THE NEXT few weeks in Ozona were punctuated with trips to the swimming pool south of town, next to the rodeo arena; Daddy’s company barbecue, where he pounded spikes into the sand to play horseshoes with the other drillers; and quiet evenings with Daddy and Mama at home. The only disruption to our harmony came when Daddy asked, as he did most every year, where we wanted to go for vacation.
The vote was always the same. Seven to one to go to Grandma and Grandpa Vacha’s. We saw them only once or twice a year and missed them terribly. Plus, to us, their farm was a veritable Disneyland. Thankfully, Mama didn’t veto our vote.
As we drove down the two-lane highway toward Grandma and Grandpa’s farm, I tried to cheer Mama up with a riddle, like the sphinx of Thebes.
What has four wheels, nine heads, twenty legs, and eighty moons?
Nobody guessed the answer: our family riding in the car—six children, two adults, and a wirehaired terrier named Freckles, which accounted for one of the heads and four of the legs. The moons totaled the number of moons in our fingernails.
The taller we girls grew, the tighter the squeeze into our Ford. The hot drive without air-conditioning tested everyone’s patience, especially Mama’s. Her switch extended the reach of her arm and drove home her message—I told you to stop it—with stinging clarity.
Suitcases on the floorboards leveled the backseat into one large bed. Seat belts never crossed our minds. Mama and Daddy decided to travel at night to lessen the number of bathroom stops and to mollify our endless bickering.
Seven hours later, we turned off the highway to take the back road to the farmhouse. It could hardly be called a road. Our bumper hit one rut so hard Daddy thought we might lose the oil pan. In the darkness, our headlights lit up a fallow field of weeds and sent rabbits scurrying. Finally, we discovered a slim path of mashed-down weeds made by Grandpa’s tractor. And then we saw it, the porch light slicing through the darkness, its warm glow guiding us past my favorite oak tree and, finally, to the farmhouse.
Grandpa opened the screen door yawning and waving. Grandma followed with her permed curls slightly askew. The dogs kept barking until Grandpa hushed them in Czech. Open arms welcomed us onto the wooden porch that hugged the farmhouse.
I loved that porch. Grandpa had recently repainted the floor a shiny gray, the pillars white, and the ceiling a light blue to mimic the sky. The porch swing hung from rusted chains outside the windows of the back bedroom.
Just inside the bedroom stood two iron beds, pushed against either wall, where Mama, Daddy, and the younger girls would sleep. My bed was to be the couch in the dining room. Vicki and Nancy were assigned to the attic with its feather bed and a trunk of yellowed Sears catalogues.
I marvel that Grandma and Grandpa welcomed our herd for two weeks. Nine heads, twenty legs, and eighty moons had a way of upsetting the status quo. On the first morning, Vicki and Nancy, trying to be helpful, tossed their chamber-pot pee out the attic window onto the tin roof. Trouble was, Grandpa had carefully guttered the roof to collect rainwater into a large holding tank beside the porch. Not only did their night water contaminate the rainwater, but it smelled ripe in the noonday sun. Grandma suggested, none too gently, that from then on they bring the chamber pot downstairs in the morning so it could be emptied properly.
For reasons no one understood, Brenda and Joni decided to use one of the window screens as a cheese grater. Grandma fussed over that screen like a mama bird and kept repeating, Jezis Maria, Jezis Maria!
Then I cornered one of the farm cats underneath the porch, convinced I could befriend him like I had my stray, Midnight. But the wild tom had other ideas. He clawed five bleeding lines down the side of my face. Jezis Maria, Grandma cried as she ran for her rubbing alcohol and iodine.
And so it went.
Grandpa didn’t pray so much to Jesus and Mary. His mild oath included the word prdel, which loosely translated to my ass! Over the years we picked up a few Czech words because Grandpa and Grandma never bothered to leave the room to talk privately. They merely switched to speaking Czech, which always made me wonder which one of us had done something wrong.
For the most part, however, Grandma and Grandpa spoke English, laughed, loved, and fed us. The screened-in porch, with its massive oak table and assorted chairs, was where we took our noon meal, the most substantial of the day. Two pie safes, originally made to safeguard the baked goods from critters, lined the porch walls.
After setting out the food, Grandma wiped her hands on her apron and opened the back screen door. She called Grandpa to dinner by repeatedly striking a triangular iron dinner bell hanging on a nail, yodeling To-nee, To-nee. Grandpa and the rest of us would put aside our chores, wash up in a basin on the porch, then take our seats at the table.
Grandma was a wonderful down-home cook. Nancy, who had become interested in cooking since coming to live with us, eagerly helped Grandma in the kitchen. Being the tomboy, I preferred working outside.
That summer the rain, soil, and sun coalesced into a perfect growing season. The cotton in the surrounding fields stood bushy and tall. Uncle Willard, Grandpa’s younger brother on the next farm over, had a bumper crop of cotton and said he could sure use any help we could give him. Farm wages were meager, but whatever money we made helped fill our family coffer. I would have done the work for free anyway.
I considered myself a good cotton picker and prided myself on my strength. I could drag the twenty-foot sack of cotton, the strap burrowing ever deeper into my shoulder, down a long row of cotton. Sweat ran off me in rivulets; a cotton field is nature’s sauna.
“Would you look at that?” Uncle Willard clucked when I helped him hoist my cotton sack onto the scale. It weighed right around a hundred pounds. Uncle Willard had a little Tom Sawyer in him; he made me want to strive to pull even heavier loads.
Before leaving for the cotton fields that first morning, Grandma came at me with an old-fashioned, handmade sunbonnet as if she were trying to rope a calf.
I backed away, protesting, but to no avail. Grandma cornered me and muttered, Jezis Maria, do you want to die of sunstroke, and tied the floppy bonnet snugly under my chin.
The enchantment of working for Uncle Willard had a little something to do with his son Danny. Danny was my age and had an ease about him. A shock of brown wavy hair, high cheekbones, and freckles accentuated his face. When he smiled, so did his eyes. He was lanky and self-assured. Some boys might be nervous around a passel of girls, but Danny had a sister and seemed quite comfortable.
“Seems you’re more interested in this crop of girls here than the cotton,” Grandpa teased him one afternoon.
Danny blushed and studied his hands but, to his credit, Grandpa’s teasing didn’t keep him away. He must have enjoyed the attention we bestowed on him; six girls can be a powerful magnet.
Nancy once remarked that we older girls all took turns liking Danny during our summer vacations. I don’t remember ever giving up my turn. I wanted to sit beside Danny on the porch swing; walk with him, barefoot, to the tank as grasshoppers whirred around us; hide with him forever, listening to the rain fall on the roof of Grandpa’s car, where we escaped one afternoon to avoid getting wet.
Even though Danny qualified as my kissing cousin, we never kissed. But I had been kissed once by an older boy behind our trailer in Fort Stockton. The suddenness of his lips on mine had surprised me, but I didn’t object, though I suspected Mama wouldn’t approve. His kiss was soft, gentle. For days afterward, I replayed the kiss over and over in my mind, which confused me because I didn’t particularly like the boy or want another kiss—just the delicious memory of that gentle press upon my lips.
The only physical contact between Danny and me was when he casually held my thumb between his fingers one humid afternoon as we talked, sitting atop a cotton sack. I remember the electricity I felt at the warmth of his skin next to mine.
But he held my thumb for a long while, I reasoned . . . he held it gently . . . he had not held Vicki’s or Nancy’s
thumb . . . he sought me out in the field . . . he . . .
These thoughts kindled my imagination as I crawled beneath my sheets on the couch that night. In the dining room where I slept, the black and silver potbellied stove took a summer sabbatical from heating the farmhouse. A glass jar of fresh-baked sugar cookies waited for tomorrow on a ledge leading into the kitchen.
I lay there, moonlight spilling through the window, listening to the clock chime atop the china cabinet. I padded to the window and looked out. Moonlight fell on the ladder resting against the garage where we had been helping Grandpa replace the shingles. Moonlight also fell on the old tractor, the one Grandpa taught me to drive. Everything looked beautiful, awash in silvery light, even the bloody axe cleaved into the tree stump where Grandpa lopped off the heads of chickens for our noon meals.
When I lay back down, I raised my arms toward the ceiling in the moonlight, rubbing them as if I had lathered on a silky moon cream. I wondered if Danny might come tomorrow to help with the roof, doubtful since it would be hard for him to break away from picking cotton. Still, I pictured him arriving early, looking past the stove to the couch where I lay. I began to make up my own episode of the Nora Drake soap opera. If only I had a flowing blue gown the color of the porch ceiling.
In anticipation of Danny, I smoothed out my frizzy hair. I eyed the distressingly flat place where my marble-sized breasts hid under my shortie pajamas, patterned with rosebuds. I rolled to my side and looked down. Nothing. I brought my elbows together and clasped my hands. I looked as if I were praying. Actually, I was praying—for cleavage. I hunched my shoulders forward to create a line that divided two pieces of flesh. From a distance, it might pass for cleavage. I decided to sleep in this contortionist pose all night, just in case.
I wanted Danny to swoop in the next morning to discover that the girl whose thumb he had held a day before was actually a woman in the making; the one true love of his heart. I awoke in the morning to the sound of Grandma making prune kolaches in the kitchen. I took note that I was on my stomach, one hand dangling off the couch and drool all over my pillow and hair.
Thankfully, Danny had not come.
“WHO WANTS to ride on the tractor to the mailbox?” Grandpa asked.
All of us jumped up. When I asked Grandpa if I could drive, he nodded and hitched the wood wagon to the tractor for the half-mile ride. Many a farm boy learned to drive a tractor as soon as his feet could reach the pedal. Grandpa wasn’t sexist; he let me drive down the dirt road to the mailbox while he sat some distance away in the wagon with the rest of the girls. After we retrieved the mail, Vicki asked if she could drive back.
I swung out of the seat and stood upright on the axle beside her as she slipped in behind the wheel. I remained on the axle and held on to the tractor seat. Vicki steered straight down the dirt road without incident, grinning up at me. Nearing the farmhouse, we needed to bank left to stop in front of the garage. Vicki turned the wheel but failed to brake. We overran the garage and headed toward a large tree beside the fence.
I looked down at Vicki. She had stopped smiling. She gave no indication she planned on stopping. Her hands gripped the wheel, but she didn’t move.
Grandpa sat too far away to help. I couldn’t reach the brake. If I grabbed the wheel and swerved, we might miss the tree, but we still had the fence to worry about. Plus, I might flip the tractor and send us flying.
I suddenly saw my hand reach down and turn off the key. The tractor immediately rolled to a stop, only yards from the tree.
“Woo-wee,” Grandpa said, “that was some fast thinking.”
It amazed even me. When Grandpa told Mama and Daddy that I had saved us from crashing into a tree, I pulled back my shoulders and stood taller. I liked being a hero. But it had been, truly, a moment of grace. And Grace, being what she is, kept her mouth shut and let me take all the credit.
Vicki, however, wasn’t so quiet. She told me she had pulled Grandpa aside to tell him she could have stopped the tractor by herself. She said Grandpa patted her shoulder and said, “I know you could have.”
Grandpa was a farmer through and through. He knew what seeds needed cultivating—to help the cotton grow tall.
ONE MORNING near the end of our vacation, we climbed onto the roof of Grandpa’s garage to finish removing the last of the decrepit shingles before nailing on new ones.
Daddy squatted on the high ridge of the roof, prying up shingles, the sun behind him. Mama and I worked side by side, down near the lower edge of the roof, our backs to the ladder.
I heard Daddy teasingly call, “Terry, lookie here.”
I shaded my eyes and looked up at him. He smiled and held aloft a wriggling garden spider the length of his little finger. Then Daddy did what I least expected him to. He tossed the spider into the air toward me. I screamed and jumped backward off the roof.
Daddy looked stricken. Mama’s face went white.
“Davy, how could you?” Mama shouted. She rushed down the ladder toward me.
Somehow, I landed on my feet in the soft dirt, shaken but unhurt.
“She’s white as a sheet,” Mama said, glowering up at Daddy. I knew Daddy meant no harm; if he had guessed my reaction, he wouldn’t have tossed the spider. But the incident did reveal his lack of understanding of just how much spiders frightened me.
Mama told me to rotate my ankles and shift my weight side to side. Satisfied that I had not broken a bone, she told me to go on off and collect myself; I had done enough work for the time being.
“He didn’t mean for me to jump,” I told her.
“Hell is paved with good intentions,” she said.
That is how I came to sit in my oak tree, out by the barn, all alone, listening to the others go about their business. In the lofty arms of the ancient oak, I rested my back against the rough bark, sad to think summer was almost over.
I sat there a long while, as still as lichen; so still, in fact, I could almost feel the sap rising in me, almost feel my roots and the tree’s roots intertwining as if we belonged to each other. She was my Great Mother, my Sistine Chapel, my Tree of Life.
Her massive limbs reach outward like a thousand-armed bodhisattva. From within her branches, a canopy of waxy leaves and dappled sunlight arch overhead. Long tresses of gray-green moss dangle from above. A lone ant traverses the furrows in the bark where my hand rests. I notice a tiny white wildflower blooming just outside her circle of shade. I think I must include the wildflower. If I can remember it juxtaposed next to her, I will never forget what it feels like to sit here, a slight breeze blowing, muffled voices coming from the farmhouse, utter contentment in every breath.
Looking up into her branches, I whispered the secret I had been carrying. “We’re moving again.”
I hardly reacted to the news when Mama told me earlier. I hadn’t even asked why, only when and where.
“Before school starts,” Mama said. “To Odessa, Texas.”
Moving had become as commonplace as the changing of seasons. What use was there in railing against the inevitable? Our move to Ozona had been merely a summer sojourn, a place for Daddy to move the trailer to teach Mama a lesson.
“Why do we have to have winter?” I asked Mama. “Why can’t summer last forever?”
My question took Mama by surprise. She looked at me oddly, like maybe the heat in the cotton field had addled my brain, despite Grandma’s sunbonnet. But she saw I was serious.
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe we have winter so we can appreciate summer more.”
I traced my finger along a crevice of the tree’s bark, contemplating what Mama had said. It seemed to me I could appreciate a thousand summers without the help of a single winter.
Mama in front of our trailer
Odessa, Texas
IN 1932, COWGIRL Grace Hendricks roped a jackrabbit from horseback in five seconds flat in the Odessa Rodeo, winning against numerous cowboys. Even though the roping competition took place three decades before I moved to O
dessa (and my philosophy leaned more toward freeing rabbits than roping them), it was fitting that I moved into a town where a young cowgirl triumphed over a few cowboys.
You might say I found my courage in Odessa, in more ways than one.
My first day at Crockett Junior High, I couldn’t locate the science room. I walked into class shortly after the bell rang. The teacher assumed I was lost.
“This is science,” he informed me.
“I know,” I said, looking for an unoccupied desk near the front.
He perused the class list. “What’s your name?”
“Terry Vacha.”
“You spell Terry with a y, like a boy?”
I nodded.
He rubbed his chin, looked out at the boys, and smiled. “Well, looks like we got us a girl in class after all.”
The boys guffawed.
I quickly scooted into an empty seat and studied the rows of boys who wore collared shirts—school rules—tucked in. Not one girl in sight. Though I wasn’t the first girl to enroll in science at Crockett, no other girls were assigned to this particular class. Maybe somebody knew something I didn’t.
During the next several days, I smiled politely when the science teacher teased me about being the only girl. I didn’t mind so much. I liked science, and the ratio of twenty-something boys to one girl made me feel almost popular. However, it was becoming increasingly clear that my science teacher thought I had breached some imaginary testosterone boundary. I kept up with the boys academically, but the teacher wouldn’t let the matter rest.
Finally, one afternoon, he asked me point-blank, in front of my classmates, “So you think you can handle anything in this class a boy can handle?”
All eyes stared at me.
“I believe so,” I said, feeling slightly uneasy.
“Even a paddling?” he asked.
I paused.
Was it a trap?
If I said no, I would be saying that boys were somehow better. But if I said yes, I could be setting myself up for a paddling. As Daddy often said, I was between a rock and a hard place.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 13