Maude

by Donna Mabry

  “I’m getting married, Maude.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Clara hadn’t said a single word that she was even interested in anyone. I just sat there with my mouth wide open.

  After a moment, Clara went on, “I borrowed money against the store to keep it going, and when that ran out, I borrowed money against the house, and now I can’t pay that either. I’m going to lose both of them.” She started sobbing. “I’ve made a terrible mess of things. I should have closed the store before all this happened. I tried to sell it, but there aren’t any buyers anywhere. Everyone in town is in the same boat.”

  I finally found my voice. “Who are you going to marry, Clara?”

  “Brother Humphreys has been coming around to the store for quite some time. He’s been asking me and asking me, and up to now I’ve been pretending I wasn’t interested, but now there’s nothing else I can do. I can’t get work. How can we live without money? I don’t have any family of my own to fall back on. Maggie’s going to St. Louis to live with her daddy’s sister and go to the secretarial school there.”

  I jumped up and stamped my foot. “You can’t do it, Clara. I won’t let you. Brother Humphreys is nice enough but he’s thirty years older than you are and ugly as a moose. You deserve someone you can love. You’ve already been married to someone like him.”

  “I appreciate your concern, Maude, really, but what else can I do? He’s well off compared to most of us, and he can keep Maggie in school and pay her keep. Her aunt has a spare room, but she’s not in a position to support her.”

  When it came time for Maggie to leave, I helped Clara and Maggie pack her things and went to the train station with Clara to see Maggie off for St. Louis. School was starting, and Maggie couldn’t stay for her mother’s wedding. She had to be in St. Louis for the start of the semester. I got the feeling that Maggie was glad she would miss the ceremony.

  Both of us sobbing, we watched the train grow small in the distance. I wished that Lulu could have been on that train with her best friend.

  One week later Clara and Brother Humphreys were married after the Sunday service. There was punch and cake after the ceremony, but no one seemed to be celebrating except the bridegroom. Everyone looked at Clara with sympathy in their eyes.

  Chapter 31

  With his father no longer the sheriff, Bud’s hijinks weren’t tolerated as well as they had been. When he and another boy from the town got drunk and drove the boy’s car into the front of a vacant store, the judge suggested they might be better off in the army. I was glad he went easy on them, but I knew it was partly because of George’s popularity and partly because the town didn’t have funds to keep them in jail.

  So, in 1937, Bud joined the army and left town. It’s sad to say, but I was relieved to get him out of my hair. He wasn’t any more energetic than his father and was considerably more worry for me. It was an embarrassment to have a child that got into one scrape after another and wouldn’t attend church. We all drove with Bud to the bus stop and waved as he left. When I returned home, I felt as if a burden had been lifted from me.

  George spent the afternoon puttering around the barn. When he came in for dinner, his eyes were red and puffy. I didn’t say anything. I knew Bud was the apple of his eye.

  Gene was seventeen that spring and growing taller by the minute. He’d already passed six feet. Once my sturdy baby, he’d thinned out, and I worried about him not having enough meat on his bones. I urged him to eat more and fussed over him in a way I didn’t with any of the other children. I’m afraid it was plain to see by everyone who knew us that Gene was my favorite. He sat next to me at church. In public I might brush his hair off his face or straighten the collar of his shirt. As he grew older, it embarrassed him, but he didn’t complain about my attentions. He was as devoted to me as I was to him, drawing the water from the well for me, milking the cow, feeding the chickens, doing everything he could to lighten my workload. He looked like my daddy, who he was named after, with the same shade of brown hair and dark eyes.

  He’d graduated from school and looked for work, but there was none to be had, even for a young man who’d shown considerably more ambition than his father or older brother ever had.

  The Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, was set up in 1933 to give work to young men who were unemployed and whose families were having a hard time of it. President Roosevelt had just changed the age minimum for the Corps and Gene joined up to go off on what he expected to be a great adventure, rebuilding the roads, bridges, and forests of America.

  I hated to let him go, but I realized it was the only opportunity open to him. I examined the clothes he would wear to make sure the buttons were all attached and there weren’t any rips on them. I packed one extra outfit, his best. The Corps would provide him with two new sets of work clothes, so he didn’t need to take more than that. I made him a big box lunch to eat on the bus for St. Louis.

  We drove him to the bus stop and waited with him. I hugged him goodbye without a tear and waved cheerfully as the bus pulled away. Betty Sue and Paul hung on to me and cried. George stood behind them, his face not showing his pain.

  I kept quiet on the drive home, and when we got to the house, I went up to the bedroom and shut the door. George said could hear me crying for a long time. He left me to my grief, giving Betty Sue two pennies to take Paul for a walk to the store in town and buy some candy. He said he sat on the back porch and talked to the dogs, his own way of dealing with the absence of both his boys.

  To me, the only good thing about it was that I knew Gene would always have a place to sleep and a good meal, and he would be paid one dollar a day.

  Part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the CCC hired over two million young men from 1933 to 1942 and put them to work planting forests, building dams, and protecting America’s natural resources. Roosevelt was a hero to me. I never voted Republican again.

  The house seemed empty without Gene in it. I asked God to provide an angel to keep him safe while he was away from me. I didn’t give much thought to Bud, but my heart ached with missing Gene. I comforted myself with knowing that what he was doing was good for the country and good for himself. I thought of him every day, prayed for him every night, and missed him every minute. It felt to me as if a part of who I was had left.

  Almost ten, Paul went to school but didn’t do well. He pretended to be sick more often than not, and George pampered him and let him stay home. He told his father the other children picked on him. Like Bud, he was the image of his father, already tall and lanky, but he didn’t have his father’s charm. He claimed the teachers didn’t like him, and I think he was right. I don’t think anyone liked him. He was rude and lazy and made no effort to be nice to anyone.

  George worked a day here and there as a laborer and made no attempt to help with the chores, even when he didn’t have work. He spent his time puttering around the house and barn, whistling a tuneless song. It irritated me more and more, and I found that as time went on, I sometimes wanted to smack him.

  Betty Sue was my comfort. She was usually sweet and helpful, but every now and then, showed a temper that would surprise me. It came out of nowhere. Betty Sue would play with a doll for hours, and then, vexed over some imagined bad behavior, whirl the doll over her head and smash it into the wall. At those times I swore I could see George’s mother in my little girl. I learned early on that only rag dolls were good playmates for my quick-tempered daughter. I prayed about it at night, asking God to look after her.

  Early in the summer of 1938…the money was gone.

  Chapter 32

  George came home from town one day and sat me down at the kitchen table. I could tell by the look on his face he was about to give me bad news, and I braced myself. George had never been much of a talker when the subject was serious, and I could see he was searching for the right words. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Maude, I went to the bank today, and it was closed. They say it just ran out of money and shut the doors. They don’t kno
w when it will open again, or if it ever will. Even if it does open, there’s no guarantee that our money will still be there.”

  My heart raced with panic. I’d given up hope of George finding a real job. Men who’d shown a lifetime of ambition were out of work. No one would hire George. They all liked him and smiled when they saw him coming, but he wasn’t what they were looking for in a worker.

  “What are we going to do, George?”

  “I’ve been thinking that the only thing we can do is sell out here and go stay with Bessie and John in Detroit. John writes that I can get plenty of work there.”

  I just nodded, but my heart filled with a black heaviness. The thought of leaving my home was frightening. Detroit was frightening. Caruthersville was the largest town I’d ever seen. How could I survive in a city that had buildings like the Penobscot office building I’d read about, 47 stories high. It must reach to the clouds.

  “What about the house? Are we just going to leave it?”

  “I don’t know what else we can do. There’s no one to buy it. I can’t pay the taxes. Even if the bank never asks for it, the government will take it. If we stay here, we could starve to death. We don’t have any choice, Maude.”

  I crossed my arms and jutted out my chin. “I’m not leaving my home.”

  George threw his hands in the air and slumped back in his chair. “All right, Maude. We’re not leaving. How are we going to live?”

  “I’ll take in sewing and laundry, like I did when James died. I made my way for almost ten years all on my own before you came along.”

  “Maude, for one thing, you didn’t make it on your own. You lived on Mrs. Connor’s property, and you didn’t pay rent. You ate at her house as often as you ate at your own, and you only had Lulu to think about. You must know there’s not one person in this town who can afford to hire you. Didn’t you hear what I said? The bank is closed. We lost a few hundred dollars. Some folks lost thousands, everything they saved over a lifetime.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes. What he said was true. There wasn’t anyone now who could afford to hire me to do the kind of work they could do themselves.

  I thought about the long drive to Detroit. “How are we going to get the money to get there? Are we going to sell the car and take the train? Are we going to try to drive?”

  “We have to drive, Maude. We’ll need a car.”

  “How much money do we have, George?”

  “I have about twenty dollars, but I can raise more.”

  “How can you raise more?”

  “I’ll sell as many of our things as I can. We won’t get anything near what they’re worth with everyone broke, but it’ll raise enough money to buy our gas and oil and feed us on the trip. If we get some extra, maybe we can stay in one of those motor lodges. That would be better than sleeping in the car. We have to take only what we need, Maude--our clothes, maybe a few household things, whatever we can fit in the car and still have room for the children to sit.”

  “When do you want to leave, George?”

  “Next Wednesday, I guess. We can have the sale Monday and Tuesday, then get going early the next morning. What we don’t sell, we’ll just leave here.”

  I wrote to Gene and Bud and gave them Bessie’s address so they’d know how to reach us, and then wrote to my sister Helen, and told her about our plan. I promised we’d stop to visit. George wrote to Bessie and told her when we would leave Kennett.

  Sunday morning, I told the preacher of our plan. At the end of the service he called me and the children forward and the members came, shaking my hand in the last gesture of fellowship. It was a ceremony the dwindling church had performed often in the last few years. Afterwards, Clara clutched both my hands in hers, and the two of us talked with tears running down our faces, promising we would see one another again someday. George drove off from the church with me twisted around in the seat, looking back after Clara until she was out of sight.

  George put up posters around town advertising a two-part sale. We sold most of the furniture and household things the first day, leaving the mattresses, the kitchen stove, and the table and chairs. George sold them, but with the understanding that they’d be picked up the morning of the day we left.

  I took the clothes out of the bureaus and packed them in cardboard boxes, labeling them neatly so I could find what I wanted when we got to where we were going. The parlor and the dining room were emptied.

  Fourteen-year-old Betty Sue clutched my arm and cried when they carried out the things from her bedroom. She couldn’t believe what was happening. I tried to comfort her, telling her that when we got to our new home she would have all new furniture. Paul was nearly ten. He watched like he didn’t care, studying us the whole time as if we were strange beings. More than once, I’d overheard someone say, “That boy ain’t right.”

  The second day, men came to look over the things in the barn. One of them gave George ten dollars for the wagon that had brought me and Lulu to Missouri from Tennessee. Various tools brought a nickel or a dime. George put the chickens into pens that he’d nailed together with wood and wire from the fence, and sold them by the half-dozen. He joked and laughed with his customers the way he’d always done. I watched from the upstairs window, and I hated him for it, for being able to make jokes as if our lives weren’t falling apart.

  Late in the afternoon, the people were all gone but one. George walked with him to the door of the barn and waved goodbye. The man left carrying Pawnee’s saddle and tack, the stirrups hooked over the saddle horn. George had kept it clean and oiled all this time, and the leather glistened in the setting sun.

  George watched as it was carried down the path and thrown on the back of a truck. He turned his back to the house and propped himself against the barn door. I could see his shoulders shaking, and my heart softened toward him. I hadn’t thought of his grief at all, only my own. I realized he was leaving the home his grandfather and mother had given him and everything and everyone he’d ever known.

  He didn’t come back to the house for supper. I was only dozing when he finally came to bed. He slipped under the covers as quietly as he could.

  I asked, “How much money do we have now, George?”

  “I think it will be enough.”

  “How much, George?”

  He turned his back to me and sighed. “Almost two hundred dollars. I got the best price for the saddle.” His voice choked when he said it, and I didn’t ask anything else. I hoped the two of us could get some sleep. Tomorrow would not be an easy day.

  I’d almost drifted off when he said, “I made a mess of everything. Being sheriff was the best job in town. People looked up to me, and I lost it. This house has been in my family for three generations, and I’ve lost it, too. I always had in the back of my mind that I’d buy one of Pawnee’s kin and I would get to use that saddle again, and now, it’s gone too.” His voice broke and I could tell he was crying again. “Now, I don’t even have that to remember him by.”

  I put my hand on his arm, hoping he would turn to me for comfort, but he lay as he was. I needed comforting, too, but my pride wouldn’t let me ask for it. I didn’t get much sleep, and I don’t think George did either. I heard him crying off and on during the night.

  Early in the morning, George and I loaded up the car, tying the boxes to the roof and covering them with a canvas tarp to keep any rain from soaking them. He put some of the smaller things on the center of the back seat, leaving just enough room for Betty Sue and Paul to sit. I put my sewing box on the floor by my feet, next to the box of food and water I’d fixed for the trip.

  There wasn’t enough room for everything, and George carried some of the boxes of household things back to the kitchen, saying that maybe we could send for them later. I was just getting in the car when Paul started screaming, pointing to the little wagon on the back porch. George went and got it and tied it to the back of the car. Paul quieted down and sat staring out the car window.

  We drove past the house and o
nto the road. Neither one of us looked back as we headed out of town, but my thoughts were behind me with the place where I’d borne four of my children, the curtains I’d sewn, and the wallpaper Clara and I put up. I knew George must be thinking about his father’s home, and his mother, and Pawnee.

  When we passed the cemetery, my eyes searched for the little headstone on Lulu’s grave, but I couldn’t catch sight of it, and we didn’t stop. We crossed the Mississippi River at the same place we had before. The old raft had been replaced by a new, larger one.

  George agreed to stop by my hometown so we could say goodbye to my sister Helen. We’d always intended to visit one another, but circumstances hadn’t allowed. Helen made us supper, and we spent the night. George and I slept on the bed that was Faith’s before she married and moved to Memphis. Betty Sue and Paul slept on pallets on the floor next to us.

  Helen’s house had been wired for electricity, and I marveled at it. There were white pipes that held the wires running across the ceiling and down the walls leading from the fixtures to the switches. She could flip the switch, and the whole room lit up. Tommy had running water installed and the well covered. An electric pump ran the motor, and all Helen had to do was turn a faucet. Tommy put a bathtub in the wash room and a toilet right in the house. To me, next to the toilet, the best thing was the water heater. Helen ran me a tub full of hot water, and I had my first rich-woman’s bath. I couldn’t believe it.

  I bragged on all of it to Helen. I couldn’t help but think how I would have loved to have had all that for my own home. I’d asked George about getting electricity and running water many times, and he’d told me we would get around to it someday. Now we didn’t even have a home.

  In the morning, we set out again with a full picnic basket that Helen packed for us. There were tearful goodbyes and promises to write more often. As we drove away, I realized that, as much as I loved my sister, I was much closer to Clara now than I had ever been to Helen. I wondered if I’d ever see either one of them again.