by Bette Greene
“Well, we have as much empty space around us as anybody else.” She sounded pleased with her logic.
“But they have even more empty space in Texas,” I said. “Thousands of miles of empty space.”
She sighed. Boredom or anger? I don’t actually mean to be rude, but I am. My father says I ask a lot of questions and then go around contradicting every answer.
“You’re probably right,” I said, trying to make amends. “But I wonder who decided that Jenkinsville, Arkansas, would be a good place?”
“The President.”
“Oh, not the President! He’s much too busy for—” There I go again, contradicting. “Well, I guess it could be that way. Maybe he did have a little free time one day and said, ‘Eleanor, I’ve been thinking about where we could build the new prisoner-of-war camp. In the Arkansas Delta there’s a little town called Jenkinsville that would be just perfect. There are fields of cotton needing picking, plenty of open space, and no big city nearby where a prisoner could hide. Yes, Eleanor, Jenkinsville would be ideal.’”
“I guess it could have been decided like that,” she said.
I continued to stand there watching the notions counter grow cleaner and more organized. Inside I felt a rising sense of discomfort. I just had to speak of him, of Anton.
I said, “I’ll tell you something interesting.” Sister glanced at me and I took it to be a go-ahead. “I sold one of the prisoners some pencils and things. He spoke the most perfect English I’ve ever heard and he was really very polite. I mean, for a German he wasn’t half bad.”
Sister looked at me more carefully, her hands motionless. Something a little scary about those now-unmoving hands. “I saw you with him. Smiling and laughing. Did you like him?”
Betrayed! By whom? Anton? No, by myself. By my ugly, stupid self. Always having to talk, always having to tell people things.
Not one tear is going to come out of my eye. Strike back. “Sister, if you really want to you can tell everybody in town that lie. I really don’t care.” Make it good. Make it very, very good. “And I don’t know if I should tell you the truth because I’m not certain you deserve it, but I’ll tell you anyway. That prisoner was telling me that he hated Hitler more than anybody in this whole world because it was Hitler who had his mother and father killed—and his sister Nancy. And he told me that every night he prayed only one prayer, that God should allow the Americans to win the war.”
The cheesecloth flew back into action. “Well, how was I to know he told you that?”
“You could have asked,” I said, listening to the sounds of injury in my voice. “All you really had to do was ask.”
Outside the store the sun had positioned itself in the dead center of the sky. As I walked down the only residential block in town it followed my steps, evaporating my energies. Soon there would be a real (just like the city) street sign on this corner. At the moment, though, nobody knew just what the sign would read. The town ladies, mostly from the missionary society, were holding out for Silk Stocking Street. “Elegant,” they said. While Mayor Crawford called it, “A damn silly name.”
Actually, there didn’t seem to be much need either for a street name or a sign. Everybody knows where everybody else lives. And if you’re worrying about a stranger coming into town, well, all he’d have to do is ask. People in this town are friendly and that’s the truth.
Set back against freshly mowed grass and twin dogwoods the Jackson house was the only two-story in town. I pressed the doorbell, which activated a series of chimes. Always at this point I’d get to feeling foolish. It was too grand a way to announce my arrival. I tried to tell myself that Edna Louise would be glad to see me especially if she didn’t have any other visitors. After all, any company is better than no company, isn’t it?
When the heavy, arch-shaped door opened, Edna Louise looked neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly surprised. She didn’t look any way at all except in sort of neutral gear. Her freshly ironed pink dress was tied behind in an abundant bow, and her blond hair fell as always in obedient waves. She looked as though she were going to have tea with the Roosevelts, but Edna Louise always looked like that.
“I didn’t know you were coming over,” she said in the same tone she would say, “I didn’t know the bank closes at four thirty.”
While her greeting didn’t sound especially hospitable, she did push open the screen door.
Now Edna Louise Jackson is not only the daughter of the richest man in town but she also has the reputation of being a little “boy crazy” so she’ll understand why I like Anton.
Over heavy mauve carpeting, she led me through the orderly stillness of the living room. With its lemony polish anointing the proper mahogany furniture, the living room was the saved room in the house. Saved for something sometime when it would be taken out and used.
In the cleanliness-is-next-to-Godliness kitchen, background organ music gave drama to the words of a radio announcer, “... The story that asks the question—Can this girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?”
I sat down next to her at the kitchen table. “Do you follow Our Gal Sunday?” I asked. “It’s probably my favorite soap opera.”
“I like Sunday and Lord Henry, but I hate Elaine. She tells Lord Henry the most awful lies about Sunday.”
“I know.”
“Well, why don’t they get her out of the story?”
“Because they need Elaine to make the story interesting,” I said, surprised that the smartest girl in Miss Hooten’s class hadn’t figured that out for herself.
“But she’s so bad!” protested Edna Louise.
“Without Elaine, Sunday and Lord Henry wouldn’t be doing anything but holding hands and strolling through their mansion. What’s interesting about that?”
“Nothing,” admitted Edna Louise. “Sometimes you have good ideas,” she added.
“Oh, well,” I said, “I guess I like to notice things like that.” With my confidence boosted I decided to tell her about him. “Today I met somebody that I like.”
“A boy?”
“Yes. No! He’s a man.”
“How old is he?”
“Maybe twenty, twenty-one or -two, like that.”
“And your mother’s going to let you go out with him?”
“Uh, no, I guess not. But he can’t go out anyway—he’s a German from the prison camp.”
“A German prisoner!” repeated Edna Louise. “That’s almost as bad as going out with a nigger!”
Repelled by the comparison, I shouted, “It isn’t!”
“It is too. God is on America’s side and anybody who’s against us is on the devil’s side, and that’s the truth.”
“The truth is that he’s a very good person,” I said with full conviction. “And someday we’re going to meet again.” Then, hitting upon a way to punish Edna Louise, I added, “And anyway, I have to go home now.”
As she adjusted the volume on the radio she called out, “Bye.”
5. Morning train to Memphis
ON THURSDAY MORNING I boarded the eight forty-five train to Memphis.
At the Skyway, on top of the Hotel Peabody, Grandma and I were seated at a white-clothed table next to the wall of clear glass. As I pointed out the buildings on the bluff, the barges on the Mississippi, Grandma seemed pleased. “I told the maître d’ to make certain my granddaughter has the best possible view.”
During lunch Grandma spoke of her fears for her two sisters and their families in Hitler-occupied Luxembourg. They hadn’t written Grandma, not in months. “Toby’s husband, Aaron, is the finest doctor in the country—he treats the Grand Duchess Charlotte.” She pressed her handkerchief to her nose. “I know they’re all right.”
I told her what I had read about mail sometimes being destroyed during wartime. “They’re probably worried about you,” I said.
Grandma fingered the diamond and platinum bar pin at her neck before looking up cheerfully to ask if I was ready fo
r dessert. When I considered the price of my lunch, one dollar and forty-five cents, I said I was all filled up. But Grandma said, “Nonsense,” as she ordered tea for two and persuaded me to try a long chocolate pastry with a French name. And that by itself cost thirty cents!
Later we walked arm-in-arm down busy Main Street, in and out of stores—Goldsmith’s, Levy’s, and Lowenstein’s. Grandma bought me two pairs of shoes and two wool skirts with matching sweaters.
“Next time,” she said, “we’re going to shop for dress-up clothes.”
When she took me to Union Station, I told her it was the best time I’d had all summer and that next Thursday she wouldn’t have to spend even a cent on me. “I just want to be with you,” I told her.
“Oh, Patricia darling, next Thursday is no good,” she said, letting her face show a regret that I mistrusted. “Grandpa and I are leaving the following Friday for Hot Springs.”
She went on talking about how sorry she was and that when she returned in August—but I had stopped listening. Why should I care? She’s had her children; she doesn’t want any more.
“Don’t worry about it, Grandmother,” I said, more shocked by the chill in my voice than the actual words. “It’s really not all that important.”
I found an unoccupied double seat and stared out the filth-encrusted window until the train began to pull out from the station yard. And not until then did I cry.
The next day I wondered why I had acted so silly, and I wrote Grandma, thanking her for all the nice clothes and “for the beautiful day that we had together.”
But outside of that day—that one day—the summer was hot, dry, and endless. Edna Louise, Juanita Henkins, Mary Sue Joiner, and Donna Rhodes had hopped aboard a bus that had taken them away from this flat and fried bit of earth that was Jenkinsville to the Baptist Training Camp up in the Ozarks. During the day they swim, hike, and learn how much Jesus loves them. At night they sit around the campfire roasting marshmallows and singing about how much Jesus loves them.
I asked my mother if I could go if I promised (cross my heart) not to sing those songs and only to pretend to listen when they talked about him. “After all,” I pleaded, “Jesus isn’t contagious.” But she said, “No. It’s only for Baptists.”
So after they went away, the little good in the summer just wasn’t there anymore. Ruth was preoccupied with her work and thoughts of Robert, and even Sharon didn’t really have time for me. She and Sue Ellen spent practically the whole day, every day, getting in and out of a water-filled galvanized tin tub which was set beneath the chinaberry tree.
There was nobody to talk to and nothing to do. The school library was closed. I had finished reading the books bought with Grandma’s ten dollars, and my father made it very clear that he didn’t want to catch me hanging around the store.
A few times I rode my bike out to the prison camp. There was always the chance of maybe seeing him. My friend, Anton. Mr. Frederick Anton Reiker. Only thing I ever saw, though, was cattle-wire fencing strung high on Y-shaped poles which squared off a huge, open area. Back a distance towards the center of the treeless compound there were ten or more long whitewashed barracks sitting on their own patches of grass. Not many people were about during the day, although sometimes I did see a prisoner or two walking. But it was never Anton.
Outside of biking, the only other thing I liked doing was fixing up my hide-out. Actually, the hide-out isn’t so much a hide-out as it is a forgotten place. It is a perfectly ordinary over-the-garage servants’ quarters—one big room, a little kitchen, and bathroom—located halfway between our house and the railroad tracks. But it has been closed up for the ten years that our family has lived in the six-room frame house out front.
There are two important things that make the place secret enough to be called a hide-out. A long time ago my father pulled up the horizontal stair boards to keep hobos from finding a home. I like it that way because no grownup would balance himself on the brace boards to climb up like I do. The second secret point is that the stairs leading up to the hide-out are located inside the garage, so from our house it’s impossible to be seen climbing up or down the stairs.
From the hide-out’s back window I watched a slow freight rumble noisily down the tracks towards Little Rock. I opened Webster’s Collegiate to the Fs. Time to get going on my ambition. It’s not the only one I have, but it’s the only one I work at. Someday I’m going to know the meaning of every word in the English language.
I let my finger run down the page of the dictionary until it stopped at the first word that wasn’t completely familiar: “Fragile.” Lots of times boxes of glassware and things come shipped to the store marked: Fragile! Handle with care. But it must have more of a meaning than that. I copied the definition into my notebook: “Easily broken or destroyed; frail; delicate.” My word of the day.
A few minutes later I climbed down the steps’ skeleton and went into the house where I found Ruth leaning over the tub giving Sharon her bath. Up to her belly button in bubbles, it was plain to see that Sharon was in one of her giggly moods.
“Do you know why the little moron—” she interrupted herself with an attack of giggles. Again she began, only to act as though she had been breathing laughing gas.
It was becoming tiresome. “Ruth, you tell me the joke,” I said.
Sharon straightened up. “No, let me! Do you know why the little moron took his loaf of bread to the street corner? ’Cause—’cause the little moron wanted to wait to get some jam.” Hiccup-like laughter engulfed her and I joined in. Mostly because I had never before heard anybody louse up a moron joke.
I hung around watching while Ruth got Sharon all dolled up in her Shirley Temple dress and Mary Jane shoes for Sue Ellen’s sixth birthday party. One thing, and it’s not because she’s my sister, but Sharon happens to be very pretty. Everybody says that with her black hair and dark eyes she looks just like Mother, while I look like—No, I don’t think I look at all like him!
Outside, the two o’clock sun right away showed us that he was far from fragile. “We’ll walk slow,” said Ruth, “so as not to anger him up.”
On the sidewalk in front of the birthday house Ruth adjusted Sharon’s pink hair ribbon. “Now don’t let me hear no bad reports come back on you, you hear me, girl?”
Sharon nodded, turning to go. “Hold up now!” called Ruth. “Remember what it is you is going to say to Sue Ellen and her mother ’fore taking your leave?”
“I had a very good time at your party and—and ah—” She looked into Ruth’s face for the answer.
“And I thank you kindly for inviting me,” supplied Ruth.
Sharon smiled. “And I thank you kindly for inviting me,” she repeated. And without even a good-bye wave she skipped off into the birthday house.
As Ruth and I walked slowly back, I tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t in too much of a mood.
“Ruth—why are you mad at me?”
“Mad at you? Oh, Patty Babe, I ain’t mad at nobody about nothing. Sometimes when a person be thinking about one thing it don’t mean they is mad about another thing. It don’t mean nothing but that they is too busy for normal conversation.”
Then it was Robert. Laughing, light-skinned Robert over there fighting in some faraway foxhole. God, would you please remember to keep Robert safe from harm? Please, God, ’cause he’s all Ruth has. Amen.
“Want to know who is the strongest man I ever knew in all my whole life? Robert is. I bet he could beat up six Germans and outshoot a dozen of them. Honest he could!”
A slow smile spread across her lips. But her eyes—Ruth’s eyes had this gloss and they weren’t smiling.
“Oh, Robert’s going to be O.K., you’ll see. And you know what? Robert’s going to help win the war.”
“Honey, I don’t care about no war. I jest cares about my boy.”
“You have to!” I felt embarrassed by the conviction rushing through my voice. “You’re supposed to care! Don’t you know the Germans will tak
e everything you’ve got, and then they’ll take you into the field and kill you? Don’t you know that?”
Ruth laughed. At me? Let her. Let her laugh her fool head off. She’s not my mother.
From a deep well between her bosoms Ruth brought out a white handkerchief with printed flowery borders and dabbed at her eyes. “Oh, Honey Babe, I got nothing in this here world worth taking, and no German or nobody else is gonna kill me till the good Lord is willing.”
“If you believe that,” I said, trying to frame the words, “then why can’t you believe it’s also true for Robert? No German can kill him unless God wills it.”
There was no answer, nothing except the sound of shoes against blacktop. But then her arm dropped across my shoulders, bringing me to her in a sudden hugging motion. “Unless God himself wills it,” I heard her say.
I followed Ruth into the kitchen where a headless hen, its blood already drying on its body feathers, lay on the rubber drainboard. “Sit and talk a spell,” she said.
I glanced again at the grotesque bird. “I’ll see you when you finish with her,” I said, backing away.
Out at curbside even the neat row of houses, mostly bungalows with screened-in side porches, seemed peopleless. Not a soul was about. I pictured the ladies of the houses, sitting with saucerless cups of coffee, their eyes fixed on the kitchen radio as they lived through Mary Noble’s trials as a backstage wife, Helen Trent’s over-thirty-five search for romance, and poverty-reared Our Gal Sunday’s efforts to keep up with the local nobility.
I didn’t want to grow up to spend my days like that, but I didn’t want to spend my growing-up days like this either. Sitting alone on a curb trying to think of something to do.
If I had a horse as black as the night I’d go galloping off in search of her. Go, Evol, Go! North toward the Ozarks and never come back.
People would ask, “What a peculiar name, and what does it mean?” And I’d lie to them, saying it was short for “evolution.” Evolution like in Darwin’s theory.
But someday it would happen. I’d find her and she’d understand right away that Evol has more power spelled in reverse. And that would be the sign between us. She would be my real mother and now at last I could go home.