Little Altars Everywhere

by Rebecca Wells

  But when Daddy and the other men come out for a weekend, the Ya-Yas start getting ready on Friday morning. Fixing little appetizers and tweezing their eyebrows, and Mama gets all nervous. It’s the only time that Mama makes me put Vitalis on my hair, and she tells us exactly what we can and can’t tell Daddy about what we’ve been doing.

  See, Mama and the Ya-Yas all came out to Spring Creek when they were little. All their families had camps and their mamas brought them out here while their daddies worked in town. When they were teenagers, the Ya-Yas just owned Spring Creek during the summers—that’s how they put it. You should see the pictures of Mama and Necie and Caro, and sometimes Teensy, how pretty they were then with their hats and sunglasses. Mama drove a Willys jeep and Caro had a red convertible, and they did anything in the world they wanted. We egg them on to tell us stories about the trouble they used to cook up back then.

  Spring Creek has always been in a dry parish, the Ya-Yas say. And it’s our job to moisten the place up!

  Our camp is named Sans Souci, which means “without a care.” We have a carved wood sign hanging out in front. All you have to say is “Sans Souci” and everybody knows where it is. It’s real big and right in the middle of the piney woods, just a short hike away from three different swimming holes.

  When we open up the camp at first, it smells the same as ever: all musty and old and good. It is dirty from being empty for nine months. But the Ya-Yas give us our assignments and we get right to work. Daddy-long-legs are crawling out everywhere, and there’s so much dust that Sidda has to take out her wheezer.

  Mama always has us clean the kitchen up first. She says, A good camper always does her kitchen right from the get-go! She’s right, too. Because once we get the kitchen spotless, then we can go in there and wash our hands and eat Letta’s ham and cheese sandwiches and lemonade and cookies and kick our feet up while the rest of the place is still a mess.

  Mama and Necie and Caro do everything themselves, with only us to help them. They hook up the well, turn on the electricity, and get rid of the dirt-dobbers that have built nests under the eaves. They just take over, and they don’t call Daddy or any servicemen to help, even though we do have a phone out there. (That phone is the oldest phone in the universe. If you got hit in the head with that big black phone, it’d knock you out cold and you’d die dead.)

  Sans Souci has screen windows running all the way around it. It’s like living in a porch the whole time. There are smooth plank floors and a huge, long sleeping porch with three ceiling fans. All the beds are lined up, one after the other, plenty for everyone.

  Two-dozen people can sleep at Sans Souci, if they’re not picky, Mama says.

  Each bed has a little reading lamp just behind your head. And the way the fans hang from the ceiling, every one of us gets this nice little breeze. We never suffocate from the heat unless there’s a storm and the electricity goes out. We do our best sleeping at Sans Souci.

  We’ve got a dressing room and a shower in the middle of the camp, but they are awful hot to spend much time in. The toilet is in a little green closet off the side of the sleeping porch, and we keep a thousand funny-books and Reader’s Digests in there. You have to pull down on a chain to flush, and the water is brownish from the well. You can’t drink that water without boiling it because of all the germs you can’t see. There’s a little basin just outside the john, and when you wash your face, the water has a tinny smell to it. It’s the kind of water that makes your skin squeak. When we get through brushing our teeth, we always have to wrap our toothbrushes in tinfoil so the bugs won’t crawl on them.

  Oh, but let me tell you, the front room is the best. It’s huge and long with a glider at one end and two couches and a rattan chaise longue, which Mama calls her “Throne.” And at the other end, there is a long table covered with a yellow-and-white-checked oilcloth, and it doesn’t matter what you spill on it because it just wipes clean. You don’t ever have to worry about what you break or spill at Spring Creek. It’s not like at home, where you get a whipping if you drop a mayonnaise jar on the tile floor. In front of the camp, we have six Navy hammocks strung between the pines around the fire pit. You can lay up in those hammocks all day long and read funny-books. Or get somebody to push you real fast and then jump out and feel like you’re flying for half a second. And at night, oh, at night! You can lay there (after you’ve put on plenty of Six-Twelve) and watch the lightning bugs and the fire, and sometimes we sing and dance and tell ghost stories.

  We keep our stilts with our names painted on them under the camp so they won’t get rained on and warp. But we keep the huge wooden electrical spool that Daddy got from the phone company outside, no matter what the weather. I can walk backwards on that spool all the way to the gate and back without falling. Me and Sidda can walk on it together like a real circus act. While we’re performing on the spool, Necie’s kids get Sidda to sing like Little Brenda Lee and they sit there and clap for us.

  At Spring Creek, I get to do what I want, when I want. Go to bed when I want and wake up when I want. When I wake up I just put my swimsuit right on without even fooling with clothes. All of us kids share the same clothes at Spring Creek. We just have a big chest full of shorts and tee-shirts and seersucker pajamas and that’s it. Mornings are good at Spring Creek. Sometimes when I wake up, the sunrise streams in through the screen windows so full of all these yellows and oranges and pinks, and I lay there in my bed. And before I’m all the way awake, I think that I’m in the back seat of the T-Bird at the Roxy Drive-In watching color spread across the screen! That is just the way it is at Spring Creek.

  Mornings at our camp Mama isn’t shaking all over, trying to fix a big breakfast like she does at Pecan Grove. I just walk out to the table and there’s a bunch of cereal boxes lined up with sugar and peaches. And I get the milk out of the short old icebox that has a good hum to it, and I fix just what I feel like. My throat never closes up on me at the camp. I eat all day long.

  I can take my cereal outside and eat in the sun. And Mama and the Ya-Yas are sitting on the steps drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Mama rubs the top of my head and says, How you doing, sleepy-bones?

  Then she starts singing “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’!” from Oklahoma!, one of her favorite musicals.

  Mama leans back on the steps and says: I adore every single one of yall! I adore Spring Creek! This is how I was meant to live! No responsibility! I hate responsibility! And she laughs and leans her face back in the sun and says, Yall don’t forget to put on your Coppertone! And Lulu, put that zinc oxide on your nose!

  I finish my cereal and head out for the creek for a morning swim with Necie and the rest of the kids, eleven of us in all. See, at Spring Creek, Mama isn’t the only Mama I have. I’ve got my pick of whatever Ya-Ya is around. We walk through the woods for our early swim. We go down the hill and I always stop at this little place where water comes out of a concrete culvert and makes a little pool. The farmer who lives by there has got it dammed up. I count tadpoles in there and rinse my face, and on the way back from swimming I stick my feet in there to cool them off. I think it’s a magic pool, because one morning I was there and counted twelve tadpoles and when I came back there was nineteen! All kinds of things like that happen at Spring Creek.

  The best swimming hole is Little Spring Creek. You’ve got Big Spring Creek, Little Spring Creek, and Dido Creek, but Little Spring Creek is the best. It has a sandy beach where we lay our towels and stuff, and the ladies set up their chairs and the ice chest. Right around there is the shallow part where the little babies can play. And then there’s this big log that divides the shallow end from the deep end. You can sit on that log and watch everything—the ladies rubbing on their oil, big trees on both sides of the creek, dogs sleeping in the sun on the bank, turtles lined up sunning themselves on the slimy log that none of us fool with. We call it the Turtle Log. It’s all theirs. We have our log, and they have theirs. You can look down at the deep end where there’s a rope swing h
ung from a huge tree, where you can swing out like Tarzan and holler before you drop down into the water below. You’ve got to be sure and let go of that rope, though, because one time a little boy whose brother was a friend of my cousin got scared and wouldn’t let go, and he hit into the tree and smashed his skull in! We didn’t see it, but we all knew about it. So it doesn’t matter how scared you are, you’ve got to let go of that rope and drop down into the deep end.

  Your first dive into the water in the morning is the finest thing in the world. It’s never too cold. It’s Louisiana summer creek water, not some northern-state water—where I’ve never been, but I know it’s so cold it takes your breath away and would give Daddy a heart attack. Little Spring Creek is the kind of water that lets you wake up slow, lets you roll over on your back and float and stare at the clouds without getting the shivers, without having to swim fast to keep from freezing to death. Mama says, This is the kind of water that spoils Southerners for any other part of the country.

  All that happens in Little Spring Creek is that your skin comes all alive and maybe a dragonfly lands on your shoulder with the blue-green colors of their wings shining in the sunlight. You don’t swat dragonflies because they’re the good bugs. They go around eating up the bad ones that itch you to death.

  Man, we have the best tractor inner-tubes in the state of Louisiana. They’re from my Daddy’s farm machinery and Mama painted “Walker” on them with white paint, but we still let other people use them. They’re big enough for four of us to sit on, and you can paddle out into the deep end and then—real careful—you can stand up on the inner-tube! Sidda and me do it the best: stand up real slow and hold hands and balance ourselves. We stand there on that tractor inner-tube perfectly balanced, with the sky a big blue tent over our heads. We stand real still and then we start rocking back and forth as hard as we can and still try to stay on. We see how long we can do it and how hard before we fall off. The only thing is, those inner-tubes have got those little nozzles where you put the air in, and if you aren’t careful you fall down on them and scrape your body up something awful. Almost every kid in Spring Creek has got one of those long scratches on their bodies. You’re just lucky if it doesn’t make you bleed, because then one of the Ya-Yas will make you get out and they put Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on you from the blue tin first-aid kit. And then you have to sit on the blanket with them, and they all say, I just hope he’s had his latest tetanus booster.

  Anyway, what we usually do is this. We swim in the morning. Then when it starts to get around noon, we pack up and walk over to Spring Creek Shop-and-Skate, which is your only roller rink and grocery store in Central Louisiana. Inside the store it is all cool, with the concrete floor under your feet and the jukebox playing in the skating rink. And they have wooden boxes with screen lids filled with crickets, and next to that they have worms and shiners for fishing. All the Ya-Yas have known Nadine, the owner, forever. And we get our bread and milk from her, and the big blocks of ice that you have to carry out to the car with these big iron tongs. If you drop that ice on your foot you’ll be crippled forever, so you better be careful. Then we go back to the camp during the heat of the day, and play with the old slot machine that Mama rigged up so it doesn’t cost a nickel to play. And we have bologna sandwiches and Fritos and Cokes and maybe take a nap or do whatever we plain feel like.

  Finally when it cools down a little, the Ya-Yas let us go without them back to the skating rink. We rent skates for a quarter. Sidda is all the time playing Nat King Cole on the jukebox. There’s this huge fan at one end of the rink that I swear you could get sucked into if you don’t watch out. I won’t skate down at that end. We put ice-cream sandwiches on Mama’s tab, and we eat them sitting on the bench. Then Lulu always goes and gets her a second one, even though she knows we’re only supposed to charge one apiece.

  I been working on my skating but I’m not what you call the greatest. Little Shep thinks he’s so tough, skating backwards and all. He thinks he’s King of the Universe in everything he does. At Pecan Grove he answers the phone just like Daddy does, putting his foot up on the kitchen stool and saying “Little Shep Walker here.” He wears cowboy boots just like Daddy and acts like he’s the boss of the world.

  Then before you know it, we’re all back in the creek for a late afternoon swim and everyone has cleared out except for only us. We wait until the sun is just starting to go down and then we take our baths. The Ya-Yas all get bars of Ivory soap and we suds up and rub that lather all over our bodies and you can hear the cicadas cranking up. And you suds up your hair, too, then close your eyes and dive into the water and rinse it out. You smell that Ivory and the creek water and see the little bitty ones with their swimsuits off, getting bathed by their mamas. And the Ya-Yas are washing their hair, too, and everybody is laughing and Little Shep and me are making our hair stand up in points.

  These are our real baths because we’d run that well dry in no time flat if we all tried to use the shower back at the camp. We get to take our swimsuits off underwater, but only the little ones can just pop up naked.

  But then one evening, Caro says, Oh, bathing with a swimsuit on is just ridiculous! And she takes off her swimsuit and flings it over by the towels, and so the older Ya-Yas go right ahead and do the same thing. And so of course all the rest of us take ours off too, and that makes it four mamas and sixteen kids skinny-dipping. We have that whole place to ourselves and they start singing one of their old camp songs:

  Once I went in swimmin

  Where there were no wimmin

  And no one to seeee

  Hung my little britches

  On the willow switches of a nearby tree

  Came a little villain

  Stole my underwear

  and left me with a smile!

  And we’re all laughing and Little Shep is trying to sing real deep like a grown-up man and Sidda’s long red hair is floating on her shoulders and Lulu is sunburned and Necie’s little ones are splashing and jumping up and down. And you can see the Ya-Yas’ breasts but they just look like Mama’s and it’s not a big deal. And we just keep bathing and playing and, oh, it is such a sweet evening. Me and Sidda take that Ivory in our hands and shoot it up into the air and when it lands, it’s so pure it floats like on TV. Then Mama gets her famous idea of swinging off the rope swing! Necie stays with the little ones, but all the rest of us climb up on the bank. We get on the rope, two at a time, and swing out buck naked and drop down into the water, yelling Aiiieeeee! As long as I’m careful not to get rope-burned, it’s exactly like flying. Landing in that water when it’s not quite dark yet, just lingering summer light on our bodies and the water and the trees and the crickets and us. It only lasts for a little while because darkness comes, but it feels like it lasts forever.

  Then we’re back on the bank and the ladies are drying our hair and we’re all whining, I’m hungry! I’m starving, Mama! And the Ya-Yas say, We’ll be home in a minute—don’t worry, we’ll get something in your stomach in five minutes.

  And would you believe it?! A car with a red bubble light on top pulls up and shines its headlights on us like we’re deer in the middle of the road or something! All the ladies scramble to wrap towels around themselves or throw on their swimsuit cover-ups. Mama is reaching for her striped terrycloth one with the hood. And this short fat sheriff gets out of the car and says: What the hell is going on here?

  Oh Lord, Mama says, some Baptists must’ve called and told on us! And the Ya-Yas all start giggling.

  Little Shep can’t believe an actual sheriff is standing there, and he just walks straight up to the man and touches his gun. The sheriff says, Get your hands away from that, son! That’s no toy! That’s a real man’s firearm.

  I know, Little Shep says, lying through his teeth, My daddy’s got ten of them. (Which is not true. Daddy doesn’t have pistols like that, only shotguns.)

  Mama says, Little Shep, come back over here. The sheriff looks at Mama and says, Well, I should have known: Vivi A
bbott and the gang. As if yall weren’t trashy enough when yall came out here as teenagers, ruining this place with all your carrying-on! Now yall come out here with your innocent little children and expose them to your pervert behavior. I should run yall in on a morals charge.

  All the ladies are covered up by now, and I think for a minute that things are going to get bad. And that sheriff is rocking on his heels like he is the King of the Universe.

  Then Caro says, Sheriff Modine, I do believe you have put on weight.

  Then the Ya-Yas really lose it. They start laughing and they can’t stop. The headlights of the patrol car are shining on the Ya-Yas’ painted toenails and their wet hair. When I look up, they look like mermaids. How dare this man come and do this to Mama and her friends?

  I go over to the sheriff and kick him in the leg. Leave us alone, you chubby! I tell him.

  He grabs for me, but Mama comes and pulls me back, still laughing and says: Bay, it’s okay, honey, really. And she picks me up, even though I’m too big to be carried. And the ladies are just howling. They gather us all up and ignore that fat sheriff and they lead us over to the T-Bird and Necie’s station wagon and start piling us in.