by Thom Jones
Anyhow, Pa gave me the keys to an old Ford that was parked under the oak tree back behind the car shop. It was a convertible, and me and Barbara Carpenter drove it down Lake Street past the stockyards, glad to stir up a little breeze, it was such a hot day. Of course, I didn’t know how to drive and we smashed into a fire hydrant in Montgomery. No one was hurt but we had to walk home along the side of Lake Street, which was so hot that day the tar was melting and the heat of the pavement burned through our saddle shoes. The dog days of August. I told Pa what happened and he didn’t get mad or anything, he just told one of the mechanics who had some spare time to take me out in a new Chevrolet and learn me how to drive—that’s what he sold, Chevrolets—and when I learned how to drive, I had a new car. Pa was good that way. When my sister Ida wanted to play tennis, he had the tennis courts built and Ida got fancy tennis clothes, but after a few weeks she got tired of it. I think Pa just built them to show off because at the time all of the rich people were putting up tennis courts. Pa had them build two courts and put a big fence around them so no one would have to run down tennis balls. They still have morning glories growing on the fence. If my arthritis isn’t too bad I like to go and look at them and smell the lilacs when they bloom.
Tootie could play tennis and beat anyone in the whole south end of town. Grown men she could beat, but when she played Pa she would let him win even though Pa was pretty bad at tennis apart from the fact that he was a big and strong man.
Pa had this punching bag in the basement and he liked to punch on it and show off, and all the kids in the neighborhood got pretty good at it. Because he liked kids and knew how to fool with them, all the kids in the neighborhood thought Pa was swell. I could punch the bag like all the kids, but Tootie could actually box and would box with Pa. She could beat up any of the boys, even the ones that were quite a bit older. This went on until she was about thirteen and she got her period, which was normal but really threw Tootie for a loop.
You know, Pa could play the fiddle and dance and call square dances. Everybody liked Pa. The mayor and big shots in town, the poor people—just about everybody liked Pa. He had Ma pack lunches for us in a straw basket so he could take us kids out on summer picnics, usually to the gravel pit for swimming. In the fall he liked to take us out bird-watching and got binoculars for everyone and would point out the birds. There was all kinds of different ones in those days. The best present he ever gave Tootie was a book on tropical birds, and she used to tell Pa she was going off into the jungle someday to see birds like this. Ma never went along on the picnics—she always worked the store—but she was glad for us to go.
All of us girls were pretty, but Tootie was the best. She looked like a movie star. She looked like Rita Hayworth. All the boys was after her. She cut her hair short and dressed like a boy, but her beauty came through; you just couldn’t hold back that kind of beauty. Pa was drinking bad by then, losing money, giving it to women, ruining his business, taking money from Ma. She kept her store money in Dutch Master cigar boxes or White Owl boxes, and he would get to drinking and just take it from her until she got to hiding it. One time he pulled out a .32 pistol and stuck it in her neck up in the bedroom because she wouldn’t give him any money. She was pregnant with Moonie at the time and nearly lost her. Pa called Ma filthy names and kicked her down the steps. It was terrible, but in those days things like that was common, Pa being drunk—scenes like that you used to hear about regular and think nothing of it. That’s just how life was in those days.
When Pa pulled out his .32 that was the only time he ever laid a hand on Ma, but he had done worse things. All of us girls had to run the store while Ma laid there in bed worried about Pa and went into labor. No sooner did Ma give premature birth to Moonie, the fifth girl, than Pa came home sick to death. They brought him home because he had gone blind drinking bad moonshine booze. It was Prohibition times and he ruined his liver. I remember the doctor said there was nothing they could do. Pa screamed something horrendous and vomited blood all over the bedroom for five days before he died. We girls had to take care of him. Ma was busy with Moonie and wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and he laid there and died in the same bed where his youngest daughter had just been born.
Really I was the main one who had to take care of Pa and look after Moonie and run the store to boot. I was the oldest and stuck with all of the responsibility.
Sometime after the funeral a lawyer man came and told Ma that they were going to take the property away because of all the debts Pa had left. Ma got another lawyer and told him that if she could keep the store she would pay him back all the money Pa owed, which was $63,000. In those days that was like millions. But Ma worked the store day and night and paid back the money.
Of all the girls, Ma didn’t show any favoritism except maybe for Moonie. When Moonie was little, she had curls and looked like Shirley Temple. All of the customers in the store would come in and rave about her and make a fuss. It wasn’t Ma so much as it was the customers. Moonie seemed even prettier than Tootie because she liked being feminine and liked clothes and dressing up, but whenever Tootie halfway tried to look like a woman, she was gorgeous. She had the most beautiful shiny red hair like you see on those Irish. Beautiful smoochy lips, a pretty face—there’s no denying. She just couldn’t hide it.
When Tootie was about sixteen, the boys got after her something awful. She wouldn’t go out with them. She would play baseball and basketball with them and horse around with them because she was still this awful tomboy, but she wouldn’t “fool” with them. Tootie got sick headaches like Ma—they had that in common—and we would have to go up in her room and put ice packs on her head. It didn’t seem like Tootie to get sick, because she was so tough—because she was such a toughie and could go without sleep and work like a man—but when she got headaches she saw lights dancing in her brain and talked to angels. Sometimes she talked to Jesus. All of these headaches came after her first menstruation.
Everything Tootie did had to be just so. She did good in school because of this. She was the valedictorian of the high-school class. She went off to college and studied to be a doctor. One time she came home for Christmas and told me the men in college was after her and she didn’t want any fool man. This is because she was her daddy’s girl and no man in the world could be like her Pa for her. Pa was far from perfect but he was Tootie’s pal, and whenever you told her how Pa kicked Ma down the stairs and pulled out his .32, Tootie would walk away or she would defend Pa. Once she hit Ida in the face over a quarrel about Pa and broke her nose. Tootie could hit like a man. It was a curse that she was so beautiful, and at medical school she got fat to cover it up. She went into a fat period. Tootie was the first woman doctor in all of town. Ma helped—it was the German way to get education and better yourself in life. Tootie won scholarships and went to the University of Chicago, which is where all of them intellectuals went. She inherited Ma’s spunk and wasn’t afraid of nothing.
Ma sent me to secretary school, but I was running with Chunky then and quit after three months. Ida married Harry and he was good to her, although he liked to run with women and cheat. Harry got rich and moved them to De Kalb, and we didn’t see that much of them after that. Moonie married Tom when she was eighteen; then after the war he left her for some floozy and she had a nervous breakdown and we had to look after her and the baby until she got over it and married Wilson.
Mary Lou, the second oldest and the one most like Tootie, got married to Monk and moved to Oswego. Ma ran the store on her own except there were always grandkids to take the clinkers out of the furnace and shovel coal, stock the shelves, and do all of the heavy work, and we girls was never far away. Moonie never did much to help in the store. She was the opposite of Tootie. She was crazy for men. Happy-go-lucky whenever one came around.
I can remember the way Ma used to stand behind the counter in the store and talk to customers. She had a way of standing, her legs one in front of the other but spread wide. She always wore a cotton
dress with an apron, and when she would talk to customers she would always say, “Ain’t that swell?” No matter what they were telling her it was always “Ain’t that swell?” She had a big belly and little stick legs. She was left-handed too. Ma was pretty when she was young, but when she got older she lost her looks. She looks like George Washington in the last picture I have of her, and her little stick legs look like Babe Ruth’s.
Chunky and I lived in the house across from the store. Chunky was a weakling and never kept a steady job. He was sickly. He was always seeing Tootie about some ailment, and she made him feel better. If she couldn’t kid him out of his troubles she gave him some pills. What they were was sugar pills. We all had to laugh because we knew, but Chunky was in the dark and said those pills made him feel like a new man. Tootie liked Chunky and would listen to him after he got religion. Tootie was interested in religion since the time she got her headaches and saw the dancing lights of heaven and talked to the angels. One day she came home and told Ma she had joined the Catholic Church. We were Lutherans, German Lutherans, and Ma just about died. I remember there was a big fight about it in the store. And while the fight was going on there was a terrible thunderstorm with lightning. Lightning hit the walnut tree, which sat just outside the window near the cash register. Scared me enough to kill me. It sounded like the world coming to an end, with a smell like I never knew.
When Ma was a kid living out on the prairie, one of thirteen kids, she was sitting by a Franklin stove when lightning struck through the stovepipe and knocked her out. That’s why she had lightning rods on the store—three of them. There was one on the gas station. Three on the garage. Two on the little house. One on Weasie’s shack. One on the back house. Two on the barn, but none on that blame walnut tree. Boom! It sounded like the world cracked in half.
Ma always got upset during a thunderstorm; she would get to shaking, and she was doing this during the fight with Tootie. I remember the electric went out and I was lighting candles in the store when she and Tootie got into the fight about the Catholic Church. Ma was almost as upset as the time Pa pulled the pistol on her. The storm and the fight all at once. Ma’s cat was so scared it started tearing around the walls until it was running on the ceiling through the power of centrifugal force. Nobody believes me, but that cat was running on the ceiling, completely upside down, or so it seemed to me. Maybe I was wrong.
It began to hail the size of grapefruits. They always say when it hails that it was the size of golf balls or grapefruits, although if you were to see it, you would see that it hailed the size of BB’s. But I was there, and it hailed the size of grapefruits! Smashed up the roof on Mrs. Idoc’s house. Tootie left in her doctor’s Buick, which got dented on top from all that hail, and I had to help Ma upstairs and put ice packs on her head.
A week later we got a letter from Tootie—she had gone and joined the Catholic Church and they made her a nun. About a year after that we got a letter from her from Africa. All these beautiful stamps on an envelope that looked like wax paper. Tootie was a doctor in a leper colony. She said she was happy serving the Lord.
Because of Chunky, I left the Lutheran Church and became a Baptist. Chunky was a street-corner preacher. He worked odd jobs when he could. Then he died of heart trouble at thirty-one. The last thing he said to me was, “I told you I was sick, Junk. But now I’m going to a better place.”
After Ma died, blind with diabetes, and the money was split up, Tootie wrote a letter to Ma’s lawyer and said she wanted all of her money to go to the mission to buy medicine for all of them lepers. Mary Lou tricked the lawyer—she was smart and had a head for figures. Of all of the girls, Mary Lou was closest to Tootie and wrote to her in Africa every month telling her about her life with Monk and raising Pug and Barney and so on. It was a happy life. Mary Lou didn’t have to work because Monk made good with his welding and so on and eventually became the plant manager at the Durabilt. So Mary Lou wrote her happy news and told her what everyone in the family was doing, not mentioning the bad things that happen in all families. Mary Lou tricked that lawyer and held money back for Tootie, and it was a good thing.
When Moonie called to tell me Mary Lou had cancer, she just said, “Mary Lou called me and said ‘The doctor told me I’ve got cancer in my breast.’” Just as plain as that. Moonie said that Mary Lou didn’t seem that worried about it. She said she’d had a lump for two years and tried to make it go away by practicing Christian Science. When Monk found out about it he took her to the doctor and they took off the breast. Monk was pretty upset. He could count on Mary Lou. Mary Lou and the kids were all he lived for. They took off the breast and Mary Lou went home. She used to tell me, “I haven’t got cancer anymore. I can just tell.” But it went to her lungs. They had to put her in the hospital on oxygen, but she finally suffocated. I hope I don’t die that way, and with diabetes I probably won’t. Diabetes gives you a heart attack; Chunky said it feels like a truck driving on your chest. Real bad pain, but it’s over in ten or fifteen minutes. Ain’t that swell, the way we have to live and die and suffer on this earth?
It was a relief to see Mary Lou’s suffering end, but still, after the death, Monk was left with a hole in his life. He didn’t want another woman, although Pug and Barney tried to tell him that it would be a good idea. Then his dog died and Monk went through a drinking spell. Nobody wanted to be around him. That’s how the family is about drinking—down on it. Ma drilled that into us pretty good.
Then Tootie comes home from Africa in her nun clothes. She isn’t pretty no more, she’s almost fifty years old. Her face is pinched and white, though you’d think it would have been tan—as black as the ace. It’s a hard life over there in Africa, with bad food and constant work, she says. “The futility of it all,” she says. “Such…futility.” She talked like the world was coming to an end, and that wasn’t like Tootie, even with her headaches. Futility, I had to look the word up in a dictionary. It means hopeless.
The Catholic Church gave Tootie a leave, and so she gets Monk straight off the booze and puts me on insulin shots. She didn’t come home for Ma’s funeral or for Ida’s funeral after Ida died of kidney failure, but aside from Pa, Mary Lou was her closest friend and she flew home on a jet plane.
I asked her if she seen all of those birds in the jungle, and she said she did. I said, “Tootie, you look bad. What happened to you?” She said a big mamba snake, nine feet long, went crazy and bit five Africans and some goats. Tootie cut off its tail with a hoe, but that only made it mad and it chased after her and bit her too, over there on the Dark Continent. Her life and health was bad ever since. Still she gave me hell because of what I eat, and I told her that if the Lord wanted to take me, I was ready to go. I would go up to heaven and see Chunky again and Wilbur, my second husband. Since Tootie was a nun, I asked her who I was supposed to be married to—Chunky, my first man, or Wilbur? Tootie told me she didn’t believe in God. I said, “Tootie, you are a nun, and when you was little and had your headaches, the angels talked to you and Jesus talked to you,” and she just laughed a bitter laugh. She told me that being a nun was no different than if she had stayed in Aurora and lived a normal life with a man. She said there wasn’t nothing to it and for sure there was no God. It was all just make-believe. But Tootie took Monk to the AA. She had a power over people and could make them well without giving them shots or medicine, she believed in herself so. Every day for ninety days she drove Monk to the AA, sometimes two and three times a day. In this she was a hypocrite, because she didn’t have any more belief in God, but she could still lay it out pretty good, and for Monk this was the cure, not the AA. She even got him to quit smoking.
One night Tootie came by in her car and caught me eating fried pork rinds and peanut brittle. It made me guilty but I told her, “Tootie, you can talk to me until you’re blue in the face; I ain’t going to change. I’m too old for it. A person has to eat.”
She gave me hell upside and down and then drove me down to Oswego to check on Monk. After
Mary Lou died, he’d kept everything in the house the same—we walked in through the back porch as always, and Monk was fixing himself something to eat in the microwave. It was like old times. He was glad to see us and he had a lot he had to get out. This was before his son Barney died and he gave up hope altogether. We went and sat in the living room, and Monk looked at Tootie and she looked at him, and I saw real love between the two of them. The love of two friends. Monk had the emphysema and it was hard for him to talk. He said, “All that welding in bad conditions with no ventilation, three packs of Chesterfields a day. Coming up in the depression, it was hard. I had this old Oldsmobile—I was just a kid and it was my first car. It had a split windshield and the left side was broken out and, I don’t know, it must have been January. I remember I went over to my girlfriend’s house in that car and drank Coke and we played the player piano—‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’ ‘The Dark Town Strutters’ Ball’—when it started to blow real hard and I realized how late it was and I had to get home. I had to be to work the next day. The dagblam Oldsmobile overheated. We didn’t have antifreeze in those days but ran alcohol through the radiator, and the closer I got to town, the hotter the car got and the slower it was going until I finally made it downtown and stopped at the Strand. A Chinaman there gave me some water for my radiator. I practically had to beg for it, since it was midnight and they were closing. No gloves. Twelve below. Lightweight coat. No hat. By the time I got to the store the car was overheating again, and it kept going slower and slower until I had to downshift into first gear as I drove out Jericho Road toward my mother’s house. Finally the old car lugged to a stop and smoke started pouring out of the engine. I flipped up the hood and fire was coming out of the carburetor, so I ran over to the side of the road, scooping up frozen snow with my bare hands alongside a barbed-wire fence—can you imagine that?—trying to put it out. But that didn’t work, so I beat the flames with my jacket, and that caught on fire, and by the time the fire went out I was crying because I knew the engine was ruined and I just wanted to die. I was out there on Jericho Road by Blackberry Creek and I saw a light go on in Bobby O’Neil’s house and saw a face come up to the window and wipe away the steam. Bobby made a cup with his hands to look out—I can see his face now with that stupid look of his; he was half crazy—but then the light went out, and I was too ashamed to go knock on the door and ask for help, so I got in the car and huddled down, and before long I was in and out of sleep and realized that if I didn’t get up and do something I was going to freeze to death. Tootie, the wind was blowing so hard I had to walk home backwards! I thought the wind was going to cut me in half. Three miles of this. Frostbite ears, frostbite feet. My mother soaked them in cool water and put me to bed covered with wool blankets, and I just passed out, didn’t get to work on time, and was fired. There I was. The girlfriend two-timed me a day later, my car was shot, and no job. People don’t know how hard it was in those days.” This is what Monk said. Tootie and I got nuts the way he was telling the story, and we was laughing so hard we practically wet our pants. I hadn’t got nuts and laughed like that since Ida was alive. Ida could be fun and get you nuts—make you have a good time.