Veda: A Novel (16 page)

Of the four girls in the graduatin class, my Rosalie was the prettiest. The most developed too. We’d got her a pretty white dress with a gauzy top, so I’d got her a strapless bra to wear with it. After the teacher handed out the diplomas, she asked the sixth and seventh grade boys to come up front. They looked so little standin next to the girls, who had on high-heeled shoes and were as well-developed as any of the mothers in the room.

A square dance record was put on and they all started goin around in circles. Bouncin and
do-si-do-in
, and pretty soon Rosalie’s bra started slippin down. Round and round they went with Rosalie
allemande leftin
with one hand and holdin up her bra with the other one. I got tickled and laughed so hard I almost forgot about my bursitis.

The followin week Charlie took me to the doctor and I got a cortisone shot. After a day or two the pain in my shoulder was gone, and I started to git excited about our plans for the Fourth of July. Charlie was gittin three days off, so when we picked up his paycheck, besides groceries, we bought sleepin bags and a whole lot of campin gear.

On the night of the third, we told the kids to git right to sleep ’cause we needed to start out extra early. I put the baby in her crib beside our bed, and me and Charlie stayed up just long enough to git ever’thin boxed up and ready to go.

Charlie was shakin me, yellin somethin I couldn’t make out. I tried to open my eyes, but they burned. My chest felt heavy, and a rubbery smell stung my nose. What was he sayin … what? I started to cough. Then I heard a poppin noise and a roar. I finally got my eyes open. Flames. Bright red and orange. The room was filled with smoke.

I started to scream. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” I ran to the crib, “Where’s the baby, where’s the baby?”

“She’s okay,” Charlie yelled, “Rosalie’s got her. Come on.” He had ahold of me, draggin me toward the door. I pulled away and ran to the stairs. Flames licked the wall. “No,” I screamed, “I have to git the kids!”

“They’re outside,” he said, “they’re safe. Come on.” He pulled me out the door. The kids were huddled together in the driveway, and Rosalie was holdin the baby. My knees buckled with relief.

“I’m goin back,” Charlie said, “The campin gear.”

“No,” I cried grippin his arm, “leave it.” He shook me off.

The house was lit up like Christmas. Huge hunks of wood were breakin off and crashin to the ground. I watched, horrified, as Charlie disappeared in the smoke. It seemed like he was in there forever. Then he came out, empty handed, doubled over and coughin. That’s when I realized he was naked. He always slept without a stitch, and he’d been runnin around like that, gittin us all out of the house. I hadn’t noticed the fire engines either, till I seen one of the firemen give Charlie a blanket. They weren’t even sprayin water. I guess there was no point. The house was too far gone.

I was shakin so bad I was afraid my legs wouldn’t hold me up. Someone helped me into the car. I took the baby from Rosalie and hugged the kids. They were all in underwear, I had on a thin nightgown, and Charlie was walkin around in a blanket.

While Mr. Alvarez, the man that owned the house, talked to the firemen, his wife come and crouched down next the car window. She said for us to come to their place. She’d find us some clothes and fix us breakfast. Then, she said, we could figure out what to do next. I reached out and squeezed her hand. I couldn’t think of nothin to say.

She found clothes for all of us, even Charlie. Nothin fit, but at least we were covered. After she fixed us breakfast, she started makin phone calls. I’m not sure who she called or who made the arrangements, but we ended up in that same auto court we’d seen our first night in Winslow. I don’t even know who paid for it.

They said it was the wirin that caused the fire. “Old house like that, the wiring just wore out,” was what the fireman had told Charlie.

The auto court seemed ever bit as old as the house was and I couldn’t stop thinkin about the wires. If I closed my eyes I saw flames behind my eyelids. Thought I smelled somethin. I didn’t dare sleep. I got up and checked the stove, the wall sockets, the fuse box, and paced the floor till mornin.

The local newspaper run a story about the fire and about us. Seven children and no insurance. People showed up with things. Clothes and shoes, used dishes, pots and pans. Then the Methodist Church held a party for us in their basement. Cake and punch. Gift-wrapped packages. They give us towels and sheets, blankets, and an envelope with a hundred dollars in it. All this from people who didn’t even know us. I was grateful. But I was also ashamed. All the years I was with Raymond, and after Ed turned up missin, I’d had to take charity. I hated worse than poison havin to do it again.

.

33

C
HARLIE WAS ABLE TO
find us another house. It was in Alta, a tiny town several miles north. It was a little two-bedroom place with knotty pine walls and a screened-in porch. There was a barn and a chicken coop. Couple of huge trees in the front yard. We’d lost ever’thin, so we spent the hundred dollars at the Salvation Army store on beds, a davenport, and a ice box.

The town had a grade school, but Rosalie would be startin high school, and she’d be ridin the bus into town. I didn’t want the kids, Rosalie especially, to start school in other people’s hand-me-downs. Charlie told me to stop worryin, that he’d have a couple paychecks before school started and we’d buy clothes then.

None of what we lost had value to anybody else, but losin some of it really hurt. The quilts my mama’d made me, the kids’ artwork, and mostly my box of old snapshots, school pictures, and the photos of the kids as babies. Those things couldn’t be replaced.

It didn’t take long for the kids to git acquainted with the neighbors. Couple of families that lived just one street over had kids about the same ages as mine. There was a fenced pasture between us and them with a big old billy goat in it. My boys didn’t like the idea of havin to go all the way around to see the kids on the other street, so they started cuttin thru the field. Problem was, that goat’d see em and give chase. Well Sam, he was a real fast runner, and he wasn’t scared of anythin. So he’d taunt the goat till it started for him and while he was runnin from it, the other kids would make it across the field. It was funny to watch, but I always worried about what would happen if that goat caught up with him. And one day it almost did.

It’d got through the gate somehow and was right on Sam’s heels. Sam run in the back door of our house with the goat right behind him, straight through and out the front door. Sam was screamin, and so was I. They went back around house and when Sam run in the back door again, I slammed it. The goat hit the door, and it knocked him stupid. Laid there on the steps for a few minutes, got up, shook his head, and wandered back through the gate. The grade school was just across the field too, so when school started Sam kept on baitin that goat, outrunnin it, so the other kids could take the shortcut.

Rosalie was nervous about startin high school, but with the fire and all that’d happened over the summer, I think all the kids were glad to be goin back to school. On the first day, Bobby and Ruthie brought home papers about rentin instruments so they could be in the band. I liked the idea, but I didn’t expect Charlie to go along with it. To my surprise, he did. Took both kids to town and instead of rentin, he bought em horns. Brand new ones, on the installment plan. Ruthie got a cornet and Bobbie got a trombone. For the first few months Charlie made em practice in the barn.

After that, it seemed like Charlie got installment-plan fever. We got us a brand new International Harvester refrigerator. The “femineered” model with the plastic door panels you could change to “match your kitchen décor.” Charlie liked the idea of fancy gadgets. The fact that we didn’t have a “décor” didn’t matter. Then he traded his Buick for a later model Hudson, and again, it was fancy gadgets that sold him. The swivel seat and armrests, the visor over the windshield, the push-button transmission. “Look here,” he said, pointin at the buttons on the dashboard. “You could learn to drive it real easy, all you have to do is steer.”

He treated door-to-door salesmen like family. Took a likin to the young fellas sellin waterless cookware. There was a easy payment plan, they told us, we could have the “en-tire set for only pennies a day.” After the pots and pans, he bought the set of
Encyclopedia Americana
that come with a free bookcase. Then he got the Electrolux.

Salesman come in and threw a bucket of dirt on my clean floor. “Watch this,” he said, turnin on the bullet-shaped silver and red machine and suckin the dirt up.

“Yeah, that’s nice,” I said, “but we don’t need a vacuum cleaner. We don’t have any rugs.”

That didn’t faze him. “You got beds, right?”

Charlie took him in our bedroom and pulled back the sheets. When he seen how much dirt come out from one little corner of the mattress, Charlie shook his head. “Well I’ll be,” he said. “Where do I sign?”

Ever’time one of them slicky-haired doorknockers started workin on Charlie, I sweated. He’d buy things, then the easy payments piled up and he was never around to deal with the bill collectors. He’d tell me to put em off, to say we’d catch up next month. But we didn’t. The men that come to take things back—the encyclopedias, the pots and panse, the Electrolux—weren’t near as friendly as the guys that’d sold em to us.

After that Charlie got it in his head we needed a television set, and since we didn’t have all those installment payments anymore, we could afford it. So a brand new Emerson TV came to live in our house. It was brought by a short fella with a gimpy leg who then climbed up on our roof with a metal contraption he said was needed to git a picture. While he was on the roof, Charlie was in the house hollerin at him out the window. “There. No, not there. Back just a bit, that’s better. Now. No, back some more.” The picture and sound faded in and out, hissed, got snowy, clear, then snowy again. This went on for a long time till finally Charlie yelled, “Okay, that’s it, okay.”

When the kids come home from school, Pinky Lee was dancin across the screen. For the rest of the day we all set in front of the television set, watchin
Howdy Doody, The Soupy Sales Show
, and
The Mickey Mouse Club
.

For all I know, ours was the first TV set in town. Every kid in the neighborhood was at our place. Sprawled on the furniture, on the floor, or with their noses pressed against the window if I’d just mopped the floor and made em stay out.

It was on all the time. When the daytime shows went off, there was the nighttime ones. Milton Berle, Ted Mack’s
Amateur Hour, Your Show of Shows
with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. We watched till the only thing on was the test pattern, and we even stared at that till it went off the air.

When the Reverend and Mrs. Bergstrom come by one night to invite us to visit the Lutheran Church, they stayed so long I suspected seein the television set was their real reason for comin by. I agreed to go, though, ’cause I hadn’t been to church in a long time, and I wanted to show the Lord how grateful I was for sparin us from the fire. I went two more times after that, but the Lutheran service didn’t feel right to me. It was just too different from what I was used to.

.

34

D
ADDY SHOWED UP
at my school, Mom.” Rosalie slammed the door and threw her books on the table. “At my school! Gawd. In that old blue suit of his, the one with the pant legs four inches above his shoes. A suitcase in one hand and a Bible in the other. Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?”

I hadn’t told the kids about his letter ’cause I didn’t think he’d actually show up. It was a long ways, and I thought he’d find out how much the bus ticket cost and change his mind. That’s what I was hopin anyway. After all this time, I still broke out in a sweat at the thought of seein him. Besides, he should’ve had enough sense to go to the creamery and wait for Charlie to git off work, not show up at the high school.

All afternoon I made the kids leave the television off so they could visit with Raymond, but like all the other times, he talked to em like they were babies and he didn’t act interested in what they liked to do or what they were learnin in school. I wanted him to see how smart they were, to recognize that they were growin up.

“Rosalie,” I said, “show your daddy that report you got a A+ on.” She made a face, but got up to find it.

“Sam,” I said, “go git that model car you built. Ruthie and Bobby, git your horns. Play your daddy one of the pieces you learned in band.”

Rosalie and Sam got half-hearted praise. But the Souza march Ruthie and Bobby played wasn’t much to Raymond’s likin. He preferred hymns, he said. He wished they had taken up the organ instead. The organ? Finally I said, “Why don’t you all go outside? Show your dad the animals you’re raisin for 4-H.”

When I seen Raymond comin back toward the house pickin at his shoe with a stick, I had to laugh. He’d stepped in chicken shit, and it served him right. After supper, it was me that turned the TV on. I didn’t care if he was offended. He turned away and buried his nose in his Bible, and if he had any thoughts about lecturin us on the evils of television, he probably didn’t dare after the way Charlie stopped him mid-prayer the last time he visited.

Charlie always looked better to me after Raymond had been there. Charlie paid attention to the kids, let em be kids, took em places. We were all a lot better off. But Charlie had his faults too. Even though he held down a job, he was careless about money. He’d cash his paycheck, take me to buy groceries, and pocket the rest. Then when it came to payin the bills, there’d never be enough to cover what we owed. Things got put off. The doctor. The phone bill. The rent. We were late three months in a row so I didn’t blame the landlord for wantin us out, but Charlie did. He said we were payin too much in the first place, and he knew of a house in Winslow we could git for less.

.

35

T
HE KIDS LOVED BEIN
right in town. They could walk to the swimmin pool, stores, and the movie theater. And that gave em reasons to earn spendin money. Rosalie got a job at the local soda fountain, Bobby got a paper route, Sam lined up lawnmowin jobs, and Ruthie cleaned house for some neighbors. Even Janie and Eddie got pennies and nickels from collectin pop bottles. I was the only one without money of my own, and when we run out of bread or milk, or if I needed cigarettes, I had to borrow from the kids.