Tallgrass (5 page)

“Betty Crocker has a recipe for pumpkin pie that looks real good,” I told her.

“Betty Crocker.” Granny thought a minute. “There was a Sam Homer Crocker up north of here. I don’t recollect his wife’s name. Mattie will know.”

“Who’s Mattie?” asked Betty Joyce. Because it was Saturday, she had come over to help, and she was carrying tin cups and plates and utensils out to the tables, which were planks of wood laid across sawhorses.

“Mattie’s my sister. She lives up to Mingo,” Granny said.

I didn’t tell Granny that her sister had died a long time ago; I just looked at her and worried that I’d be like her one day. She deserved better. It wasn’t fair that God had let her mind wear out before her body. I figured maybe she’d get worse and I’d have to take care of her all the time. As much as I loved Granny, I didn’t want to be her nurse. For a minute, I felt sorrier for myself than I did for her. Since Buddy was in the army and Marthalice lived in Denver and had a job, I did their chores and took care of our grandmother. Sometimes Granny’s mind was as clear as the Methodist bell, but most of the time, she couldn’t remember anything that had happened since the
Titanic
sank to the bottom of the ocean. I was worried that maybe I’d have to leave school one day and look after her full-time. Girls did that. Dropping out of school was the worst thing I could imagine. But I knew Mom would never allow that. She and Dad expected me to go to college, although they hadn’t insisted on that for Marthalice. I didn’t understand why they treated us differently.

Mom came in then. She wore slacks instead of a housedress, and her hair was tied up in a bandanna because she’d been hauling water to the workers. She wiped her face on a dish towel and took over at the stove, where I was frying pork chops and potatoes. “I don’t know which of us has got the worst of it, Granny, me with the bucket and dipper under that sun, or you in here over a hot stove.”

Granny smiled at her and said, “You rest, Mattie. I’ll fix the rest of the dinner.”

“I thought your Mom’s name was Mary,” Betty Joyce whispered.

With my finger, I made a circling motion near my head to show that Granny was a little nuts, which made Betty Joyce snicker, but Mom frowned and shook her head. I knew better than to make a joke at Granny’s expense. I glanced at Betty Joyce out of the corner of my eye, but she was so used to being yelled at that she didn’t pay attention to Mom’s reproof.

Mom cut into a chop to see if it was done, then began piling the meat onto a platter, the potatoes into dishes. Betty Joyce drained green beans and put them into dishes, too. Then we all carried out the platters and bowls of food, the pies, and a dish-pan full of sliced bread.

Mom rang the dinner bell, and in a few minutes, the Mexicans came in from the fields and sat down. They crossed themselves before they piled food onto their plates, and in a few minutes, they had eaten everything, including the pie. Some of them sat at the tables then, drinking iced tea or coffee that we poured from a gallon pot. A few said,
“Gracias,”
but most of them didn’t look at us. Some of the men sprawled on the grass under the trees, smoking or resting with their hats pulled over their faces, their long, narrow beet knives by their sides. Half an hour after the Mexicans sat down, the crew boss stood up, and the others followed him back to the field.

Dad, who’d come in after the men, went into the kitchen and turned on the tap in the sink, putting his head under the water faucet, then shaking it just like our collie, Snow White, did. “Those jaspers aren’t so bad after all. Sure beats me how they can work like that in the hot sun,” he told us. “Squirt, your mom’s peaked. You let her stay in here where it’s cool. Then after you girls help Granny with the dishes, you can carry the water bucket.” Mom started to protest, but Dad was firm. He’d never told her to stop work before, and I wondered if she was feeling poorly. Dad reached into his pocket and said, “Here’s you a little something to buy stamps for your war-bond books.” He handed both Betty Joyce and me a silver dollar.

“Gee, thanks, Mr. Stroud,” Betty Joyce said. “Do we have to buy stamps?”

Dad grinned. “It’s your money. You can buy anything you want.”

Betty Joyce looked relieved. If her dad found out she had savings stamps, he’d cash them in and keep the money, even if it was only a dollar. Betty Joyce wouldn’t have told me that about her father, but she didn’t have to. Some things I figured out on my own.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to pay me,” I told Dad when he handed me the dollar. Even with the Depression over, money was tight. He didn’t pay Mom and Granny, so I didn’t expect money from him.

“You do your part, Squirt. I don’t know what we’d do without you.” That made me feel good, because Dad didn’t hand out many compliments, and this one was better than the silver dollar. I decided to spend the money on war-bond stamps. Then Dad added, “Don’t know what to do
with
you, either.”

Betty Joyce and I filled the bucket and carried it to the field, setting it down at the end of a row. Then we stood in the shade of a tree, watching the Mexicans. One man drove a two-wheeled horse-drawn lifter down the rows, loosening the beets. The workers followed, yanking the beets out of the earth and knocking them together to remove as much dirt as they could. With their long knives, they topped the beets. Then they sliced off the roots, some of them seven feet long, and threw the beets into piles. Finally, using seven-tined forks, the men pitched the white beets into a wagon that Dad pulled with a tractor. When the wagon was full, Dad drove it to the receiving station in Ellis, where the beets were dumped and weighed and the sugar content of each load was calculated.

“I wouldn’t want to be a beet worker,” Betty Joyce said.

I shuddered at the idea. “It’s the hardest work there is.”

“Too hard for Beaner Jack,” Betty Joyce said, nodding toward the fence that separated our farm from the Tallgrass Road. Beaner was leaning against the fence, joking around with Danny Spano and PeteJElliot. While Danny was tall and handsome and Beaner was squat, Pete was sort of in between, neither short nor tall, average in every way except that he had a scar from the edge of his mouth to his cheek, which made his mouth look twisted up on one side. He was a dope, too.

“Hey, wetbacks,” Beaner called to the men in the field.

The workers ignored him, all but one Mexican, who glanced up, then quickly looked at a sugar beet and whacked off its top.

“Yeah you, greaser,” Danny called, and the boys with him laughed. When the Mexican didn’t pay any attention to him, Danny yelled, “You got a seester?” Beaner cracked up at that and pounded his fist on the fence post. The boys were laughing so hard that they didn’t see Dad move along the fence until he was only a few yards away from them.

“You fellows have business here, do you?” Dad called. Beaner had come looking for a job just before harvest started, but Dad turned him down. Beaner wasn’t known as much of a worker, and Dad was afraid he’d start fights with the Mexicans. “I wouldn’t hire Howard Jack’s son if he worked for free,” he’d told Mother.

“Now don’t be visiting the sins of the father on the son,” Mom’d said.

“I expect that boy has a sin or two of his own.”

Now Dad continued along the fence toward the three boys and repeated, “You have a reason to be here, do you?”

Pete glanced off down the fence past Dad, while Danny kicked at a clod of dirt with his boot. But Beaner gave Dad a surly look. “Seems like all you hire are damn foreigners. Somebody’s got to keep an eye on them.”

“Last I heard, we weren’t at war with Mexico,” Dad told him.

Danny looked up and laughed, then said, “Good one,” and for a moment I thought Dad might smile, but he didn’t. Beaner frowned at Danny, who turned his back to the fence.

“Now you boys just go about your business. You hear me?” Dad said.

“Yes, sir,” Danny replied, and Pete mumbled something.

But Beaner was defiant. “I guess we’re not breaking any law.”

“You’re standing on my property.”

“Yeah?” Beaner raised his fists.

They hadn’t seen the beet knife Dad carried beside his pant leg. He lifted it, resting it on the top rail of the fence. It was for show. In a million years, Dad wouldn’t have attacked a man with a beet knife, but he wouldn’t have hesitated to use his fists if he had to.

“Come on, Beaner. Let’s us go get us a beer,” Danny said.

Pete gave Dad that weird scar-face smile and started off. Danny followed him. But Beaner took his time. He slapped the fence rail with his fists, then spit into the dirt at Dad’s foot. “Yeah, maybe we’ll go into town and find us some one hundred percent Americans.”

BY THE TIME THE
beet harvest was over in the fall of 1942, we knew the war was going poorly and would last a long time. Every night after supper, we listened to the war reports on the Philco, to accounts of the Germans invading Russia and our soldiers fighting at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Whenever Dad went into town, he brought back news of Ellis boys who’d been called up or had enlisted before they could be drafted. Several joined right after the harvest, saying that fighting Germans or Japanese couldn’t be any worse than spring hoeing.

“That’s a fact,” Mom told Dad.

“I hope you’re right,” he replied.

At school, we had air-raid drills and newspaper and scrap-metal drives. I saved every piece of paper that came into our house and scoured the farm for useless iron tools and broken machinery, trying to do my part. I even helped Betty Joyce swipe rusted iron pieces that her dad stored outside the hardware, so that our class could win first place in the drive. All that made me feel as if I were helping Buddy. People invested their beet money in war bonds, just as I had when Dad gave me the silver dollar. I wanted the war to be over so that Buddy could come home— and so that the government could close down Tallgrass. I wanted the searchlights turned off and the yellow dogs to stop going up and down the road, and mostly, I wanted the Japanese to move back to California, so that we could return to normal.

Reminders of the war were everywhere. We faced shortages— of gasoline, farm equipment, shoes, clothes. There were fewer fabrics for Mom and Granny to choose from for their quilts, and food staples disappeared from the grocery store shelves. When it came to food, we were luckier than city folks, however, because we grew much of what we ate. Dad slaughtered pigs and butchered steers, and we produced more butter and cream and eggs than we needed. In the summer, I’d helped Mom can quarts of tomatoes and green beans and peaches, and we made pickles and sauerkraut. Still, Granny cooked her jams with honey and apple juice for sweetener, I no longer made sugar and butter sandwiches, and Mom stopped preparing desserts such as chess pie, which were mostly sugar. We tried vinegar cake and syrup loaf but decided to do without. That was a sacrifice I didn’t mind making.

What brought the war home to me most, besides the camp, was that Buddy and Marthalice were gone. When I complained to Dad that the war had taken away my brother and sister, he said, “Why, Squirt, you know Strouds are free as birds. Those two wouldn’t be here anyway. It doesn’t matter where they are.”

But it mattered to me. Buddy had been attending Colorado A&M in Fort Collins when he joined the army, and Marthalice, who’d turned eighteen in June, would have gone to beauty school or even college if she hadn’t moved to Denver to live with Cousin Hazel, who was the granddaughter of Granny’s sister Mattie. But if they’d been in school, my brother and sister would have come home for the summer and taken time off to help with the harvest and visited us during vacations. I hadn’t seen either one of them since they went away, and I’d been lonely, especially for Marthalice.

She wasn’t around to talk to about little things like whether I should cut my hair in bangs or if I looked better in red than in blue. For as long as I could remember, Marthalice had done nice things for me. When I started first grade, she stitched a crayon case out of a remnant of material. It had a pocket for each crayon, and you rolled it up and tied it with a piece of ribbon. For Christmas one year, she lined a cheese box with fabric to make a jewelry box for me. She sewed rickrack on my skirts and taught me how to use bias seam binding. When I turned twelve, the year before she left, Marthalice washed my hair every week and set it in pin curls, then brushed it out.

If she’d been at home, Marthalice would have told me how to deal with the arithmetic teacher, who wouldn’t call on me because he said it was a waste of time to teach math to girls. I wrote to Marthalice about that, but she forgot to answer. Her letters told of the movies she’d seen or the drugstore soda fountains where she ate. Sometimes she sounded like an adult instead of my sister, telling me to help Mom all I could and how lucky I was to have Mom and Dad for parents. Well, I knew that. Marthalice’s letters were short and a little vague, but still I read them over and over again, sharing them with Mom and Dad, and with Betty Joyce. I kept them in a cigar box that Mr. Lee had given me, and sometimes I took them to school in my notebook. Not many girls received letters from anybody besides their grandmothers.

Mom took the train to Denver just before we finished up the beet harvest, because Marthalice had gotten sick. I wanted to go along, but Mom said I’d already missed too much school due to harvest. That wasn’t fair, because so many kids took off for harvest that school all but shut down. Mom said someone had to help Dad keep an eye on Granny, who wandered around the house at night and sometimes unlocked the door and slipped into the yard. If anybody from the camp had wanted to get into our house, all he’d have had to do was look for Granny outside in her nightgown.

Mom spent two weeks in Denver, and when Marthalice was better, Mom helped her move out of Cousin Hazel’s house into a sweet little room in an old mansion not far from downtown, which they were lucky to find, because apartments in Denver were as scarce as hen’s teeth. Mom said that maybe after Dad signed the beet contract with the sugar company in the spring, I could visit my sister. If the war didn’t end before then—and we all knew it wouldn’t—beet prices would be sky-high. I was excited about seeing Marthalice, who was as pretty as the pictures of Snow White, tiny, with black hair and white skin, while I looked like Dopey the dwarf, only taller. At thirteen, I was five four, with brown hair that was neither straight nor curly and brown eyes. I figured if I ever did become a movie star, as Marthalice predicted once, saying she had this feeling about me, I’d be Mickey Rooney.

Buddy had been good to me, too. He teased me and told me I was a nuisance and shouldn’t follow him about the farm when he did his chores, but he didn’t really mean it. When I stepped on one of Mom’s chicks and cried because that meant I was mean, Buddy told me, “It only counts if you do it on purpose, you knucklehead.” Then he held the chick in the cup of his hands while I pumped water on her, and after a while, the chick came around. Buddy named her Hopalong because her foot was crushed. He and I kept that chicken in a box by the stove for a week before we turned her loose, and when the chick turned into a chicken, I wouldn’t let Mom slaughter it. Hopalong died of old age. When he went off to war, Buddy told me I was responsible for looking after Sabra, the dog he’d found by the road as a pup and raised. Every Sunday, I cut out “Terry and the Pirates” from the funny papers and sent the comic strip to him.

I saved Buddy’s letters in the cigar box, too, and I wrote to him. I told him who had joined up or been drafted and who was trying to get out of serving his country. I wrote to him about going with some of the Jolly Stitchers to take a Christmas basket to Helen Archuleta, Susan Reddick’s sister. Helen’s parents had turned her out after she quit high school and got married. Mr. Reddick said she’d shamed the family by marrying a beet worker—and a Mexican one at that. Bobby Archuleta had been drafted right afterward, and Helen lived in town with a widow who was on a pension, doing housework in exchange for room and board. She was pregnant now, and although she worked for Mr. Lee at the drugstore, she didn’t have much money for the baby. So the Jolly Stitchers got together baby clothes and blankets and arranged them in a pretty basket tied with a red ribbon. They put other things into the basket—diapers, a box of chocolates for Helen, two dollars. The women didn’t talk about the basket at the Jolly Stitchers’ meeting because Mrs. Reddick was a member. Mom said she was sure Helen’s mother knew what was going on but that she could ignore the basket if nobody mentioned it.

A few days before Christmas, Mom took me and two of the nicest Stitchers to call on Helen. “We hoped you could use these things,” Mom told Helen.

Helen didn’t invite us in, just stood in the doorway, proud, her arms folded, her eyes darting from one woman to another. I leaned against the edge of the porch, kicking at the snow and wishing I weren’t there. We’d embarrassed Helen, maybe even shamed her. She had so little.

The women didn’t seem to feel that way. “It would give us such pleasure to see a little baby have them,” Mrs. Gardner told her. She was a jolly lady, with hair so blond that it was almost white and blue eyes like the sky on a sunny day.

“You will let us come and hold the baby once in a while, won’t you? My fingers itch to hold a little baby,” said Mrs. Rubey. Her only girl had died of scarlet fever ten years before. “I hope you have a girl.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Helen said. “I’ve already got so much.” If I’d been Helen, I wouldn’t have wanted people to know I took charity. It would be an awful thing if folks knew you accepted other people’s leavings, that you were one of those women they dubbed “less fortunate.”

Mom knew that, and she wanted Helen to understand that the things in the basket were presents, not just hand-me-downs. “Afton Gardner made a layette with Scottie dogs on it,” Mom said, “and there’s a cunning little quilt we pieced.”

Helen bit her lip. One tooth was crossed a little over the other.

We all stood there, none of the ladies knowing what to say, Helen looking off into the distance. I’d been feeling lonely with Marthalice gone, but I had Mom and Dad. Helen had nobody. Her folks had kicked her out, her husband was gone, and Susan was crippled from polio and couldn’t walk into town to see her. “Susan worked on one of those quilt squares,” I said suddenly. “Mom let me make one, and I told Susan, and she said she wanted to stitch on it. I thought you’d want to know.” My face felt warm, and I looked down at the porch floor and the Stitchers’ feet. The women had worn their good boots, not old galoshes. They wanted Helen to believe they were there on a social call, not there to hand out a charity basket.

“Susan?” Helen asked.

“I know I wasn’t supposed to tell her, but she was so excited you were going to have a baby.” I looked at Mom then, wondering if I’d said the wrong thing. I squirmed, hoping she wouldn’t scold because I’d let Susan know about the quilt.

But Mom was smiling at Helen. “We all are. Nobody’s had a baby in a long time.”

After a pause, Helen asked, “Which square?”

“The worst one. I’m not very good.”

“I’ll look for knots. Susan’s the worst there is for getting her thread tangled up. I’m always having to straighten it for her. I mean I
was”
She paused. “I guess it wouldn’t be nice if I turned down a quilt Susan helped make. I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings.” The women smiled at Helen, who added shyly, “I think I have some tea bags.”

“We wouldn’t want to rob you,” Mrs. Gardner said.

“It’s no trouble.”

Helen stood aside, and the ladies walked in, Mrs. Rubey exclaiming, “Why, isn’t this the dearest place,” although the room was plain, with so few chairs that I’d have to sit on the floor. Mom patted my shoulder as she passed me and gave me a look that said she was glad I’d come. I was, too. I didn’t always say the right thing, but that day I guess I did. And I’d learned from the Stitchers that there was a nice way to give a present, especially when somebody needed it.

JUST BEFORE NEW YEAR’S,
Buddy came home. We hadn’t expected him, and I was the first to see him, because I was outside sweeping snow off the side porch. Our house was two stories, with a parlor and bedroom on the first floor, three bedrooms upstairs, and a one-story ell in the back of the house for the kitchen and a dining room big enough for a round oak table plus a sofa and rocking chairs. Nobody used the parlor door in the front of the house—or the parlor, either. People always came around to the side, where wide steps led up to a porch. Unless the preacher called or the Jolly Stitchers met to quilt, visitors sat in the dining room.

As I pushed the snow through the spindles at the edge of the porch, using a broom instead of a shovel, because the snow was dry and as powdery as baking soda, I saw an old Plymouth stop and a soldier get out on the passenger side. I started down the steps, thinking he wanted directions. But the soldier headed for the side porch, and then Sabra went tearing past me, barking and hopping up into the air, wild with joy, and I knew the soldier was Buddy. He came up onto the porch and hugged me, which wasn’t something we did in our family. But he was that glad to be home. And I was that glad to see him. I hugged him back, holding my face against the rough wool of his coat and smelling the cigarettes and hair oil. I could have held on forever, but Bud said, “There now.” I let go, and he looked me over. “You grew up while I was gone.”

“You did, too,” I told him, and it was true. Buddy was taller and bigger, and in his uniform with the heavy coat and smart hat, he looked like a man. I grabbed his hand and pulled him through the door, yelling, “Everybody come a-runnin’! I’ve got a surprise for you!” I felt important that I’d been the first to see Buddy.

Mom emerged from the kitchen, her hands wrapped in her apron, and said, “Oh my stars.” She put her hand over her heart and slid into a rocking chair.