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To Dan
Chapter One
M y name is Billie Standish. William Marie Standish.
It’s pretty clear what my parents’ expectations were. The “Marie” was a nod to Daddy’s mother because she died two months before I was born. Otherwise, who knows? I might have been William Edward.
My parents were told at my birth there would be no more babies. So you might say my name was down payment for using up their one chance to have a son.
For a long time I was mostly invisible. That was okay, though. Once you’ve figured out you can’t do anything right it’s just good sense not to call undue notice your way. Why step out of the shadows and get yelled at for blocking somebody’s light?
Besides, my mama’s always had the kind of temper that gets the nearest dog kicked once in a while just for being there. Being invisible had its benefits.
My parents are farmers like most folks around Cumberland, so it wasn’t hard to stay out of sight. Working to cobble together a living between what little land they owned and what they could rent didn’t exactly get them home for weekends and paid vacations.
Most families either had sons or made do with fewer acres. Not ours. Mama rode a tractor as many hours as Daddy, and they worked as much ground as any two people could. It had them gone early and home late and dog tired pretty much year-round, but it also kept us living at least a little better than some. I didn’t have to go home from school at lunchtime and eat potatoes or cold cereal like some kids did.
We weren’t rich by anybody’s yardstick. I knew better than to ask for new clothes unless my shoes were absolutely too tight or the queen of England was invited to our house for supper. But I always went back to school in the fall with new stuff. I had a few extras. I had enough.
Providing enough and having a girl instead of a boy had put a lot of calluses on Mama’s hands, though, and she was willing to grant me title of ownership to every single one of them. She could work in the fields, I couldn’t. Her call, but my fault. There’s no figuring it out. Believe me, I’ve tried.
You’d think free maid service would count for something, but it never seemed to pay down my account even a little bit.
They say I stayed with my Grandma Wharton a lot when I was little, but she died when I was seven and I barely remember. I’ve mainly been on my own since then when Mama and Daddy are gone planting, gone cultivating, gone harvesting. Gone plowing or mending fences. Just gone.
Nothing much bigger than a silent fart can get past the neighbors in a town this size, though, so I suppose I was looked after in a way.
The summer of 1968, I was eleven years old. The last day of school was May 24 and also the fifth day in a row I walked home in a bone-soaking rain. I had to strip to the skin and hang my wet stuff on the clothesline strung across the back porch before I went on into the house. And then find something to do. Find anything to do. Fill enough hours to keep from feeling alone as a castaway washed up on a deserted island.
A week after the last day of school the house was spotless and the television was making a funny whining noise after it ran for a couple of hours. I had memorized every freckle and measured the progress of every pimple on my face. And it was still raining.
Cats and dogs. Lizards and groundhogs. A real toad-strangler. A gully-washer. I spent part of one afternoon thinking up all the stupid nicknames for rain that I could and then I dragged out the Bible and read the story of Noah all the way down to the rainbow. When I was done the clock next to my bed told me I still had three more hours to fill before time to cook supper.
Labor Day was at least a lifetime away from that first week of June.
The fourth of the month, a Tuesday, Mama shook me awake just after dawn. She said, “This goes to the back door,” and handed me a key. “If you go outside today—and I do wish you’d at least get the mail for once—lock the house.”
Mama’s tongue is sharp enough to wedge criticism into any remark.
I mumbled, “Why?” Then I pulled the covers over my head and mouthed the answer along with her.
“Because I said so.”
I knew that. It was the explanation for everything she told me to do. What I hadn’t known was that the back door even had a lock. To my knowledge it had never been used in my lifetime.
I could see her with my eyes closed, slicing the air with her hip bones and elbows as she crossed me off the list in her head and moved on. Another chore taken care of.
I listened for both pickup doors to slam, Mama-Daddy, then jumped up and threw on shorts to go with the panties and T-shirt I’d slept in. I raked my hair back in front of the dresser mirror long enough to see that the zit on my right cheek was the size of Mount Olympus, same as the day before.
I had pretty much lived behind my bedroom door the past couple of weeks. It felt safer somehow than rattling around loose in the house by myself, and the big mirror across the back of my dresser was there any time I needed a reminder that I existed. Even so, when I got to the back porch and was locked in I thought I’d suffocate before I figured out the latch. There’s a big difference between a cave and a cage—ask any lion at the zoo.
I hurdled the back step and ran like the house was trying to swallow me. It still wasn’t easy to breathe and, while I stood in the middle of the driveway working on that, I noticed something else not right.
The snot-nosed brats weren’t fighting in the yard next door, even though the sun was shining for the first time in weeks. It was pretty muddy, sure, but I’d seen that woman line ’em up and hose ’em down at the end of the day rather than keep them inside with her.
I couldn’t hear any cars either, so I shut my eyes to listen. A few anemic birds were chirping, but that was it. In Cumberland, somebody’s dog is always barking. But not that day.
I went to the front hedge and looked up and down the street, and it might have been a painting. Even the trees were still, leaves too wet and heavy to move.
I’d seen Candid Camera on TV and it felt like I was in the middle of some practical joke. But people trying to make a living off row crops just don’t waste time pulling pranks on the neighbors’ kids. I knew that.
I went back and locked the door, then started walking down the middle of the street so I’d see anything that started my way. I like a scary movie now and then, but I always hate the jump-out-and-grab-somebody scenes.
I would guess most little towns in Missouri are past their heydays. In Cumberland’s case, a bunch of burnt-out skeleton buildings along Main Street stand ready to testify that the town has seen better times. A handful of empty houses gone to seed, a few scattered vacant lots—they’re just different parts of the same story. Cumberland isn’t exactly material for picture magazines anytime, but it looked downright spooky that day.
That day every house I passed looked to be abandoned. Dingy little boxes, most of them needing fresh white paint . . . an occasional outburst of aluminum siding in some color that would startle God. No sign of life in any window.
Most of the lots in town are fenced into little chain-link prison yards for all creatures under three feet tall. All that individual territory staked out looked really ridiculous with nobody around.
It doesn’t take long to walk the town, and I did all four blocks by four blocks without sharing air with anything but
birds and squirrels.
I got to the schoolhouse, then walked around to the playground and sat down in a swing where I could see the state blacktop that swipes the west edge of town. Ten minutes or so went by without one single person passing through.
The thought occurred that maybe I should be afraid, but that’s not exactly something you decide and there just wasn’t anything real to wrap fear around. It was pretty clear there was nothing around to jump out at me. This wasn’t like any movie I’d ever seen.
The world had turned inside out. Overnight. Or at least during the ten days I’d spent in my cocoon. Everybody else had disappeared and left me exposed.
Sitting there in that swing, I started to feel like I might shrink as the sky grew wider and the sun stared me down. I had to get up and move before I got stuck in the moment and it went on forever. I could be a speck of dust in no time.
I started to recite as I walked past houses a second time: The Millers and the Statons and the Hises, the Athertons and the McCombses . . . I just saw Mama this morning. I just saw Mama this morning.
A shiver ran down my back.
I peeked in a couple of windows on the way home and sure enough, all the furniture was gone. The doors were locked, too, so there wasn’t much to do but keep walking.
I tried to remember if I’d heard more trucks than usual driving around town, but that was like trying to recollect how many times in the last week a train had gone through and rattled the windows. It was such an ordinary sound I wouldn’t notice. Mama was right—I should have at least left the house to get the mail once in a while. There sure hadn’t been any announcements on the transistor radio in my room. And the girl in the mirror hadn’t told me anything.
I was about to turn up our driveway when somebody yelled my name, and I must have jumped a couple of feet.
Lydia Jenkins was in the flower garden back of her house across the street. I didn’t know her very well but I guess I was pretty glad to see her just the same.
She was old even then so it took her a while to get across the garden. She looked like every grandma in the world—a lumpy flowered cotton dress cinched in the middle with a belt, legs shapeless as tree trunks hobbling along over the uneven ground, using her hoe for a cane. She leaned on the fence, squinted her wrinkles at the sky and said, “Lordy, Lordy. If I was to be asked, I’d say it’s about time we had some sun, wouldn’t you?”
I said, “Yeah, I guess,” then blurted out, “Where is everybody, Miss Lydia?”
She laughed like it was a joke. “Why . . . gone, Billie Marie.” She always called me that when we spoke, even though everybody else just called me Billie. She told me, “The Millers and the Corlews were the last to go, just yesterday. Suppose it’s only you folks and me ’n’ Curtis now.”
I didn’t say anything and she appeared to search my face. “Surely you noticed? People been loadin’ up and movin’ out for pretty near two weeks now.”
I shook my head. “Nobody told me.”
She laughed again and my cheeks started burning. “Well, lands, child, nobody told you put one foot in front of the other this mornin’ if you wanted to walk, either, did they?”
I was ashamed for speaking up and a little mad—two more reasons not to do it very often. “Well,” I said, “am I supposed to know why, too?”
She looked sorry then. “No, I suppose not. I forget you’re just a child, you’ve grown so.” She moved her hoe handle so she could lean on it with both hands. “Your folks ain’t said nothin’ at all?”
I shook my head.
Miss Lydia took that in, then nodded. “People’s afraid the levee’s gonna break. Think it’s gonna be ’51 all over again.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore.
“Well, is it?” My heart started thumping. “I mean, why are we still here? Why are you?”
Miss Lydia smiled just a small smile. “You’re right, somebody should’ve told you.” She looked to the south, toward the river. “Well, your daddy ’n’ me seem to have better memories than most. And we recall it took a full twenny-four hours after the levee broke in ’51 for the water to get to town. That’s a whole lotta time if you make every bit of it count. I reckon he figures his time right now is better spent sandbaggin’ levees unless he’s just gotta get you all out. And me, well . . .” She snorted and her face knotted up. “You know my boy Curtis is back livin’ with me, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Even a man who won’t take out the garbage can usually find time to be a hero,” she went on. “I expect I’ll have help if I need it.”
I tried to sort it all out even as it was still sinking in. I had supposed Mama and Daddy were in the field every day like always, not shoring up levees against the river. I don’t ask questions when they come in too tired to do much more than grunt hello at me, but the truth was I hadn’t even considered what all that rain pounding the house added up to. Stupid.
I felt like I needed some little redemption in her eyes, so I said, “Hey, I’m gonna walk up and get the mail in a while. Want me to bring you yours?”
Miss Lydia gave me a good look at her false teeth then. “Why, that’d be right nice of you.” I’d only gotten a couple of steps toward home when she yelled. I turned around. “Bring it by about noon and we’ll have some dinner together.”
I would have rather gone to church in shoes two sizes too small. I could sit on the fringe of a conversation and nod once in a while, but I didn’t know how to make chitchat with anybody—and especially somebody who could remember when God was a boy. “Oh no, Miss Lydia, you don’t need to—”
“Don’t need to. Want to.” She looked up and down the street. “Just you ’n’ me, you know. Curtis is in the city most of the time, even now that he’s back. May as well keep a little company.”
I nodded, then ran home—gravel, bare feet, and all. I shut the door to my room and sat on the bed to think. There had been a note from Daddy on the kitchen table a few mornings that summer, telling me the Corps of Engineers would be calling later and to write down a message when they did. But he hadn’t volunteered what the numbers in those messages meant, and of course I hadn’t asked.
I thought about Daddy and Miss Lydia calculating how much twenty-four hours could buy and wondered when they had talked. I couldn’t remember the last time Daddy had said anything directly to me. Sometimes he seemed surprised to notice me at all—like he’d forgotten again that it wasn’t just him and Mama.
I lay back on the bed, adding up the inventory of everything below doorknob level in our house and picturing it all piled in the bed of a grain truck. It wouldn’t take that long to load. So why was everybody else gone? They had to know something.
Unless Daddy was the only soldier in the parade marching to the right drummer. He never had trouble believing that. If all the other farmers were planting soybeans fence post to fence post, he’d decide to put in winter wheat and follow it with hay. If everybody else was rushing to get the corn in when it was still a little damp, he’d take a chance on the weather and leave it in the field till it was dry.
One time I looked up at a V of geese flying and saw one straggler off to the side, determined to go it alone even if he had to flap twice as hard. That was Daddy. Every gaggle I’ve seen fly over since has made me think of him.
Thing is, he’s usually right. Or at least far enough into the gray area that you couldn’t call him wrong. About the time he’s selling that hay crop, a hailstorm comes along and wipes out everyone else’s beans. He ends up getting five cents a bushel more for his corn than all those who picked theirs wet. It’s hard to say how much is smart and how much is luck, but I’ve never known anybody to change Daddy’s mind once it was made up, so there was no point thinking about it. If he had decided we’d wait out the rain, I knew we would.
Then that comment Miss Lydia had made about a man finding time to be a hero came back to me. Talking about her son Curtis. He’d for sure be the one who wouldn’t take out the garbage.
When you
hang around like a shadow, you know people mainly by what you overhear. That’s how I knew Curtis. And what I’d heard was that Curtis couldn’t find his ass with both hands. If it was on fire. And he had a map. Wink Sweeney said one time that Curtis was mainly a smart aleck, but without the smart part.
Curtis had been back since the middle of May. He was in his early forties and, if what I’d heard was true, he turned up at Miss Lydia’s door every five or ten years and stayed till she put him out a few months later. Somebody said he showed up whenever he got out of jail, but that seemed doubtful. He’d have had to commit crimes on another planet for nobody in Cumberland to come forward with any particulars.
This time he had a job in Kansas City working at the Ford plant. I’d heard folks talking about it one day when I stopped in for a Coke at the store attached to the grain elevator. The lunch counter in there served up more news and gossip than it did sandwiches.
Daddy was having coffee with the men that day and offered his opinion that Curtis wouldn’t last six months at Ford.
Dolores Swank was wiping the counter with a rag and told Daddy to give Curtis a break, you couldn’t expect him to be “right” after that accident killed the only girlfriend he ever had. But when Daddy shot back with the reminder that Curtis had been ass-over-teakettle drunk and driving the car when that girl got killed, nobody said another word.
I’d never devoted Lydia Jenkins a whole lot of thought before and I tried to gather together everything I knew about her. Evidently Daddy respected her enough to compare notes on the weather. That was something.
I decided she most likely hadn’t been raised in Cumberland. When I thought about it, people were just a little too polite to Miss Lydia for her to be a native. They “yes, ma’ammed” and “no, ma’ammed” her, something you don’t hear all the time.
But some of that could be because she was mother to Curtis too. Nobody in our neck of the woods would dare point a finger at the family tree of any bad apple—lest one of his own turn rotten somewhere down the road. But farm folk do tend to act like bad luck might be contagious, and one way to gain a little distance is with an extra layer of sugar coating. Curtis was probably worth a whole lot of “ma’ams.”
Billie Standish Was Here Page 1