Archives for March 2012

       After we buried my mother, my brother and I were attended to by the neighbors while our dad was at work.  The couple next door was especially kind to us.  She was barren, and over the years, I suspect we had become her surrogate children.  They were regarded as the older folks of the neighborhood.  Mrs. Webster, Ida, who was sixty, spent most of her days quilting, knitting, working on her needlepoint, cooking for the relatives of the recently departed, and “doing God’s work”‘.  She evoked images of Mrs. Santa Claus, with her silver hair, immaculately done up in a bun, and her plump figure modestly covered with an abundance of long, full material gathered at the waist, with only the toes of her shoes peeking out the bottom.  Depending on the day, she smelled of rose, lavender or apple pie.

       Mr. Webster, Web, was sixty-five, and not all that well-liked.  He had been a railroad worker, and many years previously the switch on a railroad car had accidentally been thrown into reverse while he was standing on the tracks.  It resulted in the loss of his right big toe and part of the adjoining one.  After a few complications and set-backs, it was determined that he should be discharged with a reasonable pension, rather than creating a new position for him.

       His clothes closet sported an entire rack of nothing but long-sleeved, flannel shirts, in seven different shades of plaid, which he tucked into his well-worn overalls.  Lined up on the floor underneath the flannel shirts were many pairs of identical slippers, each in varying degrees of disrepair.  Ida saw to it that every Christmas he received a new pair of leather slippers.  He immediately cut a hole in the right slipper where his big toe would have gone–if he’d had one–“to give my  ‘toe-less’ foot  breathing room;” but also, I suspect to elicit sympathy from anyone who hadn’t heard his tale of toe woe.

       He wandered about the neighborhood, often showing up on a doorstop to pass the time of day with the women, who had already heard his stories again and again.  He loved to listen to, and spread gossip whenever it was convenient. If the women would see him coming, they’d get on their phone and pass the word that ‘Slipper-y Web’ was making his way down the street.  His gait was uneven because of his injury, but each day, he’d walk haltingly to the local grocery for Ida, clutching her daily grocery list, and hoping he’d run into a sympathetic ear.

       I had been cautioned more than once not to go into their house if  Mrs. Webster wasn’t there, but I didn’t need any encouragement from my folks after the time he curled his finger in my direction and motioned for me to come over, patting the bench where he was sitting. He smiled with the sun glinting little shards of brightness off his gold front tooth as he called: “Sunny, if you’ll leave that barking dog of yours at home, you can come over and  I’ll show you where my big toe used to be!”

       That pretty much tells it as far as the Websters are concerned, except that Ida pinned all the laundry on her clothesline every day but Sunday, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning.  Web tended to his vegetable garden and spent a good deal of time beneath the shade of their thriving green apple tree, sittin’ and whittlin’ in his slatted, paint-peeled wooden chair, watchin’ the world go by.  Which meant singularly–the neighborhood!

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       The day after my mother’s murder, when the police knocked on the Webster’s door,  no one answered.  Ida was in the basement running her noisy wringer washer, humming a tune, oblivious to any sound, and Web was at the grocery.  The policemen never bothered to return–after all, as they said to each other, “The Websters are above reproach.”

       I remember a special time when my mother was alive.  It was my fifth birthday, and my daddy bought me a bicycle.  It was the most wondrous gift I’d ever received.  Bright blue with silver streaks on the fenders, and squirrel tails on the handlebars.  I watched in wonder and horror as my mama and daddy skinned those squirrels in scalding hot water after their hunting trips.  The tails were a bonus, however and the envy of my playmates, whose dads and mamas weren’t into the shotgun experience.

       I was a quick learner, and I took to that bike like a turkey on a Thanksgiving table.  By the end of the first week, I could fly like the wind, and tasted my first bite of newly-found freedom, rejoicing when looking over my shoulder, that if I spied that Rag Man–I could out-pedal him forever more.

       The day after my birthday, my daddy managed to parlay two weeks of mowing a neighbor’s lawn in exchange for a dilapidated larger bike which he gave to my mama.  She was thrilled, and that summer, we began taking short, then longer rides together.  We would assemble tiny cucumber sandwiches, pack them in our baskets, and meander along the back roads.  Stopping near a wooded area, we’d lay down an old blanket over the softest patches of pine needles, and downy moss and eat our sandwiches.

       Occasionally, we’d tramp thru the nearby woods, and Johnny jump-ups, violets, woodsy sorrel, tiny fern fronds and poke, just peeping from the soil would be pulled from the damp earth.  Their slender stems would be wrapped in dampened newspaper and carefully brought back home, where together we’d arrange miniature bouquets in old perfume bottles and empty pill containers.

       Sometimes, we’d search out a blackberry patch and set about picking just enough berries to surprise my dad with a warm cobbler, swimming in cold cream that had crystalized atop the milk bottles in the old ice box.   Returning to the house, my mama would exclaim:  “Sonny, pull out that ‘ol cast-iron skillet.  I’m about to give you a cookin’ lesson.”  Then together, we’d chop up some fat bacon, fry it in the skillet, throw in the poke leaves, sprinkle in a bit of vinegar, a tad of salt and pepper and last of all, some bits of stale bread.  When my daddy arrived home, the first thing he’d say was “My nose tells me my girls have fixed my favorite meal, and I just bet we’re going to have blackberry cobbler for dessert!  “Teddy, get your feet off that rung.”  I’m not sure which tickled me more–his delight at my fixin’s, or his growling at Teddy.

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       Often, while on our bicycles, we’d stop by a house down the street from us where two brothers lived.  They seemed to enjoy my mother’s visits a great deal, and she would carry on long and interesting conversations with them to their delight.  I always resented these intrusions, and I’d show how annoyed I was by dragging my toes impatiently in their graveled driveway until the white powder covered my sandals.  Whining, I’d plead “Mama, come on.  You promised–puh-leeze.”

       Neither brother had married.  Joseph, the older one liked to garden, and while our yard was a hither and thither frenzy of common flowers and weeds, theirs was an awesome and imaginative array of neat and orderly plants of every variety.  The yard was a labyrinth of bushes with wild blooms, vines in a rainbow of colors,  flower patches everywhere, and  a small vegetable garden  with the tops of the onions, carrots, radishes and such, marching in straight and even rows, saluting the sky.

       Joseph knew all the botanical names for his rare and exotic flowers and he loved to impress my mother.  “This one is a Zanthis Teropodus (or something like that, but it sounded like an old dinosaur to me.)   “This here is an Elopidea Maryandi.”  My mother would gasp “Oh, my!”

       I’d love to have mustered up the smarty-pantsness to say to him “Boy, oh boy, you should see my mother throw her coffee grounds on our flowers–that’s about all she knows about gardening.”  This might have gotten me out of there fast, but for sure, I’d be sent to bed without any supper.

       Slight in stature, Joseph wore gold, wire-rimmed glasses, was interested in books, and had a job at the Pittsville Public Library.  He looked creepy in an over-sized tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.  He wore that jacket in all weather, hot or cold.  It was later I discovered that underneath the jacket, he’d occasionally smuggle a book or two from the library shelves.  He had acquired quite an extensive library of his own.

       Mike, the younger brother was the complete opposite.  He was my mother’s age, good looking, with a sun-tanned complexion and perfect white teeth.  He dressed well, and his muscles bulged beneath his suits.  He wore a different flashy tie every day which was always knotted perfectly, and his hair was slicked back, looking all wet and shiny.  Employed at Pitts Department Store, he held the position of “Assistant Manager of the Ladies Fashion Salon”, and traveled to Chicago and New York on occasion.  “One of these days, I’m gonna bring you some perfume from New York.”  My mother would gasp “Oh, my!”

       My daddy looked down on these two, but in particular, Mike.  More than once I heard him complain to my mother “I don’t like the way he swaggers, smokes with that damned cigarette hanging off those lips, and flexes his muscles when you’re around.  I can just hear the neighbors talking about your visits to those two.  You’re going to get a reputation–and I don’t want Sunny around them either!”

       This just seemed to kindle mama’s free spirit that much more, and she’d pull out a cigarette, tap it on the table and give my dad “the look”.  After a few seconds of seeing her eyelids all scrunched up and staring straight ahead without blinking, he’d slink out of the room.

       One balmy afternoon the phone rang and it was Joseph.  “You’ve got to come down here quickly!  That rare plant I told you about?  Well, it just got it’s first bloom–ever, and I want you to see it.”  My mama said to him “You called at just the right time.  Sunny and I were about to take a bike ride.”  And to me, she cautioned:  “Sunshine , we’re going over to Joseph’s to see his rare flower.  You are NOT to touch it–DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”  I looked down at my Mary Jane’s, knowing that in a few moments they were going to be splattered in chalky white dust.

       We were led into Joseph’s Immaculate Gardenia of Eden.  Pouting because I didn’t want to be there, and angry at my mother’s warning that I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the flower’s arrival, I knelt down to smell it, reached out–and accidentally broke the stem in two!

       The air was filled with shock and silence.  I looked up to see the glare of three adult faces staring back at me in disappointment.  Utterly ashamed and saddened, I looked into the palm of my hand at this newly born baby flower dying by the second, and blinking my eyes, a lone tear ran down my cheek and watered it one last time.

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       The next year, at my mother’s funeral, Joseph offered to give a reading.  My father reluctantly agreed, and when Joseph opened his book, there was the flower I had broken off–dried and crinkly; it’s color gone forever.

       I overheard my father tell one of the mourners:  “Mike isn’t here–he’s in New York ‘fooling around’ with the buyer of the new line Pitts is hoping to introduce.  Then his eyebrows got a crooked look and his eyeballs rolled around aside his head.

       Later, the policemen told my dad that when they went to question the two brothers, Joseph explained to them that he had been watering his precious flowers that morning, and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.