Becky Meets Her Match

by Linda Byler

  She had a good while to take stock of the situation, however, when her parents went to confer with the remainder of the family. Salome was doing better, but she could not be saddled with the responsibility of her aging parents. Her nerves would not take it.

  Becky looked through the cupboards, found a frying pan and a saucepan, then heated tomato soup and fried a few beef patties. She opened a jar of pickles and placed a bowl of applesauce on the table.

  She filled a Melmac soup bowl with the steaming tomato soup, crumpled in a handful of saltines and a dollop of applesauce, and told Mommy to eat. Like a child, she showed her delight, promptly lifting a spoonful of soup to her trembling, birdlike mouth.

  Becky was surprised by, then frightened of, the hunger in her grandfather’s eyes. He was starving. She went to the drawer in the cupboard, found a tablespoon, then began ladeling the hot soup into his mouth as fast as she could, wiping off the excess with a paper towel. He devoured the one fried beef patty, raised his hand, and pointed for another.

  Something inside Becky stirred. She felt fiercely protective of this aging, neglected couple who were her own flesh and blood.

  Her grandmother went to the pantry and retrieved a cake pan, slid back the lid, and presented a perfectly baked shoofly cake. Shaking her finger at Becky, she said, “They think I can’t do this anymore. Ha. Look at this. It’s perfect. What Rachel and Mary don’t know won’t hurt them.” Giggling, she sat down and helped herself to a generous slice. Becky laughed with her, then cut a chunk for Daudy.

  She heard a garbled, “Vett millich. Millich. Vett millich.”

  Quickly, Becky went to the refrigerator, found a glass container of milk, and poured it over the shoofly cake. She fed it all to Daudy, wiped his face, then patted his arm.

  The old face softened with appreciation, his garbled “Denke” a benediction.

  She pulled up the sheet, cranked his bed lower, adjusted his pillows, and said he could rest awhile till she could get him ready for bed.

  Mommy was already washing dishes when Becky helped herself to a steaming bowl of tomato soup and saltines.

  Long into the night, she conferred with her parents. In the end, they went home to the farm in Wisconsin, leaving Becky to take over most of the responsibility for her grandparents.

  Becky cried that first night, just like she cried before her sixteenth birthday. Then she squared her shoulders, took a deep, calming breath, and faced the situation head-on. No use whimpering and crying. She was here now. She had promised to do her best so she would.

  She told herself this in firm tones, if a sort of panic in your thoughts can be called a tone. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, the unaccustomed display of traffic lights like human-made northern lights keeping her awake.

  The small room with the twin-sized bed was constantly changing from dark to a brilliant white or yellow as cars whizzed past. With each vehicle that stopped at the intersection, she heard the grinding of loose stones. In addition, there were loud bellows from pickup trucks and softer sounds from small cars, but each and every one was as annoying as the one before.

  Her grandmother snored deeply, a steady rhythm of burbling sounds from her old nose. Or old throat or adenoids, whatever, Becky thought. A gruff duplicate of the same sound emanated from the hospital bed in the front room where her grandfather lay in a deep sleep.

  She thought of all she would need to learn, grimacing at the thought of the old unwashed bodies, the grease and filth of her grandmother’s dress front. They were so old. They had lived all their lives taking a hot bath only on Saturday evenings, wearing the same clothes for two or three days, maybe even longer. The odor in the house was the smell of unwashed bedclothes and laundry, plus dank towels that hung on their rack for weeks.

  Daudy’s hair needed a shampoo so desperately, but how did one go about washing hair if the person was bedfast? There had to be a way.

  Well, she would do laundry first thing in the morning. She would find every sour-smelling item in the house and wash them all in steaming hot water and Tide with bleach in Mommy’s wringer washer, then hang everything out to dry on the wheel line. She would bathe Daudy from head to toe, send Mommy to the bathtub, and deal with the dirty house.

  In the morning, she woke to find Mommy puttering around the kitchen, wearing her flannel nightgown with a large safety pin at the neck. Strands of loose threads dangled from the hem like spiderwebs.

  Quickly, Becky rose, took her suitcase to the bathroom, and washed and dressed before greeting her grandmother, who seemed delighted to see her. She called her Becky and told her she was making breakfast.

  Becky decided to let her, but kept an eye on her as if she were a child. When she asked Salome to help with Daudy’s sheets, she was met with a cold stare and a clipped, “It’s not time to wash them.”

  Becky returned the look with one colder than Salome’s and said in measured tones, “I’m taking care of Daudy and Mommy, so I will say what gets washed and when.”

  Salome whimpered, “Now you’re saying I’m sloppy.”

  Becky didn’t answer as she turned on her heel. Salome followed her, making excuses about not being well. Becky wanted to feel the slightest twinge of sympathy but found none, so she didn’t bother answering.

  Salome said they didn’t wash Daudy’s hair. They used a product called Dry Shampoo. And Becky wouldn’t need to bathe Daudy; that was Henry’s job.

  Becky’s mind was grinding away, the gears lining up in perfect symmetry. Yes, she wanted a washbasin on the floor, another on the nightstand, and a pitcher of warm water for rinsing. She would need a towel. As she barked orders, Salome obeyed reluctantly. Mommy grimaced and wrung her hands as they gently tugged the upper half of Daudy off the bed and began scrubbing. When Becky was finished, Daudy was smiling, Salome was laughing, and Mommy was throwing her hands in the air and saying, “Ach, du yay, du yay, dya fasaufet ihn noch!” Daudy raised one finger of his good hand and waggled it at his wife.

  Henry finished the bath. Becky brushed Daudy’s teeth and shaved him on the spots he couldn’t reach. They changed his bedding, plumped his pillows, and fed him stewed crackers and dippy eggs with homemade ketchup and sausages. He swallowed his medication and vitamins obediently, sighed, and smiled his lopsided smile. “Denke, Becky,” he said.

  When he fell asleep almost immediately, they were afraid he had been through too much, being moved from the bed like that.

  Mommy was the biggest challenge. Salome’s and Henry’s children drifted into her part of the house like orphans with sticky mouths and wet muddy shoes, making themselves at home without asking permission, playing noisily on the floor with the old tin box of Tinkertoys and empty, wooden spools.

  Becky washed walls and windows and floors. She sprayed degreaser on sticky green window blinds and scoured the bathroom and each tiny bedroom.

  Mommy slapped Becky’s shoulder when she became upset as she watched her clean and defrost the refrigerator. She said those peas would still be good, stewed with Ritz Crackers and milk. When Becky showed her the gray-green mold covering half the bowl, Mommy said you could scrape that off.

  Becky waited till her back was turned or she became distracted, which was quite often, then swiftly emptied every little Pyrex container of moldy food, sour milk, curdled cheese, and yogurt piled high with gray fuzz. She dumped limp celery, slimy mashed potatoes, and old wrinkled tangerines dressed in their own fuzzy gray sweaters of mold.

  They ate oatmeal for supper. Becky tumbled into bed with only part of the cleaning done. She cried from sheer weariness and homesickness, covered with an impending sense of gloom. To stay here would take all she had. She would have to tap into reserves of strength she didn’t know if she possessed. She could only hope that she was strong enough to meet each new problem as it arose.

  She prayed now, really prayed, sometimes begging God to help her through. No more absentminded Miede Binnichs for Becky. She acknowledged a Higher Power, an Almighty Hand above her, an
d felt guidance from a Presence she had been accustomed to hearing about all her life. Here in Pennsylvania, so many miles from her home in Wisconsin, God became real. She learned to pray, to draw on that source of power much higher than her own.

  There were days when she couldn’t stand the sight of weary, depressed Salome and her unkempt children. She was ashamed, even alarmed at her strong animosity toward an aunt who was doing the best she could. For Salome, who had weak nerves and was tied down with all her little ones, the sun hid behind a bank of black, scudding clouds called Depression.

  It irked Becky over and over how she would sit on Daudy’s couch, talking and letting those little ones run wild. They would pull down a plastic pot of African violets, spill juice and water, and ask for candy and crackers and pretzels, which Mommy stashed away on top of the refrigerator behind the cornflakes.

  If Becky would not produce these treats for her children, Salome would get up, push the cornflakes aside, procure a bag of lollipops, and proceed to hand them out. That left Becky to wipe the floor, a cloud of steam enveloping her like a teakettle when Salome and her children finally took their leave.

  Mommy always got upset when Salome did this, which was pitiful. In her state of dementia, it was very important to Mommy that the lollipops stayed hidden away behind the cornflakes. Sometimes she would cry like her heart was broken.

  The day came when Becky held her in a soft, comforting hug, soothed her with the promise that she would buy more, then marched straight over to Henry’s and confronted Salome while Henry was in the kitchen.

  “This is what Becky said,” Salome would repeatedly tell all the sisters, playing the poor damaged martyr to the hilt. “She said we have to stay home. If we can’t care for Daudy, then ‘don’t sit over here in their space all afternoon and make it more difficult for me.’ She said that. She’s only sixteen, and she had the gall to say that to me.”

  The sisters sympathized accordingly, knowing Salome couldn’t take much with her weak nerves. But the minute she left, they actually did some fist-pumping, agreeing that Enosa Becky was a gift, a godsend, a wonder.

  Where did she get it, all that common sense in one so young? They nodded their heads in the end. Yes, Enos had been like that at sixteen.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHEN SPRING CAME, BECKY HAD A ROUTINE firmly established. She washed and cooked and cleaned, sewed dresses for herself in her spare time, and even joined a group of Lancaster County youth who called themselves the Hummingbirds.

  She had a few good friends and met some interesting boys, but she wasn’t attracted to anyone. No one asked her out either, which didn’t surprise her. She knew boys weren’t particularly attracted to girls her size, so that was fine.

  Lancaster was a veritable metropolis, almost a New York City with its hustle and flow! Buggies drawn by spirited horses, cars and trucks, tractors and bikes, scooters and pedestrians, it never stopped. Even at night the dark was not really dark with twinkling lights in the distance. The English neighbors all had pole lights that flickered on at twilight like gigantic lightning bugs.

  Becky wrote letters to her family and called Mam and Nancy, swallowing back tears of homesickness. Sometimes the desire to see Wisconsin got so strong she thought she couldn’t stay in Lancaster one more week. But the homesickness always passed when she went back into the house and Daudy asked her to read from Die Botschaft, which she loved to do. Expressions of concern, humor, happiness, recognition, and love all passed over Daudy’s face like changing weather as she read to him.

  The broiling summer heat was hard on Daudy and Mommy. They both withered like lettuce left out on the counter, their breathing quick and shallow when they took their afternoon naps in the ninety-degree heat.

  Henry set up a fan attached to a 12-volt battery, but Mommy didn’t like it. She said it was noisy, and that they never had one of those when she was growing up. Daudy came down with a cold, a stiff neck, and a steady drip down the back of his throat. When he became nauseated and upset, he blamed the fan rigged up to that buggy “battry” and asked Henry to remove the fan and put the “battry” back in the buggy where it belonged.

  Becky picked beans and canned them, cooking them for three hours in two agate canners. That operation turned the little house into a steaming sauna, which evidently bothered her grandparents less than the fan with its unaccustomed noise. She learned to can red beets and carrots and cauliflower. Every edible morsel that was gleaned was carefully frozen, pickled, or canned.

  Mommy liked to pick cucumbers before they reached a decent pickling size. Every morning, in the dewy, wet grass, loose clippings from the reel mower plastered to her bare feet, Becky went in search of all the little cucumbers according to her grandmother’s instructions. She had to lift the heavy, scratchy vines, tilt her head to the left, then to the right, and peer under the wide cucumber leaves to find every tiny pickle. Babies, that’s what they were. Baby pickles with their wilting yellow blossoms still attached.

  Mommy clapped her hands and chortled like a child who had won a prize when she finally had enough of these mini-cucumbers to start a batch of seven-day sweet pickles. She washed them and snipped off the ends, but then the light went out of her face. A gray shadow of doubt crept across the childlike glee, followed by a blank expression as her eyes turned dark with fear.

  She had forgotten how to make seven-day sweet pickles, leaving her scrambling for a foothold, as if she needed to regain her sense of balance and had no idea where to begin. She cried softly, lifting her apron to find her wrinkled handkerchief in the deep pocket of her dress, spread across her thin legs.

  Becky comforted her as best she could by showing her the recipe they would be using. But that was no use. Mommy could not grasp the concept of what cucumbers were for and had no idea what she was doing with a paring knife.

  Salome mentioned the fact that a chiropractor might help; a good adjustment always did her good. So Becky cleaned up Mommy and trundled her off to the chiropractor.

  And so it went. Becky learned by trial and error what worked well and what was not a good idea. Some days she just had to wing it, the way Daniel used to say.

  She thought of him more often than she cared to admit, a wistful longing that was hard to understand. Why had he asked her to be his special girl if he didn’t know or care where she was now? Did he ever wonder how she was doing?

  If only the administration at Round Oaks had accepted her. She would not be here, so very far from home, with only phone calls and letters to assuage the cauldron of homesickness that often threatened to boil over.

  Prayers and determination, that’s what it took. Each day some new and unpredictable event cropped up, and so far, with the family’s input, she had done an admirable job, Mary said.

  She also said they should all be ashamed. Reuben and Enos for moving so far away when they knew they had aging parents. Malinda and Anna for their quilting and letting their work stand in the way of caring for the elderly.

  When Becky blurted out to Mary, “What about your market?” she was met with an indignant sputter, followed by a string of lame excuses, each one more pathetic than the last.

  So there you have it, Becky thought, pushing the creaking porch swing gently with one bare foot and listening to the sound of the crickets and katydids in the garden. English people have careers, so they put their parents in the care of trained staff at an establishment built for the elderly, which the plain folks would never do.

  “We care for our own,” she had often heard her father say. We do. Yes, we do, Becky thought, shaking her head. But of what quality is our care? She supposed care was given in various degrees in many different families, as well as in the facilities built for the care of the aging.

  She could not pass judgment, not now, not ever. She was only a young, inexperienced girl without the responsibility of her own family, so who was she to be harsh in her accounts of anyone?

  Daudy and Mommy had both lost the ability to do for themselves and were de
pendent on her for so many things. She kept the house clean, fed them nutritional meals, and did the washing every day. Yet they were slipping, wraithlike, into a fog, except it didn’t disappear into the hollows of early morning. Their days and weeks and months were leaving them weaker and more helpless. How long would she have them?

  A part of her longed for home. The other part longed to stay with her aging grandparents, whom she had come to love more than she thought possible. Without a doubt, Daudy loved her. His eyes twinkled when she got out her little harmonica. He smiled his lopsided smile and told her in his blurry speech, “Play, Becky, play.” And she would.

  She played “Red River Valley,” “Amazing Grace,” “Old Dan Tucker,” and many old tunes she had learned from her father. Daudy would nod his head and tap the tips of his fingers on the bedclothes, his eyes young, if only for a fleeting moment.

  When she sang, the tears would roll down his craggy old cheeks and drop on his shirt front, unnoticed, as he was carried away on the wings of Becky’s voice. Mommy would come bustling over, birdlike, wipe Daudy’s face, shake a finger at Becky, saying “Hush, hush.” She didn’t understand. She was only doing what she knew.

  Visitors came in the evening—family members, the ministers of the district, the group of people they had joined in worship for almost sixty-five years. When there was a knock on the door in the evening, Becky always welcomed the visitors wholeheartedly. She was glad to let them entertain her grandparents so she could slip away for a half hour for some time of quiet.

  It was when the air turned crisp in the evening and the corn turned brown on the stalk, that teams of horses appeared in the fields following the binder. The men sweated in the September sun as they loaded the bundles of heavy corn. And Daudy took a turn for the worse.

  The family was summoned and stood around his bed to make decisions. Becky stayed sitting with Mommy, trying to comfort her as best she could.