by Helen Doss
I wanted to jump in the air and kick my heels, but I was too tired. I emptied those last buckets of cherries on the kitchen floor and thanked my neighbor profusely. The deluge was over!
I finished cleaning up the mess upstairs, put up the last strip of paper, and surveyed the new bedroom. It was depressing beyond words. Although I had worked like a dog all day, the room looked terrible. It looked like the kind of wallpapering job that Donny might have done. I led the children downstairs, fed them supper out of cans, and stared gloomily at the surrounding avalanche of cherries. Donny and Teddy took their wagon to ask the lady across the vacant lot for the loan of her wash-boiler, for the hot-water canning. I made sugar syrup and laboriously began to pit the cherries with a knife. By the children’s bedtime, one lone quart jar was ready to process.
After I had my offspring tucked into bed, I stared in frustration at the ripe fruit spilling over the kitchen. It would take me from then until Carl graduated from seminary to pit that many pigmy cherries. I decided to throw them into jars, seeds and all. The first panfuls had to be washed in the bathtub upstairs, since the sink was full of cherries and the dishpan full of dough.
At five-thirty the next morning I had taken my last loaf of bread from the oven and lifted the last gleaming jar of canned cherries from the steaming boiler. I was too weary to go to bed, so I just staggered to the couch and flopped, the way I had done during those long months when Susie and Laura were on night bottles.
At six-thirty the children piled downstairs in their pajamas, shouting happily for their breakfast.
At seven-thirty the front doorbell rang. It was the old man, with two full buckets of cherries.
“Why, I thought all our cherries were picked!” I gasped, horrified.
“Yes ma’am. But the nice lady around the block, I do odd jobs for her, and she say, take from her tree all cherries I want, she already take all she want.”
What could I say, when he stood there so wistful, so happy because he thought he was making someone else happy? The deluge was on again, and it seemed as if all the cherry trees in Hebron were pouring their fruit into our kitchen.
The following day I was droopy from lack of sleep, but as I gazed at my loaded fruit shelves in the basement, and my newly papered room at the end of the upstairs hall, I felt almost smug with satisfaction. The room had turned out to be a far more professional job than I dreamed it could. The wrinkles had smoothed out, the patched holes and rips didn’t show, and the dark paste smears had dried to invisibility.
When Carl came home from seminary that night, he took me into his arms. “How’s my girl?” he asked. “Have you been working hard?”
“Oh, I did a bit of papering, and canned a few cherries,” I said.
Things were never so bad as they seemed, when you looked back on them afterwards.
CHAPTER 8
All the Wrong Sizes
AFTER four years of college and three years of graduate study, Carl received his Bachelor of Divinity degree. We began packing clothes, dishes, books, and toys for our journey back to California. Carl was to begin his full-time ministry there, in the semirural town of Forestville.
Donny, perched on a packing box, asked, “Isn’t it about time?”
“Time for what?” I moved Donny to a chair and tried to squeeze some jeans into the already-full box.
“Time to start looking again. For a boy the right size of me,”
“I’ll tell you what you can look for,” Carl said. “Go out to the garage and see if you can find a box big enough to hold all these galoshes and rubbers, will you?”
“But I’m after five now, and a boy the size of—”
“Well not right now,” I told Donny. “They wouldn’t let us adopt a boy when we’re right in the middle of moving. We’ll have to wait until we get to our new house in California. Now run and find a box for Daddy.”
When Donny was gone, Carl said, “Now don’t go putting ideas in the boy’s head. When we get to Forestville, I want to be free to throw myself into my work. Besides, I understand the parsonage there isn’t very big.”
“We’ll see,” I hedged.
We made a parting visit to my parents at their home in nearby Aurora.
“I hope you folks intend to ease up on this rapid family growth,” my father said, concerned. “With five children, don’t you think you’ve already supplied your share of the grandchildren?”
“You shouldn’t spread yourselves any thinner,” Mother urged, “trying to manage any more.”
“I can’t make any promises,” I said.
“I can,” Carl said darkly.
We piled into our secondhand sedan, with our secondhand camping equipment, and started west. Hotels were out of our class, even auto courts. We camped at county parks, state parks, and national parks all the way across the country.
One night it was after dark, and there was no park near. We put up our tent in a grove of trees, off the highway and away from traffic noise. When the first express train came through about midnight, on an unexpected embankment twenty feet behind us, it sounded as if it thundered right through our tent. We spent the night lulling the five children back to sleep, after each train came hurtling through with earth-rattling roars, hissing steam, and screeching whistles.
In two weeks we arrived at San Francisco, headed north over the Golden Gate bridge to Santa Rosa, then turned west on the Russian River road toward the coast. We came over the last rolling hill late in the afternoon, and saw the scattering of stores and houses that formed the nucleus of Forestville. The church rose from a hill, golden in the sunset, its cross silhouetted against a rose- and salmon-streaked sky.
We found the parsonage wedged between the back of the stucco church and a neighboring wooden Lodge Hall. The parsonage originally had been a tiny one-and-a-half story frame cottage, but had grown a bustle of additions in back, through the years.
I was the first of our family inside. A strange feeling it is, to walk into an old house, timeworn, with the imprints of former occupants left as in an old shoe. It was almost like standing outside of time to look around the empty rooms, the strange rooms, to see sunlight streaming through the windows in unaccustomed patterns, and to think, someday this will all be so much a part of us, so familiar, that we can’t ever see it again, clearly, as we do now. Someday we will be leaving it, instead of just moving in, and we will be leaving part of ourselves behind.
The children broke my reveries. They flew delightedly about the house, exploring, racing through the kitchen, dining and living rooms, up the narrow, winding steps to the two postage-stamp bedrooms upstairs.
“Where’s the baff-room?” they called down.
“It must be up there, near the bedrooms,” I called back. It wasn’t. We finally discovered it downstairs at the other end of the house, tacked to the kitchen as an afterthought. We also found a small study off the dining room.
“I’ll see if I can’t find myself a corner over in the church for my office,” Carl said. “With five children, we’ll need this for a bedroom.”
Donny was counting on his fingers. “There’ll be six children, when we go get that boy the size of me.”
“Don’t bother Daddy about that now,” I whispered. “Wait till we get unpacked and settled, then we’ll talk.”
There was a knock at the back door. The front door, we soon learned, was only for strangers and salesmen. Three ladies came in, introducing themselves as members of our new congregation.
“We thought you’d be getting in about this time,” one said. She stood a three-layer frosted cake on the table.
A second handed me a big bowl of salad. “We thought it might be easier, if you didn’t have to cook on your first night.”
The third lady smiled and put a large casserole on the stove. “I hope your children like spaghetti and meat balls.” She was rewarded by a full round of cheers and deep, hungry sighs.
When the good people had gone, Carl put his arm around me. “I think I’m going
to find my work most satisfying, here.”
There were problems, of course. The first was adjustment of time schedules for Sunday church services. Carl had two churches, one at Forestville, the smaller ten miles away at Occidental. They had not been under the same minister before, and both were in the habit of holding morning worship at the traditional eleven o’clock hour. Each set of board members insisted that the hours could not be changed, or people would drop out of the congregation.
“I guess you’re the one, honey,” Carl told me.
“One for what?”
“To help out,” he said. “You can be the other minister until we work this out. You can take the morning worship at Occidental, and I’ll do Forestville.”
“Oh,” I gasped. “I couldn’t do that. I’m no minister.”
“You’ve filled the pulpit before.”
“But that was different,” I said. “That was emergency, when you were sick and there wasn’t anybody else.”
“This is emergency, too, and there isn’t anybody else,” he said. “Don’t let it worry you. It’s only temporary.”
Temporary turned out to be nearly three months. I found myself submerged in home and church work. Not only were there a weekly sermon and an order of worship to plan, with appropriate hymns chosen, but the regular housework, cooking, and laundry to do. Each day was busy, but it was Sunday morning that was really hectic. Teddy had just celebrated his third birthday, Laura and Susie had several months to go before they were three, and Rita was not yet two. All were so young they had to be dressed for Sunday school; Donny always needed mismated clothes exchanged for the ones which originally had been laid out and crooked buttoning, twisted socks, and tangled shoestrings fixed. All this had to be accomplished after a hurried breakfast, so Carl could lead the Forestville Sunday school, while I jumped into the car to make it on time for the Occidental service.
Donny sometimes accompanied me to the Occidental church, and sat in the front row where I could keep an eye on him while I was preaching. One day, riding home along the road that wound intermittently through the sunshine of hillside cherry orchards and the shadows of giant redwood groves, Donny said, “Now?”
“Now what?”
“Now can we go look for a boy my size?”
“Heavens, not right now. I know I said I’d think about it after we got unpacked and settled—But Mama didn’t know she’d have to help Daddy with the churches!” I smiled at him. “Wait until I don’t have to preach any more, and then we’ll talk to Daddy about it, okay?”
The two official boards finally agreed on a compromise, so Carl could preach at both churches.
“Now I can relax and enjoy just being a mother,” I told Carl that first Sunday night after the change.
Just then Donny slippered into the room in his pajamas and hopped into Carl’s lap. “Now can we talk, Daddy?” he asked.
“Talk about what?”
“Getting a boy just my size,” Donny said. “School starts this week, and I’m going to be six years old, and I’m going to be in first grade, so that’s the size boy we want.”
Carl held his head. “Here we go again.”
Donny leaped off Carl’s lap and into mine. “Daddy said we can go! Daddy said we can go get a boy, hooray!”
“All right,” Carl shouted above Donny’s din. “All right, one more. But that’s final, do you both hear? Right size or wrong size, we’ll stop right there, with one more.”
Every week I wrote letters to agencies, and Donny licked the stamps. It was just after Christmas when a letter came from an agency in the Pacific Northwest, saying, “We are sorry we do not have any older boys for adoption at this time. However we do have a little year-old boy named Timmy, who is in desperate need of a good home. Because he was born to a Mexican mother and a Japanese father, nobody seems to want him. Yet he is a bright and charming baby.”
“That Timmy isn’t the size of me,” Donny said.
“No, he’s even younger than Rita,” I said. “But we can’t leave him in the orphanage all unwanted, can we? He’s been waiting all his short life for someone to come along and love him, and nobody ever came.”
“Well, I guess we ought to get him,” Donny said.
I hugged him. “Maybe a boy your size will move into the neighborhood,” I said. “Or maybe—”
“Or nothing,” Carl said. “Just remember what I told you. This is the end, finis, termination. In other words, this winds up our little family.”
“You’re right,” I nodded. “I think six will really be all I can handle.”
We decided to let three-year-old Teddy go with me, to be company to little Timmy on the way home. Carl drove us to San Francisco to catch our train. Going north through mountains, the train ran into violent snowstorms and snailed through drifts behind a snowplow. We were supposed to arrive in two days, but it took two days to get as far as Portland and another long day on a branch line to reach the orphanage. It was pitch dark, nearly ten at night, as we walked from the station into the swirling, icy black-and-whiteness. According to my original schedule, I would have arrived in the middle of the day, picked up Timmy, and started back on the afternoon train; now it was past bedtime at the orphanage, and there would not be another train out until the next afternoon.
What to do? I was in a strange town late at night, with no money to spare for a hotel room. In a phone booth I found the name of the local Methodist minister, screwed up my courage, and telephoned him with one of my few nickels. I felt as welcome as a stray bedbug when I told him a mother and her little boy were stranded here, and asked if he could shelter two waifs for the night.
“Bless you,” he exclaimed. “Come right over.”
He and his wife fixed us sandwiches and milk, then took us upstairs. After two and a half days, and two nights, of sitting in a chair car, the hot bath and soft bed were luxuries beyond imagining. The next morning the minister drove us to the orphanage to pick up our new boy.
Timmy, dressed for the blizzard in a red snowsuit, was a roly-poly little elf, as round and chubby as Laura had been at that age, with red apple cheeks and enormous, questioning brown eyes that had a pixie slant.
“You darling! How could anybody not want you?” I said. I knelt down and took him into my arms. “I’m your new Mama,” I told him, “and this is your new brother, Teddy.”
Timmy wasn’t talking yet, and he was too young to comprehend most of what I said. But he looked us over quite soberly, and chuckled in his unusually deep baby voice.
On the train going back, we were off schedule again as we plowed back through snow drifts that night, the next day, and most of the next night. We chugged into Portland, our junction station, two hours past midnight, very early on a Saturday morning. A taxi to a hotel was out. This station didn’t close at night, like the one at the orphanage, so I looked around for a place to sleep.
Juggling our suitcase, a shopping bag of groceries, a box of toys, and the added bundle of Timmy’s belongings, with Teddy clinging to my coat pocket with one hand and tight to Timmy’s chubby fist with the other, I led the way to the ladies’ waiting room in the station. Except for some long, thinly padded benches with high backs and sides, it was deserted. I tugged one bench around until it faced another, and settled the boys end to end on the wall bench, covering them with a baby blanket and our coats. Then I dropped on the facing bench and fell asleep. After the past night and a half cramped again in a chair-car seat, even that hard bench felt good.
At six I awoke when the cleaning woman came in to scrub floors. I got the children up and pushed the extra bench back to its place along the wall. We three sat cross-legged there, I with my feet out of the way for the floor mopping, and drank canned orange juice out of paper cups. Then we tiptoed over the clean, wet floor into the washroom to scrub off train smoke and change into clean clothes.
Refreshed, we returned to the outer waiting room to finish our breakfast. I opened a can of evaporated milk, poured each paper cup half full, and fi
lled it with hot water from the washroom for our make-believe cocoa. While we sat there, nibbling on whole-wheat biscuits and dried prunes, the waiting room began to grow crowded. Ours was the last train which had been able to fight its way into this junction, and all scheduled departures were being canceled because of blizzards and bridges out. This meant that the morning train we had intended to catch, for the last leg of our journey home, was also canceled.
By midmorning the little boys were getting tired of the station, so I decided to take them uptown. I wanted to store the suitcase and bundles in a locker, but I knew I’d need that dime for streetcar fare. With all the assorted baggage clutched under my arms and Teddy holding fast to Timmy and my coat pocket, we went uptown and spent the rest of the morning in a department store, having a wonderful time riding the escalators and elevators up and down in the warm building.
After a lunch out of our sack, Teddy admitted he was sleepy. Timmy nodded, rubbing heavy eyes. We went out to the snowy street. Up the block I saw the Portland First Methodist Church, so we headed there. When I approached the associate minister in his office, asking if there might be a couch in the building where the little boys could nap, he was most obliging. He not only produced a couch in the Cradle Roll room, but also two cribs. I undressed the boys, scrubbed them in the adjoining washroom, and put them into the cribs for real naps. When they awoke, we ate a supper of canned baby-food liver soup and canned applesauce. Then I telephoned the railway station.
“All departures are still canceled,” the information desk replied. “The first train south will not leave before tomorrow afternoon, at the earliest.”
Marooned another day with no funds! I went to the associate minister and asked if we might stay in the church overnight. He protested.
“You couldn’t possibly be comfortable here!” His hand reached for the telephone. “My wife and I have only a small apartment, but we have friends—”
“But we really don’t mind staying in the church,” I said, “as long as we’re not in anyone’s way. There are cribs here, and everything we need to be comfortable.”