Deliver Us from Evie

by M. E. Kerr

“He was too late,” said Dad. “He waited too long to go down to Florida.”

  “Do it now, whatever you’ve got to do,” Mom said. “You’ll never do it any younger.”

  “I’ve been doing it until this.” From Dad.

  Mom hooked her arm in his and said, “Me, too.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’m in the wrong movie. Where’s the one about the rich advertising guy?”

  “That must be a coming attraction,” said Dad.

  When we finally did get back inside our place, it looked like a shipwreck. We pumped water out for days, the odor of sewage and muck making us gag, everything we owned sodden, our walls covered with colonies of black, green, and purple mold and fungus.

  “This is it!” Doug said. “This does it! Good-bye to this place forever!”

  Nobody gave him an argument.

  36

  EVIE CAME BACK FOR a visit in late fall.

  “I wouldn’t know this place,” she said.

  “You should have seen it a month ago,” said Mom, “before Parr and Dad put on the new siding and Sheetrock.”

  “And Cord,” I said.

  Evie said, “Good old Cord.”

  “He hasn’t deserted us,” Dad said.

  Doug was back at the university. Evie and Patsy were driving over to see him the next day, on their way to visit Mrs. Duff.

  Evie brought Dad and me back black berets from Paris, and Dad was wearing his, eating lunch at the kitchen table. We hadn’t laid new linoleum. The floor was scarred with marks left from mold and water damage. We’d nailed it back, what we could find of it, and we’d added planks from what was once our barn.

  Evie’d let her hair grow down to her shirt collar. She had on tight black pants, Doc Martens, and a white canvas shell she’d bought in Rome.

  She’d dropped Patsy off at Duffarm, one of the few places still intact after the floods. The Buick they’d rented in St. Louis was parked in what was left of our driveway.

  Dad said, “How come you didn’t bring us back a video of your travels? I think at least we deserve a travelog, being as we’re never going to see Paris or Rome.”

  “Or Florence and Madrid,” said Evie, “or even New Orleans, Miami, or Denver, Colorado, if you keep insisting on being farmers.”

  Evie couldn’t believe we were rebuilding in exactly the same spot.

  “What can travel around the world and still stay in one corner?” Dad asked her.

  “You and your National Geographics?”

  “A postage stamp,” said Dad.

  “That’s about the size of it,” said Evie. “How are you going to manage, Dad?”

  It was the first time she called him anything. They’d been talking without him saying Evie or her saying Dad, even though I was Parr and Mom was Mom.

  “Part of our deal was for Atlee to will us his prize breeders,” said Dad, “and we got them to high ground okay. Eventually those hogs will buy a barn for more.”

  Sometimes I thought life was about trade-offs. A levee breaking would ease some lands, but drown others. A good neighbor’s death would save our necks. A flood with all its hard lessons would soften our ways of looking at things.

  Dad said, “Parr here has turned into a pretty good carpenter.”

  “We wouldn’t have been able to start up again without Parr,” said Mom.

  “Parr’s not going to be around forever,” I promised.

  “Nothing is,” said Dad. “We learned that.”

  “Sometimes I miss this place so much!” said Evie.

  “Good thing you came back,” Dad said. “You won’t miss it so much the way it is now.”

  “It’s in my blood, Dad. I’ll always come back, as long as I’m welcome.”

  “Evie”—Dad finally got her name out—“you’re like the railroad worker’s daughter who got tired of being tied down at home. You made tracks for a better station in life.”

  There we were, the four of us again, laughing around the table. It seemed like only the table had changed. We were using an up-ended hog crate in place of the one that had floated off.

  Mom and I walked Evie down to the car, with Pete and Grade chasing after us.

  “You talking to Mr. Duff?” Mom asked her.

  “If he talks to me, I am. We’ll see.”

  “Thanks for the nightie, honey. I never had anything from Paris, France…. Did you buy yourself some new clothes?”

  “I didn’t buy myself a nightie.” Evie laughed.

  Mom said, “No, I didn’t think that you did.”

  “Are you still seeing Angel, Parr?”

  “She ditched me,” I said. “I got ditched like your Pontiac did…. I’m real sorry about that.”

  “I’ve got no use for a car in New York, little brother. We’ll be staying there now. We found an apartment.”

  Evie stood still and gave a last look around. Then she bent down to pet the Labs. “So long, you two.”

  When she stood up, she hugged me, then Mom. I think she was crying when she got behind the wheel of the Buick. I could feel tears starting to sting my eyes, too.

  She sent us a little two-fingered salute and began backing out.

  “Tell Patsy hi!” I shouted.

  Mom started to walk away. Then she turned around, cupped her hands to her mouth, and called out, “Don’t you two be strangers!”

  A Personal History by M. E. Kerr

  My real name is Marijane Meaker.

  When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.

  My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.

  I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.

  I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)

  Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.

  Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His America
n family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the New York Times called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”

  One of the hardest books for me to write was Little Little, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.

  I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called Deliver Us from Evie. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she wouild be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.

  When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called Your Eyes in Stars.

  Growing up, I was friends with a boy whose family was in the funeral business. As the only male, he was expected to take over the business when he grew up. Can you imagine looking forward to that in your future? Neither could Jack, who inspired I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me.

  My book Night Kites is about AIDS. To my knowledge, it was the first print book that featured two gay men who have contracted AIDS, rather than having the illness come about because of a blood transfusion. When we first learned of AIDS in 1981, everyone grew afraid of old friends who were gay males. There was a cruel joke that “gay” stood for “got AIDS yet?” But soon we realized AIDS was not just a gay problem. The book is set in the Hamptons, though much of the action takes place on a Missouri farm.

  I have also written a teenage autobiography, called Me Me Me Me Me, which deals with my years growing up in upstate New York during the thirties and forties. My older brother, Ellis, was a fighter pilot in the naval air force, seeing action over Japan. After World War II, he fought in Vietnam for our secret airline Air America, and later in Korea. He was my favorite relative until Vietnam. We had a major falling-out over the war when he called me a “peacenik.” We never felt the same about each other after that, up until his death in the nineties. My much younger brother has lived with his family most of his life in Arizona. We don’t see as much of each other as we’d like because of the distance between our homes.

  I have always given my parents credit for my becoming a writer. My father was a great reader. Our living room was filled with walls of books. I grew up with him reading to me, and ultimately began reading any novel he did. But I am a writer largely due to my mom’s love of gossip. Our venetian blinds were always at a tilt in our house because Mother watched the neighbors day and night. Many of her telephone conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!” On execution nights in our prison, my mother and her girlfriends huddled outside in a car, waiting for the executioner to go inside. He was one of ten men who entered the prison together on execution night, so no one snooping could know who had really pulled the switch.

  I have taught writing for thirty-four years at nearby Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. We benefit, in part, the Springs Scholarship Fund. My teaching inspired me to write Blood on the Forehead: What I Know about Writing. A dozen members who had never finished a book became published writers after joining the class, and we also have members who are already professional writers. Currently, I am in the middle of a memoir called Remind Me. The title comes from an old Mabel Mercer song:

  Remind me not to find you so attractive

  Remind me that the world is full of men

  Portrait of Meaker, drawn by Louise Fitzhugh from a baby picture.

  Seven-year-old Meaker, her mother, and her brother Ellis in Auburn, New York.

  Meaker (front left) with her mother, her brother Ellis, her father, and several other Meakers at the home of British relatives in Brighton in 1938.

  Meaker as a girl scout in Auburn in 1939.

  Meaker, age seventeen, with her first car, a 1937 LaSalle convertible with a rumble seat, and a sailor from Sampson Naval Base. The bane of her parents’ existences—both the base and the sailors.

  Meaker and Jim Sears at a fraternity dance in Missouri in 1948.

  Meaker with Irving the dog in East Hampton, New York, in 1976.

  Meaker (front), with close friend and author Tom Baird and Barbara Dicks of Harper & Row in 1980.

  Portrait of Meaker at age sixty-two.

  Meaker with Tom Baird in 1989.

  Meaker holding Gerbils the dog, next to ER the Siamese cat, in East Hampton in 1989.

  Meaker and neighbor John “Trip” Timmerman in East Hampton in December 1991.

  Meaker, her brother Charles, and her grandniece Tracy Hovelin in August 1999.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by M. E. Kerr

  Cover design by Barbara Brown

  978-1-4804-5540-5

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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