I liked the Bartlett kids, at least the two that were about my age. There were about a dozen of them. They made our family of a mere half dozen kids look smallish and wimpy by comparison. They had a few that were already married, probably in their late teens. Then they seemed to have one in each of the grades up to about the 10th which is when most of them dropped out of school or got married. I guess I never noticed that even though there was one of them in each of the grades with my older four siblings, none of my siblings ever befriended them or asked them home for supper.
But I made up for it. I befriended Lila, who was one year older, and Reba, who was one year younger than I. One particular fall day, I invited them over after school. We decided to help my mom out because she was away working at the cotton gin as a bookkeeper, a job she did part-time in the fall, to help my dad when the cotton ginning season was in full swing.
There were a few dishes in the sink, and Lila pulled up a stool and started making large plumps of soap suds and blowing them about the kitchen. I didn't say anything because I had never washed dishes, not with any seriousness anyway, and I thought maybe that was the way you did it. Anyway, I liked the way the suds floated up in the air, their little iridescent bubbles twinkling like kitchen stars, and the way they landed soft as a cloud on the yellow leatherlette of the kitchen chairs. Spread out there, they looked like miniature snow-filled lakes, and even as they dripped over the chair edge and plip-plipped onto the floor, I found myself lying prone on the thick, green linoleum following the water's path till it ran down the slight slope of the floor back toward the sink.
Reba, who was not nearly as industrious as her older sister, started skating around in the suds, faster and faster, until she couldn't stop and slid directly into the kitchen window at the far end of the table. I heard a little crack sound and noticed a long line now dividing the 30 inch square plate of glass. Reba looked a little sheepish and as soon as Neila, who had heard the telltale splitting of glass, entered the room, she started making up the most outrageous story about how the crack happened. Lila had glanced arround when the window cracked, but now she appeared engrossed in her dishwashing so much that she didn't even stop when Neila started trying to get to the truth.
Just then, we got a reprieve. The phone rang, and there was no one else to answer it except Neila.
"My daddy will beat my butt," Reba whimpered. "We cain't pay for no window. We cain't pay for nothin'. He'll whup me for sure."
Lila, with her back to us, started humming. She was actually the more socially adept of the two, but she was acting like someone on a distant planet right now. The dishes squeaked as she rubbed them with the dishcloth.
"Which plate is yours," she asked without looking.
"What?!"
"Which plate is yours. Don't you each have your own plate?"
"No!", I snapped. "We all eat off all the plates. No one has a special one."
"Oh," she said limply.
I turned my attention back to Reba who seemed to be shrinking, puddling toward the floor.
"Don't worry about it," I reassured Reba. "My little sister threw a baseball through my parent's bedroom window playing "Annie Over", and it was the window with the air conditioner in it. My daddy wanted to get mad, but my mother wouldn't let him. Just let me do the talking."
"No, Mother, they're fine.," I heard Neila say. "Felisa brought home two friends, and they seem to have cracked the kitchen window. I'm not sure what happened yet. No one is hurt. Ok, see you in a few hours."
Neila hung up the bell-shaped receiver on the wallphone. I was sure that in a few minutes, it would be all over town that we had a cracked window since Molly Townsend, the telephone operator, liked to listen in on phone conversations. She seemed to especially like to listen in on ours, since six kids and a laconic mother made for interesting happenings quite often. Her own life, by comparison, was dull, except when her brother Buzzard, who was well-liked when sober and mean as a rodeo bull when drunk, came home after too much of the drink supposedly named for another bird, Wild Turkey. He was unable to support himself in the the totality, so she had lent him room and a place to stay if he would contribute to her household expenses. He did, and she made him make his bed neatly every morning, and hang his clothes in the wardrobe, not pile them on the floor.
"Ok." Neila squats down to our level. "What happened here?"
We look down at our dusty tennis shoes, silent.
"Felisa?" she asks accusingly.
I hesitate. Then tentatively......"Well, we were playing in the soapsuds, and..............
"And?"
"I can't really tell because something really bad could happen if I do."
"What bad could happen?"
"Well...........how much do windows cost?" I query.
"Oh yes, the cost......well, not much. Daddy will gripe, but he'll fix it or have one of the men at the gin fix it. The cost is not much. But you could have been hurt, whichever one of you did it."
"Reba's daddy will whup her if he finds out," I blurt out, unable to hold in this information any longer.
Neila raised one eyebrow, probably at the "whup" pronunciation.
"Oh, I see," she says. Understanding filled her hazel eyes. "Well, then. Is anyone cut? Let me see your arms and fingers."
We hold them out. She surveys them carefully. Reba's toughened skin next to my still babyish fingers. Her raggedy, bitten nails, next to my neatly trimmed ones.
"Don't worry. Just clean up this mess and yall go out and play something else that's not so dangerous."
I couldn't wait till Mother got home because Lila had asked me if on Saturday we could hike to their sister's house about two miles down the road in a cottonfield.
Mother would probably let me go. I could tell she felt sorry for the family. Once, she had offered to pick the girls up for a covered dish supper for a 4-H club banquet at the school. When the girls came out with a package of cheap weiners as their culinary offering, Mother found a way to make them into a tasty dish that people actually ate.
On the one and only visit I remember making to their house, the two girls insisted that I stay for the evening meal. I didn't eat very much because it seemed like too little food for too many people, and nobody insisted that I take the best piece of meat like we did at our house when we had company. I told them I didn't eat much meat, which was a lie, but it made me feel better not to eat it.
Their mother had come in from work wearing a white nurses' aide uniform. She worked at a nursing home in Corsicana, a larger town about twenty miles away. She looked real tired, and she didn't even seem very happy to see her kids like my mother always did when she got home. She just yelled at us to "Fill in that hole!"
Lila had had the bright idea to try to dig up her dead dog to see what he looked like after three weeks in the ground. Fortunately, we never could find the exact spot where he was buried. We got pretty hungry doing all that digging though, and Lila went to the house while Reba and I kept digging exploratory holes trying to locate Jeebie. Lila came back with three plastic cups filled with about 1/3 cup of dry oatmeal with sugar tossed on top. It wasn't something I had ever eaten in that particular form, but I was hungry. We had to make a pretty quick trip to the house to get some water to wash it down with, so we held our throats and made dying of thirst sounds and ran up the thick creosote logs to the heavy plank front porch.
Shortly after supper, I made an excuse to go home. I still wanted to play with Reba and Lila, but I wanted them to come to my house in the future. I didn't want to go over there. Even though they both seemed really happy and not to notice, I could feel and almost see a dark, sad cloud that hung over their mother.
I had an urgent question to ask Mother as soon as I got home too, since Reba had whispered something secretly to me just before I left when it was becoming dark, about a girl getting "scraped" on the railroad tracks; I was naturally concerned since the tracks ran right in front of our house.
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