by Jana Zinser
Uncle Walter raised his eyebrows but didn’t look up. “If any man should know a turd, he should.” Uncle Walter looked at Ivy out of the corner of his eyes and smiled. “He’s so full of— “
Grandma hit her fist on the table. “Enough.”
Uncle Tommy stomped his black cowboy boots across the porch. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m through with ‘Oh Hell.’”
“Blasphemy,” said Aunt Hattie.
“Oh, hell,” said Uncle Tommy.
“That’s exactly where you’re headed,” said Aunt Hattie.
“Forget this. I’m going down to the Blue Moon.” Uncle Tommy stormed down the porch steps and around the house, leaving a trail of Old Sage aftershave behind him.
“The Lord hates a sore loser, right, Hattie?” Uncle Walter stretched his arms over the back of his head. “Now the rest of us can enjoy the game.”
Grandma sighed and bit her bottom lip. “I wish you boys would get along.”
Russell gathered up the loose cards on the table.
Aunt Hattie shook her finger at Russell. “Leave those cards alone. They’re sinful.”
“I can’t stand the clutter.” He realigned the cards into perfect order, counting them as he stacked them. When he finished counting, he sighed. “Fifty-two. They’re all there.”
Ivy took the cards. She shuffled and dealt the next hand.
Angela glanced up from her cards. Her light blue eyes, almost gray-blue like Grandma’s, glared at Ivy. “These are terrible cards. You just want me to lose.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.” Angela shook her head. “Nobody is as perfect as you. I just hate it.”
“Angela, that’s enough,” Grandma said sternly. “It’s just the luck of the draw.”
Angela threw her cards on the table. “If Daddy gets to leave, I’m going home. Are you coming, Mother?”
Ivy wondered why Angela always seemed so angry. Uncle Tommy gave her everything she wanted.
“Can we go?” repeated Angela.
Aunt Hattie stood up, slapping Russell’s hand as he reached over to straighten Angela’s messy cards. “Don’t touch the evil. It’s time for us to leave this den of iniquity.”
Russell patted his hair. “I should’ve stayed swimming at the lake.”
Ivy knew Russell felt most comfortable swimming at Hawks Bluff Lake. He didn’t even seem to mind the mud-caked bottom or the crowded, tiny beach.
“Let’s go.” Aunt Hattie hustled her two children around the back porch to the path leading to their home.
“Sometimes it takes a lifetime to be a family,” Grandma said.
Uncle Walter rolled his eyes and tapped the table with his cards. “Who wants to deal?”
Grandma, Uncle Walter, and Ivy played cards at the wobbly table until the Iowa twilight drew down the sun. A few anxious fireflies turned on their lanterns early, and the birds serenaded them from the woods behind the house. For one brief moment, Ivy felt content to be an only child.
Suddenly, the sound of a loud tractor engine and a pressurized spray startled Ivy.
“Sounds like the fogger,” Uncle Walter said, referring to the tractor emitting a gray dusty cloud of chemicals that helped eliminate the bugs that killed the trees and ate the gardens. Like every summer, when the fogger sprayed its pesticides at dusk, everyone hurried inside and shut their doors and windows before the spray blurred their vision and choked their lungs. This summer, the citizens of Coffey also had to avoid Howard Decker’s erratic driving. He was usually in a drunken stupor so the random path of the fogger’s spray was quite unpredictable.
Ivy covered her nose with her hand and rushed inside to close the windows. At the window in Grandma’s bedroom, she looked outside and watched the tractor as it bellowed smoky fog. Howard drove the tractor down the street, releasing an enormous expanse of bug spray.
Ivy saw something in the fogger spray. It was Weston Thrasher, Conrad’s son, running in the middle of the hovering gray cloud. It looked unreal, like a hazy dream, as the thirteen-year-old boy vanished and reappeared in the heavy smoke like a vaporizing ghost.
Ivy shivered, remembering her escape from Conrad Thrasher’s cold menace when she had fled into the cornfield. She pushed her hands deep in the front pockets of her shorts and touched the envelope she had taken from the glove box of her parents’ wrecked car. She had forgotten all about it. She pulled out the envelope, then carefully extracted the torn slip of paper that was all that remained of its contents. She read the few handwritten words still visible.
have to get away.
No time left to
She’s yours
Barbara
Where was her mother going? Who was the note to? It didn’t make any sense. Ivy ran into her room and pulled off the back of the frame that held the photo of her parents. She hid the small scrap of paper inside. It was just another unexplained piece connecting her to her parents.
PART II
FINDING HER WAY HOME
(1970-1971)
Chapter 9
THE GARDEN HOE
Iowa summers were hot and humid. Everything slowed down and eased into a gentle lull. The air was thick like cotton candy, choking everyone’s lungs with each smothering breath. The waves of heat shimmered in ghostly patterns on the sidewalks. Even the dogs lay in the shade with their tongues hanging out, waiting for the heat to pass.
The kids spent a lot of the summer at Hawks Bluff Park. They swam in the muddy lake or played baseball. Everybody watched the games from the rickety gray-metal bleachers lined up behind the broken chain-link fence.
That muggy summer afternoon, the muddy lake was crowded with swimmers, and the baseball bleachers filled with spectators for Coffey’s championship game against the Stilton first place team, their rivals from a much bigger city a few miles away. As she splashed in the waters of Hawks Bluff Lake, twelve-year-old Ivy saw Angela talking to Coffey’s baseball players as they gathered, including eighteen-year-old Ben, Miss Shirley’s son, who played right field.
The short expanse of beach was created from sand trucked in from the local quarry. The soft sand stopped at the water’s edge. The muddy bottom of the lake oozed between Ivy’s toes, reminding her of the fearful grasp of Conrad Thrasher’s pond. She shook the memory away.
Her cousin Russell lay on the beach nearby, resting after hours of swimming. Ivy knew that the concentration and rhythm of swimming kept Russell’s mind focused and uncluttered, at least for a while.
Weston Thrasher, now seventeen, and a baseball player from the Stilton team sauntered over to the lake from the baseball field. The pimply faced boy with fat cheeks barely fit in his Stilton team uniform. The shirt stopped short of his protruding belly, and his pants hung low in the back. Weston Thrasher wore a thin leather headband around his head which held back his long, greasy hair. He didn’t play baseball or any other sport that required him to be part of a team.
“Watch this. I’m going to make him dance,” Weston said to the fat boy as he slapped him on the back. Weston pulled a firecracker from his pocket, lit it with a match, and threw it at Russell as he lay on the shore with his eyes closed. The explosion startled Russell and he jumped up, frightened. Weston laughed and lit another one, which landed close to Russell’s foot. Russell hopped away from it and stood uncertainly on the beach, patting his wet hair and staring at his two tormentors.
“Hey, Patty-Cake Boy, don’t you like fireworks?” said Weston. A few people on the beach began picking up their stuff and leaving. They knew Weston usually meant trouble.
Ben, a senior in high school with wavy hair and light brown eyes, walked over from where he was warming up for the game. Ivy got out of the water and headed toward Russell.
“Weston, stop. He wasn’t bothering you,” Ivy said.
Ben stopped next to Russell. “Why don’t you guys leave Russell alone?”
Weston lit another firecracker and threw it at Ben. It exploded at his feet, but Ben didn’t flinch. “Don�
��t you guys have anything better to do?”
“No.” The fat boy lit another firecracker. “Not a thing.” He threw it on Russell’s towel, which started to smoke and burn. Russell ran and dove into the lake, moving through the water with barely a ripple until he emerged on the other side. Ivy knew he wouldn’t return, and she wouldn’t have anyone to walk home with after the game.
With their prey gone, Weston and the Stilton boy glared at Ben and Ivy before slinking back over to the baseball field. Ivy looked at Ben. “Thank you, Ben.”
“Any time.” He smiled and trotted off to the baseball field for his game.
Ivy went to the bathroom and changed into pink culottes and a puffy-sleeved peasant shirt, stuffing her wet bathing suit and towel into her beach bag.
She sat with Raven and watched the baseball game stretch on until Ben scored the winning run. Ivy cheered as the Coffey team won. It served the fat Stilton firecracker boy right. By the time the game was over, the hot summer sun was hanging low in the sky.
Angela got into a car with Ben and some other friends from high school without offering Ivy a ride. Russell was long gone. She hadn’t seen Nick all day and Raven didn’t need to go home yet, so Ivy hurried to leave Hawks Bluff Park alone. She needed to get home for supper and cards with Grandma and Uncle Walter. The early evening arrived sullen and moist, ushering in the period of the day when time slows down, and the earth relaxes. The crickets warmed up for their nightly concert. Their incessant chirping sounded like the needle at the end of a record, clicking over and over as a reminder of the song’s end. Grandma expected Ivy to be home before it got dark, but dusk was quickly approaching.
Ivy took the shortcut home, following the railroad tracks past the row of small, tidy homes along Mulberry Street. Ivy liked the way the clothes hung in a row on the clotheslines, flapping in the warm breeze like they were waving hello. Most of the back porches faced the railroad tracks and although Burlington Northern trains only ran a few times a day, it still seemed to Ivy like a bad place to watch the sunset.
When Ivy had asked Grandma why the black people of Coffey all lived on Mulberry Street, Violet told her there was no law saying that black people couldn’t buy land beyond Mulberry Street. It was just the way it had always been, a socially enforced exclusion. An unseen line. A subtle, ugly racism, usually enforced by bankers who loaned money to pay for homes and Conrad Thrasher was Coffey’s banker. So, the black families lived in these small homes on Mulberry Street, their back porches facing the railroad tracks where trains loudly sped past.
Ivy’s friend Maggie Norton lived somewhere on Mulberry Street. They played together at school, but Maggie was always busy when Ivy invited her over to her house, and Ivy often wondered why she wasn’t welcome on Mulberry Street.
The air smelled of fresh-cut grass and sweet clover. Ivy’s sandals stuck against the patches of tar on the railroad ties, still sticky from the day’s hot sun as she hopped from one railroad tie to the next. Ivy heard a car’s wheels spinning on the gravel of Willow Drive beside the railroad tracks and turned toward the screeching tires and spraying gravel. Weston Thrasher and the firecracker Stilton boy pulled up alongside her in Conrad’s big white Lincoln, which they’d nicknamed Moby Dick. They threw an empty bottle of grain alcohol out of the car as they hooted, whistled, and panted like dogs in the summer heat.
“Leave me alone, Weston. Haven’t you caused enough trouble today?”
Ivy continued walking, head down, watching the railroad ties. Her heart pounded. She glanced toward the cluster of homes alongside the tracks. If only she knew where Maggie lived, but she knew she wasn’t welcome there.
A tall man came out on his back porch in one of the homes.
Weston pulled off the road and drove alongside the tracks. The Stilton boy reached out and tried to lift up Ivy’s shirt with a baseball bat. She jumped out of his reach.
“Poison Ivy,” Weston taunted.
Ivy turned and glared at the boys. “Go away, Weston. Go far, far away.”
Weston laughed and spat a big glob of brown chewing tobacco at her. “Like your mother did?”
She clenched her fists at her side. “Something’s seriously wrong with you.”
The man on the porch walked into his yard and picked up a garden hoe. A few moments passed. When Ivy glanced up, he was walking toward her. She recognized the lanky man as Maggie’s father, Otis Norton.
The boys hollered louder and banged their hands on the sides of the car as they continued to follow her along the tracks and spat chewed tobacco out the window.
When Otis reached her, she saw the steel-cold anger in his dark brown eyes. Ivy and the tall black man stood together side by side. The pair stared at the threatening white boys, who got out of their car and lumbered toward them.
Otis held up his hand with his palm out and his long fingers spread apart and the hoe in his other hand.
“Now, you go on home. Fun’s over, boys.”
The Stilton boy shook his head. “I don’t think so. Hey, wait, you’re the trash guy at Warner College, ain’t you?”
Although Otis worked for the maintenance department at Warner College in Stilton, he ignored the boy’s question. He took a deep breath and shifted his weight. “I’m only going to ask you nicely once.”
The chubby boy pulled a knife from his back pocket and waved it at Ivy. He imitated Otis’s tone. “I’m only going to ask you nicely once to take off your clothes and lie face down on the ground, butt-naked, Sunshine.”
Weston laughed and slapped the Stilton boy on the back. “Good one.”
“She’s just a child,” Otis said. “No need to bother her with your nonsense.”
The Stilton boy spat at Otis. The thick brown splatter from the chewing tobacco landed on the side of Otis’s face and slid down. Ivy gasped. Otis’s expression turned furious.
“Looks like we made the big black man mad,” the Stilton boy said in a child’s sing-song voice.
Ivy watched Otis clench the worn red handle of the garden hoe. Working maintenance kept his lean body in shape. His muscles flexed taut as he held the hoe, normally used to weed his garden and kill an occasional pesky snake.
Otis tilted his head back and swung the garden hoe cutting back and forth through the air, making a swishing sound. The hoe danced in the air in a blur, just a whisper from the boys’ faces. Otis used the edge of the hoe to cut the leather headband around Weston’s head. He knocked the Stilton boy’s knife to the ground. The boys froze. They turned and jumped into the huge white car and sped off.
A whippoorwill called from a weathered fence post as if announcing Otis the victor of the standoff. “Looks like you got yourself in a bad fix,” Otis said, rubbing his chin.
Ivy’s hands trembled as she nodded at Maggie’s father. “They had no right to spit at you and treat you like that.”
Otis smiled at her. “Thank you, Ivy.”
Otis had learned to survive by making concessions in a town where the railroad tracks were the best view a black man could get. He rubbed his pencil-thin mustache. “They’re just ignorant white boys. Bold as you please on the outside, but scared as chickens in a strong wind on the inside.” His hand rose to touch her shoulder, but he hesitated and let it fall back down at his side.
“Too bad your hoe wasn’t a little longer.”
Otis’s shoulders shook and a great bellow of laughter escaped from the tall man. “You’re a piece of work, Ivy, indeed you are.”
Otis and Ivy walked along the railroad tracks, the tall weeds brushing against their legs. Grasshoppers jumped in surprise from their camouflage hiding places in the field. Several of Otis’s neighbors were now standing on their porches watching them, their hands perched on their foreheads, blocking the last haze of the setting sun. None of them had come to help her, except Otis. She looked up at him.
“Maggie’s lucky. I wish I had a father like you, Mr. Norton.” Ivy reached out and linked her arm through his. He flinched when her fingers touched his
arm. But Otis didn’t pull away.
Maggie and her mother, Pinky, who had been watching anxiously from the safety of their home, hurried over to meet them. Maggie, who already stood as tall as her mother, hugged Ivy. Pinky, a petite woman with tight, curly hair, patted Ivy’s shoulder.
“Are you all right, child?”
Ivy nodded.
“Let me give you a ride home, little miss,” Otis said.
Ivy nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”
Ivy and Maggie walked to the Nortons’ house and climbed into the back seat of their old Buick. Maggie’s dog, King, tore out of the kitchen doggie door and jumped into the car at the last minute with his tail thumping. Ivy laughed at his enthusiasm. “Maggie, what’s wrong with your dog? He’s purple.”
Maggie laughed and her face scrunched up. “I know, doesn’t he look funny? King likes to roll in the mulberries. We have lots of mulberry trees.” She flipped back her thick, shoulder-length braids. “That’s why they call it Mulberry Street.”
“What kind of dog is he?”
The dog jumped across their laps.
“Oh, just a big purple dog, I guess,” said Maggie.
Ivy petted the friendly, mulberry-stained dog. “Maybe I could come over to your house sometime?”
Maggie looked down at her hands. “I’m not allowed to have friends over.”
Ivy cocked her head to the side. “Why?”
Maggie blushed and glanced at her father in the front seat whose head almost touched the car’s roof. Then she looked back at Ivy. “Well . . .”
“Oh, you mean white friends, don’t you?”
Otis adjusted his brown plaid cap and glanced at Ivy through the rearview mirror. “Well, Ivy, it’s kind of hard to explain. When you’re black, you have to try and protect your children from situations that could be, well, misunderstood. We have a rule in our family that no white children are allowed to play at our house. Just to avoid any problems that might arise. I hope you understand; it has nothing to do with you.”