Veda: A Novel (17 page)

Charlie was fine with em earnin money, but he didn’t like em havin so much freedom. He got more and more crabby. He didn’t like the kids runnin all over town. Didn’t like the looks of their friends. Juvenile delinquents, he called em, like ones he seen on TV. But it wasn’t just on television, he claimed. He’d seen em in Winslow. Hoodlums on street corners, wearin Levis and black leather jackets, cigarettes rolled up in the sleeves of their tee shirts. Seen em drag racin, drivin to the edge of town and back with their radios blarin that rock and roll music, honkin their horns, and yellin things at each other. Lookin for trouble.

Even if Charlie had seen them things, it didn’t have nothin to do with our kids. Not a one of em had give us trouble, unless you counted Bobby and that friend of his takin my Pall Malls and smokin em. They only done it once, ’cause when I found out, I made em smoke a whole cigarette with their hands behind their backs. Turned em green as bottle glass.

Still, Charlie didn’t like the kids Rosalie run around with. And he thought Bobby bein quiet meant he was up to no good. He didn’t like Ruthie listenin to that Presley fellow either. He wanted the kids to have animals to feed, like when we lived in Alta, and he wanted a garden. Said the only way to keep kids out of trouble was to move out of town.

So he took to drivin the county roads. Found a vacant house he thought we might be able to git cheap. It took him a month to track down the owner, a man named Harmon. Besides the house, there was a barn, chicken coops, and a couple acres of weeds. Charlie called it the “Harmon Ranch.”

We moved when school let out in June. None of the kids were happy about it. And neither was I. Six miles out of town might as well of been a hundred. Come September all the kids would be in school and Charlie’d be workin. I didn’t drive, so I’d be stranded.

Charlie promised Rosalie she could keep her job in town if she’d walk to the creamery when she got off work, and ride home with him. He said he’d take Ruthie in to town so she could play with the band at football games, but she had to give up the idea of goin to the dances and such. That’d mean too many trips back and forth and she’d have plenty of chores to keep her busy anyway. I hated the house. The broken linoleum, the rusted kitchen sink, the shit-brown walls. I wondered if there was anythin I could do to make it livable.

For the first week I scrubbed floors, windows, walls, and tried to talk Charlie into paintin over that awful brown. “The house can wait,” he said. “We need to get the garden in.”

“It’s too late,” I said. “It should’ve been started months ago to do any good.”

He went ahead anyhow. Made the boys turn up the dirt. Then give us all packets of seeds and told us where he wanted em to go. By the time the seeds sprouted it was July and over a hundred degrees. The soil caked and cracked in the sun, the plants wilted, and weeds took over. Charlie made the boys stay outside and hoe the weeds while he set in the house in front of the swamp cooler.

And the animals. First Charlie bought an old cow. Then he got some baby chicks and a pair of rabbits from the Co-op. He handed out chores the same way he did the seed packets. Bobby was to take care of the chickens, Sam was to weed the garden, and he put Eddie in charge of the rabbits. The girls’ job was to help with housework, and since I was the only one except Charlie that’d ever milked a cow, that job was mine. I sort of liked milkin the cow though. She was gentle, and there was somethin comfortin about restin my head against her warm flanks, the musty smell of the barn, and the ringin sound the milk made when it hit the pail.

I doubt Charlie knew it when he took the place, but the “Harmon Ranch” was surrounded on all sides by rice fields. And there’s no place better for breedin mosquitos than a flooded rice field. All summer long, me and the kids were covered with bites that swole up like goose eggs, but Charlie never seemed to git bit. Mosquitoes weren’t the only pests we had. Flies, crickets, no-see-ums, ants. In the evenin, soon as we turned lights on, there’d be moths and mosquitos circlin the light bulbs, buzzin our ears, and landin in our food while we ate supper. And I was always findin black widow spiders near my washin machine.

The heat was almost unbearable. But even with the heat and mosquitos, I liked summer best. That’s when the kids were around. The rest of the year I was alone all day in that awful, lifeless house.

Every year Charlie demanded more of the boys. He got more chickens for Bobby to take care of. He got turkeys, too, and the rabbits multiplied. It was Eddie’s job to feed the rabbits. He’d go out in the mornin before school and pull grass to put in the cages, but by the time Charlie went to look, the rabbits had eat it all. Charlie never believed Eddie fed em, and Eddie would take a whippin rather than say he hadn’t. I should have stood up to Charlie for bein so hard on Eddie, and I tried, but whenever I said somethin, he’d git really mad. And I hated the turkeys. We all did. They’d hang around the kitchen door, shit all over the steps, and ever’time any of us went out, they’d flog us with their wings and peck our legs. I had varicose veins, and I was afraid if they pecked me in just the right place, I could bleed to death. The only way to back em off was to hit em with a stick or a broom, and Charlie didn’t like us doin that ‘cause it bruised the meat. When it come time to kill one of them cussed birds for Thanksgivin or Christmas dinner, I didn’t feel bad about it at all.

.

36

B
UT SOMETIMES CHARLIE COULD
be a lot of fun. We’d go campin, swimmin in the river, or over to Chico to Bidwell Park. We played games, Monopoly, checkers, cards. Charlie liked recitin poems, and challengin the kids to memorize em. He liked to cook, and the things he made were mostly good. Except for his pancakes. He always managed to burn em on the outside, but they’d be raw in the middle and heavy as a dinner plate.

And he helped the kids with their homework. The problem with that was he thought he was smarter than ever’body else. If he didn’t agree with how they were told to do somethin, or if he thought their textbooks had somethin wrong, there’d be a big argument. And it didn’t help to tell the kids their teacher “didn’t know his ass from his elbow.”

And as time went on, he got stingy. Complained about the cost of laundry soap, shampoo, toothpaste. Jumped on us for usin too much hot water or too much toilet paper. He’d check the electric meter to see if the little wheel was goin around and, if it was, he’d go through the house lookin for the culprit. A light that was left on, a radio, a cord that was plugged in, lettin the juice leak out and wastin money. Then he’d go buy some silly appliance we didn’t need. Bought one of them things you make labels with and pasted his name on things. Like he had anythin worth stealin. One day he came home with a Osterizer.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a blender,” he said. He set it on the kitchen counter and plugged it in. “Watch this.” He cracked a couple eggs into it, added vinegar and salt, and pushed a button. It made a awful racket and churned while he poured salad oil through the openin in the top. In seconds the mixture got white and creamy.

“Mayonnaise!” he said, lookin proud of himself.

“Wow,” Rosalie said, “if we make all our own mayonnaise, maybe we can afford to buy toilet paper.”

He didn’t say nothin right then, but I knew he’d stew over Rosalie’s remark and wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me he was tired of her sass. Say she had a smart mouth and it was my fault for lettin her get away with it. Once he got started, he’d go on for hours. She went too many places, he’d say. He didn’t like the boys she went out with. She stayed at her girlfriends’ houses too much, and she didn’t help enough around the house. I’d tell him she helped me plenty and that she hadn’t gone anyplace in months. I’d beg him to let me sleep, but I’d be so tense by then, I couldn’t.

He did that any time one of the kids did somethin he didn’t like. Any of em except Kathy. She was the baby. He never got upset with Kathy.

By then the TV had become old news. Charlie didn’t want the kids watchin it so much. He said it was makin em lazy. They needed to be outside, doin chores, gittin exercise. I did let em watch some shows, though, like
American Bandstand
that come on right about the time they got home from school, but I made sure the TV was off when Charlie got home. Then he would turn it on and watch what he liked—boxin matches, Arthur Godfrey, George Gobel, Lawrence Welk. He loved Lawrence Welk.

Charlie said the kids didn’t do enough to help me. But they did. In ways he didn’t understand. They entertained me. Made me laugh. We laughed a lot, and it was laughter that kept me goin.

Rosalie was a natural storyteller. A comic. She’d sing, “Bringin in the Sheets, Bringin in the Sheets, We will come rejoicin, Bringin in the Sheets…” while we took the laundry off the line. She’d put underpants on her head and throw socks while we folded clothes. She’d waddle around the kitchen pretendin to be Agnes Gooch from the
Auntie Mame
movie sayin, “I lived, I lived,” or squeak like Prissy the maid in
Gone with the Wind,
“Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuthin ‘bout birthin no babies.”

I was hangin up the wash and she was tellin me about her date the night before. “So he drives to this place and parks,” she says, handin me one end of a bed sheet. “He thinks I’m going to make out with him, but I’ve already decided he’s a creep. He slides the seat back and turns on the radio. So smooth. Then he takes his jacket off. And you know what he does? He reaches in the glove box and gets out a jar of Vicks…”

I pick up another sheet, pin it to the line. “I’m listenin.”

“…and he starts puttin it in his nose.” She screws her finger around inside a nostril, and I start to laugh.

“Can you imagine, Mom? Gawd, he wants me to make out with him and he puts Vicks up his nose?”

I didn’t like her bein in parked cars with boys, but here she was tellin me about it, actin it out, and makin me laugh, so how could I git mad at her. She still hadn’t done a lick of work, but watchin her and laughin with her was worth a lot more than havin her hang up the wash.

Sam was funny, too. And he was musical. There was a old piano in the house and he taught himself to play it. We all liked to sing. I taught the kids songs I learned when I was a girl, and they taught me ones they heard on the radio. I had a lot of fun singin and cuttin up with my kids.

There was other times, though, that they made me so mad I felt like stranglin em. Charlie said I was gullible and the kids took advantage of that. They played tricks on me and laughed at me when I did somethin dumb. Corrected me all the time, too, just like Raymond did.

“It’s
sit
, Mom, not
set
. You’re supposed to say
I saw it
, not
I seen it
. Chickens
lay
eggs, people
lie
down.”

“It don’t make no difference,” I’d say. “You know what I mean.” The madder I got, the harder they laughed. One time when we were shoppin, I got tired and told em I’d meet em at the car. When they found me settin in a Ford half a block from where our Buick was, they acted like it was the stupidest mistake in the world.

“Well dammit,” I said, “it looks the same. It’s green. I thought it was ours.”

They thought I was hilarious. Especially when I embarrassed myself. Like the time I run out of a store ’cause the clerk was a man and I didn’t want to ask him where to find the Kotex, or that time the elastic broke on my underpants and I had to walk around all day holdin em up through my dress. The one they thought was funniest, though, was the time I got my bra strap caught on the car door handle. I was wearin a sleeveless blouse and my bra strap had slipped down on my shoulder, so when I bent down to put somethin through the car window, the strap got caught. I got in the car, worked my arm out of the blouse, and unhooked my bra from the back. It come loose and slingshotted out the window. Hit an old man standin on the sidewalk.

But teasin me or not, I loved havin my kids around. It was the isolation that made those years on the ranch so hard. I had no friends. No hobbies. The kids were in school all day and Charlie barely talked to me when he was home. I tried to keep things up. Fix meals. Take care of the animals, the garden. But more and more I didn’t feel like doin any of it. Dishes didn’t git washed. Laundry piled up. I couldn’t face the ironin. I was tired. Wore out. And I was sad.

The kids were growin up way too fast. Rosalie and Ruthie had turned into young ladies. Bobby had gotten tall. He reminded me of my brother Laird. Same skinny frame. Same thick reddish brown hair, same deep set eyes. And Sam, my athlete, had his heart set on bein a football player. He was short and skinny, but determined. He sent away for some Charles Atlas exercise books, got a big iron bar from someplace and built a set of weights with old tires, rims, and cement blocks. Went around flexin his muscles. Sayin, “Feel this. See how strong I am.”

Rosalie and Bobby got their driver’s licenses and Charlie bought a old Plymouth for em to use. It made me nervous, havin em out on the roads. Specially at night. There was no streetlights on those county roads, and in the fall and winter there was a thick ground fog called “tule fog” that made it nearly impossible to see. It was known to cause a lot of car wrecks, and it worried me.

.

37

W
E SET IN THE GRANDSTAND
at the football field and watched Rosalie walk with her senior class. My throat ached with pride and somethin else I couldn’t quite name. Emptiness maybe. She was the first one of my kids to finish school, and it was just a matter of time before they all would. They’d be leavin home one by one. I didn’t know how I’d git along without em.

After graduation Rosalie went to workin full time at the soda fountain. She thought she’d earned the right to be treated like a grownup, but Charlie didn’t agree. He kept treatin her like a kid and when he didn’t like what she did or who she was with, he’d take his anger out on me. When she was out at night, he’d walk the floor, yellin at me about her attitude. She didn’t respect him. She was runnin wild. She was goin to git herself knocked up. I’d lay in bed pretendin to sleep, prayin he’d stop, tension risin off me like heat off a sidewalk.