DeWitt's story about the duck being wrapped up by a snake, though odd, was just one of many stories about what happened to them once they were in our care. I felt bad that our home didn't end up being a safe place for them, but when we decided to get them, we had no idea how often they reproduced, nor did we understand their pushy and inquisitive nature. Those two traits combined after a while to make them almost unbearable pets. We just envisioned cute little quackers, floating sublimely and peacefully on the tank, providing photo ops, not the thunderous herd that ran quacking from the tank to the back door angrily demanding food every time we stepped outside.
I'm sure either Jan or I started the appeal for ducks. Our father liked animals, and certain animals were more than welcome at the ranch, but others he instantly vetoed. He would have vetoed ducks, but he was gone more of the time than he was home now, traveling for Murray Gin Company, so we didn't ask him.
Mother became even more independent, and we three girls became more brazen in our requests, knowing that unless it involved bleeding, hurting someone, or setting something on fire, she would usually let us do it.
"The Georges have the cutest little ducks," Jan said. "They quack and waddle." Jan was priming the pump. "So we were thinking...you know.....that maybe we could just get two or three and put them on the tank to watch them swim and stuff."
"What's the 'and stuff'"? Mother asked.
"Just watch them swim really. That's all." Susan said, interjecting herself into the conversation.
It was magic. We were always slow to realize it though. We often forgot to use Susan, our secret weapon. Mother would give in to her without even a frown, almost every time. Maybe it was because she rarely asked for anything, and if she did it was actually logical and sane unlike the requests of a few of her siblings.
So that was how it was that we traveled the winding backroad to the George's home four miles away late one fall afternoon. Mother stayed home doing the million things she now had to do since Daddy had started traveling.
We took a shoebox to put them in . Susan drove. She was fifteen and had been driving for about a year. Franny George was in 7th grade with me at school, and she chased the ducks until she caught them one by one. She handed the first one to Jan, who cradled it against her plaid dress. The second one was mine, and Susan deferred, so the third one was mine too. I realized then that Susan had no interest in the ducks, but had merely intervened with Mother to help us get what we wanted.
We transferred them to the shoebox in the back floorboard, and Jan and I crawled in the backseat, leaning down trying to keep them from hopping out of the box.
"I can't wait to put them out on the tank," Jan enthused.
"You'll have to wait till tomorrow," Susan said quietly. "Something would get them tonight right away."
"I never thought of that. We can put them in the coop we used for Julie. It's made for chickens and ducks, not puppies," I said, remembering Julie's near-death experience, hanging herself in the coop door.
We had turned from the farm to market road onto the dirt road that led back to our house. About a mile and a half down the road, just around the curve that led to Ventura's house, our car started limping.
"Oh no, we've got a flat tire." I heard something in Susan's voice. I wasn't sure what it was. The sky was like gray marble, and night came quickly when it looked like that.
We knew the lady who lived in the little house we were approaching, the only one for at least two miles either direction. Ventura was a lady who had come from Mexico after marrying a man from Corsicana. She raised goats, and often stayed in her little home alone since her husband drove a truck. At night it could be deathly quiet. She did ironing for us since Mother didn't have time, and I had often wondered if she was ever scared by herself on that deserted stretch of road.
"Maybe Ventura is home," Susan said hopefully as she pulled the car as near the ditch as she could get it and turned off the motor.
"I don't see any lights," Jan said. "I don't think the goats are gonna let us up on the porch to knock on the door."
Susan got out of the car and peered toward the house. "She's not home," she said authoritatively.
"We've got to walk home." Jan and I stared at each other. It was almost dark. Our house was at least two miles down a dark, treelined road with no houses between Ventura's and ours.
I'm not sure if I really wanted to protect the ducks, or if I just felt safer staying put in the car, but I made a quick, panicky, decision.
"I'll stay with the ducks," I said forcefully.
Susan considered it. "We've got to get going," she said to Jan. "It's getting dark fast."
Jan hopped out of the backseat, casting a glance back at the ducks.
She and Susan started walking south on the road at a fast pace. They didn't look back. I squeezed over the seat and locked both the front doors, then crawled over the seat again and locked the back doors. I rolled up the windows, leaving only a tiny crack at the top of the window on the ditch side of the car.
The darkness seeped around the car like thick smoke, and the darker it got, the more rigid I became. The ducks scrabbled around in the shoe box and eventually escaped, but I could hardly watch them. I now had to watch the road south where Susan and Jan had been swallowed up by the darkness, and east, where it curved around where we had come from. I kept praying that Ventura would show up.
"Surely she'll be home soon," I thought to myself. She wouldn't leave the goats very long by themselves. They'd eat the siding off her house.
The fear that rose most in my mind was that someone would come along and try to help, and I wouldn't know whether to let them or not. Most people in the country were good people. And they especially liked to help people with car troubles, but I wanted to wait till Mother came and said what we should do.
I was more afraid just of the dark itself and what imagined thing might come out of that forbidding darkness. I could envision monsters of varying shapes and sizes. The trees swayed and I could make a different scary shape out of each wave of the branches. They looked like giant fingers ready to reach down and snatch me. No, it wasn't people I was scared of; it was something else, something my own mind invented.
An eternity passed. How long could it take them to walk two miles? The ducks were running all over the back floorboards. I sat rigidly looking south, then east, and occasionally turning toward Ventura's house, hoping against the odds that I'd see a light and discover she was home after all. Finally, a light was coming slowly down the road toward the car. It wasn't our pickup, though. It was someone else.
What should I do, I wondered, feeling more and more anxious. What if it was someone I didn't know? The pickup pulled directly in front of the car, grill to grill. A man got out. I couldn't see him in the darkness. He approached the car, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered into the front seat of the car.
The anxiety that had risen into my throat rushed out in my cry, "Robert Earl!" He saw me in the backseat then.
"I'm going to fix the flat. Your mother called me. Then I'll drop you by the house--you and the ducks," he said. He seemed like he wanted to laugh, but he didn't. He was a very serious person, nice, businesslike, but he didn't laugh much. I guess running the store kept him with a lot on his mind, especially when people like my mother called him out at night.
When I got home, Susan and Jan told me about the walk home. They started out, feeling brave, then became increasingly afraid as they saw the shadows of the trees, heard the low moans and groans of the country, the screeches and howls of animals, and thought of snakes and other animals that crossed the roads at night. So one of them suggested they sing, and they skipped arm in arm down the dusty road singing at the top of their lungs a favorite song from the musical "The King and I".
"Whenever I feel afraid, I hold myself erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I'm afraid. While quivering in my shoes, -----I strike a careless pose, and whistle a happy tune, so no one ever knows I'm afraid. The result of this deception is very plain to tell, for when I fool, the people I fear, I fool myself as well."
They sang this, lungs stretched tight, trying to make all the noise they could. I wondered who they thought they'd fool. Probably only themselves.
"Mother seemed surprised to see us!" Susan laughed, thinking of it. "Like she'd forgotten she had any kids or that they were gone anywhere. She was washing dishes in the kitchen, singing, with all the lights on in the house and all the windows wide open. Then she got kind of worried, thinking what she needed to do, but she called Robert Earl, and he said he'd come right on, especially when she told him one of the kids was in the car over there guarding some ducks."
The little ducks were put to bed in the coop for the night, while we slept under the lovely vibrating noise of the huge attic fan. Early in the evening, it drew warm air through a large vent in the hall, sucking it through all the bedroom windows, but later, as the temperature eased down during the night, we'd often draw a light blanket up over us, snuggling down, retreating from the cool air.
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