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. 





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