None of us was trying to make any particular point this year except that we were having a wonderful Christmas. We were working at making it wonderful—the best ever, we kept reassuring each other and Grandma and Grandpa. We exchanged our gifts, ate until we c ouldn’t force down another mouthful and sat around the big table in the warm kitchen groaning with satisfaction.
There’d been more snow during the night, completing the perfect picture but we discovered when we went outside to “shake our dinner down” and slough off the sleepiness that the heavy food had induced that the new snow was freezing. We left earlier than we would have ordinarily. Grandpa had agreed that it could make driving hazardous. When we got to Blue Eye and the bend in the road where we’d halted on the way down yesterday, we all three seemed to tense up and strain forward in our seats.
“I hope they drove safely,” Mom said under her breath. “Wherever they went.”
Chapter Four
MY THIRD YEAR of school—at this new school in Galena—was going smoothly. The teacher, Mrs. Keller, if not exactly in my pocket, didn’t seem to find me as repulsive as Mrs. Webster had. I wasn’t particularly looking for a replacement for Mary Ann, I was just looking. And enjoying the effect I thought I was having on my classmates. Junior teased me about all the girls I imagined had crushes on me. He pointed out that if anybody so much as looked at me I thought they were flirting. I was so convinced of my charm that when a lady being introduced to me by Bessie Moore said I looked very familiar, I blushed prettily and said, “Thank you.”
I felt lost trying to figure out the telegram Junior sent me on my birthday in March. Well, he didn’t actually send it, but he had gone to the railroad station and picked up a Western Union form which he filled out as follows:
To: Totsy Woods
Address: c/o Scott Moore
Galena, Missouri
Message: HAPPY BIRTHDAY STOP
WILKINS BOY DEAD RIGHT
STOP JACKING OFF
GROWS HAIRS ON PALMS OF
HANDS STOP LAST SENTENCE
FROM UNRELIABLE SOURCE STOP
WILKINS BOY’S INFORMATION MOST
RELIABLY CONFIRMED
STOP STOP STOP
LOVE
J. W.
It wasn’t till he explained that “stop” was a period in telegram-talk that I sort of understood. He refused to explain any further. He just said he’d promised to send me a telegram when he found out and what he’d found out. Namely, the Wilkins Boy was right. The white stuff floating on the water … I decided not to think about: it. Or of jacking-off, let alone growing hair on the palms of my hands.
There was another new third-grader that year and being two new town kids we were sort of thrown or lumped together at the beginning of the year, bolstering each other’s confidence. The other one was Reba Jean Bolton and I liked her immediately even though being “lumped” with her was a bit embarrassing. She needed all the confidence bolstering she could get. The other kids made fun of her clothes because they were unmistakable hand-me-downs and some of the things she wore shouldn’t have stopped on their way to the rag-bag. She wasn’t stupid and could hold her own in the classroom. She read in a flat monotonous voice but didn’t stumble and her handwriting on the blackboard was clear and neat. What she couldn’t cope with was the playground at recess. The taunts of the other girls flattened her against the wall. She never joined in any of the games unless I dragged her with me. My insisting on her being accepted was also a test of my own popularity and position. I was new too and had to prove myself. Championing Reba Jean required every ounce of persuasion and strength that I could muster but then I’d had pretty good training recruiting for Mary Ann and had quite a bag of persuasive tricks.
Reba Jean wasn’t the cleanest girl in class but when I went to where she lived I understood why. She lived in one of the store buildings on the south side of the square—an old haberdashery that had been one of the first shops to go out of business at the beginning of the depression. There was no running water, no sink or wash basin and I often helped her carry buckets of water from a neighbor’s garden faucet down a side street. I’d visited Reba Jean several times in the big bare room where she and her mother and father slept, ate, cooked, and did what little washing they did before I knew there was another room to the store.
We were doing homework together one day alone—her mother was often out—when we both lifted our heads from our work at a crying sound. I looked at Reba and her eyes grew big and darted to a door in the back wall that I’d never noticed before. The door out the back was in the center of the wall, this one was small and near the corner.
“What’s that?” I asked. It could have been a kitten or even a baby.
“Oh, it’s Clementine. She’ll hush up in a minute.”
“Clementine?” The sound was louder, fretful and demanding. Definitely an animal. A puppy maybe. “Does she want in?”
“She can’t come in,” she said dismissively. She turned her attention to her tablet where she was copying out something from one of our readers.
“Oh.” I figured that it was a puppy and it wasn’t allowed in the house. Then suddenly there was a wail, high pitched and eerie ending in a whining whimper. “Why don’t we go play with it? Maybe it wants a drink of water or something.”
“It’s my sister.”
“Your sister?” I stood up expectantly. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Nobody does.” She went on copying.
“Well, she seems to want something. She’s just a baby?”
“Yes. Just a baby.” She carefully finished writing a sentence, ground the end of her pencil with a twisting motion into the paper making the period, put the pencil down carefully and stood up. “Come on. You’re my best friend.” She headed toward the back of the long room. She opened a drawer in a kitchen table and took out a long skeleton key and walked to the door and unlocked it. She looked over her shoulder at me. “I’ll let you see.”
She had a baby sister that she hadn’t even mentioned. That was very surprising. I’d always wanted a baby sister or brother to take care of. When I told Junior I was going to ask Mom why she didn’t have a baby, he finally elaborated on his slightly cryptic telegram and reminded me that babies weren’t a one-person operation. But if Dad came home one day … well, it might still be possible. He wasn’t sure how old you had to be to start making babies or how old when you had to stop.
Why wasn’t Reba Jean pleased and proud of her little sister? I’m sure I would have been. Why was she kept behind locked doors? I was beginning to be apprehensive as I went through the door into the dark little room. It had obviously been a storeroom for the shop. There was only one small window, high up on the end wall, over a door that had been boarded shut.
The whimpering sounds came from a crib that I could just make out against the wall. Reba Jean moved toward it with sure firm steps and let the side of the crib down with a bang. The sharp noise caused the high-pitched wail to soar out into the darkness and a shiver went down my spine. I pushed the door we’d come through fully open, letting in a bit more light. I followed Reba to the crib side and looked down. On the dingy wrinkled sheet was a baby. She was wearing only an out-sized diaper which made her little limp legs look like sticks coming out of the wide openings. Even in the dim light, I could count her ribs. The slightly enlarged head was made to look bigger by being connected to the emaciated body by a thin cord of a neck. A neck that couldn’t possibly have held the head upright.
Reba Jean picked her up, cradling the dangling head in the crook of her elbow to keep it from lolling back over her arm. She turned to face me. “This is Clementine. Say ‘hello,’ Clementine. This is my friend, Totsy. Totsy Woods.” She looked up at me and smiled shyly. “My only friend, Clementine.” She rocked her like a doll—a boneless rubbery doll—back and forth in her arms.
I couldn’t speak. It was a baby and yet it wasn’t. Somehow the skin on the pathetic little frame looked withered and old
. The head wobbled dangerously and the poor baby’s mouth was open showing a few nubs of teeth, just some bumps that hadn’t come through the gums yet. I finally managed a “Hello.” I tried to say the name but for this lifeless little creature to have a long lovely name seemed wrong.
“Here, Totsy. Hold her.” The bony bundle was in my arms before I knew what had happened. “I’ll get some water for her.” She headed out the door, leaving me holding the smelly little creature. I couldn’t think of it as a baby. It had nothing to do with any baby I’d ever seen. The sounds it made and continued to make in my arms were more animal than human. “This’ll keep her quiet.” Reba Jean was back with a baby bottle filled with water. “Just sugar and water. We don’t get much milk.”
“I’ll put her back in the crib,” I said.
“Don’t you want to hold her? She’s just like a little doll. I dress her up and play with her all the time.”
“I think she’s a little wet.” I thought from the way she smelled she was more than that and couldn’t wait to get her out of my arms.
“Oh, she’s always wet,” Reba Jean said, relieving me of the wriggling grunting body. The wriggling and grunting were the only signs of life. I couldn’t see how it could go on breathing down that thin little tube of a neck. “Water goes straight through her.”
“She’s kinda skinny …”
“Always has been,” she said matter-of-factly as she put Clementine back in the bed. I wanted to straighten out the sheet but it seemed too late. A nice straight clean sheet might have made her more comfortable.
“Maybe if you gave her more milk she’d grow some more …”
“She won’t.”
“Won’t what?”
“Won’t grow.”
“All babies grow. Maybe because she’s been sick or needs …”
“She’s nineteen.” The bottle in place had stopped the whining. “Nineteen what?”
She turned to me. “Nineteen years old.” She bent down and lifted the side of the crib that fitted back into its top slot with a click. “There. Come on.” She headed out the door.
I was thunderstruck. Nineteen? I stared again at the awful wormy little body squirming lazily, moving almost in slow motion as though under water. Nineteen? And this is as far as she’d got? I ran after Reba Jean, trying not to look as shocked as I felt. What had happened? What went wrong? God must have been out to lunch when this seed was planted.
“Momma thinks it’s her fault,” Reba Jean said, reading my mind. “She cries all the time and says it’s her cross to bear. They say Clementine will be just like that until she dies.” She said all that in her flat monotonous reading voice. As though she were repeating something she’d memorized.
“Is it your Momma’s fault?”
“Papa says it is. When he drinks.” She was straightening up her homework. “He wanted to put Clementine in a home, but Mom keeps saying it’s her cross to bear.”
I gathered up my books. My hands weren’t sure of themselves. I dropped things and had to pick them up. “Well, it’s very sad. Sad for your mother. I’m sorry …”
“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s just the way it is …”
“Well.” I wanted to run home and wash. “I’ve got to go. See you tomorrow…”
“Yeah. ’Bye.” She said it as though she didn’t expect to ever see me again.
She confessed to me months later that I was the first one she’d shown Clementine to who’d remained her friend. I never told anybody about Clementine. Not even Junior. Not even when the image of her poor misshapen body haunted me. I took on some of Reba Jean’s shame about her as my own.
Chapter Five
THE COLD WINTER hadn’t brought any Woods out of the woods, but spring did. Dad appeared one Sunday toward the end of April—not too long after my birthday. He was not laden with gifts for me or for any of us. All he brought with him was a raging case of jaundice and the most beautiful pair of riding boots I’d ever seen. The jaundice we had to nurse him through, the boots we had to polish.
We were in our upstairs apartment listening to the Sunday evening radio programs when he appeared. Junior and I were glued to the crackling noise, Mom was correcting papers for her Wilson Run pupils when there he was. Standing at the head of the stairs, looking thin and sick.
“That was quite a rusty you cut, Milly,” he said as we all sat staring at him. “Turn that fuckin’ thing off,” he ordered. Junior snapped the radio off without taking his eyes off Dad.
“You were cutting quite a rusty yourself, Woody,” Mom said calmly. “I somehow got the impression you were being held prisoner by a red-headed gorilla.”
The corners of his mouth twitched with the beginning of a smile that was cut with a grimace of pain. “Not up to much rusty-cuttin’ now.” He leaned against the door jamb and slowly crumpled to the floor. Mom and Junior were both beside him in a flash.
He was put to bed in our room and took over our lives as we tried to save his. He was back. What was left of him.
By the time school was out in late spring, Dad was on his feet. But not his dancing feet. His interest in the Domino Cafe had been dimmed by Dr. Young’s pronouncement. “You drink, you die.” But he had a new interest. Baseball. Granted, that wasn’t new. The new interest wasn’t just baseball, it was Junior playing baseball. A new dimension had been added.
“That boy’s born to it, Woody.” His cronies confirmed his convictions and Dad would beam.
“Looky here, son,” Dad would say, holding up the paper. “The Boston Red Sox just signed on a rookie—only eighteen—for ten-thousand dollars. Just look at that! I tell you, boy, that’s where the money’s at.” Their eyes would flash with greed and wonder or perhaps just ambition. Dad had a potential star on his hands. He was sure of it, you could tell by the way he looked at Junior. The fact that I was going to become a dancing movie-star seemed of no interest.
For some reason, Mom didn’t have to work that summer. As a waitress or anything, I mean. Maybe it was because Dad got a job. He was actually working. Well, for while anyway. So we spent that summer in Springfield and by some fluke right in the middle of colored town. Being segregated against. Mom was taking some summer courses at the Missouri State Teachers College and Dad was driving a truck back and forth between Galena and the Springfield stockyards. Full of livestock going up, empty going down.
We had a very nice big house across the street from a beautiful park with a sparkling swimming pool which we weren’t allowed to use. The park or the pool. Junior and I were outraged that just because we weren’t black we couldn’t go into the park. Watching those sleek beautiful bodies frolicking on the other side of webbed mesh steel fences cut off from us as though in another world was so painful that we stopped playing in our front yard. We even stopped using the front door. We went down the street to a trickle of a creek where we’d dejectedly try to catch crawdads and be called “white-trash” occasionally by passing black children which made us feel even more inferior.
By the time the summer was over, our original trio was restored. Regrouped. Dad was gone. Again. He had disappeared on one of his trips going back down to Galena empty. As I understand it, the boredom of the same fifty-odd miles of road—or perhaps the smell of his untidy passengers—became too much and he just kept right on driving. It sounds rather implausible, but those were the only facts I ever got. Junior and I figured he hadn’t stolen the truck or he’d have been in jail.
Back in Galena for the next school year, reality was particularly harsh. Mom had signed her contract with Wilson Run, but there was going to be some problem about payment. More than one school was short of funds. Many teachers were paid with what they called “warrants”—not as good as a check and only a little better than an I.O.U. Now she wasn’t even getting real money for teaching.
People who were really down and out (like Reba Jean’s family) could get free potatoes—dyed blue so they couldn’t sell them but also told the world they were on relief—and some other nec
essities. Mom’s school along with others in the poorest districts, were given loads of free grapefruit. Mom laughed and said most of her country children had never even seen the fruit before but took to it avidly and she swore the citrus intake had cut down absences from colds by over fifty percent.
It was during Thanksgiving vacation—the Sunday before we three had to return to school—that we heard footsteps on the stairs and we all four came together on the top landing. Mom from the kitchen, me from the main room, Junior from our room which I was sure we were going to lose again the moment I saw Dad standing there. This had been one of his shorter absences— only about three months and, as it turned out, his last. He was wearing the beautiful riding boots with beige twill riding breeches and a leather jacket. He’d never looked so handsome. Or healthy.
We all just stared at each other and gaped at the splendor of this almost unrecognizable man until Mom said, “Truck have a blowout, Woody?” Her eyebrows arched over twinkling eyes. “Or did you shoot a rod?”
“No. I just sort of blew a gasket.” They looked at each other for a long moment and then hooted with laughter as Junior and I dashed to give him welcoming hugs and kisses. Again. Perhaps if we’d been a little less welcoming … But we let Mom take the lead on that.
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