For the longest time, little Lonnie’s only concern was to eat. Then came his desire to walk and not wet the bed and to escape outdoors as often as possible. It became apparent early on that Lonnie was going to have an artistic bent. Darrel first noticed this when, at the age of five, Lonnie traveled with him on a business trip to Owasso, Oklahoma. Lilly Pharmaceuticals had recently added an agricultural branch, Elanco, to the company, and Darrel quit the extension office when he landed the well-paid position as VP of Sales for the greater Missouri region. Elanco’s main source of revenue came from the sales of Spike 20P, which, when applied in the proper dose to any pasture, choked out infiltrating brush and left the native grasses to flourish. The beauty of the new product was its safety. In no way did it resemble its predecessors, causing cancer in cattle that fed upon treated grasses or drank from water tainted by the chemical’s runoff. When Darrel was challenged by potential customers to prove the validity of this claim, he gladly swallowed a couple Spike pellets whole and smiled reassuringly. Ron Dotson was in charge of sales in the greater Oklahoma rangeland, and when they first met, it was almost inevitable that the two strapping men with good looks and the air of cowboy decency would end up more than coworkers but also friends who enjoyed the bimonthly gatherings scheduled to keep each other in the loop on company business and recent agricultural happenings.
As Lonnie and Darrel drove down the crunchy gravel road to Ron’s doublewide trailer, past an oil derrick that was pumping away almost as naturally as if it had always been there, it was hard to imagine all that had occurred at this place in the dark hours of the morning only weeks before, when Ron’s wife of seven years had left him for a wagon-driving minister who spouted Bible verses and used his horse whip as an “instrument of the Lord” to ward off Ron’s desperate pursuit of the woman he had loved since he was nineteen. The patchy front yard looked as though it was resting in eternal peace, and the only sign of life was a plastic, sunflower-shaped swing that hung on a rope from the only tree in the yard and softly twisted in the chilly, morning breeze as if to tempt any children who might cast their eyes upon it to come play. But Ron and his wife never had children. She didn’t want them to interfere with her work as a horse trainer. And so the swing hung, its yellow, petaled seat bleached by the sun, waiting.
Lonnie and Darrel made their way out of Darrel’s company Suburban toward the doublewide. Darrel knocked five times before opening the unlocked side door and peering inside. Lukewarm sunlight streaked through the opened blinds on the kitchen windows, highlighting the dust motes that floated about the stale room. Dried dirt. Water spots. Ancient hints of lemon soap. It didn’t smell particularly bad. On the counter was a box of opened Fruity Pebbles, which made Lonnie’s mouth water and his stomach churn in disgust when he thought of how it was going to waste just like the flower swing floating outside. Sheila rarely bought sugar cereal because it was much more expensive than Post Toasties, of which there was an abundance in the McAllister household. Dishes lay washed and ready to be put away in the strainer next to the sink. The trash needed to be taken out and seemed to mock Lonnie from the swinging lid permanently stuck open like a mouth with a newspaper stuffed inside but half hanging out like a tongue. Darrel’s large frame made the kitchen floor moan under his weight as he stepped across the cracker-colored linoleum, the heels of his boots crushing invisible crusts and crumbs as he walked.
Lonnie was certain they shouldn’t be making their way deeper into Ron’s house as he and Darrel moved down the dark, carpeted hallway, but he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. In the living room, papers had been left all over the place. Gelling coffee and beer stagnated here and there. Shivers ran down Lonnie’s spine when he caught sight of a stuffed barn owl with wings spread frozen in front of the living room window. He wanted to touch it but found himself disappointed by the dust coating the head, laying adrift in the lifeless eye sockets, the hard hollow body, the realization of the animal’s degraded state.
As they neared the back bedroom, sounds of water could be heard—someone taking a shower. The bathroom door had been left opened a crack. An empty bed. Morning breath still lingered in the air, mingling with sweat and mismatched sheets. Old, deflated pillows were bunched up, sweet and slick from scents left by generations of heads. Bedside reading material, fiction—another world. Then the water turned off. Darrel called out Ron’s name to make their presence known. Seconds later Ron appeared, still wet in a pair of black bikini briefs, drying his hair with a towel. Any conversation that followed was lost on Lonnie. He kept staring at Ron’s almost-naked body. Lonnie had seen his father without clothes on many times, but this was a whole new experience: another man with a smile and a laugh and a package like his father’s, concealed in tight, smooth cotton instead of the loose, stained boxers his father always wore. At the age of two, Sheila had caught Lonnie jumping naked on his bed. She spanked him and told him he had to wear shorts to cover up his “boy parts.” He remembered how afterward he had lain in bed looking at his “boy part” and touching it. Then he had put it away with a resolution not to get in trouble over that thing again.
Ron dressed quickly and scurried about to clean up the living room and kitchen, making all manner of excuses as he did so for why the place was such a mess. Darrel pretended not to notice, and Lonnie was given crayons and paper to color and keep himself busy. Lonnie applied a green crayon in short, quick strokes to the back of a piece of the stationary that bared Ron’s photograph as well as his business information on the front. The green was for grass because everywhere Lonnie looked, the world was covered in grass. Next he drew a tree, brown with long limbs that stretched up into the sky. Next to grass, Lonnie had concluded trees were the most prominent fixtures of the world, and they were all the same—brown with tall arms reaching up to the heavens. And then there were houses, which seemed to dominate the landscape as much as trees did. And people, of course, lived in houses. So Lonnie drew Ron and Darrel and the yellow sunflower swing. And, of course, Lonnie had to be in the picture as well. And they must all hold hands because they were happy. It was imperative that they were happy. Happiness was the only thing worth recording, worth putting down on paper. And holding hands or kissing or singing, that’s what people did when they were happy. Maybe there were other emotions in the world, but the one Lonnie was certain he understood was happiness, like Sheila singing in the afternoon kitchen alive with the warmth of dinner preparations or the joy in Grandma Gwen’s eyes when Pepaw kissed her soft lips or the way Darrel would laugh when his hands were intertwined with Sheila’s out on the front porch swing just after sunset.
Lonnie continued to color until his first picture was complete. How accomplished he felt. He had just created something where moments before nothing had existed. What a feeling of triumph and power, the whole world at your fingertips rendered just as you like it. He selected another piece of the parchment and started again. The ream of paper was seemingly endless, and Lonnie continued full-heartedly at this newfound form of gratification until lunchtime, when he presented his drawings to Darrel and Ron, who were, of course, delighted. Ron pointed out that guys don’t hold hands with other guys, though. Guys only held hands with girls. Lonnie thought this over, and though it didn’t make sense, it was true he had never seen two men holding hands before. So he resolved to make certain he drew only girls holding hands with guys. On a whole, the pictures were a success, however, and Ron asked if he could keep them to hang on his refrigerator. This was no problem for Lonnie. After all, the crayons and paper belonged to Ron in the first place, and Lonnie liked the idea of his artwork being on display for all to see. And though he tried not to think about it, he liked the idea of the pictures hanging where he was certain a bikini-briefed Ron would stroll about when no one else was around.
By the time Lonnie was six, all of the McAllister siblings that would be born had been. The final two, Esther and Ruth, were named after characters in the Bible that had become particularly inspiring to Sheila. Esther,
the next in line after Lonnie, was the only McAllister to arrive in their world with blonde hair, and she favored Sheila so entirely, it was hard to believe Darrel had any part of her making at all. Ruth was an accident. And even once Ruth had become an inevitability, she was still a bit of a disappointment because it was thought she would be a boy, so much so that the family had even predetermined her name, David—another of Sheila’s Biblical favorites.
At the same time, Darrel’s job with Elanco had taken off and thus financial pressures had eased up around the Nebo farm, which had been dubbed Squirrel Ridge due to the plentiful red and grey furred creatures that chattered like a gossip chain as they frolicked about the centuries-old oaks that canopied the forests around the place. Darrel had quit smoking, a habit Sheila had been determined for him to do away with in light of the example it was setting for the kids. Sheila started a garden up by the old Reese farmhouse Darrel had torn down, which was now little more than pieces of broken beer bottles or baby blue paint occasionally unearthed by her hoe. She planted everything that could grow in the rocky Ozark soil—cantaloupe, corn, okra, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, strawberries, etc. For help with the weeding and picking, Sheila secured the assistance of her children, who lent their soft, little hands along with tears, laughter, enthusiasm, and dread all in a single afternoon.
Squirrel Ridge could have been its own country, its own world, its own universe, independently alive and capable of single-handedly sustaining life for the McAllisters within its lush perimeters. Darrel’s master’s degree in conservation offered his family the constant insight that without leaving the three hundred acres one could not only survive but thrive off the land. Meat could easily be obtained from the wild animals that scampered and flew and swam in abundance. Fruit was everywhere, from the autumn olive berries that bordered the large front pasture to the wild strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, mulberries, and gooseberries that crowded the thickets. Wild onions sprouted throughout the fields, and among the clover stippling the McAllisters’ front yard, sheepshire was plentiful and enlivened more than a few taste buds on lazy afternoons when the kids lounged about playing with the farm cats. In the moist valleys between distance ridges stood mighty walnut trees with limbs of nut pods waiting to be harvested, and coloring the hearty tops of the ridges were dustings of purple Echinacea flowers eager to be plucked for aesthetic reasons as well as more medicinal ones.
With each season, the McAllisters’ private Eden could be seen moving, growing, breathing, if anyone took the time to notice. Even in the dead of winter, when the trees where subject to ice-covered coats, bobcats and coyotes roamed the virgin snowfalls, leaving paw prints zigzagging through dried-up cornfields and under the eaves of cedar groves. There were moments when each of the McAllisters saw their secluded kingdom for the uniquely shifting organism that it was. For Sheila, it was the wintertime that stood out most, when ice storms would cause blackouts for miles that wouldn’t be repaired for days, when she could pull out her Christmas records to play on the stereo and cardinals flocked to the seed she tossed into their briefly inhospitable world. The girls loved the springtime, when buds of color began to push up through the decomposed leaf piles in the forests and clumps of new alfalfa appeared in the pastures—daffodils, tiger lilies, irises, orchids, and daisies. During those days from mid-March until late-May, the girls would frequent the blushing fields to pick the latest armload of blossoms to fill Sheila’s house, using up every available vase and extra Mason jar to hold them. It was a glorious sight, each surface that could take it sporting an arrangement of virtual sunshine. Lonnie liked the summers, not necessarily the suffocating heat but what came with the shift in temperatures: the vivid greens that ruled the day and the trips down to the river to swim and cook hot dogs over a gravel bar bonfire. He liked the cattle roundups and the cutting of the hay, during which he would perch himself on the edge of the tractor’s big tire next to Darrel to watch with attentive eyes as Darrel circled the alfalfa fields, concentrically chopping down the aromatic greens. As they came to the last uncut rows, tiny, wild rabbits that had found shelter deeper and deeper in the center of the field would at long last make a dash for it as their final refuge was eviscerated, and as soon as Lonnie would see one go, he would point excitedly. Darrel would stop the tractor to let Lonnie run after the hares, which usually resulted in their rather easy capture. Lonnie collected them all in an old cardboard box, and for a couple hours on those afternoons, he enjoyed the furry company, holding their weightless bodies carefully in his tender palms, giving them each names and stories before releasing them once again when he was called for dinner. Darrel preferred the falls around the farm, when the summer chores that had demanded his attention seemed to ease up and the slowdown of chlorophyll production in leaves caused them to turn a lush palate of purples, reds, and yellows. He preferred earlier nights, when quitting time was met with inky skies and the house was a refuge from the chill of the oncoming evening, when the summer frogs and crickets had finished their symphonies and deer creeping through fresh, naked forests were fair game.
It was in the fall, just as Lonnie was about to enter kindergarten, that Sheila and Darrel pulled Kristy, Rebecca, and him out of public school to teach them at home. They had gone back and forth a few times over the idea of keeping their children on the farm, where they could protect them from the “evil influences of the public school system,” which Sheila was constantly being warned about in her Christian magazines, but when the counselors at Son’s Light Academy—a homeschool group based three hours away in Joplin—assured Sheila and Darrel the process of removing their kids from Nebo Public School was not only easy and legal but the best thing that would ever happen to their family, they finally resigned themselves to the task.
“Oh, Soodie,” was all that Gwen said when Sheila told her what she and Darrel had done.
“I know you don’t think I can do this, momma, but I’m really excited about it and so are the kids.”
“But what about their friends? How will they socialize?”
“They’ll see them at church.”
“I can’t imagine ever doing something like that with you and Butch. And Darrel is okay with it?”
“Yes, momma,” Sheila sighed, annoyed.
“Now, now. Don’t get upset with me. Your daddy and I can’t help but be concerned for you all living out there in the middle of nowhere like that. And now this.” Anytime Gwen brought Willie into her reasoning, she knew Sheila couldn’t help but consider Gwen’s thoughts on any matter a bit more carefully.
“We’re gonna be fine. Besides, we can always put them back in public school if we have to,” Sheila said.
Homeschooling wasn’t a cheap proposition. Every textbook had to be purchased for each of the subjects the kids were to learn, along with all the regular school supplies, desks, bulletin boards, and file cabinets. Still, Sheila took on the task like everything else in her life, committing herself wholly once the decision had been made to move ahead with it. Darrel did what he could by teaching the kids everything he knew where biology was concerned, especially around the farm. He explained the life cycles of plants and delineated differences between the vast array of trees growing all over Squirrel Ridge. And when an animal was killed for food, Darrel didn’t just butcher it, he dissected it so that at a young age, the McAllister clan could name the primary bones, organs, and functions of the organs in the body. In possibly the most vibrant of these “science classes,” Darrel pulled a pair of lungs from a deer carcass and used his own breath to inflate them. Then he sliced the massively aerated organs open with a knife to show his kids the blood vessels and corpuscles that expanded and contracted in order to supply oxygen to the body, a visual experience that would not soon be lost on the wide-eyed fivesome.
What Sheila and Darrel were doing was wildly unorthodox for their area and became gossip all over Nebo. At Nebo Baptist, where many of the teachers from Nebo Public School attended, it was especially
apparent that there was little support for what the McAllisters had begun. Half the church hardly greeted them anymore when they arrived for Sunday service and equally ignored them as they left. Instead of being put off by their church, however, the McAllisters simply quit attending the local institution and began to meet up on Sunday mornings with a young couple named the Kellys, who had also recently become disillusioned with strict Southern Baptist “fundamentalism” and enjoyed discussing new, modern concepts in Christianity, like clapping and raising one’s hands while singing, anointing with oil, and laying hands on the sick to pray for their recovery.
Lonnie took the new “charismatic” dogma that had infiltrated his world quite seriously, especially after hearing story after story of “God’s faithfulness” in turning any situation around by answering what seemed to be even the most impossible of prayers. Just as Sheila had turned to God when things had first begun to get rocky with Darrel, now Lonnie turned to Him for all things troublesome.
This was never more apparent than in April, when one of the heifers that should have given birth had not. The vet was called to perform an emergency C-section, and of course, the McAllister siblings were loaded up in the family’s station wagon to watch the procedure for “science credit.” It took a little over an hour from the first incision to the final stitch, and in the end a baby calf wobbled around the barn corral on gangly legs while its mother, which the kids decided to name Star because of a white star in the center of her forehead, laid on the hay, slowly coming out of her state of anesthesia. But while the calf seemed no worse for the wear, Star had become paralyzed by the procedure that had saved her baby’s life. Darrel was far from thrilled at this realization when after three days, she had barely moved. However, when he grabbed his shotgun to put Star out of her misery, Lonnie stopped him.
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