Tales from a Free-Range Childhood Page 11

  We got on the merry-go-round, and for the first time in my life I got on a horse! I did not get one in the middle either. I got on a big horse right on the outside edge, where it was dangerous.

  After we rode the merry-go-round three times, Daddy offered, “I’ve got an idea. There is a ride that wasn’t here last year. Let’s ride it. It’s called ‘The Octopus.’”

  We walked over to where The Octopus had been put up. It was in the back corner of the lot, near the back of the baseball stands. As we walked up, I noticed the big sign that said, “OCTOPUS,” spelled out in yellow light bulbs, about half of which were burned out. Why had this thing not been here before?

  The Octopus had gigantic mechanical arms. On the end of each was what looked like a large, silvery, tubby thing. The tubby things could be opened up, and you could see that there was a little seat up in there.

  When we walked up, the ride was not actually running. It was moving—lowering just one tubby thing at a time, unloading the victims from the last ride. “I’ll get the tickets,” Daddy said as Joe and I were hypnotized, staring at the thing. It did not look like it could go as high as either the swings or the Ferris wheel. It looked like it simply went in some version of “around.” Since I was really scared of heights, this looked pretty good to me.

  Daddy handed us the tickets, and Joe and I headed for the ride. We climbed up into one of the tubby things, and they closed it up and locked us in. That’s when I realized my daddy had only bought two tickets. He was not coming near that thing.

  Joe and I sat there laughing with anticipation of our first real ride besides the merry-go-round, while The Octopus moved only a notch at a time, so that each tubby seat was low enough to the ground for all the new passengers to be loaded. At last, it was filled.

  Without any warning at all, a big greasy-looking man pulled a lever, and we took off.

  It felt like the first thing that happened was that they popped your head off so that they had two parts to work with. Then The Octopus took all the heads, spun them around and around, and slung them off in one direction. At the same time, it took all the bodies, tangled them up, and spun them off in the other direction. All your internal organs were then left hanging in the middle of the air, hoping they could jump back on one end or the other as your separated parts passed back by.

  Pretty soon, I had my head down between my knees with my eyes tightly closed and my little fingers in my ears so my liver couldn’t squirt out through my brain. At the same time, another part of my body knew that I would never have children after this ride.

  My brother, Joe, wasn’t even holding on. He was waving his arms around in the air and yelling, “Whooo! This is fun! This is fun!” I knew that his brains had to be up in a tree somewhere over near the Chambers’ house.

  All of a sudden, he started hollering, “Look at Daddy, look at Daddy!”

  I raised up and took a quick look. To my dismay, I saw my own father standing near the ticket booth laughing his head off.

  After what felt like about an hour, the thing finally stopped, but it seemed like forever before they got around to our seat to unload us. Finally, the greasy man unlocked the handles and let down the front of the seat.

  Joe immediately stood up and proclaimed to the whole world, “I want to do it again.”

  He then started to step down from the high seat with the full belief that his foot was going to be the first thing to touch the ground. Was he ever wrong! When he stepped forward, his whole body took over its own movement. He ended up smacking full-length face first in the sawdust. It was pitiful. I knew better than to move until he recovered, or I would join him.

  I watched while my brother tried to get up. He would get up on one knee, then suddenly fall over sideways. He would then try the other knee, only to fall over in the other direction. He tried to crawl along on his belly. That’s when I saw the long string of green stuff coming out of his nose. It was something to watch.

  Finally, he recovered.

  Daddy came walking up to us and said, “Well, boys, what do you want to ride now?”

  Without hesitation, Joe answered, “The merry-go-round.”

  We got on, but this time neither one of us climbed on a horse. No, we stayed seated safely on the little bench with the ducks on the end.

  In a few more days, this year’s time of the rides came to an end. They were taken apart and loaded on trucks so they could be hauled to some other little town where the people had nothing better to do. We thought the ride business to be all over until the next year . . . we thought!

  Sometime after that, our family was all at home together on a Sunday afternoon. We heard the kitchen door open, and suddenly my aunt Eddie stuck her head around the corner into the living room.

  Aunt Eddie was our mother’s little sister. She lived fairly close to us and was often coming over to our house. Usually, she came with her whole family: Uncle David and our cousins, Kay and Andy. But today, she had come on her own.

  “Come in, Eddie,” Mama invited. “What’s going on today?”

  With a sheepish smile, Aunt Eddie reached behind her and held up a basket. We went to look at the same time we heard the mewing sound. In the basket were two kittens.

  My mother spent her childhood growing up on a farm. She was so glad to get away from that farm when she grew up and became a schoolteacher. She was finished with all animals. We did not have pets of any kind at our house. Mother’s proclamation was that she was not going to feed an animal that did not work. She did not like dogs. I actually thought she was afraid of them. She really did not like cats.

  “Cats are nasty,” she would argue. “Just imagine something that digs its own bathroom with its own hands! Cats jump up on your lap without an invitation. Then they lick your face. And if they smell milk on your breath, they will lick you right on the lips. Then they jump down and slime around your legs. I can’t stand that!”

  I would argue back, “Cats are not slimy. They are furry.”

  Mother would not lose the argument. “It’s their attitude!” she concluded.

  Joe and I knew that she was not happy with Aunt Eddie bringing these cats into our house.

  “What in the world are you doing with these cats?” she asked her sister.

  “Aren’t they cute? I got them from Mrs. Galloway as presents for Kay’s birthday.”

  Suddenly, I understood everything. Kay was, of course, my cousin. I knew exactly when her birthday was, and it was not her birthday. No, Kay’s birthday was not going to come around for two more weeks.

  Suddenly, all of us understood why Aunt Eddie had come over with the cats. She wanted us to keep them for her until time for Kay’s birthday—to hide the cats for two weeks.

  Mama had two words to say about that idea: “En . . . oh! Not in this house!”

  Aunt Eddie looked shocked. “What am I going to do, then? I was counting on your help. I don’t know what to do.”

  Suddenly, my brother, Joe, piped up. “I’ll do it!” he offered with excitement. “I would like to do it!”

  “How are you going to take care of these cats if they cannot come in the house?” Mama countered.

  “I’ll keep them in the garage,” was Joe’s answer.

  “They’re nasty.” Mama wouldn’t give up.

  “I’ll wash my hands every time I touch them.” Joe wouldn’t give up either.

  “They’ll still be nasty,” she kept on.

  “I’ll wash my hands every time I look at them.”

  “They’ll still be nasty.”

  “I’ll wash my hands every time I think about them.” Joe just kept on!

  Aunt Eddie joined the argument: “It’s only two weeks, and I even brought the food!” She held up a paper bag, obviously full.

  “I give up!” Mama folded. “Okay, you can keep them two weeks, under one condition.” She pointed her finger at Joe as she laid out the limits. “You cannot give them names. If you give them names, you know what is going to happen. You will g
et attached to them, they will get attached to you, everyone will think they live here, and we will never get rid of them.”

  Joe’s face fell. But he finally agreed: “Okay, no names. I’ll just have to call them ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’”

  Everyone laughed except Mama.

  So the plan was made. Joe kept the cats in the garage behind the house and fed them there morning and night. He washed his hands about two hundred times each day. He was totally happy.

  The next morning, Joe came back into the house after feeding the kittens. “Do we have any more baskets?” he asked Mama.

  “What do you need with more baskets? What’s wrong with that one?” she wondered.

  “Those cats are just like us. They won’t quit fighting. I need to separate them.”

  There was a little room on the back of our house that everyone called “that room.” In “that room,” we kept everything that no one on the face of the earth would ever again need in their life . . . but they might. It contained every flattened brown paper grocery bag that had ever come into our house from the grocery store, deflated footballs and basketballs that would never hold air again, small kidney-shaped pans for every time someone in our family had been in the hospital, every piece of Tupperware ever made that had a lost lid, Christmas-tree lights that didn’t work last year but might somehow come back on next year . . . and an assortment of old Easter baskets.

  Mama headed out there and soon came back with two Easter baskets. They were just alike and even still had faded pink plastic grassy stuff in the bottom. She gave the baskets to Joe, he separated the cats and put one into each basket, and the whole world was happy.

  The following day was a Saturday, so our whole family was at home. After lunch, Joe headed out to the garage to check on the cats. He was not gone five minutes when we heard screaming.

  It was Joe, screaming his head off. The sound was not coming from the direction of the garage, though. It was coming from the backyard of our house. As he kept screaming, you could tell that he was coming toward the house. He was yelling words, but he was shrieking so desperately that his voice seemed to turn wrong side out, and we could not understand a word he said.

  He got to the door, and it flew open. Joe came crying into the house, and the first words we could understand were, “They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead, dead, dead!”

  Our entire family was running toward the door, heading out into the yard to see what in the world had happened.

  When we arrived in the yard, there they were: the two little cats, flat on the ground. You could tell that they were breathing, but not very successfully. They were almost coughing and wheezing.

  One of them tried to get up off of the ground, and it fell right over on its side, legs trying to walk in thin air. The other one tried to get up, and it fell the same way. Then they began to try to crawl along the ground on their bellies, and we saw long, slimy, green stuff coming out of their noses.

  “They’re not dead!” Daddy announced. “But what in this world happened to them?”

  We were looking at Joe. He picked up the two baskets, one in each hand, and as he swung them around and around over his head, he answered, “I let them ride The Octopus!” Then he disintegrated into tears. “I’m sorry! They didn’t do any better than we did.”

  Mama walked over to the two little cats. She looked down at them, then did something that none of us believed. With her own two little cat-hating hands, she reached down and picked up the cats. She held the cats up against her heart like she loved them. Mama began petting the little cats until in no time they were purring happily.

  And she gave them names—or at least we thought she did. As she keep petting and they kept purring, she called one of them “Pitiful” and the other one “Unfortunate.” Then she announced, “I better take them in the house.”

  We all watched, still in disbelief, as Mama took the cats into the house where we lived! Not only that, she took them right into the kitchen where we ate food. And while she kept holding and petting them, she got hold of the telephone and called Aunt Eddie.

  We were all listening. “Eddie,” we heard her start softly, “I hate to have to call to tell you this. There is a problem. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you are going to have to get Kay some more cats for her birthday . . . because I love these, and we are going to keep them.”

  And for the rest of her life, every time you went to see my mama, you had to put up with: jumping on your lap, licking your face, rubbing around your legs—Pitiful and Unfortunate, my mama’s first cats.

  Chapter 13

  NOTHING WORKS BUT HER MOUTH

  Mama did not teach school during the years between the time when she and Daddy got married and the year when Joe and I were both safely in school. Then, that year, when I was in the second grade and he was in church-basement kindergarten, she decided to go back to resume the career she was to practice for thirty-eight more years.

  She had needed no special help with the two of us during the seven-plus years when she was mothering full-time at home. However, when she again started teaching school, there were times when we all needed the help of a babysitter so that Mama could work through the tasks and errands that were not possible with two small boys as her helpers.

  The solution was near at hand. Just up Plott Creek Road and over the hill from our house lived Miss Annie McIntosh, an older lady whom Mama and Daddy both knew well because in those days everybody knew everybody. Miss Annie was a widow whose four sons and one daughter were grown, who could be recruited to be the called-in babysitter whenever we needed one.

  Miss Annie drove an old, gray 1939 Chevrolet she called “Rattling Rachel.” She would drive herself to our house to keep us whenever Mama called her. Miss Annie would come creeping down the dirt road, peering through the steering wheel of the Chevy as she drove. She would pull into our driveway, get out of the car, and always without knocking come right in the house.

  She carried a gigantic fake-leather pocketbook with double handles. As she sat down in a chair, she would plop the big pocketbook on the floor beside her. All on its own, it would pop open, and a whole raft of old, fluffy Kleenex tissues would float out and land all around it. There were unknown other dangers hiding beneath the remaining tissues.

  After a few moments of recovery from the one-mile drive, Miss Annie would get up and wander around the house gathering up all the scattered books we had left here and there and everywhere. Then she would return to the Kleenex-guarded chair and utter totally predictable words: “Do you boys want me to read you a little story?” We almost always did.

  Sometimes when Mama called for Miss Annie’s help, she could not come. On most of those days, she would say, “Bring them up here. I can’t leave the house right now, but they can stay here with me just fine.”

  My brother and I loved those days. Miss Annie lived in a big, old, rambling house with a basement, a first floor with a wide porch running more than halfway around, an assortment of bedrooms on the second floor, and even a walk-up attic over that. It was a warren of treasures, turns, and hiding places.

  Being an old lady, Miss Annie took a lot of naps. As soon as she was asleep, Joe and I would engage in a quiet session of our favorite hobby: snooping and prowling. We snooped and prowled so much that we knew not only what was in every room on every floor, we knew exactly what was in every closet and every drawer in every room on every floor. We were championship snoopers and prowlers.

  Of all the curious places at Miss Annie’s house, one of the most fascinating was what she called “my garage apartment.” The garage apartment looked very much like a miniature version of her house. It formed the second story of the garage in which the old Chevy lived, and we watched an interesting parade of people move in and out of the apartment throughout our childhood snooping years. Joe and I spied on all of them.

  We could sit in the garage, hiding behind the Chevy, and listen for water to come down the big black drainpipe, knowing for cer
tain that when we heard water, someone had just been to the bathroom upstairs. We would climb up into a large red maple tree in the side yard and pretend to one another that we could see into the apartment windows, even though both of us knew very well that we could not. We would even graphically tell one another about what we pretended that we were seeing.

  For a short while, an older man named Arthur lived there. Arthur drove a little red Studebaker of a 1950-ish vintage. It looked to us like a small airplane without wings. Arthur had even made a small silver propeller and attached it to the nose of the Studebaker. As the Studebaker rolled along, the little propeller spun wildly. Arthur told Daddy that the propeller made the Studebaker get better gasoline mileage. Daddy told Mama that if the Studebaker got good gas mileage, it was because it saved on gas by sucking the fumes off all the liquor Arthur had been drinking.

  We were told that Arthur had formerly lived with his wife but that one day she went to the store to get some bread and forgot the way back home. This meant that Arthur no longer needed a whole house, and the apartment was just right for him. In spite of the assertions that the apartment was “just right,” Arthur did not live there very long.

  After he moved on, the apartment was occupied by Mrs. Fox and Mrs. Way. They were old ladies who drove an ancient LaSalle. The LaSalle was chocolate brown with cream-colored fenders and was very elegant, though old. It was so long that they had to maneuver it back and forth over and over again to get it turned around in the small driveway.

  We learned that Mrs. Fox was Mrs. Way’s mother, though they both seemed so old to us that we couldn’t make much helpful sense out of that knowledge. Mrs. Fox always dressed for church, wearing an old fur piece that looked like a troop of little dead foxes hanging around her neck. They had eyes and teeth and tails, and I told my brother that they would bite you if you got close to them.

  The most wonderful thing was that they were church-hoppers. This meant that about once a month, they came to the Methodist church. Since we sat near the front and one of the only empty pews was right in front of us, when they came to our church they would end up sitting there. All through the church service, the dead foxes dangled over the back of their pew and right in front of us. They terrified my brother and kept me from getting bored with the sermon.