Maude
Page 21
Bessie said, “I know you’re all starving. Wash up to your elbows and then we’ll eat. You can all have a nice bath after dinner and wear some of our things until you can get more for yourself.”
So that’s what we did. After washing our hands and faces, we sat at the table, joined hands while John said the blessing, and then had our meal.
Bessie had outdone herself. There was a platter piled so high with fried chicken that I guessed three or four birds had given their lives for us. She’d made a huge bowl filled with fluffy mashed potatoes with butter melted around the curves in the top. We emptied the gravy bowl filled with golden gravy, but Bessie said there was more staying hot on the stove if we needed it. One dish held green beans that had been cooked all day with bacon drippings. Another had a pile of corn on the cob and next to it a bowl of melted butter with a little mop in it. There were white cornbread johnnycakes, fried in a skillet, and a pile of biscuits, light as a feather. It had been a long, long time since we’d seen a meal like that!
We ate until we couldn’t hold any more. Then the men, followed by Paul, went out to sit on the front porch and smoke while Betty Sue and I took turns getting a bath. I scrubbed every inch of me until there wasn’t any more dirt and washed my hair. It felt so good when I could finally get the brush through it. When I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I wanted to cry. My hair jutted out in wild, uneven clumps.
Bessie gave me clean clothes to wear, and Maxine found some for Betty Sue. The girls went up to Maxine’s room. I told Bessie about the trip, how our things got stolen on the very first night, and about the tires going flat and the transmission falling out. She cried with me when I got to the part about not being able to brush my hair and cutting it off.
While Bessie and I talked, George and Paul got cleaned up. Paul made us all laugh when he came out of the bathroom in clothes John gave him, a shirt that hung down to his knees and pants rolled up about ten times.
When we were finished with the talking, Bessie showed me the room George and I would sleep in. She’d made up a pallet by the wall for Paul. Maxine had a bed in her room for Betty Sue.
We were all saying good night when John asked me, “Maude, when did you cut your hair?”
I started giggling and couldn’t stop. “A few days back. I threw it in a stream somewhere outside of Toledo.” Bessie and I laughed wildly. Looking back on it now, I think the laughing did more to feed my soul where I was hungry than the food did.
It was late when we finally went to bed. I stretched out on the mattress and sighed. I had to fight to stay awake long enough for my nightly talk with God.
“Thank you, Lord for taking care of us and getting us to a safe place, and thank you again for that wonderful meal and for the family that prepared it for us, and thank you for sending your angel, dressed like a truck driver, to bring us the rest of the way. Bless Gene in his camp, and Bud at Fort Knox, and Bessie and John and Maxine, and keep your angels watching over Gene and Betty Sue and the other boys. Amen.”
Chapter 35
At breakfast the next morning John said he wanted to take George to the factory with him so he could apply for a job, but George said he was still tired from the trip and would go tomorrow. His sister gave him a knowing look but kept quiet. When he made an excuse the following day, Bessie walked over to the stove and picked up the big steel coffee pot with its scalding hot coffee. She held it over his lap and said, “George” in a way that immediately got the attention of everyone at the table. “Get ready and go to work with John. You got a wife and two kids to support, and that Kennett, Missouri, glad-handing you’ve been doing for the last thirty years won’t go over here.”
George didn’t say a word, just stood, put on his hat and walked to the screen door to wait for John. I looked down at the table and kept quiet, but I had to hold back a little smile. I’d actually seen a look of fear on the faces of both John and George. It gave me a little thrill.
After they left, Bessie poured us both a cup of coffee and sat with me to talk. She laughed. “I know how lazy George is. He could get away with it at home. He thinks he’s like the lilies of the field, not that he thinks he’s beautiful, but that if he keeps everyone laughing, that’s enough in the line of helping out. That won’t work here.”
I knew she was right, and I was grateful she was strong enough to make George get up and get to a job. Sometimes, I wished I had the same gift. My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just been able to make George behave the way he should have, but I guess I simply didn’t have it in my nature to boss people around. George was actually afraid of Bessie. Nobody in my whole life was ever afraid of me.
When George didn’t come back for three hours, I told Bessie, “I hope his being gone means he got the job.”
She gave me a smile. “Don’t worry about it. John’s a foreman now, and they think right highly of him. They’ll hire George on his say-so, and I’ll explain to George that I expect him to work hard enough that John isn’t embarrassed about it.”
Betty Sue went to school with Maxine. She was all excited about it, and I felt relieved to see her smiling again. I kept Paul home with me for the first day. Even at ten years old, he hung onto my arm like he was afraid of everything. Bessie and I went down to Jefferson to a store called Goodwill. It sold used clothes and furniture. She said to get enough clothes to tide us over for a while and she would pay for it. George could pay her back out of his first check. She said, “Betty Sue would probably rather pick out her own things. She can wear Maxine’s clothes for a while. Maxine has enough for five or six girls.”
I picked out a stack of clothes for myself, George, and Paul. They even had underwear that looked almost new. Those two used dresses I took looked more expensive than any new ones I’d ever made for myself. They had a lot of fancy seams and nice buttons. Bessie said a lot of rich people gave their things to the Goodwill when they got tired of them. It was hard for me to imagine that. All my life, I only had new clothes when I’d outgrown the old ones or they were too worn and frayed to be respectable.
After that, I kept my sewing kit for mending, but I never made another dress. It was cheaper to get one at Goodwill than to buy fabric and make one.
George came home with John at the end of the day, and even though I waited for him to talk about it, he didn’t say anything about the work he’d been doing.
The evening passed pleasantly enough. Bessie and John had a big Motorola radio in the front room, and we all sat around and stared at it while we listened to Jack Benny. I loved it. I’d heard radios before, at Clara’s and at the homes of some of my other friends from church, but since George would never do anything about getting electric power for our home, we never had one. It was just like having Jack Benny in the living room.
On Sunday morning we dressed for church and went with Bessie, John, and Maxine to their new church home. Even George went without a fight. He knew Bessie expected it.
The church met in a rented storefront on Jefferson Avenue. The windows had been covered with ivory-colored drapes, and instead of the long pews that all the churches at home had, there were old seats that looked strange to me. Bessie said they came from an old movie house. They were arranged in a ‘v’ pattern. At the front was a lectern sitting on a table.
I’d never been in a church that didn’t have its own building. They didn’t use the name, Holiness, either, but called themselves the Pentecostal Church. Once the service got going, I saw that it was the same as my church as home, and it filled my heart.
Having a meeting in a storefront was a curiosity to me, but the members were welcoming, and in only a few minutes I relaxed and felt at home.
George worked at the factory for two weeks before he told me how he felt about it. He lay on his back in the bed and sighed. I could tell he was wanting to tell me something, so I just said, “What?”
“I hate working at the factory. It’s dirty and noisy, and you have to punch a time card. I want to do something else.”
That ended the discussion. When George brought home his first paycheck, we rented the house next door to Bessie. It was just like hers, only reversed, a two-story house with small porches on the front and back, and a narrow driveway on one side that went to a garage that bordered the alley out back. The two houses were like all the others on the block, so close together that if you reached out of the window of one house, you could touch someone reaching out of the other. Bessie told me it was a good deal because it had four bedrooms, and the landlord would pay for the water, and George would only have to pay for the electricity and gas. I’d never thought about paying for water.
It was as if I’d stepped into another world. Certainly, it was an easier life for me. I loved the bathroom, the running water, the flush toilet, with the box on the wall over it and the pull chain that washed the bowl. It was like a miracle. I didn’t have to go outside and draw water from the well at the end of the porch to carry inside for cooking and laundry and for baths, then empty the tubs when they were used. The bathtub was so big, I could lie in it with my legs stuck almost straight out.
Bessie and I had a good laugh at the idea that we would need to buy an alarm clock, since we weren’t allowed to keep a rooster inside the city limits.
There was an icebox in the kitchen, and Bessie said that she would tell the iceman the next time he came to add us to his route, so there was no more going to a root cellar for things that needed to be kept cool in the summer.
The gas stove was a wonderful thing to me. No more watching out for snakes in the woodpile when I needed to build up the fire in the kitchen stove, and no more going outside when it was freezing cold to get wood.
In the basement was a huge coal-burning furnace. Bessie told me that in the winter a truck came and dropped the coal through a small trap-door into the little coal room. From there it was shuttled into the furnace by a large corkscrew-looking thing called a hopper. George certainly liked the sound of that. No more cutting firewood for him. I worried about all these new expenses that we had never had before--rent, electricity, coal, and ice. The depression was easing its grip on the national economy, but we would still have to be very careful.
We moved our few things next door and John drove George around in his truck to places where they could get used furniture. Bessie loaned us her extra mattresses for a few days, and Paul slept on a pallet until George found enough mattresses for us. When he brought them home, I took a lamp and inspected them, front and back, before I let him bring them into the house. I knew enough to make sure there weren’t any bedbugs. George said he’d expected as much and examined them before he paid the man, but I double-checked anyway.
I don’t know if having running water made the laundry any easier for me. I didn’t have to pump from a well anymore, but even with a tap and sink in the basement, I had to carry clothes downstairs, wash them on the board, rinse them, wring them out, and then take the wet clothes to the back yard to hang them in the sun. It wore me out. I tried to get Paul to help me, but he would run off and hide until I was finished and George wouldn’t make him do any kind of work at all.
The second week we were in the house, George found a nice table and four chairs that were only ten dollars second hand. George and John brought something home with them every week until the house was furnished well enough to get by. The best thing was the radio, not a big console that sat right on the floor like Bessie and John had, but one that looked like a church steeple and sat on the table. We gathered around it at night and listened to Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, and best of all, on Saturdays we listened to the Grand Ole Opry. It was sponsored by The National Life and Accident Insurance Company and Prince Albert Tobacco. When a salesman from National Life knocked on my door one day, out of my appreciation for the Opry, I bought a thousand dollar policy on George. The nice young man came by every week to collect the dime payments and to mark in the little passbook he had given me that my premiums were up to date. A lot of the men who worked in the factories got killed on the job and I worried about what would happen to me and the children if I lost George. I was pretty sure I couldn’t make enough money sewing and doing laundry to support us.
My favorites on the Opry were Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys, especially when Roy sang Great Speckled Bird, and Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Some nights we also heard Red Foley. George claimed he was a cousin, but I didn’t believe him. I asked Bessie about it one day, and Bessie said it was the first she’d heard of it.
We all had our favorite shows, the Opry for me, and Jack Benny for George, which I thought was no co-incidence, him being so stingy and all. Paul was hypnotized by The Shadow, and Betty Sue loved when the big stars like Bette Davis or Katherine Hepburn did a drama on The Lux Radio Theatre. We all gathered around the radio after dinner each night. I sat and rocked in the perfectly good rocking chair George found in an alley. I’d scrubbed it down on the back porch, just in case, and then placed it next to a small lamp table in the living room.
I bought a small radio for the kitchen. While I cooked and cleaned during the day I listened to Stella Dallas and My Gal Sunday. It felt like walking into another world, into someone else’s life more complicated than my own, and I found that comforting.
Chapter 36
In spite of all the luxuries we had in Detroit compared to Missouri, I still didn’t feel quite at home. I bought sheets and made proper curtains for all the rooms and crocheted pineapple pattern doilies to go on the backs and arms of the upholstered pieces. It made me feel more as if it were my home, even if it was rented.
I gave thanks to God for the life we lived. We had plenty to eat, a church home, and a decent house. I enjoyed keeping it clean and decorating it, even if it weren’t mine. I asked God to forgive me for the resentment I felt toward George and for my sometimes un-Christian attitude. It seemed to me that as I grew older, it was more and more difficult to forgive others. I’d been taught that it wasn’t right to ask God for forgiveness for my own sins if I couldn’t do the same for someone else.
When I could afford it, I bought red and white checked fabric and made a tablecloth and curtains for the kitchen. The cloth cost an outrageous price, ten cents a yard, but I told myself that it would cheer things up. I still put a few cents in my savings when I could. It didn’t come from selling eggs, but I took it out of what George gave me for the groceries. If I found something on sale, I put the difference from what I would normally have paid in my sewing box and, after a while, it seemed like my money. Every now and then I would take a dollar’s worth of change and get myself a one-dollar bill for it.
There wasn’t much area for a garden, but I cleared a patch in the back yard and planted tomatoes and green beans. My gardening skills stood me in good stead, and the next fall I had a nice little crop with enough to trade some of my harvest with Bessie, who’d planted her own garden with turnips, green peppers, and cabbage.
Even though we’d been separated for a long time, Bessie and I picked up our old friendship right off. It was comforting to me to have a woman friend who understood my situation and to share my life. I admired Bessie’s strength and the way the men obeyed her.
Chapter 37
By 1940, I was forty-eight years old and, for the most part, pretty much contented with my life. Betty Sue quickly made friends in school. George worked steadily, if not happily. I suspected it was more out of fear of Bessie than anything else. He managed to get his job at the Buick factory changed from the assembly line to that of custodian. When he first told me about it, I asked him, “What is a custodian?”
“A janitor. I clean up
and look after things. I like it better than the line.”
I just shook my head. If George preferred it, it must be easier work.
Paul still missed school most of the time. George was always telling me to let him stay home because he wasn’t learning anything anyway, and it seemed to be true. At twelve years old, he could read and write only a few words. His teachers suggested sending him to a special school for slow learners, but George refused to even hear about it.
One day they sent Paul home with a note from his teacher, Miss Spence. It asked for a parent to come in and talk to the teacher at the end of school on the next Monday. I went in like they asked, but I was nervous, scared a little by the size of the school building, Bellevue Elementary. It was a great difference from the one-room school where I’d studied. With the help of a student, I found the right room. A pretty young woman and an older man were waiting for me.
They both smiled at me warmly and waved me to a seat at one of the desks. I clutched my handbag on my lap and waited for them to say whatever it was they had on their minds.
The woman began. “Mrs. Foley, Paul hasn’t made any progress at all in his classes, and we think we may be able to help him. There’s a special school he could go to, one with a medical staff, that could see if he has a physical problem and maybe correct it.”
I frowned. “Where is this school?”
The man leaned towards me. “I’m Dr. Goodwin. I’m the supervisor at the school. It’s in Oxford, about thirty miles north of here.”
“Thirty miles north? How would I get him there every day? We don’t even have a car.”