At the Far End of Nowhere

by Christine Davis Merriman

  Sometimes, I make Spence so mad he punches me. Then I cry and run to my daddy, and Daddy always takes up for me. He scolds Spence and tells him he must always take care of his little sister.

  “She’s just a little girl,” he tells Spence.

  Daddy tells me not to cry. “Your face gets ugly when you cry. If you cry too much, it will grow that way.” So I try harder than ever not to cry. I don’t want to be ugly.

  And me and my brother have both learned never to slam a door—not when my daddy is working on a watch.

  Some days, when my daddy’s clock repair business is good, the old farmhouse echoes with musical chiming, and bonging, and ticking, and whirring—on the hour or half hour or even sometimes on the quarter hour. Daddy keeps the fixed clocks on a long, flat table in what used to be Grandma Magda’s sun parlor. He likes to keep the clocks running for at least a week before his customers come to pick them up. That way, he can be sure they are working well and keeping time.

  A French mantel clock may swing its golden sun-shaped pendulum; an anniversary clock may twirl four shiny chrome balls, clockwise and counterclockwise, showing off its polished workings underneath a glass cover. A carved wooden bird may pop out of the oval-topped door of its carved Black Forest house, flutter its painted wings, and let out a rowdy “cuc-koo, cuc-koo, cuc-koo” to tell you the number of the hour. A spice clock may keep up a quick steady tick, tick—as comforting as a baby’s heartbeat. A mahogany mantel clock with a heavy brass pendulum may make a loud gong, gong, gong that you can hear all over the house.

  The clocks my daddy fixes come in all different shapes—banjo clocks, chariot clocks, clocks with columns and pedestals, a clock that looks like Felix the Cat and rolls its eyes and swings its tail.

  Sometimes, other, larger clocks come to stay for a while at our house. A tall Regulator wall clock with a long pendulum has a tick that’s so loud it breaks into the silence at night. A sweet cherrywood grandmother clock rotates bright phases of the moon through a hole in her face—as the weeks go by, you can see the moon’s faces, changing ever so slowly.

  Grandfather clocks. Well, they are so big, my daddy usually goes to the owners’ houses to fix them. Sometimes, one of the finials—those things that stick out the top of the grandfather clock’s head, like two curvy horns—is broken off or missing. Then Daddy turns a brand-new finial on the lathe in his workshop. He makes the new one so carefully, carefully; it must match its twin, in size and shape and color and grain, exactly. Then he goes back to visit the clock at its home, and gently, gently, he attaches the new finial, just so.

  “Clocks need to be tended to, Lissa. Cleaned, oiled, and adjusted. You should keep them wound, but not too tight. Some clocks you need to wind every day. Some will run for eight days without stopping, but you should wind them before they run all the way down.

  “Now, an anniversary clock can run for an entire year without winding, but it won’t keep the most accurate time.”

  One rainy Saturday, Spence shows me how fun it is to jump up and down on his bed. We can almost hit the ceiling when we jump. We jump higher and higher. Spence can touch the wallpaper above the bed and make squiggles on it. Jump, jump, jump….

  “What the hell’s going on up there?” It’s Daddy’s voice! We both freeze, standing on Spence’s patchwork quilt. We hear Daddy’s heavy steps creaking on the stairs.

  He throws open the door and shouts at us. “Goddammit! You children nearly made me ruin this watch.” He’s holding up a gold pocket watch. Its uncoiled mainspring dangles from its barrel in Daddy’s trembling hand. “And I could have put my eye out with this mainspring.”

  We had forgotten—or maybe we didn’t even realize—that Spence’s bedroom is right above the room where Daddy keeps his watchmaker’s bench and works on watches. That room is lit by one of our grandma’s old Victorian chandeliers. The chandelier hangs from that room’s ceiling, right below Spence’s bed.

  “The ceiling was shaking. The chandelier was swinging. It could all have come crashing down on my head!”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy!” I say, but he isn’t listening. He turns away and makes his way back down the stairs to finish fixing the watch.

  “Boy, is Daddy mad,” I say to Spence. But Spence has moved on to something else.

  “You know how you say you have claustrophobia, Liss?”

  “I know I do. I don’t like being stuck in little tiny places where I can’t escape. It makes me feel like I can’t breathe. It’s like when Daddy tells me I mustn’t cover up my head at night, or I might asphyxiate myself. He says that means I won’t be able to get enough air to breathe while I’m sleeping.”

  “Well, claustrophobia is just a kind of fear you need to get over. And I know a way to cure claustrophobia,” Spence says. He points to an old trunk at the foot of his bed where Jimmie stores winter woolens and extra blankets. He pulls everything out of the trunk and dumps it on the floor. Moth balls roll out from the woolen folds.

  Spence takes out an old wristwatch from his desk drawer. Daddy gave it to him. It has a second hand for timing things.

  “Get in the trunk, Liss. If you can stay in there for a whole minute, you’ll be cured of claustrophobia.”

  “I’m scared to, Spence!”

  “You’ll be fine for just a minute. Underwater swimmers can go a lot longer than that without air. Come on, get in.”

  He holds open the curved lid of the trunk, and I get in. He closes the lid. All is can smell is mothballs. And I’m all scrunched up inside. I hate it! I can hardly move! I try to push up on the lid, but Spence is sitting on it. I start beating on the lid.

  “Let me out! Let me out!”

  Finally, after what seems like a long time, Spence gets off the lid and I push it open and get out. “I couldn’t breathe in there! Why’d you sit on the lid?”

  “Jeez, Liss.” Spence looks at his watch. “You were in there for less than fifteen seconds!”

  “I hated it!”

  “Jeezy peezy, Leezy. Take it easy! You’re never going to get rid of your claustrophobia that way. I was just trying to help you.”

  Usually, I run to tell Daddy whenever Spence does something I think is mean. But I don’t tell him about Spence trapping me in the trunk; Daddy is already mad at both of us for disturbing his work. That night, when my daddy comes to tuck me in I ask him, “Are you still mad at me and Spence?”

  “No. I can’t stay mad at you children. Sometimes I lose my temper.”

  Then Daddy tells me a bedtime story from long ago.

  “On windy days, some folks claimed they could hear ghosts whispering and moaning over in Fallen Angel Swamp. And so, it happened that one fall afternoon, after working late in the fields, I started the long walk home through Piney Woods due north of Fringe-a-Frock’s old sawmill. I was hungry for a good hot supper. In the distance, I could see the sun sinking behind Tulip Hill at the far western edge of my Pappy’s tobacco farm.

  “My ears perked up. The wind was rising. I turned up my collar against the cool evening air and descended a long slope down, down into the marshy wetlands to escape the turbulence. Halfway down, I lost the sunlight. At the bottom of the slope, I began to feel a powerful tugging at my boots. I heard a gulping noise—like a scaly underwater creature transforming itself into a fierce amphibian, breathing heavily, gasping for air, emerging after centuries of struggle from the murky waters, trying to suck off my boots, gobble them up, and swallow me.

  “Just then, on the verge of crossing Crider’s Creek, I halted mid-step at the sound of a deep, eerie voice, crying out ‘Knee deep, knee deep!’ Was this an omen warning me of the water’s depth? Or was it the hideous swamp demon many folks believed had dwelled for generations in the depths of Fallen Angel Swamp?

  “Well, just as a precaution, I stepped back onto the safety of the creek’s mossy bank, and found me a sturdy ash branch. With my pocket knife, I sharpened one end of that branch to a point and whittled a barb into it, sort of like a harpoon. Then I rolled
up my britches to above the knee, grabbed my spear, and began once again to ford the creek, ready to do battle with that ferocious swamp monster.

  “Again, mid-step, I heard a voice, a different voice this time, one that warbled with the crippled twang of a very old man. ‘You’ll drown, you’ll drown!’ creaked the voice. Surely this was the voice of a wise woodland spirit or guardian angel or holy saint, warning me not to cross these cursed waters, this River Styx!

  “So rather than venture across those dark waters, I pulled myself up the soggy creek bank and spent the night sleeping on higher ground.

  “As the sun rose next morning, I could plainly see that the water was indeed shallow, no deeper than my ankles, and that those otherworldly voices had been nothing more than the false warnings of a couple of croaking bullfrogs!

  “I crossed Crider’s Creek in safety, and got home in time for breakfast. ’Course, my Mammy was right anxious about my welfare, and she scolded me something fierce, even while she served me up a helping of cornbread and clabber. I reckon she had a bad temper, too. Runs in the family, it seems.”

  At the end of Daddy’s story, he gives me a big hug. The croaking frogs make me laugh. Daddy’s tall tale and his hug take the fear out of bad tempers, and make me feel safe again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MOON ROCKET

  OUR first year living on the farm, Spence gets a compass for his birthday, and Daddy teaches him how to read it. Spence goes on long hikes around the neighborhood and uses the compass to draw up a map on a big sheet of Daddy’s mechanical drawing paper. When he’s done, Spence shows me his map.

  “Look, Liss, if you don’t want to get lost out here, you need to learn the lay of the land. See? I wrote the four directions along the edges of this map—north (left), south (right), east (top), and west (bottom). You need to know the four directions so you can read a compass. I put different size rectangles with labels to show where buildings are.

  “This is us,” he says, “Our property.” Spence and me are sitting cross-legged next to each other on the front-porch floor, and he has the map spread out in front of us. He points to our twelve acres. Our place is nested right in the middle of the map—farmhouse, grape arbor, Daddy’s woodshop, three vegetable gardens, barn and corn crib, three chicken houses, and two big fields that run all the way over to the east and south woods at the top and right edges of the map. At the top-right corner of the map, an arrow pointing beyond the east and south woods says To Grangerville Crossroads.

  “Out past Grangerville is the Long Green Valley. But I ran out of room, and couldn’t fit that on the map,” Spence explains. “Mommy says that’s where some of her Amish Mennonite relatives live on big farms.”

  Another arrow labeled Horse Country points north. “That’s what Mommy calls My Lady’s Manor,” Spence tells me. “That’s where, a long time ago, the King of England gave a big parcel of land to the first Lord Baltimore, and later on, another Lord Baltimore gave this manor part of it to his wife, who was a lady.”

  “Daddy says I must always be a lady, and not use bad words and be quiet and obedient.”

  “Well, Liss, this is a different kind of lady, with a capital L, who is married to a lord. Lords and ladies are all rich. Mommy says the ones who came here were from important English families who were friends with the king. They came over here and set up big horse farms, and went to the Episcopal church that’s still here. And at Thanksgiving, they still wear their fancy red or black riding coats and riding hats or top hats and shiny boots, and bless their hounds and mount their horses and go hunting for foxes.”

  “I feel sorry for the foxes, Spence, even though, in my storybook, sometimes foxes are bad and trick little small red hens.”

  “Well, I think foxes are pretty smart. Maybe they have fun playing tricks on the horses and hounds.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t guess they like to be chewed to death by the dogs.”

  Spence shrugs, “Who knows?” I can tell he’s ready to move on to the next thing. Daddy has told me Spence doesn’t like to go too deep into his feelings. “He’s like his mother that way.” I’m not so sure about that. I like to think maybe Spence and Jimmie are just trying to be practical, or even brave.

  But now, Spence has moved on. He’s pointing out Aunt’s Essie’s place, next to ours, on the map. “See Liss, that’s just north of us, and there, even farther north and over toward the east, is Mr. Clay’s dairy farm.” Mr. Clay has been farming our fields since Granddaddy got sick and died.

  Spence has drawn a pair of curvy lines to show the road at the bottom of our front yard. Across the road is Brenner’s place—a house and barn with fields all around. There are woods behind it that run up a hilltop all the way to the west edge (bottom) of the map. In the evenings, we can see the sun going down behind Brenner’s woods from our front porch. The Methodist church (a box with a triangle drawn on top) is at the bottom-left corner of the map. We can see its steeple from the upstairs windows on that side of our house. In good weather, Spence and I walk there for Sunday school.

  As the year goes by, Spence takes me along with him to explore our twelve acres. Out in the east woods, we discover a hillside where rusted old cars are half-buried under dirt and dried brown leaves. We call it the Car Graveyard. Down a pathway between the east and south fields, we find a beautiful tree with big greenish-yellow blossoms shaped like tulips growing all over it. Some of the flowers have dropped to the ground, and we bring them home for Jimmie. “I see you’ve found the tulip tree,” she says, and smiles as she puts the flowers in a big glass Mason jar on the kitchen table.

  One day, we find glittery rocks in the east field, and tote two of them into the kitchen.

  “Look what we found, Mommy!” Spence tells Jimmie. “Look at all the sparkly speckles buried in these rocks! We found gold!” Jimmie is washing dishes. She dries her hands on her apron and examines the small flat rocks.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Spence. But that’s just fool’s gold. It’s not really valuable. You’ll find it all over the property, especially in the woods and in the fields.”

  “Liss!” Spence shouts, all excited. “Let’s excavate the rest of these ancient ruins. We’ll do what archeologists call a dig!”

  Spence finds an old coal shovel in the cellar. We use it to dig around the foundation of Daddy’s woodshop. We find pearly white shells with glossy rainbow colors inside, poking up through the mud, and run to show them to Jimmie.

  “Look what we found behind Daddy’s shop!” Spence says, lifting up a shovelful.

  “Oh,” Jimmie says. “Those are oyster shells. Your Grandma Magda loved oysters. She used to toss the shells out there when she was done eating the oysters.”

  Daddy has built a bookcase for us in the hallway. We clean up the oyster shells and polish them. I color pictures on some of them with crayons. Then we use the shells to decorate empty spaces between the books on the shelves.

  With Spence, the adventures and ideas just keep on coming. Behind the barn, we find all kinds of neat stuff, piled in an old rubbish heap nearly a story high—broken concrete, chipped cinder blocks, scraps of rusted metal farm tools, a cast-iron and white enamel bathtub, rotting planks, a thrown-away icebox, rolls of chicken wire, old tires, and thrown-away car license plates.

  “We can use pieces of this old junk to build a rocket ship,” Spence says. “I can be the pilot, and blast off to the moon. We’ll use some kerosene from the tank for rocket fuel.

  “Liss, next Saturday, let’s get up real early. You can help me build a spaceship behind the littlest chicken house. By nighttime, we’ll have it ready, and I can blast off to the moon.”

  After supper and homework, I sit in my bedroom at the oak desk my daddy built for me and begin to write a story, printed in pencil in a composition notebook, about our moon rocket project. There are four main characters—Spence, me, Perry (Spence’s best friend at school), and Perry’s little sister, Jeannine, who’s a year younger than me. Spence asks me to call him Ca
ptain Rewop (power spelled backward).

  By Friday evening, I am up to Chapter Three of my story. I am not good at drawing, but I sketch some pictures in crayon to illustrate my story, including one with me, Perry, and Jeannine on the ground waving goodbye to Spence, who peers out the round window of a pointy-tipped spaceship as it blasts off into space on a trail of flame and smoke.

  Before going to bed, Spence and me set our alarm clocks for four A.M.

  Saturday morning is rainy and foggy. We sleep through our alarms. I get up before Spence, as usual, when Jimmie calls me to help make breakfast. I always make my daddy’s breakfast—coffee and oatmeal. In the pantry, I stand on a two-step stool my daddy built for me. As I do each step, I recite it inside my head:

  1. Fill the saucepan with water up to the place on the inside where the handle is attached.

  2. Scratch a wooden matchstick on its box—it’s easier and safer for me, my daddy says, than using a little cardboard match.

  3. Light the gas stove and be careful not to burn myself.

  4. Bring the water to a boil in the saucepan.

  5. Dig the oats out of the cardboard box with the Quaker Oats man’s picture on it, one fistful, another fistful, then one-half of a fistful—Jimmie only fills her fist once, but her hands are much bigger—and drop the oats in the boiling water.

  6. Turn down the flame.

  7. Stir the oats around with a big spoon.

  8. Let the oatmeal simmer while I make coffee in the blue and white speckled enamel pot.

  When I’m done fixing Daddy’s breakfast, I get Spence up to feed the chickens. Daddy takes his place at the head of the kitchen table, beneath the Regulator clock. I sit on his lap and say grace.