She yanked up her dress and pulled down her drawers. “Take your thing out and put it in there.” She pointed.
“Why?”
“That’s how you do it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on. It won’t hurt you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw my big brother do it to Billie Ann Caldwell in our well house, and it didn’t hurt him none.”
“Yeah, but he’s in the Air Corps!”
“Well, Billie Ann ain’t in the Air Corps, and it didn’t hurt her, either.”
“Well, it still seems like a dumb thing to do.”
“Oh yeah? Well, your own daddy does it.”
“How do you know?”
“All daddies do it. He does it to your mother. My big brother says he does it to Laverne Thomas, too.”
“How does he know that?”
“Laverne told him. My big brother does it to Laverne, too.”
“Well, I’m still not going to. I’m going to open the door.”
“Wait a minute!”
She yanked her drawers up just as the doors swung open. We walked outside.
“You won’t tell, will you?” she said.
“No.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Let’s go swing. I’ll let you be first.”
“Okay.”
We ran across the vacant lot between the Haskells’ and the Childers’, and I picked up the swing board and set into its notches the rope swing hanging from a limb of Alice’s chinaberry tree. I sat down, and Alice gave me a shove, and I rose into the air. The wind whistled in my ears. Alice shoved again and again, and I rose higher and higher. I rose until I was almost level with the limb the rope was tied to. I pretended I was a pilot chasing a Jap plane. Alice was panting.
“Alice! Don’t swing him so high! You want to break his neck?” Mrs. Childers was at the upstairs window. She was fat and ugly and hung down in front. She didn’t have a dress on, and as I sailed back and forth across the window I could see her big old tits about to fall out of her slip. Alice stepped back and let me coast down, and Mrs. Childers disappeared.
“My turn now,” Alice said. “Pump me.” She sat down on the board, and I straddled her, standing up. There was barely room for my feet between her fat legs and the ropes. I grasped the ropes, bent my knees, pushed my body down. We moved. I kept pumping, and we went higher and higher, almost as high as I went with Alice pushing me.
“We better coast now,” Alice said. “Mama’ll yell at us again.” Slowly we coasted to a stop. “Push me,” she said.
“No. It’s my turn. You push me.”
“No. I pushed you longer than you pumped me.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did!”
“Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t!”
“Did, did, did!”
“Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t!”
Alice jumped out of the swing and socked me on the ear. I let out a yell and grabbed the swing board and ran for Gran’s house. Alice took off after me. I was getting scared, and yelling, and tears were coming into my eyes, and I could barely see. I could hear Alice panting behind me. She grabbed for me and caught my suspenders. The clamps popped off the front of my pants. She pulled on the suspenders. By now, we were across the street. Gran was standing on the porch. Alice let go and ran for home. The suspenders popped me hard in the back. I yelled again, grabbed my pants, and ran up the sidewalk and up the steps. I looked back. Alice wasn’t in sight. Gran hugged me to her and wiped my nose with her skirt.
“Come on inside, Gate,” she said. “I’ll read you the funnies. We’ll see if Dick Tracy’s caught The Brow yet.”
I dropped the swing board behind the honeysuckle bush.
I’ve often wondered why, of all the experiences I must have had during my father’s absence, that Sunday has remained so vivid in my mind. Years later, when the storms of puberty wracked my mind and loins, Technicolor dreams of that fat little girl in the straw, panties at her feet, skirt turned inside out over her breastless torso, haunted me. Never mind that Gatewood Lafayette Turnbolt at seven couldn’t have satisfied Alice Childers even had he been willing. I could at least have paid closer attention, been curious, explored with eye and finger and gotten a preview of the joys and tribulations that lay ahead. Even now that my virginity is long since gone, Alice Childers still intrigues me. Who finally accepted her invitation? How long after she extended it to me? Did she remain fat, or did she grow into beauty? Is she now a housewife? A waitress? A professor? A whore? Whatever she is, she is lost to me. Just one vivid memory of a hazy but crucial time.
But there are flashes of others. Virgil Stoner, the druggist’s son, came home with a chestload of medals and only one leg. He jerked down the Nazi flag that he had sent his father and that Mr. Stoner had displayed so proudly behind the soda fountain. Virgil sat at one of the little round marble ice cream tables for two or three days, his crutch lying beside him on the floor, saying hello to his friends and neighbors from before the war. Then he went home and shot himself with a German pistol. I was an anti-aircraft gunner during recess at school. I sat astride a long piece of pipe like a stick horse and blasted away at the sky. Golden Patricia Cabell was always near me. I jerked my head back and crumpled to the ground as some invisible German or Jap pilot (the entire Axis was our foe on the school ground) got in his licks. Patricia lifted me gently, I hung my arm around her neck, and she and I struggled together back to our fort. She was a good nurse. The wound wasn’t fatal. Joe George Calhoun was waylaid by a bunch of “big boys” in the school privy. They removed his overalls and shorts and tossed them up on the roof. “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” crossed my grandmother’s lips at least once a day. The radio spoke daily of the Allies and the Axis, Roosevelt and Churchill, the White House.
And my father came home once, after his basic training, I suppose. He wasn’t in uniform, but he brought me and Belinda (now five) and Rick (almost three) each an overseas cap and patted us all on the head and sat and talked to us for a while as if we were somebody else’s children. Then Mother came out of her room with a little suitcase, and she and my father got into the car and drove away. Gran came out of the kitchen, where she had stayed during the time my father had been in the house. “Come on, kids, I’ll read you a story,” she said. My father and Mother were gone all the next day. I heard them come in during the night, but when I got up the next morning, my father was gone.
“Virgie and Joe George are going to stay with you a few days, so you all behave yourselves and do what she says.”
“Where are you going?” Belinda asked.
“To the Comanche hospital to get our new baby,” Mother replied, “and Gran’s got to take me.”
“Couldn’t you take yourself?”
“Well, yes, but Gran’s going to help me pick out the baby we want.”
“Why can’t we help pick it out?”
“Because they won’t let kids come into the hospital, that’s why,” Mother said, laughing.
“We could stay outside by the alligator pond, and you and Gran could bring some out and let us pick one,” I said.
“That’s a good idea!” Mother said, laughing again. “But I don’t think the doctor would let us do it.”
“Why?”
“Well, does Mr. Stoner let you take candy out of the drugstore before you pay for it?
“No.”
“Well, that’s how the hospital is, too. You have to pick while you’re inside.”
The day was dark gray. The wind wheezed in the treetops. I carried Mother’s suitcase to the car. Virgie and Joe George were driving up.
“You didn’t pick a very good day to go, Mother,” I said.
“No, but it’ll h
ave to do.”
“Don’t worry about a thing, Lacy,” Virgie said. “Everything’s going to be all right, I promise.”
“Hi,” Joe George said. “Brrr!” He hugged himself.
“Hi,” I said.
“I believe you, Virgie,” Mother said. “We just have to trust in the Lord.”
Gran was shooing Belinda and Rick off the porch back into the house. When she had put her suitcase into the car, she bent and kissed me and hugged me. The big fur collar of her coat smelled cold and dusty. Then Mother kissed me, too.
“Remember, you’re the man of the family,” she said. “Help Virgie every way you can.”
“I will.”
Virgie put an arm around Joe George’s shoulders and the other around mine and hustled us into the house. As soon as we slammed the door, she pulled a brown paper sack from under her coat, held it high and said, “Well, who wants a cookie?” Rick started crying. She picked him up and carried him to the kitchen, sat him in his high chair, put the cookies on a plate and poured milk for all of us.
“You all help yourselves,” she said, “but stay in the kitchen until you’re through. We don’t want to mess up Miss Gloria’s sitting room, do we?”
She handed Rick a cookie, and he started gnawing on it and pretty soon forgot to cry. We sat around the table and ate.
“Which would you rather have, a brother or a sister?” Virgie asked. We all looked at each other. Belinda shrugged.
“I don’t guess it makes much difference,” I said. “Maybe a sister, since we’ve already got two boys.”
“What’s a hospital?” Belinda asked.
“It’s where they take people that are real sick,” Joe George replied.
“Mother’s not sick!” Belinda yelled. Then she looked at me, worry in her big brown eyes. “Is she, Gate?”
“Of course not!” Virgie said. “Your mother’s fine! The hospital’s a healthy place, and they keep the little babies there until they’re big enough to take home, and then the mothers and daddies come and get them.”
“Our daddy isn’t here,” Rick said.
“I know, honey,” Virgie said. “But he’ll be home someday, and won’t he be surprised when he sees what your mother’s got!”
“He already knows about it,” I said. “He knew about it before he went to the Army.”
“Oh, of course he did! He probably helped your mother fill out the order.”
“Why don’t we fill out an order, Mama?” Joe George asked. “Gate’s already got Belinda and Rick, and now he’s getting a new one. I’m tired of being the littlest one in our family.”
“Finish your milk,” Virgie said. “Let’s clean up these crumbs, or Miss Gloria will be awful mad when she comes back.”
Sleet was slapping at the windows now, and the wind was higher than ever. Joe George and I sat by the window and watched the lights of the cars moving slowly up and down the road and listened to the wheezing of the two big elms in the front yard. The lights were on in some of the houses, and Virgie turned ours on, too. She sat on the floor by the big coal oil stove and played with the little ones, but they didn’t seem to want to play very much, and I was getting tired of looking out the window and talking to Joe George. It got pretty quiet, and Rick started crying again, and Belinda looked like she was about to, and I wanted to.
“Anybody want any supper?” Virgie asked. Nobody answered. “Too full of cookies, huh? Okay, then, time for bed.”
She said Joe George and Rick and I could sleep on a pallet on the floor, just for the fun of it, and I helped her get the quilts down and undressed Rick while she attended to Belinda. Belinda climbed into Gran’s bed with Virgie.
The pallet was thin, and it took us a while to get comfortable, but things finally got still, and Virgie was snoring softly, and Joe George’s breath came slow and heavy, and I lay there staring up into the darkness and listening to them and to the wind and sleet. I was thinking I was the only one still awake when Rick slid over to me and whispered in my ear.
“I wish Mother was here,” he said.
“I do, too,” I said. I put my arm around him.
Virgie fixed us oatmeal with prunes in it for breakfast and dressed the little ones and shooed Joe George and me out the door into the cold. The storm was over, and the sun was out, but the little white sleet pellets still lay on the dead grass and crunched under our feet as we walked across the pasture to school.
All the kids crowded around me when they found out that Mother had gone to get the baby. The girls especially liked babies, and they all wanted to know if they could come see it when Mother brought it home. Even old Mrs. Potter smiled a little and let us talk for a few minutes after the bell rang before she told us to shut up and sit down.
As Joe George and I walked back across the pasture after school, Virgie came out on the back porch and yelled at me. “Hey, Gate!” she said. “You’ve got a new baby sister!”
“Yippee!”
I ran for the house. Virgie told us all to get in the car and go with her to the grocery store, and we could tell everybody. She drove us all over town, and we stuck our heads out the windows into the cold and yelled the news. The little ones bounced on the back seat and chanted, “We’ve got a baby si-i-i-ster! We’ve got a baby si-i-i-ster!” over and over again, and people in cars and on the sidewalk smiled and waved.
“Your grandma called Mrs. Haskell not an hour ago,” Virgie said. “She said it weighs eight pounds, and your mother named it Cherry Ann.”
“When are they coming home?” I asked.
“Miss Gloria said Saturday, and an ambulance will bring your mama.”
“An ambulance! With the siren and red lights and everything?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Boy howdy!”
We waited for Saturday like Christmas. Belinda and Rick were always asking Virgie, “Is it Saturday yet?” and she would laugh and say, “Not yet. I’ll tell you when.” But Saturday finally came, and when it came it was cold. Virgie wanted us to stay inside, but we couldn’t, at least Belinda and Joe George and I couldn’t. We sat at the top of the front porch steps, all capped and coated and gloved, watching our breath steam out before us in the still, clear air. We looked up and down the street and listened for the siren and talked about Mother and Cherry Ann and wondered how much hair our baby sister would have and what color her eyes would be. But the ambulance didn’t come, and we would get too cold and have to go inside and stand by the stove. Rick, all cozy in corduroy, watched us puff and blow our hands.
“Saturday yet?” he asked.
I laughed. “Not yet, but pretty soon.”
And when we were toasted, we would go back out and sit some more, and then get up and wander around the yard, wanting to do something besides just wait, but not knowing what. Finally, I climbed the mulberry tree in the backyard. The tree wasn’t as tall as the house, so I couldn’t see anything, but I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted like I was looking way off down the street.
“See anything?” Belinda asked.
“Yeah, I see the street…way, way down the street, clear to the highway…and a bunch of cars…a big, long black car… It’s the ambulance! The ambulance is coming! Hurry, Belinda! Run to the front, or you’ll be too late!”
Belinda took off around the house. I climbed down, and Joe George and I sat under the tree and giggled until Belinda came back, and then we put on serious faces again.
“It’s not there!” Belinda said. “You’re telling a story!”
“Doggone!” I said. “I thought sure that was it.”
Joe George got up and walked around the other side of the house, and pretty soon he came running and yelling, “It’s coming! It’s coming from the other way! Hurry, Belinda, or you’ll miss it!”
And Belinda took off again. We kept up this game until Belinda got tuckered out and looked like she was about to cry. “No fair, Gate!” she said. “You keep on fooling me!”
Her brown eyes looked so big
and hurt that I felt kind of ashamed of myself, so I held her in my lap and played with the curls that were sticking out from under her red knit cap, and pretty soon she grinned at me, and everything was all right again.
Virgie came out and told us to come in and eat, and we missed the ambulance. We were halfway through our soup when Gran opened the door.
“Yoo-hoo!” she hollered. “Anybody home?”
We jumped up and ran outside, and there was the ambulance already pulled up outside the front gate, and two men in white coats rolling out the stretcher with Mother on it. No siren, no lights, no nothing. Virgie held us back on the porch while Gran went out and took a little bundle of blanket from one of the men. She carried it to the house, and we all crowded around, saying, “Let me see! Let me see!”
“No, no,” Gran said. “Stay back until they get your mother in.”
Mother’s hair looked bright red against the sheet of the stretcher. She smiled at us when they carried her up the steps, but she looked tired and pale, and she didn’t say anything. We waited until the men came back out with the stretcher, and Gran came to the door and said, “You can come in now, but don’t make any noise. The baby’s asleep.”
We tiptoed, but Gran still said, “Shh!” Mother had been laid in Gran’s bed, and the little bundle of blanket was in the crook of her arm. She reached over and folded some of the blanket back and showed us the little red baby.
“Ooooo! Little!” Rick said, reaching toward it.
“No, no! Don’t touch,” Gran whispered. “You’ll wake her up.”
“She does look like a cherry, doesn’t she?” Belinda whispered to me.
Mother stretched her arm toward us, and we went up one by one and hugged her and kissed her.
“My babies!” she whispered. “You’re all my babies!”
Later, Virgie handed Mother an envelope. “Here’s something that’ll make you feel better,” she said. “A letter from Will.”
Mother tore open the envelope. There was just one sheet of paper inside. She read it quickly and dropped her arm onto the bed and looked at Gran, even tireder than before.
“Will’s been hurt,” she said.
My father and several others had been crossing a bridge across a rocky ravine, and somebody blew up the bridge with a hand grenade. One soldier was killed, and my father and the others fell to the bottom of the ravine. I never knew where it happened, except that it wasn’t overseas. My mother got a letter from him occasionally while he was in the hospital, but she never read them aloud to us as she did before the accident. And she never smiled when she read them to herself. She read them once, then put them into their envelopes and put them away in her cedar chest.
Some Sweet Day Page 6