I nod. I understand enough to know that my father would go crazy mad if he were ever to find out that Lonny tried to tamper with Daddy’s most perfect creation. And somehow, I feel guilty, guilty, guilty—I must have done something really bad!
That evening, I am lying on my stomach in the tall weeds underneath our grape arbor. It’s like being in a leafy green tunnel. The archway of dark leaves makes a hushing sound all around me like a lullaby. I am almost asleep.
I am just back from seeing the doctor. I’m here in the arbor filling my belly with grapes and my mind with forgetfulness. The doctor pronounced me good as new, and he gave me a tongue depressor and a hot cinnamon fireball for being a brave girl. But I don’t feel brave. I feel guilty.
Through the grapevines, I see my daddy coming out of his shop behind the house. He locks the shop door behind him, and eases himself down on the wooden bench underneath the shop window.
When I part the vines like a curtain, Daddy spots me and beckons. I run across the lawn and huddle close to him on the bench. He takes my hand and holds it on his lap.
The bench faces the south field where a green truck, loaded with harvested bales, looms large, mid-field. Daddy seems to look beyond the truck. He clears his throat to speak and makes a sweeping gesture with his free hand, indicating the entire field.
“Nature,” he begins hoarsely, but has to hawk and spit into his pocket handkerchief. After working in the shop, his throat is usually coated with fine sawdust.
He begins again. “Mother Nature provides for her own,” he says. “See those discarded bales?” He points to a stretch of stubble-covered field littered with broken bales.
“You see a few of those bales left behind after every harvest. Nature always reclaims a portion of her yield. Those discarded bales are straw houses that Mother Nature gives back to her grasshoppers. Each un-gathered bale shelters a multitude of hoppers, whose off spring will continue to fiddle their wings and sing long after man’s world has come to an end.”
It has grown dark now, and a heavy dew is falling. Jimmie hurries out the back door and lopes across the yard to the clothesline. She takes down some sheets and pillowcases, folds them, and carries them inside in a large wicker basket so they won’t get damp and mildew.
A few yards from the house, Spence is squatting between the gas pump and the kerosene barrels, digging for ants he’s collecting for an ant colony he plans to observe.
Jupy wags his tail and snuffs at a rabbit hole beside the barn.
Daddy gestures toward Jupy. “Humans are a lot like animals. They go running from one rabbit hole to another, sticking their noses down into the dirt, trying to pick up the scent, sniff out the truth, digging even deeper when they think they’ve found it. But the truth can be an elusive thing.”
Daddy lifts his work cap, scratches his scalp, and puts his cap back so it’s looser on his head. He stares at the hay truck; its windshield is glossed with dew.
“You know, Lissa, all my life I’ve invented and loved and made a living by all kinds of machinery. When I was just a little tacker, not much bigger than you, steam was the coming thing. I saw a steam engine for the first time at an exhibition when I was eight years old.
“Well, I went straight home and made myself a miniature engine that worked on my Mammy’s cookstove. And when I was a young buck, still wet behind the ears, I bought myself my first automobile, an R&V Knight. We had moved to the city by then.
“In those days, there were so few cars on the city streets I could park wherever I pleased, right in front of any restaurant or place of business I chose to go into. But soon, there got to be too many people and too many cars; there were traffic jams and road accidents; and there was noise like you never used to hear when there were only horse-drawn wagons and buggies on the roads.
“And then the whole world went to war—twice!” Here, Daddy pauses and seems to be watching a scene playing out across the field in front of him.
“For the First World War, the United States had three draft registrations. First, they called up men between twenty-one and thirty-one. Then, a year later, they registered the young men who had just turned twenty-one. Finally, in September 1918, they extended the age up through forty-five. Well, I was just about to turn forty then, so I signed up. The war ended in November, before they got to me. I was sixty-three when we got into the Second World War, too old for the draft, but I did work as a trouble-shooter in the government machine shops. I kept the drill presses and the metal lathes and shapers running, turning out weapon parts so men could kill one another faster and more efficiently.
“After the war, I made myself a vow that I would never again use machines for the purpose of destruction. I use my machinery now to create things that are beautiful to look at, smooth to the touch, and soothing to the soul.
“But man is still busy inventing bigger and better machines to kill with: A-bombs and H-bombs! And now he’s working on rocket-powered engines, so he can invade other planets and create chaos in the universe. Chaos!”
My daddy’s eyes look like they have a cloud passing over them. He lets go of my hand and raises his arms out toward the electric wires that run above the empty clothesline from the barn to the shop. A wren perches on the top wire, and way past the tenant farm across the road, I can hear doves cooing in the woods.
My daddy cups his hands, palms up. He whispers, “Adveniat regnum tuum. Thy Kingdom come,” to the wren.
Then slowly, very slowly, he lowers his hands, looks at me, and says, “Pray, always pray to the Blessed Virgin Mother whenever you’re in trouble, Lissa.”
I clamp my mouth shut tight and stare at my daddy. I’m not sure what a virgin is, but from what I’ve learned in Sunday school, God likes Mary because she is a virgin, and some things girls do with boys make girls bad and not virgins. I’m not sure, but I think I might not be a virgin anymore. I am glad Daddy will never know about Lonny’s circus. I whisper to myself, over and over, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE END OF JIMMIE’S WORLD
THE battered old trailer where Lonny lived is locked, and the windows boarded up. He has moved away to I don’t know where. I don’t see him around anywhere anymore. Spence gets a mechanical drawing kit for his birthday and spends hours locked in his room. When I ask him what he’s doing in there, he tells me he’s drawing detailed plans for a spaceship that will take him to the moon.
“Can I see them, Spence?”
“No! It’s top secret.”
I dig out the composition notebook and read my moon launch story, up to where it ends in the middle of Chapter Three. I can’t figure out what will come next, so I start a different story that seems to come into my head from nowhere—from the far end of nowhere. It goes like this:
I live in a black house. It is very dirty. The chairs and tables—what few we have—are covered with dust. We don’t have a carpet. At night, I wrap myself in a few worn blankets and try to get to sleep on the bare wooden floor. It is very cold at night. Sometimes, I hear the wind moaning outside the window, “Ah, me. Ah, me.”
I get up very early in the morning and give feed and water to the few chickens we have. We do not have a house for them. They sleep in the trees at night and wander loose in the yard by day.
I bring in some wood and start a fire in the cookstove. I scoop meal from the bin and make meal cakes. I wake up my two younger brothers and my baby sister. I feed her some soft mush made from the meal.
My father is too old to get up early. I stop by his bed to check that he is still breathing. I leave some meal cakes for him on the warming shelf above the cookstove. I get water from the spring and wash the few cracked dishes. I put my baby sister in a wooden pen with some blankets in it, where she can stay safe while I’m gone. I give her empty pots and pans and a spoon to play with. I tell my brothers to be good, and I go to school.
In the afternoons, I come home and take care of the chickens. I fix more meal cakes and make mu
sh for the baby. I wrap the baby in some blankets, put her in a wicker basket, and carry her with me to our small garden. I bring in some vegetables for dinner tomorrow, which I do not get to eat except on Saturday and Sunday.
I pull, pick, or dig up more vegetables to take to the store. I sell them for meal, which is all I can get for them. I go back home and do my homework by candlelight. I go to bed and let the wind sing me to sleep. “Ah, me. Ah, me.” The End.
It’s spring when I first notice the strange man in our south field. I am swinging on the tire swing out front. Far across the hayfield by the wood’s edge, where the pink and white dogwoods are blooming, a pickup truck moves slowly forward. When the truck stops, a man—far away and tiny—gets out. He walks to the back of the truck, pulls out a gadget that flashes like silver in the sunlight. He unfolds the tool into a tiny three-legged toy that looks something like Spence’s telescope.
I run into the house to tell Jimmie about the strange goings-on in our field. Jimmie raises the kitchen window and sticks her head out for a good look. She calls the man’s tool a surveyor’s tripod.
“Your daddy,” she explains, “decided to sell the land, all but two acres, to George Clay. George wants to add it on to his dairy farm.
“The property taxes are getting to be too much for us,” Jimmie says. “I’m just thankful George promised to farm the land, and not parcel it into building lots.”
Several weeks later, I sit on my daddy’s varnished oak tool chest in the shop. I keep very quiet. Daddy lets me stay and watch him work—just so long as I don’t distract him. Daddy stands at his woodworking lathe and turns a lamp. Sawdust is powdered all over his long work coat. Myshkin, the one-eyed tomcat, perches on the windowsill. As Daddy works, Myshkin’s tail switches back and forth like a metronome.
Suddenly, Daddy shuts down the lathe and turns to me.
“I’ve made a mistake,” he says. His face looks very tired.
“Did you ruin it?” I think he’s talking about his lamp.
“It was a mistake to sell that land to old man Clay.”
“Why, Daddy?”
“I had a premonition today about old man Clay falling from a great height and being swallowed up by the universe. He won’t be around much longer. And when that son of his—what’s his name? Cory?—gets ahold of that land, he’s going to turn it over to the first building contractor that comes along. Mark my words, young Cory Clay is not cut out to be a farmer. Got his head in the clouds, that one. He’s a dreamer boy. Out to make a fast buck. And that silly blonde wife of his—what’s her name? Faye? Always puttin’ on airs. And, in my humble opinion, that woman has a screw loose. The farm means a lot to your mother. She’s a country girl at heart. Won’t be country for long now.
“I lost most of my business,” says Daddy, “when I agreed to move out to this godforsaken neck of the woods. But it’s what you children and your mother wanted. You outvoted me, and I could see what our old neighborhood was coming to. I didn’t want you children growing up there.
“Your mother wants to help out. She wants to go back to nursing. I was against it all these years. No self-respecting man depends on his wife to pay the bills. I didn’t mind when she wanted to keep on with her father’s chicken-and-egg route to make a little pin money, but now she’s lost most of her customers to all the new supermarkets.”
Before she got married, my mother was nurse. She wanted to be a registered nurse, but Grandma Magda made her drop out of school when she was only in the eighth grade so she could work on the farm. Without a high school diploma, she could only be a licensed practical nurse, but she’s a good one. Probably the best, I think.
Now, because money is so tight, my daddy lets Jimmie take on private nursing jobs from clients who live on My Lady’s Manor—on land that used to belong to Lord Baltimore. From nighttime to morning, Jimmie keeps charts on an old lady who is bedridden. Sometimes, she gets called in to clean up an old man who is senile and tries to poop everywhere, including on his daughter-in-law’s fancy dining room table.
Sometimes, she takes cleaning jobs. When she cleans the local dentist’s office, she brings home his discarded waiting room magazines—Look, Life, The Saturday Evening Post—for me and Spence to read and use for our school projects.
When she cleans the local churches, I help her dust the pews. They have curlicues and notches that are hard to get to, and they seem to go on—row after row—forever. In the wintertime, my hands get cold dusting when the church isn’t heated.
One time, Jimmie finds a pretty pair of red gloves in a church’s lost and found box. She gives them to me. The next week, a girl in my class at school sees me wearing them on the playground. Her name is Linda Willard.
“Hey, you’re wearing my gloves. Where did you get those?”
“My mother found them.”
“Well, they’re mine.” She grabs my hand and turns down the wristband on one of the gloves. “See.” She points to the initials LW printed in indelible black ink on the inside. “I lost those gloves a couple of weeks ago.”
I just take them off and give them to her. I don’t say anything or even look at her. I feel guilty. I feel like a thief.
I repeat, “Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not steal,” over and over to myself all day. If I say it enough times, I will be safe. I will be safe, even though my fingers are frozen.
Sometime toward the end of August, George Clay falls down into his silo. He struggles for many hours in a quagmire of field corn, treading yellow kernels that give way like quicksand under his feet. Eventually, he is rescued. The fire department ambulance arrives, siren blaring, red lights blinking, and rushes Mr. Clay off to the hospital. On the way, he has a heart attack and dies.
Jimmie grew up with George Clay’s sister, so she goes to his funeral, wearing an out-of-fashion black straw hat with faded cloth flowers and a skimpy net veil. Daddy stays home to keep an eye on me and Spence.
“I’ve seen too much of death already,” he tells us. “And I’m too old to need reminding.”
Just as Daddy predicted, Cory Clay inherits his father’s land, which now includes the ten acres that used to be our east and south fields. First thing he does is build a brand-new brick house for his wife, Faye, over at the far end of the south field at the edge of the woods.
On a cold January afternoon, I hop off the school bus after Spence. We race each other up the driveway and burst into the kitchen, breathless.
“Go upstairs and change your clothes, children. Then I’ll give you some of my lentil soup.” We hurry to put on flannel shirts and old dungarees. Mine are hand-me-downs from Spence. Spence’s are hand-me-downs from one of our cousins.
We return to find Jimmie ladling up some steaming lentil soup she’s kept warm on our big cast-iron kerosene cookstove.
“This will warm you up,” she says. “It’s good luck to eat lentil soup in January, brings you luck in the new year.”
Spence gulps down his soup in a hurry, grabs his work coat, and rushes out to take care of the chickens before it gets dark. “You stay warm in here with Mommy, Liss. It’s too cold out there for girls.”
While I finish my soup, Jimmie shows me a thick envelope with an opened gold seal.
“Look what came for me in the mailbox today, Lissa. Pretty fancy, huh? It’s an invitation from Faye Clay to a housewarming.” Housewarming is spelled out in swirly pink and gray lettering.
“What’s a housewarming?”
“A party to celebrate a new house. You’re supposed to bring a gift for the house. It’s this Saturday evening. You want to come with me?”
“Oh, can I? Yes! Yes!” I always love to go places with Jimmie.
Jimmie grew up during the Great Depression, so she’s very frugal. Nothing goes to waste. Worn-out sheets become dust rags or handkerchiefs. Socks are darned, shoes repaired, dungarees patched, torn shirts and dresses mended. Besides, we really don’t have a lot of extra money to spend these days. To find a housewarming gift, Jimmie sorts throug
h the big cedar chest—her hope chest—in her bedroom. The farmhouse has four bedrooms, and because Daddy has to get up so much at night, Jimmie and Daddy sleep in separate bedrooms.
Jimmie goes through gift boxes and tissue paper, sorting through presents she was given years ago at her bridal shower, gifts that have never been used. She says she’s saving them for a rainy day, or to give to me when I grow up and get married. Finally, she selects a set of twelve linen dish towels, each embroidered with a different flower, tucks them back into their original bed of tissue, seals the box with tape, and covers it with pale blue wrapping paper—from the box of remnants she keeps in the closet.
On Saturday evening, Jimmie and I walk across the south field. It seems strange that this is not our land anymore. A square of bright light glares at us from the new picture window. Jimmie raps the shiny brass knocker. Faye answers the door. She looks tiny standing next to Jimmie, but she’s all dolled up like a TV housewife—like Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, or Leave It to Beaver’s mom, June Cleaver—in a hostess outfit: a belted dress with rolled sleeves, turned-up collar, full skirt, high heels, bright red lipstick. Her hair is done in a sleek French roll. Jimmie towers over her in a plain cotton housedress and chunky, sensible shoes, her hair pulled back in its usual tight bun, no makeup.
Zora Clay, Faye’s mother-in-law, a short, plump farm woman with a gold tooth, takes our coats, and we follow Faye as she flounces across her new living room with its split-level floor and gestures grandly at the table piled high with gifts. Jimmie places her gift on the table. It looks kind of plain and small next to the other brightly wrapped and ribboned gift boxes. I feel embarrassed for Jimmie, and tag along close behind her to the buffet table.
I sit on a sofa in the corner next to Jimmie, sip fruit punch, nibble pastel butter mints and cashews, munch on potato chips, and watch and listen to the grownups. Jimmie shushes me when I announce that I don’t like the taste of the garlic sour cream dip. Faye is starting to open her presents. She gushes over the deluxe electric Mixmaster and a set of crystal wine glasses. When Faye picks up Jimmie’s gift, she seems to inspect the blue wrapping paper (which, I now notice, looks faded next to the other presents), hesitates a moment, then rips off the wrapper, tears open the box, and shears the tissue apart with her red-polished fingernails. She lifts out the linen towels, stares at them, pulls them up to her nose, sniffs at them. Almost immediately, she squishes up her nose, pushes them away from her, and stuffs them back in the box.
At the Far End of Nowhere Page 8