Sister of Silence

by Daleen Berry

  When Dad heard me playing, he said I was going to become a famous concert pianist. He promised he would someday send me to a music conservatory. I would sit for hours on the little bench, trying to play the old, worn-out instrument. For years, just as I had with dancing, I begged for lessons, but there was never enough money.

  So instead, I went outside to play, or stayed inside and read. After school, I would jump off the bus, eager to explore on my way home. Mom always waited for us at the bus stop. Then she and Carla walked home while I dawdled behind. I walked down the narrow country lane on my own. It was a short walk, made longer by the presence of a general store and post office in a gray-shingled building. Inside, I bought pieces of nickel candy from Mr. Engle, the elderly shop owner who shuffled slowly around, helping me remove the lids from the candy jars that sat atop glass display cabinets. He also sold ice cream and all kinds of household and garden items in the comfortable but dusty old shop, and I would slowly wander around savoring my sweets as I peered closely at everything there.

  Mr. Engle’s son worked in the post office next door. Jim was the postmaster and he sorted mail in a room barely big enough to turn around in, but which had the most lovely, little brass boxes from floor to ceiling. There was row upon row of them, except where a small window opened in the center. That was where customers bought stamps or leaned over the narrow ledge, eager to share neighborhood news.

  Each brass box had its own small window, and an even smaller brass knob with a pointer that turned around a numbered dial to unlock the boxes. I loved turning the little knob and opening its tiny, hinged door, to find someone had sent me a letter of my very own.

  I would practically run off the bus every day, stopping long enough to buy something from the store if I had money, or go into the post office in case my mother had left mail in the box for me. Jim would always come out whenever any of the neighborhood children came in, smiling kindly and asking how our day had been, or what we were learning in school. I enjoyed talking to him for a few minutes, before skipping happily down the road.

  “Well Miss Daleen, how are you today?” Jim asked.

  “I’m fine, but I don’t see any mail in my box.” I was disappointed.

  Jim grinned. “Then you’ll be happy to know that’s because it’s too big to fit into the box.” He turned and picked up a big bundle and opened the small door between his work area and the customer service area.

  “I think this is yours,” he said, handing it to me.

  “It’s my weekly delivery of Grit newspapers!” I practically danced out of the building, yelling as I went. “Thank you, Jim!”

  The papers were too heavy to dally, but on other days I would stop to gaze at the jewelweed that grew alongside the road. I called the bright specks of orange hidden among the tall bushes touch-me-nots. My hand would be poised to touch one of the elongated pods that hung on the same stem as the small, delicate flowers when it would suddenly pop without warning, exposing a tiny curled green vine and a few white seeds. One of the things I really enjoyed during late spring and early summer was to try to pop as many of the little pods as I could. Sometimes, I would pluck them very carefully from their stems, place them in my open palm, and make a game out of trying to reach home with the buds still intact, because even stepping too hard could cause them to pop. Then I would sit down and with barely a touch, I would watch the remaining ones burst open, revealing the amazing coiled green tendrils inside.

  From the general store to my home, it was a short walk down a small hill and past the touch-me-nots, over three sets of railroad tracks, and across a bridge under which ran a small creek. Each day was an adventure, and I often stopped just to watch a groundhog or a rabbit run by.

  Our home sat at the end of the bridge. Sometimes in summer, I would stand and look over the railing to the water far below, dreaming about how nice it would be to take off my socks and shoes and climb over the rocks. I knew they would feel good, because for several years while growing up, that’s how Carla and I, and all the neighbor kids, stayed cool on the hottest of days.

  My girlhood dreams came alive and found fruition in the tiny town. I was an entrepreneur, so by age eight I spent countless hours dreaming about what I would do if I could earn my own money. Not long after, I got the job delivering more than fifty newspapers on my bike, covering a two-mile route each week.

  Dad had convinced me to get the route selling the quarter-a-copy papers. Having grown up during the Depression with a single mother and four other siblings, he had once had a Grit route himself.

  One ordinary house near the middle of my route, though, created within me a fear that threatened to eat me up. That’s because “Lurch,” as I named him, lived there. He was tall and towered above me, and he scared many neighborhood children. He was also a stranger and because he looked mean and had a deep voice, I was terrified he would kidnap me. Fortunately, his parents usually answered the door, smiling and trading coins for the Grit I held out. I was always eager to leave before Lurch could appear. Each time, I talked inside my head, telling myself, just like my mother had chided me, that Lurch only looked mean. That he was just different, and that he did, in fact, actually have a problem: he was a boy trapped in a man’s body.

  So one day when I nervously knocked at his door, praying his parents would answer, I was hardly able to speak when Lurch opened the door and looked down at me. I swallowed hard and managed to squeak, “Here’s your paper.”

  “Hold on,” he said, turning away.

  I wanted to bolt. Instead, I tried to tell myself that he wouldn’t hurt me, that my parents had checked with Jim, who’d told them Lurch was harmless.

  But it seemed to be taking Lurch more time than it should just to get the money to pay me. My mind began racing. Could he be getting a knife?

  The door opened in the middle of my fanciful fears, and Lurch reached out, coins in his palm. “Here you go,” he said, smiling as he emptied them into my hand.

  “Thank you,” I said, handing him the paper and turning to leave. I forced myself to walk slowly when my feet wanted only to flee, because I knew he was standing in the doorway watching. But as I got on my bike and glanced back, I saw him wave.

  I gave a shy wave back.

  I hated to spend the money I collected from my customers each week, knowing I was my only reliable source for getting more. But even beyond carefully counting and stashing it away in a dresser drawer, was the joy of sitting down at the end of the long route and reading the weekly serial story within each issue. I would lie on my stomach across my bed, head in hands, and read furiously, trying to race to the final few words to see how it ended. Most of the time, I was forced to wait until the next week, and the week after, until the story finally ended weeks later.

  I got lost in other reading adventures, especially Nancy Drew mysteries. I read every book I could get my hands on, and when it was time for our family vacation, I always took along a tall stack of books I had gotten at the library, or borrowed from classmates. About four hours into the first day of our trip, I could count on hearing one of my father’s favorite expressions. A geography and history buff who taught us all the names of the states and their capitals, Dad loved to relate tidbits of information about the places we passed, and it irked him that his eldest child wasn’t as interested in our travels as he was.

  We were driving through St. Louis, Missouri, when he spoke up. “There’s Scott Joplin’s house,” Dad said to no one in particular. Or so I thought.

  “Remember, Daleen? He’s the famous jazz pianist.”

  My ears barely caught the sound of my name being spoken, and by the time I looked up, I saw my father glaring at me from the rearview mirror. “For crying out loud Daleen, get your nose out of that book! You’re missing all the famous sites and some beautiful scenery.”

  Groaning in protest, I laid the book across my lap, careful not to lose my place. I rolled down my window. “Moo, moo,” I said, talking to the cows grazing along the fences.

/>   It didn’t take too long to pacify Dad, who soon lost interest in me and instead tried to debate some political issue or another with my mother.

  “I’m telling you, Eileen, there is no way Tricky Dick wasn’t behind the break-in. Gordon Liddy’s crew isn’t smart enough to have done it on their own,” he said, thumping the steering wheel in earnest.

  Knowing his tirade could take awhile, I grinned and quietly turned my book over—eager to find out what mystery my hero or heroine would take on next.

  It wasn’t just the loosely structured history lessons or following the trials of my main characters that made the trips memorable. By day two, Dad would pop the top on a beer can, leading to Mom’s dismay, expressed by the thinning of her lips.

  “Don’t worry, Honey. I’m just having this one,” Dad told her stony profile.

  The rest of the trip became a battle of wills between them, with Mom growing silent every time Dad opened another can of beer, and Dad growing annoyed every time she tried to ask him to stop drinking.

  “If you wreck, one of the girls could be hurt.”

  “I’m a good driver, and I’m not going to wreck.”

  “Well what if the police stop us, and realize you’re drinking?”

  “They won’t. Now can we please talk about something else?”

  In hindsight, I do think we were fortunate, because in spite of Dad’s drinking, he always held a steady job and he wasn’t usually a mean drunk. But Dad wasn’t home much, either, and most of the money he did earn, typically went to buy more beer.

  With or without the beer, survival is something that seems to come natural to Appalachian people. I learned this after Dad, who hadn’t even had a drop to drink at the time, almost died because he wanted to watch the World Series. It happened early one morning after he climbed a tall ladder to install a TV antenna on our roof.

  “I tried to tell him to wait until the dew was gone, because it was a slate roof and I was afraid he would fall,” my mother said as she cried afterward.

  Dad would have none of it. He was going to put the antennae up there, “by God or else!” Mom is fond of adding when she tells the story.

  Turns out, it was “or else.” I was in the kitchen when I heard a noise and turned to look. I saw something go flying by the window at the same time I heard my mother scream. By the time I ran out the back door and around the corner, Dad was lying on the ground at her feet.

  Mom was right there when it happened, standing on the same spot where he landed. First the tools came falling off, and she somehow managed to move the ladder and then leap out of the way, seconds before Daddy’s body came hurtling to the earth like a falling meteor.

  “I knew he’d kill me if I didn’t move,” she said. “And he would have, because when he hit the ground, he bounced three feet back into the air.” The only thing that saved his life, the doctors said, was the deep layer of peat moss that covered the earth where he landed.

  He broke his pelvis in three places, and his back in two. Dad spent the next five weeks in traction in the hospital, where we would drive to visit him each day. Because children weren’t allowed to visit, Mom would open the window to his hospital room so Carla and I could climb through. Then she would pull out the six-pack of beer Dad had asked her to bring, pop a top, and hand it to him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After that night when Dad came home drunk and dragged Mom downstairs to make him dinner, he transferred to Martinsburg, West Virginia, leaving us behind. Somehow, one year later he convinced Mom to join him there. We lived in a spacious trailer park with yards so big we couldn’t hear our neighbors talking to each other. Tall trees were scattered throughout the park, giving us lots of shade. Second only to swimming in the neighbor’s pool across the street, my favorite pastime occurred when winter came and the ground froze, allowing us to skate on the pond behind the singlewide trailer Dad had rented.

  Mom bought used ice skates from a secondhand shop for Carla and me, and we would walk down the hill to the pond below, where we would tie the laces over the worn, white leather. Then we carefully tested the water before skating onto the frozen pond. Mom made sure the ice was thick enough it wouldn’t break, but she was afraid of water, so she wouldn’t skate with us. Once I learned to skate, I went around and around on the ice, pretending to be Peggy Fleming. I was pulled from my childish reverie only after I tripped over a small branch that had frozen into the water’s rough surface.

  I missed my Grit route, but my parents allowed me to babysit two neighbor boys on the weekends. And I mowed lawns, so I could add to my growing savings account. Because we were close enough to tour the nation’s capitol, I spent some of my money while visiting the Smithsonian Institute and other sites there. We visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and Ulysses S. Grant’s Memorial, but most often we toured the National Air and Space Museum, where Dad proudly showed us “The Spirit of St. Louis” and the Apollo 11 command module. He used those times to teach us the history of flight, from the Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong and the NASA space program.

  Aviation was the greatest part about living in Martinsburg with Dad. Since I was just a little girl, I had known about my father’s love of flying, because he would regale us with stories about famous aviators. I learned not only about such famous flights flown by Chuck Yeager, Charles Lindbergh and “Lady Lindy,” as my father called Amelia Earhart, but also about every space mission the American astronauts or Russians cosmonauts ever made.

  Dad got his flight instructor’s certification, so he worked part-time as an instructor in the evenings and weekends—which was good because it seemed to keep him from drinking. He had also talked my mom into running the tiny airport café. The daughter of a chef, friends and neighbors had always praised her home-cooked meals. Each day Carla and I would get off the bus, don aprons, and help wait on the customers who called her “Crystal,” while Mom served them coffee for ten cents a cup.

  Mom’s little café soon became quite a popular place for pilots, who would often fly there just for her delicious lunch specials—especially on Wednesdays, which was spaghetti day. Several times, well-known politicians or celebrities would land at the little airport and eat there. Once, after Ray Charles’ jet landed there, the crew invited her inside.

  “You should have seen it—even though he’s blind, he has bright colors all over the interior,” Mom told us.

  But it was Paul Newman, who raced cars at the nearby Charles Town Racetrack, that Mom always dreamed of meeting. But she never saw him. “I waited for him, though.” She laughed when telling the story.

  When we weren’t busy helping Mom, Carla and I would ride our bikes all around the property, or tease and torment the airport employees. Sometimes we even went flying with Dad or Mom, who was taking flight lessons herself.

  Aside from the impression being an “airport brat” left on my mind during this time, two major news events were molding both the nation and my young mind. Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the nation learned that Nixon had been involved in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. At home, my parents closely followed the twists and turns of both stories. They had discussed the Watergate scandal at length, and kept abreast of Hearst’s subsequent criminal activity, talking about the incidents after the evening news. At age eleven I soaked it all in, keenly interested in the outcomes. It was summer before the climactic end occurred and President Richard Nixon resigned. After having watched Walter Cronkite talk about Watergate and Patty Hearst every day on the six o’clock evening news for what felt like years, I recognized the role the media played in the world. And by then, I knew I wanted to be an observer who wrote about that world.

  Our move to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia when I was ten became bittersweet because Dad’s drinking soon began to grow worse, causing more and more friction at home. That’s because Dad started spending every weekend and even some weeknights out drinking with Bruce, his best friend and cowor
ker. When we finally met Bruce one night at a pizza parlor, I realized it wasn’t his fault, for Bruce drank far less than Dad did.

  We soon grew to love Bruce during occasional evenings spent together. He also became a cheerleader of sorts, for when I turned into a gawky teenager, Bruce would offer praise and encouragement whenever he saw me practicing the piano, reading my lines for a school play, or working on a writing assignment.

  One day while Bruce was visiting us, I walked around the trailer with a book balanced on my head, trying to perfect my posture and dreaming of the day when I would model for some famous magazine.

  “Why, how elegant you look. You’re going to end up modeling for sure, as tall and slender as you are. They won’t be able to resist you, with your great posture and poise!” he said, making me blush and yet feel graceful at the same time.

  Because West Virginia is a rural state, by his or her twelfth birthday every child knows how to drive and shoot—not at the same time, though. People either need to put food on the table or they’re avid hunters, or perhaps both, so many children learn to use a shotgun or rifle. That’s why, when I was nine, Dad and my Great-Uncle Paul took me out for target practice—and much to their amusement and pride, I kept hitting the bull’s-eyes. The next thing I knew, Dad had gone to Heck’s Department Store to buy me my own 30-30 rifle, which I proudly carried while I tromped along with Dad through the woods behind our house during deer season. Knowing how jealous the boys in my class would be if they saw me, I was never more proud.