The Sound of Gravel

by Ruth Wariner

  I nodded.

  Lane smiled again and patted his faded jeans. “Come sit on my lap.” The words were tinged with a definite sweetness, but also something else, and whatever that something was, it kept me frozen in place from fear or unfamiliarity, my hands clasped behind my back.

  A fly buzzed on my ear in a spot where milk had dried. I shooed it away. “But maybe I can just try it, practice to see if I can do it,” I said shyly. “I’m pretty sure I can milk a cow and help my Mom too.”

  Lane laughed heartily and jumped up, as if the joke had given him energy. In one motion he reached over and picked me up by the belly. My shirt rode up and his calloused hands felt rough against my skin. Then, he sat back down on the bucket and cradled me—one arm around my back and the other under the back of my knees. I felt my bare lower back against the denim of his pants as he bounced his legs up and down as if I were a baby. A nervous knot grew in my stomach, but I wasn’t quite sure why.

  “Well, now. Let’s see.” The bouncing had stopped and he turned his head to look at me. “Maybe you and Luke can come outside in the mornings and afternoons to feed the chickens and pick up the eggs in the chicken coop till you’re both old enough to milk cows.” He put his arm around my neck and brought my face closer to his. His whiskers dotted his jaw, chin, and upper lip. His nose looked bigger and wider up close, shiny, and covered in little white dots.

  “What are we s’posed to do with the eggs?” The words nearly got trapped in my throat, blocked by the knot that had formed when Lane put me on his lap.

  “Take ’em to your mom. She can separate them so that you guys can have some, and Alejandra and her family can have some too.” He broke into a hollow chuckle. “You have to be careful not to break them, though, because we’ve got lots of mouths to feed around here.” He gave that chuckle again. I felt his arm lift my neck and my face rose even closer. His whiskers grazed my cheek, and I smelled cheese curds on his breath. He looked straight in my eyes, and his voice was barely audible.

  “Can I have a kiss before you go back inside?”

  I jerked my head back and tried to wriggle out of his lap, only he held me tighter, so tight I almost couldn’t breathe. I suddenly felt sick too, sort of like I’d felt when I’d gotten the flu. But this was a different kind of sick, a kind that I had never before felt, and I didn’t understand where it came from.

  “Just one little kiss before you go inside. Come on now, it’s no big deal.”

  I stopped wiggling. It wasn’t doing any good. Instead, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and kissed Lane on his rough, unshaved cheek.

  I felt his grip loosen, and this time when I pushed, he let me go. I jumped off his lap and scampered away. From behind, I heard that chuckle yet again. “Ya see now, that wasn’t so bad.” Then the chuckle turned into a full-blown laugh. “See ya later, alligator.”

  Fearful that he might ask me to sit on his lap again, I put my hands in my pockets and walked quickly out of the garage. The night air made my skin feel cool, and I realized I was dripping with sweat. I made a silent vow to stick closer to my brothers and Mom over the rest of the summer.

  6

  Mom smiled from ear to ear as she made the announcement: she was pregnant again and the baby would be born in December. Her belly and bosom began to grow even though her hips and legs remained slender, an incongruity I first noticed on a hot midmorning in August. The two of us were walking together hand in hand out to Lane’s shop, her fingers warm and swollen in mine. We weren’t even halfway there when I noticed sweat running down Mom’s forehead and the front of her neck. She carried a stainless-steel bucket in her free hand, and I carried one in mine.

  As Lane had predicted, the baby’s impending arrival meant that I would indeed need to take on more responsibilities around the house. In a few months I learned how to make cheese and butter from the milk Matt lugged back to the house each day. I learned how to whisk eggs, oil, and lime together in precise ratios to make mayonnaise. And most important—now that Lane had finished building our electric grinder—I learned how to make bread.

  The shop door was locked when we arrived, but Mom had a key to the padlock, and soon we entered Lane’s world of heat and grease. The stink reminded me of my stepfather and made me queasy. A string hung lazily from a ceramic light socket screwed to the wooden ceiling; Mom yanked it, instantly flooding the room with a harsh, naked light. We made our way through a maze of toolboxes and buckets of bolts and an old, rusted washing machine lying on its side, its guts spilling out onto a grease-stained white towel. At last, in the shop’s back corner, we found them: several black barrels lined up against the wall. Each was twice my size and looked just like the heater in our living room. I asked Mom why we kept beans and wheat in the shop.

  “So we’ll have food to last us when hard times come,” she said, “after the United States is destroyed.” Lane regularly rotated the barrels, she told me, so that the oldest grains were the most accessible; the newest were always stored here, in the shop’s far corner.

  A cloud of tiny particles rose up like smoke from the barrel when Mom pried off its lid and dipped a pale plastic pitcher into the pile of wheat berries. Then, pounding the lid back onto the barrel with the meaty part of her hand, she told me to follow her out of the shop, where she locked the door before leading me over to the grinder. The contraption was bolted to a small, white table. On the ground below, at the base of the shop’s gray cement wall, a hard, black plastic tube stuck out of the dry dirt—the end point of an electrical wire that Lane had attached to a line on a neighboring farmer’s property, with whom we shared the costs of electricity.

  The tube sat open to the air, as did a bare wire bent into a fishhook shape that stuck out of its tip. Mom held the tube-and-hook in one hand, and the loose wires of the grinder in the other, motioning for me to watch closely. I crouched down, my hand on her back.

  “Ruthie, always make sure that when you hook these wires together, you don’t touch any of the bare ones,” she said gravely. “You have to be very, very careful. The pieces that aren’t covered with plastic will shock you, and they could hurt you real bad.” She paused for effect. “Do you understand me?”

  I nodded slowly and seriously before Mom broke into a gentle smile, her face bright red and dripping wet as she wiped it with a towel. “The black tube has electricity coming through it, but it won’t hurt you if you only touch the hard plastic part. But promise me you’ll never touch the metal bits.”

  “I promise,” I vowed.

  Satisfied that I understood, Mom stood up and flipped the brown switch Lane had welded to the grinder, which emitted a gentle squeaking noise that made the thin metal table vibrate. I placed my bucket under the grinder’s nozzle while Mom poured the whole grains into the funnel. The grinding began, and a tan-colored dust soon spilled into my bucket, creating clouds that made me sneeze right into the flour. Mom giggled as she reminded me to cover my mouth, then shook the flour from her polyester pants, turned off the grinder, and wiped my face clean with her towel, now soaked through with sweat. She disconnected the grinder, set the black tube with its bare wire on the ground, wiped the grinder clean, and headed back to the cool safety of the house.

  Bored, I sat with my elbows on the table while I watched Mom make the bread dough, which seemed to take forever. After several hours of letting the dough rise, kneading it, and letting it rise again, she finally kneaded it one last time, separated it, and placed it into our special bread pans—juice cans shorn of their labels. Mom placed the pans upright in the oven and baked the bread. The smell of it seemed to transform our little house, as did the perfectly round slices of bread it produced. My siblings and I ate a delicious dinner of warm bread, honey, and milk out of cereal bowls that night.

  By the end of summer, the peaches had grown ripe on the trees and then overripe, plunging to the damp earth below. Alejandra’s eldest children and Matt climbed silver ladders to pick the fruits that remained on the branches, while Luke and
I scooped the rest from the ground. In late summer, we’d devour bowls of peaches smothered in fresh cream and sugar, a welcome change from bland meals of wheat and beans. But fruit was always left over, and all of us had to help preserve what we couldn’t eat.

  Learning how to boil peaches in quart jars was the last lesson in my summer of domestic education. As Matt, Luke, and I carried the many, many glass jars to our bedroom, where we’d been instructed to place them on shelves up against the wall, I felt the winds of change begin to blow. I was tired of homemaking and excited about starting school.

  * * *

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, after the limbs of the peach trees had been picked clean and their light green leaves began to turn golden yellow and dark red, I was ready to start first grade. I hated having to sit and watch as Matt and Luke set off each morning for Primaria Miguel Hidalgo, which was just across the highway from the LeBaron bus stop. Mom told me that the school, which taught only grades one through four, was where I would learn to read, write, and do math. I couldn’t wait. I had always been fascinated by how a sound could be suggested, an A or a B, by a single squiggle on paper. Plus, I wanted to play with new friends and get away from Audrey and her unpredictable tantrums.

  On the last Sunday evening before school began, Mom gave us our weekly baths after she cut our hair. Thinking about starting school the next morning, I was especially embarrassed by my bowl cut, which felt shorter and looked even more boyish than usual. I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair long enough for pigtails or a ponytail, no matter how many thousands of times I begged for them. Long hair had too many tangles, Mom insisted, and she had enough work to do without having to fight with my hair every morning.

  Even though Lane had put a toilet in our house, we still didn’t have running hot water, so Mom had to place our biggest stainless-steel pot under the faucet that came up from the kitchen floor, fill it, then set it on top of the stove. The tub, which was kept in the almost-finished bathroom, was round, made of galvanized steel, and could only hold one of us at a time. We would wait our turn in the kitchen while Mom traipsed back and forth from the bathroom, her hands protected by red oven mitts as she gingerly transferred the boiling water to the bath.

  Audrey went first since her hair was the thickest and took the longest to dry. Next came Aaron, who always fought the bath and threw his head against Mom’s chest, kicking his feet against her round, pregnant belly. After that it was my turn. The warm air smelled like Ivory soap and fogged the window. Our bathroom didn’t yet have a doorknob, but Mom had stuffed a sock in the hole where the knob should have been to give us a little privacy.

  I looked at Mom’s face as she helped me into the bath. She looked so tired. I gripped both sides of the small tub to support myself while dipping my body into the murky water. I had to sit upright with my legs crossed to fit in the tub. Mom picked up the pot from the floor, turned the nail away from the door, and went back into the kitchen to heat up more water. My shoulders and upper torso shivered from the cold, but she came right back and filled a tall plastic cup with water, poured it over my head, and massaged pink strawberry shampoo into my hair. I loved the comforting feel of Mom’s fingertips rubbing my head and the luxury of having her undivided attention.

  Only at moments like this did I feel a longing for the comfort of other girls. I missed my girl cousins from California. I wished they had stayed in LeBaron so I would have had other little girls to play with. Mom had read Disney’s version of Cinderella to us out of an oversize children’s book, and I used to have dreams of pretending to be princesses with my cousins. We’d wear beautiful gowns and dance with princes at formal balls. But then I’d wake up and find I was stuck with a bunch of boys and an older sister who scared me.

  “Why don’t my cousins and aunts go to my dad’s church anymore?” I asked as soap suds rolled down the sides of my face.

  Mom considered my question for a few seconds. “You know they moved to California after your dad died. They left the church. And, actually, Grandma never believed in your dad’s teachings, not even after Grandpa joined the church and moved us to LeBaron.” Mom paused, searching for the words to explain this to me. “Grandma was a Baptist, and they believe that polygamy is bad. She didn’t have much say when Grandpa decided to move our families down here, but after your dad was killed, they all lost faith in his teachings.”

  “Why?”

  “Because not all of what your dad said would happen came true. And, well,”—Mom took a deep breath—“Grandpa once told me that he worried about his daughters livin’ polygamy, that they were so poor with so many little kids. Maybe he regretted gettin’ involved with your dad’s church.” She lifted her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders. “But I never have.”

  I still didn’t quite understand why they left. Life in LeBaron didn’t seem so bad to me. Mom washed the rest of my body in silence, then held out a damp towel for me with her arms open wide. I fell into them, savoring the warm feeling of her arms squeezed tight around me.

  7

  A rooster’s crow woke me up the next morning. In the half darkness, I stepped over Audrey’s legs and made my way across the chilly cement floor to a dresser full of musty-smelling, unorganized clothes. I picked out a simple white blouse with a heart-shaped patch that matched its red, short sleeves and a pair of elastic-waist jeans. I headed to the bathroom to dress myself before anyone else needed it. “A freckle-faced boy,” I said aloud to my reflection in the mirror.

  Mom shuffled by in her house slippers, and soon the smell of boiling cornmeal wafted my way. I heard the familiar splatter of its bubbles as I entered the kitchen and found Mom smiling, standing over the stove in her navy-blue robe.

  “You ready for school, Sis?” Then she gave me a second look. “I like your pretty blouse.”

  I looked down at the wrinkled cotton. “I’m ready,” I said, my voice still dry and raspy from sleep. I sat at the table with a nervous stomach and swung my tennis shoes back and forth underneath my seat. My nerves went away when I dipped my teaspoon into the mush, which Mom had made sweet by adding honey and cinnamon. But I felt queasy all over again when I found a tiny black fly lying dead and upside down at the bottom of the bowl. I hated few things on the farm more than finding flies in my food.

  The sky was blue and cloudless when Matt, Luke, and I stepped out of the kitchen door, my brothers in their T-shirts and jeans, Luke’s hair standing up in an unruly cowlick. Mom bid us good-bye at the doorway, wished us good luck, and waved us on our way. For almost half an hour we walked along a dirt road in silence, each of us carrying identical woven-plastic schoolbags with rubber handles. My heart began to beat fast when we reached the two-lane highway and the gray, rectangular cinder-block building just on the other side, with its metal-framed windows, slanted tin roof, and four classrooms for each of the four grades that were taught there. Fifth-grade students took a bus to a nearby town.

  As we waited to cross the road, a semi pulling a trailer with a crowded load of cows rumbled past us, the cattle squished in together randomly, facing all different directions like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. As the truck rumbled past, it blew dust into our faces and my hair into my eyes. I cleared my forehead, certain that my first day of school had been ruined.

  The dry, sun-baked schoolyard was filled with a mix of light- and dark-skinned children playing together. But no one else had skin as light as mine; Casper would not have felt whiter. A basketball bounced with a hamp-hamp against a cement court filled with kids. One boy with dark, curly hair threw the ball up, aiming for the hoop—nothing more than a netless, rusted rim. I saw no swings, slides, or any other play equipment, only girls playing hopscotch and jump rope in the dirt, repeating Spanish chants and kicking up dust at their feet.

  From behind came the sound of a heavy metal door scraping a cement floor, and all eyes turned to find a Mexican teacher calling students in Spanish through a megaphone. I stood frozen while each child bolted for one of the four classroom doors and got in line. U
sing the children’s heights as a guide, I found the right line, and soon our teacher stepped out to welcome us. A serious but friendly woman, she had dark hair and large curls that surrounded her face and made her look as if she were wearing a football helmet. She wore a purple dress with nude stockings and gray high heels, dark red lipstick, purple eye shadow that matched her dress, thick, black eyeliner, and mascara. She waved us inside.

  The classroom smelled like Pine-Sol and had twenty wooden desks in lines on a cement floor that looked brand-new, smooth and shiny like the film over Mom’s glossy photographs. I scanned the room and chose a desk in a far corner beneath a window, which is when I realized that going to a Mexican school meant being taught in Spanish.

  “Buenos días, alumnos. Me llamo Señora,” the teacher said.

  The words blurred together in fast-paced sentences. I never even caught my teacher’s name; it was forever lost in the torrent of her opening speech. My body went stiff and the blood rushed to my face as I looked at my classmates and watched wide-eyed as they reached down into their plastic schoolbags almost in unison. I followed their lead and took out my new spiral notebook, which Mom had given me as a special present for starting school. Meanwhile, the teacher walked the aisles and made marks in her notebook with a sharp, yellow pencil, smiling and greeting each child individually.

  When she reached my desk, she stopped, knelt down until we were eye to eye, and smiled. She said something to me in Spanish, and all I could do was stare at her and hold my breath in fear. She smiled again, then called someone over, a little girl on the other side of the classroom who promptly picked up her supplies and moved to the desk next to mine.