The Long Journey Home (3 page)

Daddy tried to ignore both women, dumping so much catsup on his food that his plate looked like a miniature replica of one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War. With Aunt Bama present, Daddy knew that Mother wouldn’t let her manners go and scream at him with her usual “You ruin everything I cook by pouring catsup on it, Wyman! Absolutely everything!”

Earnest Junior loved Mother’s cooking and ate helping after helping. Well satiated after one dinner of baked ham, sweet potato soufflé, and green peas in white sauce, he pushed his chair back from the table and announced with a rare sparkle in his eyes: “When Mama and Daddy die I’m going to be as rich as a king.”

“When your Daddy and I die all our money is going to foreign missions. That’s stated in our wills,” Aunt Bama said severely, glaring across the table at her son. “The Lord will take care of you, Earnest Junior.”

“The Lord, my foot,” Mother snorted when the two of us rehashed the dinnertime conversation privately later. “She means the law.”

Then once again she expressed her frustration with Aunt Bama for not telling her more about Earnest Junior’s condition. Mother felt it unfair, since she, by far the youngest of the whole bunch, would probably be left to deal with him. In a way, that’s exactly what happened. In her old age, when Earnest Junior called Mother collect from a prison, or some other place when he was an escapee on the run, she always accepted his calls. She said it made her feel safer to know where he was. She grimly referred to him as “my inheritance from your father.”

But it was Earnest Junior who ended up inheriting The Old Home Place.

I have few memories of Daddy during the first four years of my life. While we lived there he was either at the warehouse supervising the workers or traveling in the northern states drumming up trade for his and Uncle Frank’s lucrative produce business. I do remember his striking image when, like Uncle Frank, he dressed up in his white linen suit on special occasions, pausing at the garden during rose season to snap off a red rosebud for his coat lapel.

Granddaddy is a giant in my first memory of him. I am sitting on the floor, looking up and up into his teasing face under his straight dark hair. The whole house was filled with his presence, his voice, and his smell, a mixture of talcum powder and cologne, both of which he used liberally because he never bathed. He just splashed a little water on himself like Daddy did and depended on the toiletries to do the rest. But Granddaddy never smelled bad, unless you didn’t like the aroma of Prince Albert pipe tobacco that clung to everything he wore and permeated his skin. I loved its smell because his pipe, and the smell of it, were part of him, and he was as much a welcome part of my world as the sun, the pecan orchard, and the flower garden in the backyard with its row after row of blossoms.

I think of Granddaddy in a dark, pin-striped gabardine suit. Even at breakfast he wore a suit. After breakfast he’d sit on the front porch in one of the high-backed rocking chairs, cross his legs, and smoke
his pipe. After a while Daddy would come out of the house and ask, “Are you ready to go to work, Daddy?” Granddaddy would get up and go with him, though he hadn’t worked in years.

Mostly I remember Granddaddy, still dressed in his pajamas, on mornings when I went to his room to play with him. I always gave him the baby doll whose glass eyes shut with a clanking sound and whose wooden head was covered with brown, carved curls. I pretended to give him the baby doll because she was best, but the real reason was that I loved my brown bear more.

Our play together was a daily ritual. Mother told me that Granddaddy was “a nice old man, but senile.” Lucille Williams, the African American woman who worked for my family from the time I was three months old, called him a “friendly old fellow.” “His mind had been out of order for so long,” she told me several years ago, “that they treated him like a little child.” Whatever the condition of Granddaddy’s mind, his heart and mine were of one accord in the early morning when the baby doll and the brown bear played together among the rumpled bedclothes.

Then one morning, when I was three years and nine months old, Granddaddy wasn’t in his room waiting for me. His bed had been stripped down to the mattress, and the smell of him was hardly there at all. Baby doll and brown bear dangled useless from my hands.

Later Mother held me in her arms in the living room as she stood over Granddaddy’s casket. Granddaddy looked odd and artificial, with his lips painted, rouge on his cheeks, and his mouth stitched into an expression I’d never seen before. Daddy had been mostly absent from my early childhood, and Mother had been distracted and distant. Only Granddaddy had been warm and welcoming, and he’d died and hadn’t taken me with him. More than half of my world was gone.

“You shouldn’t show him to her,” Daddy wailed to Mother. Daddy sat in a straight chair by the secretary, pressing his bald head hard against its dark wood, sobbing. When Mother put me down on the floor, I ran out of the living room and out the back door. Just
across the fence, my friend June was playing in her yard. “June!” I called. “June! I have a dead Granddaddy in the living room!”

Lucille came and stood at the back-door screen. She’d mistaken my announcement to June as bragging, not the hysteria it was.

“Shame on you, Margaret Richter!” she yelled. “Shame on you!”

I fastened my eyes on the pecan grove, while I felt my heart heavy in my chest and mockingbirds called from the trees.

N
OW WE WERE LEAVING
T
HE
O
LD
H
OME
P
LACE
. F
OR MONTHS ON
Sundays Daddy had taken us two blocks up the street to the new house to see the progress the builders had made that week. “Finest oak flooring money can buy,” he’d boom proudly as we walked through the rooms that weren’t rooms at all but spaces divided by beams. I always walked in a daze trying to imagine that place, with its sawdust and nails, as home. But I couldn’t. It didn’t matter. With Granddaddy gone, home itself wasn’t home anymore.

Despite my grief, the day we moved up the street to the new house I was excited. Men came and went, hauling pieces of furniture and boxes out of the house. The front yard was filled with bureaus and dressers and chairs stacked one atop the other. Mirrors leaned against the palm trees. Boxes of dishes, pots and pans, clothes, books, photographs, canned food, bags of flour, cornmeal, and sugar stood among the shrubs.

Mother and Daddy’s bed, stripped of its linen, stood in the middle of the walkway. Wildly excited and nervous, I climbed up onto the bed and began to jump on the bare mattress. Granddaddy was dead and buried in the cemetery across the road from the pickle plant. A speeding car had smashed my dog Spot. And we were leaving
the fig tree and my rope swing forever. But the higher I jumped, the more my sadness was replaced by the joy of pure motion. Higher and higher I jumped, giddy with a head full of blue sky and furniture. A bus pulled away from the station across the street. A dog barked. The town clock rang out the hour. Still I jumped.

Then Mother came racing out the door, screaming, “Stop! Stop that, Margaret! Stop!”

I stopped.

Even so, my feeling of freedom was so great that nothing could diminish its vivid memory. For those few minutes I spent jumping on Mother and Daddy’s bed I was utterly joyous.

I was filled with wonder when I looked into the shoe box of tiny pine trees that Mother held in her hands. They were a whole miniature forest.

The yard of the new house was broad and deep. To one side of the backyard were four pecan trees. An old oak stood near the back door. Thick wisteria vines hung from its branches, their blossoms lush and abundant. Except for the pecan trees and the oak, the yard spread its two acres flat and blank without another tree to catch the sunlight or create patches of welcome shade.

Sometime after I was four Mother planted other trees—the maple near the front porch, the mimosa with its pink puffs and tiny leaves that folded together at evening like praying hands, Japanese magnolias, dogwood along the sidewalk, and a crab apple and a pear tree out back. Though I watched her plant many of them, it was watching her plant the shoe-box forest of pines that most filled me with wonder.

Mother set the box down on the grass and beside it dug a hole with her spade, chopping and chopping until the dirt was loose and soft enough to receive the tender roots that she pushed into it. Then
she patted the dirt around the little tree with her hands and watered the earth with drizzle from the hose that she dragged around from where it lay coiled under the faucet. The tree looked small and vulnerable—not like a tree at all, just a small sprig of pine in the grass. “Are you sure this is going to grow into a real tree?” I asked.

“It will grow into a tree as tall as the house and taller,” Mother assured me. Then she carried the box to another spot, dug a hole, and planted another tree. She repeated the process all over the front and long side yard while I followed her, dragging the drizzling hose and its long extensions.

I couldn’t imagine the long-leafed pines they would grow into, tall and glorious, yielding enormous pinecones that were used to start the Christmas fires in the living room fireplace, or how many pine needles would be shed each year to be raked into the driveway to make it a carpet of golden brown. I don’t remember being aware of when the trees changed from looking like twigs and began to look like trees, or when I began to look up and not down at them. I don’t remember when I looked out at the yard and realized that we lived in a grove of pines. What I do remember is that walking around the yard with Mother, watching her plant the trees, taking them one by one from the shoe-box forest, was one of the happiest, most thrilling experiences of my childhood.

“Hold him up and look at me,” Mother said, backing me up against one side of the new house. She stood my brother Wyman—I’ve always called him Bubba—in front of me. I caught hold of his hands.

“Be still,” Mother said, bending her head over her Kodak box camera.

The sun hurt my eyes.

“Be still, I said!”

Bubba squirmed his determined sweaty hands free from my grip and toppled to the grass.

“I told you to hold him up!” Mother screamed.

“I didn’t mean to let him fall, Mama,” I pleaded. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I told you!”

“Mama!” I cried. But there was no way for me to reach my mother through her fury.

Bubba was special, even with his earaches and his bawling. Though I was three years and eight months old when he was born, I still remember how proud Mother was of him. She would get all dressed up afternoons and push him in the wicker baby carriage back and forth in front of the house for everyone to see. One day I sat at my rolltop desk and drew a picture of Mother pushing Bubba in the baby carriage. I worked a long time on the drawing, bearing down hard with my pencil.

When I went out to the sidewalk to show it to her, she didn’t even notice me. I had to pull at her skirt to make her look down. “Mama, I’ve done a drawing for you.” She glanced at my picture and said, “That’s nice,” in a tone of dismissal. Then she went back to pushing Bubba’s carriage. It was around this time that I stopped saying “Mama” and began to say “Mother” instead.

Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” on the Stromberg-Carlson radio that stood in the living room by the love seat. The whole house was filled with the aroma of turkey and dressing baking in the oven, fresh cranberries bubbling in the pot, yeast rolls rising on the stove. Bubba and I sat on the living room carpet watching his new electric train running around its track, the engine hooting and hooting. I felt
sick with envy. I could hardly bear to look at the handsome engine with its fine wheels turning, smoke puffing out of the smokestack.

I wanted an electric train of my own. I wanted to feel the cool metal of the engine in my hands. I wanted to touch each detail of window, door, step, and wheel with my fingers. I wanted to fit the sections of track together to create my own loops and curves. I wanted to bring my train to life by switching the switch on the transformer. I watched, furious with wonder, as Bubba fumbled with the mysterious wires that sparked and sputtered.

Bing Crosby crooned as the train turned a curve. His words mixed with the hooting of the train and with my horrible feeling of shame; girls were not supposed to want electric trains. Girls were supposed to want tea sets, dolls, play kitchens, and stuffed animals. Wanting an electric train was just one more indication that something was wrong with me, that I was terribly flawed.

The Atlanta Journal
crackled in Daddy’s hands as he sat reading in the wingback chair by the fireplace. The fire crackled too, but inside I felt cold. I looked across the room at the bride doll abandoned under the Christmas tree, along with its wrinkled wrapping paper and tangles of bright ribbons. The doll was terribly expensive. I’d seen her price tag in Rich’s, the big department store in Atlanta that we went to around Christmastime. I knew that Mother had made some sacrifice to buy such an expensive doll for me. The doll had a hole in her head for each hair—dishwater blond, hair the same color as mine—and pale blue eye shadow delicately suggested on her eyelids. Her full lips were painted a warm rose color. She was elegant and beautiful, and I hated her. I hated her most because I was supposed to love her.

“She’s very beautiful,” I said to Mother. She was a large, stiff wooden doll, and when I tried to bend her straight legs to make her sit down, I pushed too hard and she cracked from one end of her torso to the other. Thankfully, her body stayed in one piece so that the crack was covered by her white wedding dress. Mother wouldn’t know.

The train continued tooting and puffing. Bubba added his own sounds to those of the train as it entered a long tree-covered tunnel and came back out again.

Bing Crosby continued his crooning.

I walked to my room and got my notebook and pen. Then I went back to the living room, curled up on the love seat, and wrapped the afghan around me. I was lonely for Miss Brown, my fourth-grade teacher. I thought about how just before Christmas, her boyfriend came home from fighting the Germans overseas and walked right into the principal’s office and asked to see her. The principal sent a fifth-grader to our classroom to give Miss Brown the message that her boyfriend was there.