“Just the ironing board,” Mother said.
“Oh, Lordy! Where are we going to put that?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll make it,” Mother said. “We’re not licked yet.”
“How about the running board?” I asked.
“Well, we couldn’t open the door…” Gran said.
“We could open one door,” Mother said. “We’re lucky we won’t have to climb through the windows.”
Cherry Ann let out a yell. Mother went into the house to check on her, and Gran and I worked on the ironing board.
“How far is it to El Paso?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Three days. Maybe a little longer. There. One more knot ought to do it, honey.”
“Okay. I’m finished.”
“Let’s check it over.”
We walked around the car, and Gran flashed the light around over all the ropes and knots.
“It’s sure loaded, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah. Hope it all stays on.”
“It will. Let’s go in.”
Mother was changing Cherry Ann’s diaper on the kitchen drainboard. She chuckled while Mother sprinkled the talcum powder on her.
“We’re through,” Gran said.
“Good. Get the kids in the car while I finish up here. I don’t want to stay around here any longer than we have to.”
Belinda was sitting on the living room floor, staring at the wall. “I want to go to bed,” she said.
“Too bad,” I said. “There’s no bed here.”
“Come on, honey,” Gran said, picking her up. “There’s a nice pallet in the car. Will you turn out the lights, Lacy? I don’t want to come back.”
“Yes, I’ll be right out.”
Gran laid Belinda on the pallet and put a pillow under her head, then scooted under the steering wheel and across the front seat.
“Can I sit in the front for a while?” I asked.
“Sure, honey.” She patted the seat beside her.
We watched the light go out in the living room, and then in the kitchen. Belinda sat up.
“Are we moving now?” she asked.
“Yes, just as soon as your mother gets here,” Gran said.
“When are we coming back?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Someday. Maybe.”
Mother came down the steps and handed Cherry Ann through the window to Gran and got in and started the engine. The lights flicked on.
“Everybody set?” Mother asked.
“I think so,” Gran said. “How’s the gas?”
“Full. I had it filled when Pearly put the rack on. He gave it to us out of his own gas stamps.”
“That was mighty nice of him,” Gran said. “There are lots of good people in this world.”
Mother backed the car into the street and turned it toward town. Lights were still on in some of the houses. People were sitting on their front porches, getting the breeze. They looked at us when we went by. Gran waved at some. Nobody was downtown. Everything was closed. Small bulbs burned in some of the stores, making their ordinary merchandise look eerie. Others were dark, and our headlights flashed back at us through their black windows. A light was burning behind a drawn shade above the drugstore. Mother turned and drove by the burned-out bank and the Helpy-Selfy. Soon we passed the last house, stopped, and turned onto the highway. I turned and grinned at Belinda. I could barely see her through the darkness.
“We’re on our way!” I said.
She nodded. She was sleepy. Everybody was quiet. Mother hunched over the steering wheel, looking straight ahead, too. The car wasn’t as crowded as I thought it would be. The diaper bag and the Thermos jug were on the floor. The flashlight and the map were on the dashboard. That was all. The headlights cut a short yellow path ahead of us. A cottontail crossed it. A nighthawk crossed it. Two headlights met us, dimmed, moved past. Johnson grass and sunflowers waved lazily in the edge of the light. There were fence posts, bridge rails, a light in a farmhouse window. The motor hummed. The dashboard lights shined on Cherry Ann’s sleeping face. She had her thumb in her mouth. I wanted to talk.
“How far are we going tonight?” I asked.
“Shh! You’ll wake the kids up!” Gran whispered.
“How far?” I whispered.
“Far enough to find a tourist camp and put these kids to bed.”
“How far is that?”
“We’ll see. Dublin, maybe.”
“That’s not far!”
“Shh!”
The motor hummed. I got stiff. I shifted around.
“You want to get in the back?” Gran whispered.
“No.”
“You can if you want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
I saw the lights of Dublin. I sat up straight to get a better look. Mother slowed the car as we started through town.
“There’s one,” Gran said, pointing to a row of white cabins.
“No vacancy,” Mother said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“They’re all filled up. No more room. There’s another one.”
“No vacancy,” Gran said.
“Another one.”
“No vacancy.”
“We’ll try Comanche,” Mother said.
We tried Comanche and Blanket and Early and Brownwood and Bangs. Everywhere there were tourist camps and cars. Nowhere was there a vacancy.
“Get up, birthday boy!”
Gran was standing by the bed, grinning. Mother was with her, holding Cherry Ann.
“Wake up, kids,” Gran said. “It’s Gate’s birthday!”
Belinda stirred beside me. She rubbed her eyes and stretched, and Mother and Gran sang the birthday song. When they moved aside, I saw a chocolate covered doughnut on the dresser. One lighted candle was stuck in it.
“They didn’t have any birthday cake at the cafe,” Mother said, “but the waitress did the best she could. Come make a wish.”
There were two little somethings wrapped up in Kleenex, one on each side of the doughnut. I shut my eyes and wished that our trip was over and we were there. I blew, and Mother and Gran clapped their hands.
“Open your presents, Gate,” Mother said.
They were two fifty-cent pieces.
“That’s a whole dollar,” Gran said. “You can buy your own present when we get to El Paso. Something to start a new life with.”
We went to the tourist camp cafe and ate breakfast. I’d never been to a cafe before. There was a shiny counter with stools and a lot of tables. It was full of soldiers and sailors and women and kids. Everybody was talking pretty loud. A woman in a white dress came over to our table.
“Did you hear the news?” she asked.
“We just got up,” Gran said. “What news?”
“The Japs have surrendered!”
“You don’t mean it!”
“Yep, it’s in all the papers. The war’s over!”
Mother and Gran talked about the war and the Japs and General MacArthur all through breakfast. Gran bought a newspaper and read to us about it all after we got on the road. Mother and Gran were real happy about it for a while, but then Gran quit reading and folded the paper and stuck it under the seat. She sat there staring ahead at the highway, and then she had tears in her eyes.
“If only it had come sooner,” she said.
“Yes, but it didn’t,” Mother said. “It just didn’t. Let’s don’t talk about it any more.”
Gran wiped her eyes and looked at us in the back seat. “Well, kids,” she said. “Are you enjoying the trip?”
“Yes.”
“Want me to tell you about where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“It’s in the high mountains, far to the west. There are lots of horses and cows and cowboys and Mexicans, and they have a school, and Belinda’s going to be in the first grade, and Gate’s going to be in the third grade, and I’m going to be a teacher. I know a song about it. Want me to sing it?”
“Ye
ah!” Belinda said. “Sing.”
“Okay! Here goes! One! Two! Three! Lacy, you join in.”
Oh, give me a home, where the buf-fa-lo roam,
Where the deer and the an-te-lope play,
Where sel-dom is heard a dis-cour-ag-ing word,
And the skies are not clou-dy all day.
Mother joined in on the chorus, and pretty soon everybody was laughing and carrying on and having a good time. Gran told us stories and read us Burma-Shave signs and asked us riddles and told us the names of the towns we went through. There were hills of bare whitish rock and cactus and scrubby little dark green bushes. There was the sun, always shimmering on the highway ahead of us, always playing tricks, making us see lakes and rivers that weren’t there. There were detours and machines and dust and men waving red flags at us. There were filling stations and toilets and the smell of gas and men asking us where we were from and where we were going. There was sweat, and Cherry Ann crying. There was Mother, hunched over the steering wheel, squinting through her shades into the sun, and Gran, looking at the map. There were tourist camps and cafes and NO VACANCY signs. There was supper and more highway and a long black train full of soldiers and more ice in the Thermos and a diaper change beside the road and the stink of dirty diapers in the front seat and cars with big, round air coolers in their windows and a purple-and-yellow-and-orange-and-green sundown, and finally, there was a bed and sleep.
The highway stretched ahead of us like an endless blue ribbon across an endless brown table. There were no houses, no animals, no people. Then they were there, like huge windmill towers. Their stink came to meet us.
“Oil derricks,” Gran said. “Black gold. Stinks to high heaven, doesn’t it?”
“I wish some of that stink belonged to us,” Mother said. “It’d probably smell pretty good, then.”
Everything was sun and hot metal, pipe and sheet iron and derricks and trucks and men in shiny steel hats and sheds and pumps working up and down like crazy hobby-horses and bare black ground and pools of dirty, stinking stuff. Then there was more sand and brush and derricks and oil. There was an air base with acres and acres of shiny bombers, lined up row on row, like they were growing in a field. We stopped and watched one come in for a landing.
“Well, boys,” Gran said, watching it. “I guess you’ll all be going home soon.”
The sun was setting when we passed through Pecos. The desert was still before us, but off in the distance was a line of blue mountains.
“Well, kids, that’s where we’re going,” Gran said.
“Yes, right through them,” Mother said. “They scare me to death, just looking at them. I’ve never driven in mountains before.”
“I’m not worried, Lacy. You’re a good driver.”
“Famous last words! Well, here goes!”
The mountains were farther away than they looked, and it was dark long before we got to them. Then the road narrowed and started winding, and we were climbing through the blackest blackness I’d ever seen. There were no houses, no towns, no cars, no lights. Just the road and its black center stripe and the little reflectors on the guard posts, warning us of curves and cliffs. I kept imagining that the lights were getting dimmer, and I wondered what we would do if they went out. Everyone was awake, but it was very quiet. Belinda and I sat bolt upright in the back seat. Cherry Ann lay quietly in Gran’s lap. My heart was in my throat. I kept wondering if that road really ended anywhere or just kept going on and on through the blackness.
Your face has almost faded from my mind, my father, into the long silence. But I’ll cut a rose with this old bone-handled knife and lay it on the dark earth that covers you.
William Lafayette Turnbolt, prominent Carson County farmer and civic leader, died at 4:15 p.m. yesterday at Grayson Memorial Hospital. He was 54.
Mr. Turnbolt, formerly of Darlington, Tex., moved to Calloway in 1952, shortly after his marriage to Mrs. Miriam Colson, widow of the late G. H. Colson and owner of Colson Farms. He entered immediately into community life and over the years served terms as president of the Calloway Lions Club, worshipful master of Carson Lodge No. 769, F&AM, deacon of First Baptist Church, and advisor to the Carson County 4-H Club. He was a director of the Farmers & Merchants State Bank from 1955 until his death. He served in the Army during World War II.
Survivors include his widow, two sons, Robert and William Jr., both students at the University of Texas at Austin; a daughter, Cynthia, a sophomore at Carson County High School, and other children by previous marriages.
The funeral will be at First Baptist Church at 10 a.m. Friday, with burial in Crestview Cemetery. The body may be viewed at Johnson & Bennett Funeral Home after 2 p.m. tomorrow.
Expressions of sympathy may take the form of contributions to the First Baptist Church organ fund.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRYAN WOOLLEY was born in Texas in 1937 and grew up in Fort Davis, a small mountain town west of the Pecos. He received most of his education from the people who live there, and the rest at the University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Christian University and Harvard. He is a journalist whose career has included sojourns at the El Paso Times, the Tulsa bureau of The Associated Press and the Anniston Star in Alabama. He is at present a writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal and Louisville Times Magazine.
Some Sweet Day Page 10