I felt like a tightrope walker, brushing away the cobwebs, then squatting down to steady the kerosene lantern for Daddy.
His face already beaded with sweat, he began to poke and snake a little metal cable between the wall that divided the kitchen from the living room.
I saw a dead bird lodged in one of the cross beams. It had been dead a long time and had dried out, showing a lacework of skeletal bones and mysterious openings. Quick as an eye blink, a spider the size of my palm darted under a cross beam.
Sheets of sweat formed on the backs of my legs.
A pearl of moisture slid the length of Daddy’s nose and dripped onto his dungarees. “I got out twelve feet of snake,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Means we can get through with cable here. Mrs. Mullins wants an outlet on this wall.” He reeled in the snake and clipped it on his tool belt.
Back down in the living room, we cut an opening for Mrs. Mullins’s outlet and Daddy began to push the snake up through the hole.
“You willing to go back up in the attic by yourself?” he asked quietly, so Mrs. Mullins wouldn’t hear in the kitchen.
I nodded, trying to forget the spider.
Daddy squeezed my arm. “When you see the tip of the snake, coil the end of the Romex around it,” he said. “Sing out when you’re done.”
“Okay,” I said.
He held the ladder steady until I stepped off it and onto the cross beams.
What Daddy had told me to do wasn’t easy, because the thick Romex was hard to twist. My first two coils slipped loose, but I kept starting over and finally yelled down, “Ready!”
“Good,” he yelled back. “Now I’m going to pull on the snake. You just ease the Romex off the roll and make sure it follows along.”
“Okay,” I called.
And so the morning went, with Daddy putting outlets and switches and overhead lights where Mrs. Mullins wanted them.
In the afternoon, I held the soldering cup while he dipped the bare wires in solder and twisted them together.
“The REA inspector will examine these junctions real close,” he said. “If they’re not just right, I’ll have to do them over.”
At the end of the day, we drove back to the apartment, worn out. I stared at the palms of my hands, black from the Romex. Daddy looked fierce, with black lines smearing his face and clots of cobwebs matting his hair.
Mrs. Stanton had slid our mail under the door to our apartment, and I almost stepped on the letter from home. I ripped it open, then held the pages over my heart, as if that would connect me with home even for a second.
Daddy caught me doing that, and he looked away.
Reading as I walked through the apartment, I climbed out the little half door at the end of the hall that led right up to the roof.
Oklahoma was a funny place, where people got out and walked on their flat roofs. Daddy had strung up a clothesline so we could dry our wet clothes after we washed them in the bathtub. I sat on an upside-down bucket someone had left.
Nana had sent two pictures from our album at home. There was Aunty Rose and me, kneeling in the grass on the west side of the house. We had our arms around Jacky, who grinned at the camera, his tongue lolling out. Grandpa had taken the picture, and his long shadow fell on the grass and up the side of the house, bigger than life. I ached to stand close to him and smell his Lifebuoy soap.
In the picture of Nana and Grandpa on the side porch, their eyes seemed to be looking right into mine.
Nana wrote:
I sent the pictures so you don’t forget us. Rose and I canned twenty-four quarts of tomatoes today. Tomorrow I’m going to make juice out of what’s left. I hope your daddy is feeding you good.
If I’d had any idea you’d be leaving us, I’d have taught you how to cook. I guess I just thought you were ours to keep.
The rest of the words blurred as I wiped away the tears. I was wiping my nose on the back of my hand when Daddy came up through the trapdoor.
I put the letter back in the envelope and turned away. I felt Daddy standing there and wished he’d leave.
“I reckon you pretty well hate me for taking you away,” he said.
His throat sounded as tight as mine felt.
I didn’t answer.
“Your granddad hurt me too,” he said. “I loved Will and Mae like they were my own folks.”
I swallowed. What did he expect me to say?
“When your mama died, seems like I lost about half the people I loved. You. Your grandparents. Rose.”
I nodded, not looking at him, wondering if my throat might explode with pain.
“And I had to fight a war on top of everything else,” he said. “I just couldn’t hardly stand it, some days.”
“But I can’t hardly stand it now,” I said, turning around and letting him see the tears running down my face.
I waited, hoping he might pet me and say we could go home soon, but he didn’t. And I couldn’t see the look on his face because I was crying so much.
After a while, he turned around and left the rooftop. But I stayed up there a long time, finally finishing the letters and looking at the pictures again and again.
Aunty Rose wrote:
Dear Willa Mae,
I keep watching for you, just expecting to see you walk in my room or come across the road from the pasture with Dad. Mom had one of her sick headaches today. She misses you like anything and worries. Dad’s acting like a cow without its calf. It was surely mean of your daddy to take you away. I never thought he would do such a thing. If you write every day, like we promised each other, I should get a letter from you Saturday or Monday. I’m going to Walnut Hill with Charles Michael tonight. I wish you were here to help me paint my nails. I finished the red dress and hope it looks pretty on the dance floor. Let me know how your daddy is treating you.
Hugs and kisses, R.
“I’m out of the bathroom.” Daddy stuck his head through the opening to the roof.
He looked scrubbed and hopeful and tired, but I could tell by the way he stopped half in and half out of the little door that he wondered if I was still mad at him for dragging me off to Oklahoma.
“You about ready to eat?” he asked.
I stood up, putting the letters and pictures back in the envelope.
“Let me get a bath first.”
Daddy took my hand to help me through the door to the roof as if I hadn’t gone through it a dozen times by myself.
In the bathtub, I soaked and scrubbed, watching clean skin appear under the grime.
Daddy dried my hair while we sat up on the roof. Then, as darkness fell, we spooned out what we wanted from a quart of Nana’s peaches and a quart of her blackberries.
“Should I fry some Spam?” Daddy asked me when we were done.
I shook my head. The cool, sweet juiciness of the fruit had satisfied me.
I collapsed on my pallet that night, holding Daddy’s hand, my last thought being that as much as I had missed everyone, I had forgotten to write home.
Chapter 12
We’d been in Oklahoma a week by the time we finished wiring the Mullinses’ house and Daddy’s work passed inspection.
The Friday afternoon the REA man came out to the Mullinses’ place, wearing a safety helmet with the REA logo on it, I almost forgot to breathe as he went from junction to junction and connection to connection. He tugged cables and peered into holes.
When I glanced at Daddy, his face looked as confident as Abe Lincoln on the side of a penny, but he was opening and closing the fingers on his left hand.
Finally the inspector nodded to Daddy. “Screw ’em down,” he said, gesturing at the switch plates and outlets Daddy had had to leave hanging loose until they passed inspection.
Daddy pulled a screwdriver off his tool belt and got to work, and I stood right beside him, ready to help if he needed me.
As soon as the inspector installed the meter on the pole, he turned on the electricity and the
Mullinses’ house lit up. The day was overcast, and when the fixture came on over the kitchen table, Mrs. Mullins clapped and said, “It’s just like the sun’s come out.”
We packed up the last of the tools, then pulled onto the highway with Mr. Mullins’s fifty dollars in Daddy’s pocket. Daddy radiated happiness like the pictures of the apostles with gold around their heads in the Bible.
“You bring light to the world, Daddy,” I teased him on the way back to town.
* * *
The next two weeks brought Daddy a steady flow of business. Mr. Mullins had a nephew who needed his place wired. And Mr. Mullins’s nephew knew a rancher with a bunch of outbuildings who was looking for a wiring expert to handle his spread. And Uncle Les had a friend the next county over who needed work done.
Daddy would listen while people told him what they wanted, then nod and say, “I can do that.”
We worked every day—even on Sunday unless the people he was wiring for had something against it. I was careful not to mention that in the letters home. And every day I went with him, climbing around in attics and haylofts and chicken houses, helping him snake cable. We’d only been away from home for three weeks, but my hands seemed permanently lined with black.
I liked being his helper, and after a while, I didn’t even need to be told what to do. Daddy would just meet my eyes and nod when I figured it out for myself. When we’d get in the truck at the end of the day, both so tired and filthy we could hardly move, he’d put his hand on my head and let it rest there for a minute. Then we’d drive fast through the hills, making the air blow through the cab of the truck to cool us off.
Our money started to stack up. Fifty dollars. A hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars. Although Daddy had customers signed up waiting for him to come wire their houses, one night when we were eating Spam and eggs up on the roof, Daddy announced we were going to take the next day, Tuesday, off.
“Why?” I said.
I didn’t miss home so much when we were busy working. In fact, sometimes when we were pushing to get a job done in three days so we could get on to the next one, I’d forget my homesickness altogether. I stopped thinking, Well, this is Saturday, so Nana and Aunty Rose will be cleaning. This is Sunday, so they’ll all be going to church. This is Monday, so they’ll be doing the wash.
So why did Daddy want to take a day off? Idleness was the devil’s playground, as Grandpa said.
“Well,” Daddy answered me, “we can’t keep living like gypsies.” He wiggled his eyebrows, trying to make me laugh. “Before long it will get too cold to sit up on this roof and eat supper. We’ll have icicles hanging from our ears.”
“But it’s nice up here,” I said, looking at the purple sky splashed with stars like the inside of a magician’s cape.
“We need a bed for you to sleep in,” Daddy went on. “And an iron, so we can tend to our clothes. And some real dishes.”
“No,” I said, my fierceness making Daddy blink.
If I had a bed, somehow that would root us in this place. And I didn’t want roots here. I didn’t want Oklahoma dishes.
“But Mae Bug,” Daddy said. “We’re living all ragtag. What would your grandmother say?”
I set down my plate, not wanting any more of my supper though I’d felt half starved when I’d smelled the Spam frying. “I need things…”
Daddy waited while I tried to figure out how to explain it to him.
“I need things that aren’t here.”
Daddy set his plate down too and stood looking at the stars, not saying anything.
In her last letter, Aunty Rose had written:
I get so lonesome for you, Shorty, and so do Mom and Dad. I think Dad could even be nice to Harold now. For your sake. He lost your mama. He doesn’t want to lose you too.
Why couldn’t I get Daddy to try again?
“We could go home now,” I said. “We’ve got some money, and you’ve got some confidence in your house wiring. We’ve got a fine truck. You could give those Green boys a run for their money.”
“You still want to go that bad?” Daddy finally asked, his voice sounding tired in the darkness.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “More than anything.”
* * *
We took the next day off, but didn’t go shopping for furniture. We went fishing. The leaves were starting to turn yellow, and we saw pumpkins fattening in the fields as we drove up to the little green lake behind the sweet potato farm.
School would be starting soon, and I found myself remembering the sights and smells of the first day, everybody so starched and polished they practically cracked when they sat in their seats. The windows shining from the teacher’s elbow grease and vinegar water. The flag at the top of the pole, against the sun, snapping and ruffling as we pledged our allegiance.
I guess Daddy was thinking too, because he was quiet. His eyes looked sleepy, and once when I was taking a fish off my hook and dropping it in the bucket, I noticed he’d leaned back in the grass and fallen asleep. I watched little tadpoles playing around the murky edges until he woke up, then we ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we’d brought along.
While we were eating, a train passed through the valley just out of sight over the hills.
“Trains make a lonesome sound,” Daddy said.
I nodded and tossed a crust in the water, watching to see if a big fish rose for it.
“After the attack on Pearl Harbor, all the servicemen on leave were scrambling to get back to their posts,” Daddy said. “Dad took me to the train station in Huxley and saw me get on the train.”
I stared at the still, green water and listened to the whistle of the train in the quiet valley. I tried to imagine the world suddenly at war, servicemen racing to get on ships and airplanes to fight for our country.
“As soon as Dad shook my hand and turned away, I walked on through the train car and down the steps on the other side. I couldn’t bring myself to stay on that train. I didn’t care that the Japanese had blown up Pearl Harbor. My life had been blown up a lot worse. Your mama was dead. I wasn’t allowed even a glimpse of you, which was what I needed more than anything.”
Daddy closed his fingers around my arm, and I nodded.
“My second family had turned their backs on me. Will had lost his senses. The baby was all by himself in the cemetery.”
I knew for sure now that Daddy had loved Mama. And he loved me. He must have been mighty hurt by the way Grandpa acted.
“So I just let that train pull out without me,” he said.
“Did you catch the next train, Daddy? And still get back on time?”
Daddy shook his head, staring at his red-and-white bobber floating in the water. “I laid low in Huxley for days, trying to talk some sense into myself.”
“You didn’t go AWOL, did you?”
He nodded, not meeting my eyes.
I’d seen enough war movies to know that people who were absent without leave were cowardly people who didn’t have the gumption to fight for our country. Grandpa had been in the infantry in World War I and gone clear to France on a cattle boat. And he hadn’t been afraid. He wasn’t even afraid to catch a water moccasin to show me the cotton mouth.
“So did you get in trouble?” I asked.
Daddy shook his head. “I finally accepted the fact that I had to do my duty, even if I didn’t want to. Even if I didn’t feel in any kind of shape to be running the communications on a destroyer. I went back. I was three days late, and my commanding officer could have let me get in a lot of hot water. But he knew how it was.”
Daddy studied my face, trying to read my thoughts. “He was a good man. He just fixed up the records some way and got me back on the ship.”
I didn’t want Daddy reading my thoughts, so I turned away, pretending to untangle a worm from the coffee can full of bait. I put it on the hook and threw the line out, the bobber making a big splash in the silence.
“How’d we get on this subject, anyway?” D
addy said after a while. “I’ve not told that story to anybody before.”
“The train,” I said, watching the water tremble around the bobber. “The train down in the valley made you think of it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That and your wanting to go home so much.” After a pause, he added, “I guess I know how you feel.”
* * *
In the next few days, we finished up the last two jobs that Daddy had committed to. He never did say for sure that we’d be going home when we were done. But he didn’t say any more about buying furniture and dishes, and he didn’t take on any more jobs.
I wrote Aunty Rose:
I don’t want to get your hopes up, but maybe Daddy is thinking of coming back. He’s done real good at finding jobs in Oklahoma, and he could have a lot more. But he knows how much I miss you all. I just want to come home and see everybody. See how much my lamb has grown. I want to talk to you and go back to the way things were.
I looked over what I had written. Every word was true. But there was more that maybe Aunty Rose wouldn’t be able to understand. I liked helping Daddy wire houses. I liked holding his hand at night until one of us went to sleep. I liked the magical music that poured out of him sometimes. I liked the way he dried my hair, as if it was the most important job in the world. I liked the way he tried to take care of me, even if it was jelly sandwiches and navy cooking.
Chapter 13
Daddy never did say for sure that we’d be going home until we were packing up the tools after finishing our last job on Wednesday afternoon, so I didn’t get a chance to write with the news. But it was just as well, or they would have worn themselves out watching for us.
Daddy and I traveled home the same way we came, except the truck was loaded with tools and equipment instead of Nana’s canned goods, plus Daddy had almost five hundred dollars in his pocket.
We packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and filled some of Nana’s empty mason jars with drinking water. As we drove through the Ozarks, I wished I had money to buy Nana a pretty chenille bedspread.
“Which bedspread do you like better, Daddy?” I asked, pointing to a clothesline in front of a weathered house in the side of the hill. “Peacocks or butterflies?”
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