Breeding Like Rabbits

by Ardyce C. Whalen

  She bypassed the cloakroom to her right, fearing what she might find in there, and entered the main room, the classroom. Britt’s feet encountered the floor heat register—a circle, four feet in diameter, that let the heat from the big old furnace in the basement enter the classroom. We girls loved to stand on that circle. It blew up our skirts until it looked like we were wearing hoops skirts. We could pretend we were Southern belles. We fought to stand there. If a girl hogged the circle too long, someone would push her off—it’s my turn!

  On the south wall, Britt saw the map rack with its four rolled-up maps. She walked over and pulled down the map of the United States and sneezed from the dust. I blame you for my difficulty in knowing directions. I always think the top of a map is south because you’re on the south wall. And east is to my right. Wrong! Blackboards covered the entire wall from left to right, below the map rack, but to the right of the map rack hung the picture of President George Washington, the one that still appears on a one-dollar bill. Additional blackboards ran the entire length of the west wall. Above them hung the old school clock as usual, but time had stopped.

  The bookcase, the school library, on the north wall was gone. Built of wood, stained walnut, it stood six feet tall and was four feet wide, with pull-down wood-framed glass doors to protect its contents. I loved that bookcase. I wonder who has it now. I read all its books except the biography of Lincoln. The book had his picture on the cover, and I just couldn’t get past his beard.

  No rows of ink-stained, wooden desks with inkwell holes and with names carved into them remained. The room was quite bare because whenever an election was held, the room contained portable voting booths, and voters milled around the center of the room, waiting their turn to register and vote.

  She turned and took one last look toward the front of the room. Before Christmas, the entire front of the room was turned into a stage for the annual Christmas program. The Christmas program was, in the true meaning of the word, awesome. Students were freed from the Scandinavian command, “Don’t show off!” They sang, recited pieces of poetry, showed off their artwork, and put on a one-act play, all to the applause of their proud parents and relatives.

  Three weeks before Christmas, the teacher sent a note home with each student. The note asked for a spare bed sheet and a folding chair or two if possible. Parents were also asked to bring cookies and Kool-Aid for the big night. Coffee for the grown-ups was made in the school’s makeshift kitchen.

  The sheets were needed as curtains for their eight-foot by twelve-foot stage. A long, strong wire, supported by ceiling wires, stretched from one side of the twenty-two-foot-wide schoolroom to the other. Two other wires stretched from the cloakrooms to that long wire. On these wires, the sheets—white, no colored sheets in those days—were hung, using large safety pins as hangers, allowing the sheets to be drawn open and shut with ease. The east cloakroom served as their dressing room. Student performers would come out of it and wait in the space sheeted off from the main stage until they heard their cue to get out and do their thing. The folding chairs were for the overflow crowd, and there always was one.

  I starred in the one-act play when I was in eighth grade. I had to kiss a boy. I hated the very thought of kissing. But it turned out to be worth it. On the way home, my dad turned to look at me sitting in the backseat of the car with Hannah, and he said, “You sure were good in the play, Britt.” What a wonderful night!

  Britt wandered outside to the old swing set with its attached teeter-totter. She touched one of the steel supporting legs. I stuck out my tongue, and it stuck to this leg. It was a really cold day. I thought I’d never get my tongue back. I closed my eyes and pulled. I got my tongue back, minus some tongue skin. It hurt for over a week.

  We played during recess: Steal Sticks, Pum Pum Pull Away, Kick the Can and Kitten Ball, and Hide and Seek. I liked school a lot, but I loved recess.

  Time to walk back home—she had a lot left to do. Britt entered the house the usual way, through the back door, and saw her parents sitting at the table having their morning lunch.

  “Dad, what are you doing in the house at ten o’clock in the morning? Did you forget to take your lunch with you?” She walked to the back of her dad’s chair and put her arms around his neck.

  “I’m working out in the Quonset this morning—getting the potato digger all set up for work. I’m going to miss seeing you on the tractor seat while I ride the digger, making sure the vines don’t get stuck on their way back to the field.”

  “It’s been two years, Dad, since I’ve done that, but I miss it too.”

  Ingrid cut into the conversation. “Enough reminiscing, you two. I’ve got a job for you, Britt. You’re leaving—don’t know when we’ll see you again. I’m going to move Hannah into your room and turn Hannah’s bigger room into a room for the twins—they’ll be four years old soon. You have some stuff in a cardboard box in the back of the closet. Go through it and throw out what you don’t want. What you do want, take it with you.”

  “But she can have some lunch first.” Carl Anderson reached over and pinched the skin on Britt’s lower ribs. “No fat there—she’s too skinny!”

  “No, she’ll do it now. If she doesn’t, she might forget to do it. She can have her lunch later. She’s not going anywhere today. Go on, Britt.”

  Not wanting to start any kind of disagreement—who knows when she’d see them again?—she headed off for the upstairs closet in what was still Hannah’s room.

  Britt sat on the floor with the opened box beside her. She found some old clothes, those she’d give away, and her old photo album. Her father had given her a camera when he visited her in the hospital after her appendix operation. She’d filled this album with pictures of the farm. She’d take that with her. A large manila envelope contained essays she’d written for English—only the good ones. She started to read the top one. It was titled “Potato-Picking Time.”

  I shivered with the cold and with excitement as the old white truck ground to a halt on the edge of the potato field. Dad, Hannah, and I sat looking with squinted eyes at the potato field. A cloud had descended upon it, making it difficult to see. Out of the cloud, lumpy shapes emerged—potato pickers with folded sacks on their backs. The sun was burning away the cloud/fog. It was time to get out and get to work.

  This year I was working to earn money for a wristwatch. Last year I’d earned enough to buy a bicycle.

  Dad moved among the workers, doing a mental roll call of the hired pickers—twelve pairs. They always worked in pairs; counting Hannah and me, he’d have thirteen pairs, but we worked only on Saturdays. Our parents would never let us skip school.

  We made our way to the big sack pile. We’d each lay ten burlap (gunny) sacks lengthwise on the ground in a neat pile. We then would each fold one sack lengthwise into a three- or four-inch belt. This we’d put across the midpoint of our sacks on the ground. Folding the sack stack in half, we’d each hoist it to our waist and secure the belt around our middle with a five-inch nail—bent like a C. When we bent over to pick, we had to be careful not to fall on our heads from the weight of the sacks.

  We each had our own row and our own potato basket. When our baskets were full, we’d meet in the middle. One person would pull a sack out of the pack on the other’s back and hold it open between the two rows. The other person would empty the baskets into the sack. That made a bushel. We’d proudly stand our bushel up between the rows. For each bushel, our dad paid us ten cents.

  Potato picking was one of the best times on the farm. During potato-picking time, a cook was hired, and the basement of the farm was turned into a big kitchen and mess hall. Canned goods on shelves lined the north wall—vegetables, fruits, and even jars of canned meat. Meat also filled the monstrous twelve-foot freezer that occupied the east wall. A stairway coming from the main floor’s back entrance ended in the center of the basement. Come down, turn right, and against the west wall
was the kitchen: stove, sink, and a counter with cabinets underneath (the only refrigerator was in the upstairs kitchen). The rest of the basement had two rows of tables with benches to feed the hired men. Not only did the men get three meals a day, but they also had two lunches, one at ten in the morning and the other at three in the afternoon. The cook made up the lunches, and Britt’s mother drove out to the field with coffee and sandwiches for the men.

  It truly was the best time on the farm, until Britt went and turned it into the worst by one “righteous” incident. She was going to fight evil, and she convinced Hannah to go along with her. She knew what she was planning was wrong and that they would be punished.

  Britt closed her eyes and saw her nine-year-old self. Hannah was seven. The cook that year was a large woman in her fifties, named Helga. She came from upstate, close to the Canadian border. She was a great storyteller, and her stories held Britt and Hannah entranced. That is until the day Helga told them her favorite story. It was about a blue light that had shown her the way out of some woods after she’d lost her way driving one winter night. After that, it followed her and told her things: her personal little blue spy. It told her what to avoid so that she’d not fall into sin, and it told her what sins others were not avoiding. Hannah and Britt almost shook with fear; her stories invaded their dreams. What was the blue light telling her about them? They’d never heard such a thing before; it wasn’t a Bible story. In church, the preacher never mentioned a blue light. The blue light must be from the devil. That would make the cook someone who listened to the devil!

  Christians were supposed to fight the evil, and someone who listened to the devil was evil. She and Hannah would be Christian soldiers, as in the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” that they sang in church. They went into the woodshed, and Britt grabbed the ax. They would scare the cook away. Down the basement they went, and Britt handed the ax to Hannah. If their mother got angry, and Britt knew she would, she wanted Hannah to get the most blame.

  “I carried it all the way down here,” she said to her younger sister, “so now you have to take it. Hold it out in front of you and tell the cook to get out of here and off our farm!”

  Hannah obeyed; she always obeyed Britt. She held the ax in front of her and shouted, “No more blue light or we’ll kill you!”

  The cook told on them, of course, and their mother was furious. She made them apologize and spanked them both in front of the cook. The basement was out of bounds for them until the end of potato picking.

  Potato picking was never the same after that.

  Britt walked out to her dog’s grave. Spot was buried in the evergreen grove south of the main farm buildings. A stone marked her grave. Thoughts of Spot filled Britt’s mind as she knelt beside the grave. If there’s a heaven for doggies, there’s one thing I know … Spot has a wonderful home.

  She got Spot, a black-and-white giveaway mutt, when the puppy was seven weeks old and Britt was seven years old. Britt loved Spot passionately from the moment she got a whiff of her sweet puppy smell and cuddly pudginess. For years, Spot was one of her best friends, second only to her sister, Hannah. Whenever Britt felt bad, she could count on the comfort of Spot’s love and wet kisses. Spot was never judgmental. Her kind, brown eyes radiated unconditional love. (Perhaps that’s why Britt always preferred brown eyes to blue, gray, or green.)

  Britt loved her but also knew that she was not perfect. Spot had developed two bad habits: she learned how to get in the chicken house and suck the insides out of eggs—egg-sucking dogs were not myths—and she learned the thrilling sport of car chasing, a sport that would be the death of her.

  Her front leg was broken in the sport one sad day. Britt’s father made strips of wood from a peach crate and tied them securely to Spot’s front leg to form a splint. At night, Britt slept with her in the shed that was their cookhouse during harvest time. With piles of burlap sacks for a mattress, it was actually quite comfortable. In time, Spot’s leg healed perfectly.

  For a while, it seemed that she really had learned her lesson, but the thrill of the chase was not to be denied. She went back to her old ways of chasing, nipping, and barking at car tires, until one day a driver swerved and ran her over. Britt figures he just couldn’t take this irritation anymore. He’s forgiven, but Britt would never forget him; nor would she ever forget her best friend, Spot. As Britt walked back to the house, she noticed that the two partly rooted- up trees that she and Hannah called their “broncs” were gone, but she could hear her mother saying, “Girls, if it starts to feel good, stop!”

  Britt would miss her home, her parents, the known, but she was ready to live the life of a navy wife. But on the day before she was to board the train for the East Coast, Jesse’s letter came.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Jesse! She hadn’t thought about him at all after Andy said, “Okay. Let’s get married.” She’d been stunned; she’d not expected that—they were so young! He accused her of not wanting to get married because she wanted to date other guys. Well, that was probably true. Andy was her best friend, and they’d dated for four years, but she never thought of him as her one and only. The two years she’d been in college, Andy was working, and she didn’t see him very often. For one thing, he didn’t have a car. So she had dated other guys once in a while, and one of them was Jesse, and now, a day before she is to take the train to Connecticut where Andy’s aunt lives, she gets this letter from him!

  Jesse. He was the boy who sat behind her in English Lit during her sophomore year, second semester, in college. The seating arrangement was no accident. When Britt had walked into class on the first day, looking for a seat near the front because she was a bit nearsighted, she saw him. He sat by the window, second seat in the row, and the sun was gleaming off his blond crew cut, turning it a strawberry blond. As she looked at him, her fingers ached to touch his bristly hair to see how it would feel to run the flat palm of her hand over it. No one occupied the seat in front of him, so she made a beeline to it before anyone else saw the empty seat. She sat down but didn’t turn around; she didn’t want to be too forward, too friendly. She knew from experience that that was a bad idea.

  What was it about her and redheads anyway? Britt had a crush on a red-haired boy when she was in seventh grade. A family with two boys had moved into a farm up the road a ways. The oldest boy, Pat, was in the sixth grade; his brother in third. About his brother she remembered only that two fingers on each of his hands were webbed. Red-haired Pat was the one she had a short-lived crush on—short, because after two months, the family moved out of the area.

  In high school, she was madly in love with another red-haired guy, Steve, a year older than she. When he came into study hall, her hand shook, and she had to stop writing. One day he asked her to go to the movies. This meant a lot of driving for him—ten miles out to her home, back into town for the movie, then he had to bring her home again, followed by his drive back to town where he lived. He must have really liked her to drive forty miles just because of her. She was excited and afraid, afraid she’d be boring. What would they talk about? He was coming Saturday night, so she spent part of Saturday reading the newspaper so she’d have something to say to him, and a couple of hours at least, deciding what to wear. Her parents were excited too. Steve’s father was a wealthy farmer, and they were Lutheran—it could be a match made in heaven, or so her parents must have thought.

  Steve—tall, red hair combed neatly, a sport coat and slacks, and smelling of Old Spice—knocked on the door. Britt opened it and invited him in. She introduced him to her parents, and off they went to see the new western movie, Shane. Britt wasn’t crazy about shoot-’em-up westerns, but she did like Alan Ladd.

  The ten-mile drive into town seemed to take forever. I have to say something—this silence is making me even more nervous. “I like Alan Ladd, don’t you?”

  “He’s okay. Did you know that if he has a tall leading lady, he has to s
tand on a box to kiss her?” Steve, who stands six foot one, laughed at the idea.

  “No, I didn’t know that. Interesting.” And I didn’t need to know that, thank you very much.

  “Have you seen the movie Johnny Belinda? That’s excellent. They had to change the Motion Picture Production Code to show it—it’s based on a true story, and it’s about rape.” He looked over at Britt to see how she reacted to the word “rape.”

  She felt her face flush. “No, I haven’t seen it. I don’t think my parents would want me to see it.”

  “Do you always do what they want you to? Live a little. That’s what I say.”

  “Would you mind if I turned up the volume on your radio a bit? I can barely hear the music.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Britt reached over and turned up the volume. Thank goodness. Now we can stop talking.

  The movie was good—the good guys won, or rather, Alan Ladd did, but he was wounded. Steve put his arm around her back and rested his hand on her shoulder. “Good movie, huh?” He waved to some friends and steered her in their direction for a little small talk. Steve looked at his watch. “Oh! Better go. I’m sure your parents have a curfew for you.” He steered her to the car and opened her door.