“What?”
“A boy at school called me Dick Tracy.”
Daddy poured himself another cup of black coffee from the percolator on the stove. He brought his steaming cup over and set it down on the other side of me and slipped into his chair, looking at me.
“I’ll tell you what. If that boy thinks you look like Dick Tracy, he either needs glasses or somebody’s been putting something in his milk,” Daddy said. “Now, if he had said Brenda Starr, that’s another story!”
Daddy was still shaking his head and muttering “Dick Tracy” when he rose to clean off the kitchen counter, tossing the eggshells into the trash. He bent down and picked up something from the floor.
“Well lookie here,” he said.
“What?” I strained to see.
He held up a wiggly cockroach. I recoiled. Mama hated cockroaches; she said they signaled filth and poor living conditions. In Mama’s world, the only good cockroach was a dead one. She drummed into our heads the importance of keeping the kitchen spotless and putting food away in tight containers. Unfortunately, she couldn’t control the habits of previous renters or the warmer climate in southern Texas, which favored the survival of Periplaneta americana.
I had never studied a cockroach up close, so I cautiously approached the squirming insect trapped between Daddy’s fingers. Two hairlike antennae waved in the air. After a few moments, Daddy wordlessly took his free hand, fished a match out of the matchbox, and struck it on the side of the gas burner. He slowly moved the flame beneath the abdomen of the cockroach. Just as it lifted its abdomen, trying to avoid the heat, Mama walked into the room. She immediately assessed the situation.
“Stop that this instant!” she yelled at Daddy. “If you want to kill it, fine, but don’t you dare torture the thing. That’s cruel and heartless.” Daddy threw the cockroach to the floor and squished it beneath his loafer.
“I can’t believe you were torturing it,” Mama scolded.
“It’s only a cockroach,” Daddy defended. “You despise the things.”
“Cruelty is cruelty,” Mama answered.
The lowly cockroach would be one of my first lessons on human decency. I am an expert witness when I say Daddy wasn’t a cruel man. I saw him cry many times when he was touched, proud, happy, or sad. I saw him climb trees to rescue kittens, fix a leak in the neighbor’s faucet, and look under the hood of a stranded motorist’s car. I think Daddy thought what I had thought up until that moment: something as lowly as a cockroach didn’t merit human decency. If you’re going to kill something, what difference is there in how it dies?
Mama’s answer to that question would have been suffering.
It was Mama’s low tolerance for suffering and cruelty that caused her to turn her fury on Grandpa Vacha.
In early June, we piled into the car and drove past colorful fields of Texas bluebells on our way to Grandma and Grandpa Vacha’s farm. We planned to stay a few days, and by some miraculous stroke of good fortune, Mama decided I could stay an extra week by myself after the rest of the family returned to Alvin. I could hardly contain my excitement. I missed so many things about farm life: the animals, the freedom, the closeness to the land.
Back then, Grandma and Grandpa Vacha’s farm was self-sustaining. They planted, harvested, canned, butchered, and smoked their own meats. They looked to the Farmer’s Almanac for weather forecasts and planting tables based on the moon’s phases. They were second-generation Moravians who lived a normal life based on the old ways.
However, their normal looked nothing like ours, which may have caused some of the disharmony between Mama and Grandma. Mama called Grandma’s admonitions old wives’ tales and Grandma said things like “a stitch in time saves nine” when she noticed Mama had not mended our clothing properly. Sometimes they sounded like two guinea hens gabbling. Unfortunately, one or the other usually ended up in tears.
When we first arrived, everything went smoothly.
“Jak se máš?” Grandpa asked, which was Czech for “how are you?” Grandpa wore his familiar shorts, cowboy boots, and safari helmet. When we hugged him, he playfully poked our belly buttons and called them our pupiks.
Since it was Saturday, Grandma and Grandpa changed into their “town” clothes and we drove to the county courthouse square to socialize with the other farm families gathered in town. Grandma joined the women fanning themselves and gossiping beneath the shade trees on the courthouse lawn. Across the street, Daddy and Grandpa joined the men, clacking down their dominoes to play a game of Moon or 42. Mama watched Brenda while Vicki, Patricia, and I practiced turning cartwheels near the gazebo bandstand. Intermittently we all sipped RC Colas from chilled bottles that wept in the heat.
Afternoons like that made me wish our family could live that way forever.
Back at the farmhouse, Grandpa disappeared into a small pantry that I nicknamed his money room. Cigar boxes, tins, and glinting jars lined the shelves, making the pantry look like an old-time general store. Inside every container were bills, silver dollars, half-dollars, dimes, and buffalo nickels. Grandpa came out of the room with a five-dollar bill for each of us. I thanked him and carefully tucked mine into my special purse. Back home, unless Mama needed it, I would push it into the slot of my piggy bank.
Grandpa had lost faith in institutional banking during the Great Depression. His solution had been to dig a hole in the dirt floor of his detached garage and wedge in a widemouthed jar to hold his big bills. I remember a $10,000 bill, but maybe it was only a $1,000 bill. (Grandpa leased the mineral rights to his land, converting his revenues into high-denomination bills, which the US Treasury circulated until 1969.) After securing his money in the jar, Grandpa covered the area with a large sheet of plywood stained with oil leaks from his car. He locked his vault by parking his car on top of the plywood.
Grandpa had just locked his vault when he discovered his young hunting dog had dug beneath the fence of the chicken coop and killed a chicken. Mild-mannered Grandpa picked up the dog, two paws in each hand, and slammed his body to the ground. The dog yelped and lay there, its breath knocked out of him. Mama shrieked for Grandpa to stop.
Grandpa bellowed at the dog in Czech. Then he yelled to Mama in English, “Farm dogs have to be taught not to kill livestock!”
“No animal deserves to be treated that way,” Mama insisted.
Grandma and Grandpa must have struggled to reconcile Mama’s concern for their dog with her seeming lack of concern for their son. Grandma never approved of Mama’s divorcing Daddy, or her decision to send her children away for two years. Grandma and Grandpa had been the ones to take care of Patricia when Vicki and I were sent to Iowa.
Grandpa was, by nature, a peacemaker just like Daddy. So, a few hours after the dog incident, he came out of his small bedroom off the back porch, acting as if he and Mama had not argued. Mama and Grandma, on the other hand, gave each other a wide berth. Both seemed relieved when it came time to say good-bye.
But Grandma cried when she hugged Daddy. Tears formed in Daddy’s eyes, too, as he pulled away and said they best be going.
Thankfully, Mama didn’t renege on her promise to let me stay the week with Grandma and Grandpa. For a whole week, I would be immersed in their wonderful world.
While Grandma and Grandpa talked on the porch, I wandered toward a lone oak tree, dripping in Spanish moss, not far from the barn. I climbed onto a wide branch listening to the whir of grasshoppers. Sitting there felt like the most natural thing in the world. I felt so at peace in those giant arms. In between leaning my back against the bark and jumping down to rejoin Grandma and Grandpa in the kitchen, I fell in love with that tree. It would become the single most important icon of my childhood.
* * *
AFTER I returned home to Alvin, Mama sat me down and told me that my grandpa in Iowa, Grandpa Skinner, who had talked about striking it rich on uranium, had died. My aunt Betty wrote to say Grandpa had said good night to Grandma and never woke up. He died in his sleep of a heart
attack. It was normal, Mama said, for older people to die. I sadly scrawled the date of Grandpa’s death into the white Bible Grandma Skinner had sent to me. Guy Raymond Skinner died October 9, 1958.
I paused when I recited my prayer that night: “Now I lay me down to sleep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Mama had found a Kingdom Hall and the Jehovah’s Witnesses again, or they had found her. She spent a fair amount of those early days in Alvin studying and reading her Bible. However, when I asked her what happened to people when they died, she did not flip open her Bible; rather, she pointed to a boiling pot on the stove.
“See the steam coming off the potatoes there?”
Steam wisped upward toward the kitchen cabinets.
“It’s a little like that,” Mama said. “When we die, our body stays but our spirit rises like the steam.”
It made sense. Hadn’t some part of me, unconnected to my body, soared upward in Amarillo on the swing that day? I silently watched the steam rising from the potatoes, wondering where Grandpa’s spirit went. Wherever it went, my love followed him there.
* * *
ONE NIGHT, after we had moved into our second rental house in Alvin, Daddy shook me and Vicki awake in the bunk bed, mumbling something about seeing the moon. Vicki preferred the warmth of the covers, but I managed to pull myself up and out of bed. The wood floor felt cool to my bare feet.
Daddy led me out of the house and halfway down the rough cement sidewalk. He knelt down beside me and scooted me in front of him. My gaze followed his finger.
“Lookie there,” he said.
I looked up to see a star resting on the tip of the crescent moon. Daddy called the star Venus.
“You may never see them so close together again in your lifetime,” he said. I heard the awe in his voice.
Never again so close together.
The bright star and the crescent moon etched themselves on the wall of my mind. That night Daddy wakened me not only from my bunk bed but also from my tiny world beneath a single roof. I looked up into the grandeur of a greater scale. I felt infinitesimal, the night sky felt immense, and Daddy stood somewhere in between. I don’t think either of us realized that he and I, standing together in the night, mirrored the proximity of Venus to the crescent moon.
I would later come to know Venus as the morning and evening star, twinkling at dusk and dawn. I also learned that Venus took its name from the Roman goddess of love and beauty whom the Greeks knew as Aphrodite. Aphrodite had no childhood; she was born adult, nubile, and infinitely desirable. Though she married, she was frequently unfaithful to her husband.
Infidelity seemed to be one of Mama’s weaknesses, too. After Daddy began working out of town again, Mama looked for ways to feel loved outside the Kingdom Hall. One of them was Chief. I think Mama met him at the edge of the sea near Galveston at the café where she worked.
I have a picture of Mama sitting in front of an adding machine in the café’s office. The café was one of Mama’s attempts to “better herself” and help bring in some much-needed money for the family. Our utilities had been turned off a time or two, and Mama had taken to throwing our unopened bills into the trash.
Mama thought that she and a girlfriend could manage a small café. I don’t know the particulars of their arrangement, but Mama and her friend kept the books, waited on customers, cleaned tables, and cooked if the short-order cook didn’t show. Mama took me to the café some weekends to help clear tables and wash dishes.
In the alley behind the restaurant, Mama discovered Trixie, a starving kitten foraging in the garbage can. We brought her home, and I made it my mission to make up for all the bad that had ever happened to Trixie. I slipped her extra bits of food and spent endless hours entertaining her with twine. At night, she curled into a ball against me. I buried my face into her fur, breathing in the musky scent of milk. When I whispered “good kitty,” she nuzzled her nose against my chin. Sometimes she groomed me as if I were a cat, too. I loved the feel of her sandpaper tongue.
After some time, Trixie became pregnant. Mama warned me I might wake one morning to find a bed full of kittens. Neither of us could have imagined what actually happened. I opened my eyes to see a half-eaten kitten, still wrapped in its opaque birth sac, dangling from Trixie’s mouth. I shrieked and ran for Mama.
Mama removed what was left of the dead kitten and helped Trixie deliver three live kittens. Afterward, Mama found me in the living room, my knees drawn up underneath my chin. She sat down beside me and rubbed my arm.
“She didn’t know how to be a mom,” Mama said. “Remember how scrawny she was when we brought her home? She didn’t have a mom for very long. She just didn’t know any better,” Mama reassured me. Which was why, days later, when Trixie opened her mouth to lift one of her kittens by its scruff, I panicked.
“Trixie’s eating her kittens again!” I screeched.
Mama assured me Trixie was now being a good mother. Mama cats carried their kittens in their mouths when moving them to safety. However, I soon discovered just how hard mothering was. Trixie’s mammary glands became infected and necessitated a stay at the vet’s office. In Trixie’s absence, Mama and I fed the kittens warm milk and honey every three to four hours from two baby-doll bottles we borrowed from Patricia. The pug-nosed kittens mouthed the hard tip of the plastic bottles, dribbling more milk down their fur than into their bellies. But they thrived. We nestled them into the folds of an old bath towel, inside a cardboard box, which we set next to the warm oven.
The vet finally called to say Trixie could come home. Mama clicked the receiver into the cradle and said, “Terry, I don’t know how we’re going to pay the bill. They won’t let her come home unless we do.”
“I have money,” I said.
I walked into the bedroom, grabbed my white piggy bank, and brought it to Mama. She nodded and we hammered it open. It held change and two five-dollar bills Grandpa Vacha had given me. Mama counted out some of her tips from the café. Together, we pooled enough to bring Trixie home.
Having Trixie back was worth every penny. I soaked up the sight of her and the kittens sleeping in a jumbled pile of tails and paws. We had two boys and a girl pouncing on one another and chasing their tails until it was time to give them away. It was terribly lonely that first week without the kittens.
It was during this time of grieving that I woke to see Chief climbing out of Mama’s bedroom window, either because Daddy had come home sooner than Mama expected, or because Mama awoke to hear noises in the driveway that she attributed to Daddy. In actuality, the noises Mama and Chief heard may have been two men trying, unsuccessfully, to repossess our Ford.
I had never seen anyone climb out of June Cleaver’s window on Leave It to Beaver. Something had begun to feel off-kilter to me. I loved Mama and I loved Daddy, but I disdained the middle place between them where Mama opened the door to her bedroom or used her window for escape. I longed for Mama to become less like Aphrodite and more like Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home.
If only Mama were more like other mothers or my grandmothers.
This longing would grow into a quintessential thorn that pierced both Mama and me.
NOT LONG after Chief climbed out the window, I went to school, the same as any other morning, except that Trixie had been taken to the veterinarian again.
Toward the end of the school day, during choir practice, a woman from the principal’s office walked in and asked me to follow her. I nervously wondered if I had done something wrong. The principal asked me to take a seat. Evidently, Mama had called and said I was to check out of school immediately because we were moving.
I looked at him in disbelief. “We’re moving?”
“That’s what your mom said,” he said. He handed me a fist of papers and said I could check out of school as soon as I turned in my library book.
“It’s at home,” I told him.
He frowned and looked over the top of his glasses. “You should hav
e brought it to school with you.”
“I didn’t know we were moving.”
He shook his head and told me to drop the book off at school before we left town.
I came home to find Mama crying in front of a man who had a wad of money in his hand.
“Fifty-five dollars!” Mama exclaimed. “That’s it? Fifty-five dollars for all the furniture in this house?”
“Take it or leave it, lady,” the man said, unmoved by her tears.
“It’s highway robbery,” she said, grabbing the money from his hand.
Clothes, dishes, knickknacks, everything Mama wanted to take had been tossed into bags and boxes. Brenda played near a pile of discarded items in a corner of the living room. Patricia saw me, dropped her baby doll, and ran up to hug my waist.
“Help me get this stuff into the car,” Mama ordered. “We’re leaving.”
“Where?” I asked. “Where’re we going?”
“We’re moving to Ozona, where Davy is. We have to move fast.”
That’s all I knew. We had to leave town fast. Apparently our creditors were closing in.
As we pulled out of the driveway, it hit me.
“Mama, what about Trixie?”
Mama looked at me as if she had been waiting for this conversation to play out. “The vet won’t give her to us unless we pay the bill. We don’t even have enough money to buy groceries, Terry. We can’t get her out. And even if we did have the money, the vet’s office is closed for the night.”
I felt a physical pain in the area of my heart and a knot so tight in my throat that it caused me to moan, “No.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mama said; tears filled her eyes. “I’m sure the vet will find her a good home.”
I pictured Trixie peeking from a cage and buried my head in my hands. I knew what it felt like to wait for someone to come for you.
My baby sister Joni
Ozona, Texas
OZONA WAS THE only town in Crockett County’s three thousand square miles of rugged terrain. A statue of Davy Crockett stood in the town square.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 7