.  

Susan made several  items for styleshows,  but I never did.  My shoulders started aching as soon as I sat down at the machine.  And I could just as well have stood on my head, which I loved to do, and looked at the pattern upside down and made more sense of it than looking at it head on.  Mother made so many things for us:  dance recital costumes, school clothes, evening gowns for Neila - that I thought I should want  to do it too.  But it just wasn't in my genes.

 I got the "no-sew" genes, probably from both my grandmothers.  My paternal grandmother had a treadle machine, but if she ever used it, it was long before my birth.  It sat abandoned in her back bedroom, but it made a great diversionary toy.  We could get that treadle going fast by pumping it with our foot.  She didn't like for us to do it and would stop us if she heard or saw us because, as she put it, " It's  a good way to get a finger mashed  off."  And my mother's mother, well, the only domestic thing I ever saw her do was fold a handkerchief that she had in her lap.

The girls modeling the summer clothes wore white patent leather shoes or tennis shoes.  Some of the girls showing school clothes wore penny loafers with white bobby socks. Just about all of them wore frozen smiles as well, making me wonder if anyone really wanted to be there. 

"Let's go," I poked Susan in the side with my index finger.  She shoved the digit away and heaved a loud sigh. 

Three or four more girls walked across the stage, turned on their heel, and sauntered toward the back of the stage where the curtain swallowed them.  I wished it would swallow the monotone announcer.  Where did they get her anyway--behind the textile factory?

"Ok," Susan whispered.  "Let's go on three....1,2.3...." and she rose and walked demurely down the steps and out the door of the Women's Building, toes pointed, head held high like she herself was modeling.  I limped along behind her,  pulling Jan, who was still trying to eat a sticky red candy apple that had left pieces on her face and hands.

"We need to meet up with Mother and Daddy at the livestock barn," I reminded her. 

"I hate that smelly place," she said.  "I'll wait out here for you."

"Okay, but we might be in there a while," I warned her.  "We want to look at the cows."

She made a show of rolling her eyes.  Jan and I traipsed inside and found Mother and Daddy admiring a hereford bull, the kind of bulls they had at Corbet.  I loved their squat red bodies and white trim.  They seemed kind, not like Brahama and other types of mean cattle who looked like they would rather butt you than walk past you.  I was never scared of the Herefords, even the bulls, with their long, wide horns.  You could shoo them away if they got too close in the pasture.   They might give a little snort, but they'd amble away, like they were humoring you.

Jan somehow got some hay stuck to the red sticky stuff on her face, and it looked ghastly, so Mother took out a tissue, spit daintily on it, and rubbed her face hard until she got most of it off, leaving just red streaks in several spots. 

I'd begged to raise a lamb to show in the livestock exposition for 4-H, but my dad steadfastly refused, saying that the wolves would get it.  "You'll get tired of feeding it," he had said, but Jan and I had fed his dogs for years.  And they weren't even cute, like lambs.   "You won't want to sell it at the end of the year," he went on.  I didn't oppose him on that idea, knowing it was probably the truth.  Anyway, I gave the lamb raising idea up once I saw that he wasn't going to give   He knew how attached I got to animals, and he probably knew it would break my heart for my lamb to be sold, possibly for slaughter.

Our parents were soon ready to leave the livestock barn, and we picked Susan up outside the door, making our way down the crowded midway, pushing past the carnival barkers, the enticing games you could never win, the brightly lit food stands and the trailers with their garish lettering that housed all those people with various oddities.

I really never liked to go in there much, though once we did, to look at the headless lady.  Actually, we looked at her head, so she wasn't headless.  We looked down on her, and her head seemed to be sitting on a board, a small hole surrounding her neck.  She insisted on greeting everyone and trying to make conversation which made me feel very uncomfortable.  We spent approximately 30 seconds in there, so at the rate people were parading across the little platform in front of her head, I figured, she should be rich, judging by the cost of the tickets.

 I felt ashamed to stare at the human oddballs, and I felt sorry for them.  It didn't seem like much of a life, but I thought maybe they got to ride the rides for free when no one was around.  That was at least some consolation.  Maybe they could have some fun with the other carneys.  And  I mollified myself by thinking that  maybe they got to eat salt water taffy and cotton candy any time they wanted.  How bad could a life like that be?















Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE:OF SPINNING HULA HOOPS AND SPINNING CHICKENS

The orange Hula Hoop spun around my waist, and Becky stood a few feet away making a bright green one do exactly the same thing.  We were trying to win the prize at Robert's birthday party for the person who could keep the hoop going the longest.  

The boys couldn't do it at all.  Their hips just wouldn't swivel the way ours did.  We laughed at their efforts,  grabbed the brightly colored hoops, stepped inside them, lifted them waisthigh, and started the rotation by giving the hoops a brisk push in a circular motion, lifting our arms out of the way so we could keep the motion going by moving our hips slightly with each rotation.

Our mothers looked at us, laughed, and shook their heads.  My concentration was broken looking at them, and I failed to keep the momentum of my hoop going;  it started wobbling.  I tried wildly to keep it going by making bigger ovals with my hips, but it made two or three lopsided circles, then fell to the ground at my feet.  Becky kept hers going for ten or more rotations and was a gracious winner, offering to share her candy prize with me.

The site for the contest was Robert's  front yard, which faced the farm to market road that was also the main street of town.   Fifty yards down the street stood the wooden revival tabernacle where we sometimes sweated and swatted mosquitoes on summer nights while listening to a visiting preacher's forceful sermons.

Just south the two family-owned grocery stores sat on opposite sides of the street.  Beside one of the stores, the blacksmith pounded away in his shop, where you could see  a fire burning inside most days, and hear the loud metallic clank of iron against iron.

Beside the other grocery, the post office, its flagpole standing at attention, was host to everyone in town almost every day.   I memorized our box number-367  , but I didn't even know our telephone number; it was only one digit, but if I needed to call home from someplace else, I just said "give me the Skinner residence, please" because my mother taught me to use good manners with the operator, even if I suspected she sometimes listened in on conversations. 

Standing in front of the green asbestos-sided house, we smiled broadly at people in town who passed by in cars and waved at us real friendly-like while we hula hooped.  Everyone had heard about the new hoops, and this was the first time people in Purdon had seen them in use, so they stared as they passed on their way to and from the stores and the post office.  We just made a few tries spinning the hoops,  and shortly, we got the hang of it and were able to keep them going around our waists for several minutes.

My mother laughed and said we moved our hips like Elvis Presley.  He wouldn't be shaking those hips much anymore, she said, because he was going into the Army.  It had been on television for a month or more, and they were planning to show him getting his substantial head of hair shaved on television when he was inducted into the service.

Robert had the mumps like the rest of us this past school year. I only got them on one side, but Susan had them in both sides, and Mother took a picture which made us laugh every time we saw it.  Even Susan laughed, although she said it made her hurt to think of it.  She looked like a chipmunk with the winter's store of nuts in her cheeks. 

Mother got a funny look every time we mentioned Robert and the mumps though.  She said something one day about them "settling", but then wouldn't say anymore.  I was curious about a lot of things, but for some reason I let that rest and didn't ask further about it.  Anyway, I thought that Robert's mother wanted to make this party special for him because of the "settling".

She asked Mother if Neila would bring Lady, her gentle horse, down to the party and let all the kids ride.  Neila dressed Lady up in a Cowboy hat with holes cut out for ears.  I was afraid she'd bring her down there in the pink hat she put on her one time for Susan and my joint birthday party.  I didn't think Robert would like that.

He liked to wear cowboy boots and drink straight out of the cold water bottle in the refrigerator.  That made me sick.  When I played over there, I always asked Mrs. Miller if I could have water from the faucet with ice.  That assured that I wouldn't be drinking out of the same jug as Robert.  Mother was a fanatic about few things, but strangely germs, especially germs you could get from eating and drinking after other people, sent her into orbit, and I guess I picked that idea up from her.

"Don't ever drink after anyone," she'd say.  "That's a sure way to get sick."

Well, I did get the mumps anyway, but it wasn't because I ate or drank after anyone.

I could just picture invisible things floating in the water and food after someone had taken a drink or a bite.  It wasn't hard  to follow Mother's instructions in that regard.

Mrs. Miller was always really nice to me.  She just had one son too,  like three other families where I often played, and I always thought she treated me as if I were her little girl.  Maybe I just wanted to think that, but anyway she treated me really special.  If Robert and I got in a fight, she always took my side. 

"Stop that," she'd say to him, even before she knew what was happening.  "What did you do? Are you not sharing?" 

Poor Robert would be so dumbfounded at her verbal rampage that he just stood mute,  a toy gun dangling at his side, his cowboy hat hanging at his back, attached by a thick cord around his neck.  He'd scuff his cowboy boots on the floor while he tried to think how to defend himself.

When he'd retrieved his voice, he'd start, "Awwww, Maaaama, I didn't do nothin'", but before he could finish, she made a rapping motion with her fist toward his head, and he ducked  and stopped talking, seeing that she had her mind made up.

I tried not to take too much advantage of her obvious bias toward my side, but after she turned down the hall headed for the kitchen where she was cutting up a chicken to fry, if Robert didn't do what I wanted, I simply moved my head slowly in the direction of the kitchen, and he immediately gave in.  I pretty much got to play with whatever I chose for the rest of the afternoon.

I was glad she didn't have to go out and kill the chickens and pop their heads off like she used to when they lived in the country.  Susan and I had gone out there to play one day several years earlier, and we were on the screened porch when she walked into the bare dirt backyard, her cotton dress billowing in the breeze, threw some feed on the ground, and once the hens were contentedly pecking away at the grain, jerked one up by the neck and swung it around fast three or four times till its head let loose from its body.

 I started crying while Susan took several steps backward, tripping and almost falling into the family's tin washtub; then she stood shellshocked. 

Robert looked at me and said, "Whatchu cryin' about, crybaby?  It's just an old chicken.  It didn't hurt it.  That's supper, and my mama fries gooood chicken."

When Mrs. Miller came back inside after plucking all the feathers off the hen, she seemed surprised that I was crying and Susan was standing inordinately still like a human statue, staring out into the yard.

"Oh," she said.  "Oh,oh,oh.  Oh, dear.   You girls have never seen anyone wring a chicken's neck?"

"No ma'am," I blubbered.

Susan proved unable to respond, her deep brown eyes seemingly set, staring straight ahead. 

Mrs. Miller set the chicken carcass on a  small board shelf beside the door next to a bar of soap, and gathered us into her ample arms, squeezing tight.  "I'm sorry.  I didn't realize you hadn't seen that done afore.  It don't hurt 'em.  It happens too fast.  Besides, chickens have  little bitty brains.  The others watch it happen, but it never dawns on them that the next time it could be them.  They don't even run away like animals that have some sense.  I'm sorry," she said again, letting go of us and knocking the soap onto the floor when she picked up the dead bird.  Then she headed off to the kitchen, the hen, its skinny legs stretched taut, dangling headdown, lifeless, next to her thick thighs.

"I hope we're not staying for supper," I whispered to Susan.

"We're not," she said with more determination than I'd ever heard in her voice.  "I'll call Mother if she's not here by 4:30."


The party was in full force after everyone had ridden Lady.  Neila patiently walked the horse around and around in the back yard under the shade of a huge post oak tree until all the kids had ridden.  We waved goodbye to Lady, and Neila hopped in the saddle and trotted off toward home. 

We all traipsed inside, and Robert opened his gifts.  He got a lot of trucks, toy guns, and his parents gave him a real BB gun.  They reminded him that he could only use it if they were with him, and only in the woods. 

After cake and ice cream and the obligatory singing of "Happy Birthday", Robert wanted to play with his toys, and we were ready to go home.  We alternately walked and skipped home, Mother skipping with us and challenging us to a race when we reached the railroad tracks and could see the house.  I'm not sure it was because she wanted to race or because she wanted to hurry and get home when she saw what was going on in the front yard.

Stephen had several friends over, and they were trying to rig something up on the roof where they could jump off.  They had an orange thing they said was an old Army parachute.  My mother put an end to the jump training as we entered the driveway, but she invited everyone in for cold drinks.  The boys were hot from their efforts and agreed to come in and have something. 

Once inside, their substantial energy seemed to surge, and they seemed to be everywhere, yelling to each other, throwing balls, running upstairs, thundering back downstairs, plinking on the piano in the living room, and slurping their drinks.  Most of them wanted cold cokes out of the bottle, and they left the glass bottles all over the house.

 Neila had a friend visiting, and they had been quietly looking at magazines in her room when they had heard the thumps from the roof, but had tried to no avail to get the boys to come down. 
They gave up and decided to enjoy their day, ignoring the mischief going on above them.

When all the boys suddenly stormed into the house, the girls grabbed their magazines and stashed them under the bed.  Several boys  barged into her room and asked what they were doing, teasing them about their magazines, and saying they were going to find what they were reading.  Both of them sat impassive on the bed until the boys left. 

Mother came into the bedroom shortly after to say hi and tell Neila she was home, as if it weren't evident. 

Helen, Neila's friend, was an only child, and she was used to a calm, controlled life with her quiet mother and father.  The rowdiness of the boys with their loud talk and play seemed to unnerve her.  She motioned her head toward the living room where two boys tossed a ball, one banged on the piano, and two more were fighting, rolling onto the couch, falling to the floor, and scooting the big chaise chair around each time they rolled over. 

"How can you stand this, Mrs. Skinner?   Why don't you stop it?"  she asked plaintively, as though it physically hurt her.  "They're going to ruin  your furniture."



"One day," our Mother said calmly, "they'll all be grown and gone-- and I'll just buy some more furniture." Then she looked  at Helen and laughed her pure, unpretentious laugh.   Helen stared at her, uncomprehending.

That pretty much summed it up.  There were six kids, their friends, and one adult who still appreciated the value of playing.  She could call time when needed, but she had a different perspective than a lot of parents, and it made growing up with her so much fun.




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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: THE HAZARDS OF DATING

Tonight looked to be exciting. Neila had a date!! With any luck, she'd bring him back home and they would sit in the living room which was situated right next to the bedroom that Susan, Jan and I shared. We watched television with our parents until 10 p.m. when the news came on. Then we meandered one by one into our room, and put on our matching pink cotton shorty pajamas,  killing time until we heard the telltale slamming of two car doors.

"They're here!" Susan said, uncharacteristically interested.

"Mother and Daddy just turned off the tv and went to bed," I noted.

"I think I hear them," Jan added. "The front door just opened."

"Quick!" I said. "Shut the bedroom door." Something blonde flashed past me and hit the door with a quick slap, slamming it into the facing with finality.

Without consultation,  Susan and I ran simultaneously to the door to join Jan and each pressed an ear to the hard thick wood.

"I can't hear anything," Jan said in a stage whisper.

"Shhh," Susan put her finger to her lips and frowned at her.

I shrugged at Susan. "Nothing," I mouthed.

Just then we noticed Jan slidiing her head downward on the door. We didn't immediately understand why until we saw her grab the brown metal doorknob to stabilize herself so she could turn and peer through the keyhole. She squinted with her right eye and looked with her left, but she seemed to be having trouble getting anything in focus.

"Move over," I said, shoving her into the cedar chest beside the door.

I positioned my eye on the keyhole. "There they are. They're coming in the front door." I said with some excitement.

"Let me see, please," Susan said, edging me out of the way.

Jan pouted, sitting on the edge of the cedar chest. "I thought of it first," she said, sticking her lip out.

Susan was now sighted in on the green brocade couch, which sat directly opposite our bedroom door on the far wall of the living room, next to the front door.

She made motions with her long, delicate hands indicating that we should be quiet.

In just a few moments, though, she seemed to lose interest. "They're sitting on the couch. I don't think we should be doing this," she said. "It's not really very nice to Neila. She might get mad at us. Let's go to bed."

"Ok," Jan said too quickly.

"Wait, Jan," I said, trying to muster soldiers for a new plan I felt forming in my vacuous head.

"Let's jump from the chest of drawers to the bed,  then run to the cedar chest and open and shut the door while we do it.  We'll each start at a different place and cross in the middle."

The door would never stay shut for long by itself because the house had shifted and none of the doors fit perfectly in their frames.

The chest of drawers stood on the left side of the door,  with  the bed  situated lengthwise at a 90 degree angle to it;  the cedar chest was on the right side of the door.

"Ok," I instructed her, trying not to look at Susan's disapproving face. "You get on the cedar chest, and I'll get on the chest of drawers. When I tell you, pop the doorknob and swing the door toward me. You jump off the cedar chest and run across to the bed. I'll jump off the chest of drawers onto the bed, onto the floor, then catch the door and swing it closed,  run across the room and  jump on the cedar chest. Then we'll repeat it in reverse, with me popping the doorknob."

Susan made no secret of rolling her eyes.

"Get on the cedar chest," I told my minion, while I stepped nimbly from the bed onto the top of the chest of drawers.

"Ok," she said, turning and crawling up.

"You understand what to do?" I asked authoritatively.

"Uhuh," she said, looking slightly uncomfortable.

"Ok, go!" I said jumping with all my might onto the bed, then bouncing up off it onto the floor and running across toward the cedar chest, hitting the door which had swung open.  I hit the door so hard with my flat palms that they felt like they'd been stung by a hundred bees.

Once Jan was in place on the chest of drawers, I gave the command again, then popped the doorknob, sending the door flying open.  Jan was to slam it shut, but she was not fast enough in getting down to the floor, so the door stayed open, and we had to hide, both of us now cowering on the bed, watching the door shimmy slightly on its  hinges.

"Felisa?  Jan?"  We heard Neila's voice and looked sheepishly at each other.  "What are you doing?  You should be in bed."

We didn't answer, but hunkered down now, dreading what came next.

She entered the doorway, and looked toward us.  Susan had burrowed down in her bed and pretended to be asleep.

"Now you need to go to sleep.  You haven't shown  Bill that  you have very good manners, now, have you?"

We ducked our heads, unable to meet her gaze.

"Sorry," Jan said, meaning it.

"Sorry, too," I said, probably meaning it.

"Goodnight.  Bill is going home in a few minutes.  See you in the morning."

"Night," we said, barely looking at her.

"That was dumb of us," I said, realizing that most of it was my fault.

"I agree," Susan said, suddenly awake.

"Neila's not mad", Jan offered.

"Yeah, but I feel stupid." I said. "Bill probably thinks we're idiots.  And what if he never asks her out again because she has sisters who act like monkeys?"

"Well, I don't think she really wanted to go out with him again," Susan said, "so maybe we did her a favor."  

"We'll find out tomorrow," I imagine, I said resignedly, pulling the sheet and bedspread over my head.

"Can we jump off the chest tomorrow?  That was fun!" my former minion asked. 

"You'll have to ask Mother; and for goodness sake, don't tell her that we already did it!"

I sank into the bed, pulling the covers tightly around me,  hoping to lose my immaturity in them.
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