To Sail Beyond the Sunset (4 page)

Mother set her mouth in a grim line and did not answer. For her the Bible was the final word…whereas Father was a freethinker, a fact he did not admit even to me at that time. But Father knew the Bible more thoroughly than Mother did and could always quote a verse to refute her—a most unfair way to argue, it seems to me, but an advantage he needed in dealing with her. Mother was strong-willed.

They disagreed on many things. But they had rules that let them live together without bloodshed. Not only live together but share a bed and have baby after baby together. A miracle.

I think Father set most of the rules. At that time and place it was taken for granted that a husband was head of his household and must be obeyed. You may not believe this but the wedding ceremony in those days required the bride to promise to obey her husband—in everything and forever.

If I know my mother (I don’t, really), she didn’t keep that promise more than thirty minutes.

But they worked out practical compromises.

Mother bossed the household. Father’s domain was his clinic and surgery, and the barn and outbuildings and matters pertaining thereto. Father controlled all money matters. Each month he gave Mother a household allowance that she spent as she saw fit. But he required her to keep a record of how she spent it, bookkeeping that Father examined each month.

Breakfast was at seven, dinner at noon, supper at six; if Father’s medical practice caused him to need to eat at other times, he notified Mother—ahead of time if possible. But the family sat down on time.

If Father was present, he held Mother’s chair for her; she thanked him, he then sat down and the rest of us followed. He said grace, morning, noon, and night. In Father’s absence my brother Edward seated Mother and she said grace. Or she might direct one of us to return thanks, for practice. Then we ate, and misbehavior at the table was only one notch below high treason. But a child did not have to sit and squirm and wait for the grownups after he was through eating; he could ask to be excused, then leave the table. He could not return even if he discovered that he had made a horrible mistake such as forgetting that it was a dessert night. (But Mother would relent and allow that child to eat dessert in the kitchen…if he had not teased or whined.)

The day my eldest sister, Audrey, entered high school Father added to the protocol: He held Mother’s chair as usual. Once she was seated Mother said, “Thank you, Doctor.” Then Edward, two years older than Audrey, held her chair for her and seated her just after Mother was seated. Mother said, “What do you say, Audrey?”

“I did say it, Mama.”

“Yes, she did, Mother.”

“I did not hear it.”

“Thank you, Eddie.”

“You’re welcome, Aud.”

Then the rest of us sat down.

Thereafter, as each girl entered high school, the senior available boy was conscripted into the ceremony.

On Sundays dinner was at one because everyone but Father went to Sunday School and everyone including Father went to morning church.

Father stayed out of the kitchen. Mother never entered the clinic and surgery even to clean. That cleaning was done by a hired girl, or by one of my sisters, or (once I was old enough) by me.

By unwritten rules, never broken, my parents lived in peace. I think their friends thought of them as an ideal couple and of their offspring as “those nice Johnson children.”

Indeed I think we were a happy family, all nine of us children and our parents. Don’t think for a minute that we lived under such strict discipline that we did not have fun. We had loads of fun, both at home and away.

But we made our own fun, mostly. I recall a time, many years later, when American children seemed to be unable to amuse themselves without a fortune in electrical and electronic equipment. We had no fancy equipment and did not miss it. By then, 1890 more or less, Mr. Edison had invented the electric light and Professor Bell had invented the telephone but these modern miracles had not reached Thebes, in Lyle County, Missouri. As for electronic toys, the word “electron” had yet to be coined. But my brothers had sleds and wagons and we girls had dolls and toy sewing machines and we had many indoor games in joint tenancy—dominoes and checkers and chess and jackstraws and lotto and pigs-in-clover and anagrams…

We played outdoor games that required no equipment, or not much. We had a variation of baseball called “scrub” which could be played by three to eighteen players plus the volunteer efforts of dogs, cats, and one goat.

We had other livestock: from one to four horses, depending on the year; a Guernsey cow named Clytemnestra; chickens (usually Rhode Island Reds); guinea fowl, ducks (white domestic), rabbits from time to time, and (one season only) a sow named Gumdrop. Father sold Gumdrop when it developed that we were unwilling to eat pigs we had helped raise. Not that we needed to raise pigs; Father was more likely to receive fees in smoked ham or a side of bacon than he was to be paid in money.

We all fished and the boys hunted. As soon as each boy was old enough (ten, as I recall) to handle a rifle, Father taught him to shoot, a .22 at first. He taught them to hunt, too, but I did not see it; girls were not included. I did not mind that (I refused to have anything to do with skinning and gutting bunny rabbits, that being their usual game) but I did want to learn to shoot…and made the mistake of saying so in Mother’s hearing. She exploded.

Father told me quietly, “We’ll discuss it later.”

And we did. About a year later, when it was established that I sometimes drove Father on country calls, unbeknownst to Mother he started taking along in the back of his buggy under gunny sacks a little single-shot .22…and Maureen was taught to shoot…and especially how not to get shot, all the rules of firearm safety. Father was a patient teacher who demanded perfection.

Weeks later he said, “Maureen, if you will remember what I’ve taught you, it may cause you to live longer. I hope so. We won’t tackle pistol this year; your hands aren’t yet big enough.”

We young folks owned the whole outdoors as our playground. We picked wild blackberries and went nutting for black walnuts and searched for pawpaws and persimmons. We went on hikes and picnics. Eventually, as each of us grew taller and began to feel new and wonderful yearnings, we used the outdoors for courting—“sparking,” we called it.

Our family was forever celebrating special days—eleven birthdays, our parents’ wedding anniversary, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Washington’s birthday, Easter, the Fourth of July (a double celebration, it being my birthday), and Admission Day on the tenth of August. Best of all was the county fair—“best” because Father drove in the harness races (and warned his patients not to get sick that week—or see Dr. Chadwick, his exchange). We sat in the stands and cheered ourselves hoarse…although Father seldom finished in the money. Then came Halloween and Thanksgiving, which brings us up to Christmas again.

That’s a full month of special days, every one of them celebrated with noisy enthusiasm.

And there were nonspecial days when we sat around the dining table and picked the meats from walnuts as fast as Father and Edward could crack them, while Mother or Audrey read aloud from the
Leatherstocking Tales
or
Ivanhoe
or Dickens—or we made popcorn, or popcorn balls (sticky all over everything!), or fudge, or we gathered around the piano and sang while Mother played, and that was best of all.

There were winters when we had a spell-down every night because Audrey was going for it seriously. She walked around with McGuffey’s speller under one arm and Webster’s
American Spelling Book
under the other, her lips moving and her eyes blank. She always won the family drills; we expected that; family competition was usually between Edward and me for second place.

Audrey made it: First place in Thebes Consolidated Grammar and High School when she was in Sixth Grade, then the following year she went all the way to Joplin for the regional—only to lose to a nasty little boy from Rich Hill. But in her freshman year in high school she won the regional and went on to Jefferson City and won the gold medal for top speller in Missouri. Mother and Audrey went together to the state capital for the finals and the presentation—by stage coach to Butler, by railroad train to Kansas City, then again by train to Jefferson City. I could have been jealous—of Audrey’s travel, not of her gold medal—had it not been that by then I was about to go to Chicago (but that’s another story).

Audrey was welcomed back with a brass band, the one that played at the county fair, specially activated off season to honor “Thebes’ Favorite Daughter” (so it said on a big banner), “Audrey Adele Johnson.” Audrey cried. So did I.

I remember especially one hot July afternoon—“Cyclone weather,” father decided, and, sure enough, three twisters did touch down that day, one quite close to our house.

We were safe; Father had ordered us into the storm cellar as soon as the sky darkened, and had helped Mother down the steps most carefully—she was carrying again…my little sister Beth it must have been. We sat down there for three hours, by the light of a barn lantern, and drank lemonade and ate Mother’s sugar cookies, thick and floury and filling.

Father stood at the top of the steps with the slant door open, until a piece of the Ritters’ barn came by.

At which point Mother was shrill with him (for the only time that I know of in the presence of children). “Doctor! You come inside at once! I will not be widowed just to let you prove to yourself that you can stand up to anything!”

Father came down promptly, fastening the slant door behind him. “Madam,” he stated, “as always your logic is irrefutable.”

There were hayrides with young people of our own ages, usually with fairly tolerant chaperonage; there were skating parties on the Marais des Cygnes; there were Sunday school picnics, and church ice cream socials, and more and more. Happy times do not come from fancy gadgets; they come from “male and female created He them,” and from being healthy and filled with zest for life.

The firm discipline we lived under was neither onerous nor unreasonable; none of it was simply for the sterile purpose of having rules. Outside the scope of those necessary rules we were as free as birds.

Older children helped with younger children, with defined responsibilities. All of us had assigned chores, from about age six, on up. The assignments were written down and checked off—and in later years I handled my own brood (larger than my mother’s) by her rules. Hers were sensible rules; they had worked for her; they would work for me.

Oh, my rules were not exactly like my mother’s rules because our circumstances were not exactly alike. For example, a major chore for my brothers was sawing and chopping wood; my sons did not chop wood because our home in Kansas City was heated by a coal furnace. But they did tend furnace, fill the coal bin (coal was delivered to the curb, followed by the backbreaking chore of carrying it a bucket at a time to a chute that led to the coal bin), and clean out the ashes and haul them up the basement stairs and out.

There were other differences. My boys did not have to carry water for baths; in Kansas City we had running water. And so forth—My sons worked as hard as my brothers had, but differently. A city house with electricity and gas and a coal furnace does not create anything like the heavy chores that a country house in the Gay Nineties did. The house I was brought up in had no running water, no plumbing of any sort, no central heating. It was lighted by coal oil lamps and by candles, both homemade and store-boughten, and it was heated by wood stoves: a big baseburner in the parlor, a drum stove in the clinic, monkey stoves elsewhere. No stoves upstairs…but grilles set in the ceilings allowed heated air to reach the upper floor.

Ours was one of the larger houses in town, and possibly the most modern, as Father was quick to adopt any truly useful new invention as soon as it was available. In this he consciously imitated Mr. Samuel Clemens.

Father judged Mr. Clemens to be one of the smartest and possibly the smartest man in America. Mr. Clemens was seventeen years older than Father; he first became aware of “Mark Twain” with the Jumping Frog story. From that time on Father read everything by Mr. Clemens he could lay hands on.

The year I was born Father wrote to Mr. Clemens, complimenting him on
A Tramp Abroad
. Mr. Clemens sent a courteous and dryly humorous answer; Father framed it and hung it on the wall of his clinic. Thereafter Father wrote to Mr. Clemens as each new book by “Mark Twain” appeared. As a direct result, young Maureen read all of Mr. Clemens’s published works, curled up in a corner of her father’s clinic. These were not books that Mother read; she considered them vulgar and destructive of good morals. By her values Mother was correct; Mr. Clemens was clearly subversive by the standards of all “right thinking” people.

I am forced to assume that Mother could spot an immoral book by its odor, as she never, never actually read anything by Mr. Clemens.

So those books stayed in the clinic and I devoured them there, along with other books never seen in the parlor—not just medical books, but such outright subversion as the lectures of Colonel Robert Ingersoll and (best of all) the essays of Thomas Henry Huxley.

I’ll never forget the afternoon I read Professor Huxley’s essay on “The Gadarene Swine.” “Father,” I said in deep excitement, “they’ve lied to us all along!”

“Probably,” he agreed. “What are you reading?”

I told him. “Well, you’ve read enough of it for today; Professor Huxley is strong medicine. Let’s talk for a while. How are you doing with the Ten Commandments? Got your final version?”

“Maybe,” I answered.

“How many are there now?”

“Sixteen, I think.”

“Too many.”

“If you would just let me chuck the first five—”

“Not while you’re under my roof and eating at my table. You see me attending church and singing hymns, do you not? I don’t even sleep during the sermon. Maureen, rubbing blue mud in your belly button is an indispensable survival skill…everywhere, anywhen. Let’s hear your latest version of the first five.”