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
1 comment:
Outstanding! It really captures the sense of change that all families, or most families, experience. Bouncing the baby is really funny. She prob. thought it was all part of the game!
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