Tales from a Free-Range Childhood Read online

  Mr. Bowles went on to explain everything in great detail. There would be two levels of “getting suspended.” First, there was the misdemeanor level. He read off a list of minor offenses and told us that any of these would result in “getting suspended in school.” We would be put in a special room with all the other students who were being suspended in school, and we would all be suspended in there together with a teacher watching us.

  Then there was the felony level. This was a serious list. It included things like fighting on the school bus (especially fighting with the driver), stealing lunch money, changing grades on your report card (but only if you made them better), and, worst of all, calling a teacher the same thing you had already heard your parents call them. If you did any of these things, you would be suspended out of school on your own! That was it.

  With this last pronouncement, the assembly was over, and we marched out of the auditorium and back to our second-grade class.

  Once we were back in the room and settled down, Old Miss Lois Harrell looked us over and asked, “So, boys and girls, did you all understand what Mr. Bowles told us?”

  “Yes!” It was Tommy who answered for the class. “No more paddling!”

  “That’s right, Tommy,” she intoned. “But there is to be punishment. From now on, you are going to get suspended instead of paddled. Is that clear? Do any of you have any questions at all about this? I want it to be clear.”

  Near the back of the room, a little boy named Eddie Curtis raised his hand. Every year, Eddie would be seated near the back of the room. I remember often seeing his eyes closed for long periods of time in the school day.

  “Eddie”—she saw his raised hand—“do you have a question?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I heard everything Mr. Bowles said, but he just didn’t make it clear to me. There were a lot of big words. Just what does suspended mean, anyway?”

  The entire class wondered the same thing Eddie did. Mr. Bowles had worn that word out for most of a good hour and had not one time actually told us what the word itself meant.

  Being a good second-grade teacher, Old Miss Lois Harrell did not answer the question. No, we already knew what she was going to say: “Go look it up!”

  Every one of us hated that phrase, “Go look it up.” Whenever you did not know what a word meant, you heard, “Go look it up.” Whenever you did not know how to spell a word, you heard, “Go look it up.” How were you supposed to look a word up if you did not know how to spell it to begin with?

  I remembered a day when I spent what seemed like hours flipping back and forth between c and k trying to find katsup/ cetchup/catsup/ketchup or whatever was in the dictionary. It was torture.

  We all watched as little Eddie trudged over to the dictionary. It was a gigantic and heavy New Century Dictionary, a dark red color. Old Miss Lois Harrell had acquired it, one section at a time, over a year of shopping at the A&P store. Now, it was finished and bolted together for all of us to use.

  Eddie opened the big book and started turning toward s. Soon, he was to the su’s.

  Suddenly, Eddie spotted the word. His back arched, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he wailed, “Nooo! Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, they are going to hang us! If you are just a little bit bad, they are going to put you in a room with all the children who are a little bit bad and hang us all together with a teacher watching. If you are really bad, they are going to drag you out of school and hang you all by yourself without even having anyone to watch. Nooo!”

  The entire class fell apart.

  Two days later in the Waynesville Mountaineer, the following headline appeared near the bottom of the third page: “Twenty-eight second-graders petition school board to re-establish paddling as their preferred form of punishment.”

  And it was done.

  Chapter 5

  LITTLE CRITTERS

  From the time I was born until after Joe was born, I never once spent the night away from home. This meant that I had never had a night not spent in the same house with my mama. I thought, of course, that this was normal, not knowing that many other children had unwatched adventures with no mother present.

  After Joe came along, however, Mama was very tired. It was not long until I was regularly being invited to spend a night, or more, at my grandmother’s house. This was the delight of my early life. Grandma Walker thought that I was infinitely cute and extremely smart. I loved time at her house.

  Grandma and Granddaddy Walker lived about a dozen miles out of town in the Fines Creek community, just over Rush Fork Gap from Crabtree. It was the farm on which Mama had grown up, a place she did not remember fondly but where I loved adventure and play.

  After a dozen miles in the car on the paved road, we would turn off and stop at a big gate. My job was to get out and open the gate, hold it until the car went through, then swing it closed. It was another long mile down the farm road to the house. Since Granddaddy did not drive, the road condition was no concern to him. He actually preferred it washed out, to prevent accidental company from curiously wandering down the road.

  The house was old and made of logs, but they were now covered with boards and did not show. There was no electricity or running water in the house. Cooking was on a wood stove, light was by candles and lanterns, and water was carried in from the spring a few steps out the kitchen door in the back of the house.

  With no indoor plumbing, there was no bathroom in the house. Instead, there was an outhouse a few yards above the house on the way to the barn. It was a large outhouse with two seats side by side. In a family as large as Mama’s was when she was a child, shyness was not part of the family formula.

  If you needed an actual bath, it came in a tin tub on the back porch of the house, but this did not happen often if you were a child.

  One of the finest things about the trips to Grandma’s was that, in the early years, Joe did not go with me. No, he was a baby. The reason I was going to begin with was to give Mama time with him without my being there. My interpretation was that my grandparents wanted only me, and the idea was for me to get all of their attention without having to share a thing.

  There was one actual bedroom downstairs in the house. It was the room where my grandparents slept. There was also a room called “the front room” that served various purposes, from visiting with company to classing tobacco to occasional bedroom. The other permanent sleeping space was one big, long room that made up the entire second story of the house. My mother and her six sisters had grown up in that room, and it was filled with a varying number of beds at different times.

  There was only one ongoing problem with spending time at Grandma’s house: it was called my uncle Sonny. He was my mother’s baby brother, and he was only a few years older than I was. He was like a big brother I neither needed nor asked for. He seemed to think that I was his personal science experiment. He worked at always continuing to find new ways to trick and scare me. I did not then realize that he was simply making up for having come into a world already occupied by six sisters and an older brother.

  My uncle Sonny now occupied the second-floor bedroom in the log house. It was his domain, and I did not at all like going up there. It was a spooky place to me.

  Whenever I visited overnight at Grandma’s house, I slept in the same room with Grandma and Granddaddy. When I was three and four years old, I slept between the two of them, right there in the deep middle of the feather bed. It was always warm, even in the coldest weather.

  When I got to be a little bit older, I still slept in their bedroom. Now, I was too big to share the feather bed, so Grandma made me a little pallet on the floor by folding several of her homemade quilts and placing them on top of one another until I had a fairly comfortable and private bed of my own.

  I got to be eight years old the summer after the second grade in school. Joe was five, and this would be his last summer at home before going to church-basement kindergarten. Mama wanted time with him.

  It was a total surprise one day when Mama announc
ed to me, “Your grandmother has invited you to come and spend a week with her. A whole week! You should really like that. Get your clothes ready, because we are going today!”

  I knew nothing of what might have really gone on in securing this invitation. I was simply delighted at the prospect of the coming week: no brother, no father, no mother for me!

  With some extra clothes, pajamas, and my toothbrush packed in a brown paper grocery bag, I climbed into the car with the rest of the family. Everyone was going on the little trip to deliver me to Grandma. The only thing I could think of on the way was how long the twelve-mile trip seemed to be before we got there.

  The whole family came in and visited for a few minutes. After we caught up on all the news of the family we had somehow missed, it was time for the others to go and leave me to my own devices. I acted like I would miss everyone, and they were gone.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I worked with Grandma in her garden. My job was to pull weeds and carry rocks to the edge of the garden. No matter how many years and how many generations of people carried rocks, they never ran out. The rocks seemed to multiply in the bare garden in the wintertime.

  Late in the afternoon, we returned to the house. I stayed in the kitchen and watched Grandma as she cooked supper, smelling and tasting along the way. When all was ready, she called Granddaddy and Uncle Sonny. They came in from the barn and washed up on the back porch, and we all gathered at the table.

  It was a vegetable supper, all from the garden, with a little bit of leftover sausage from breakfast added in. We were all happily eating and talking at the table when, out of nowhere, Grandma made an announcement to me: “You are now eight years old! My, my, that is old. And you are going to be here with us for a whole week. That will be fun.

  “But there is one thing: a week is too long for you to sleep on the floor in our room. You are old enough now that you can go upstairs and share the room with Sonny. There are plenty of beds up there, and the two of you always get along just fine.”

  Oh, no! I thought to myself. That is the worst idea in the world. If I am captured up there all night, no telling what will happen to me. This was not to be a happy time, but Grandma was the law and there was no questioning her about this.

  I ate as slowly as possible, trying to put off the inevitable night to come. Finally, there was no way left to stall. It was time to get up from the table and get ready to go to bed.

  It was dark by now, and Uncle Sonny had a little old lamp that we were to carry up the stairs so we could see our way to bed. Since there was no electricity anywhere on the farm, there was no light at all coming in any windows from outside. It really was totally pitch-dark.

  I gathered my little bag of belongings. First, I went out on the back porch and brushed my teeth, using some water from the drinking-water bucket out there. Then it was time to go.

  Sonny led as we climbed the steep stairs. The entire world that I could see was the world illuminated by the lamp he was carrying. The light of the lamp itself made everything outside its circle exceptionally dark. We got to the top of the stairs, and he held up the lamp so you could see most of the long room. There was indeed a collection of several feather beds jammed into the space up there.

  He pointed to the bed closest to the top of the stairs. “This is my bed. You can sleep in any bed you want. Just pick one. They are all just about alike anyway.”

  I looked at the long room and the multiple beds and made my decision. I found my way by the light of the lamp and picked the bed that was the farthest from his bed. It was the bed that was against the wall at the far end of the room. Before he blew out the light, I put on my pajamas and crawled down into the deep covers of the chosen feather bed.

  The lamp was out. It was so dark that there was no visual difference between open and closed eyes. I closed them tightly anyway and curled into a tight ball to work on falling asleep.

  Sleep had nearly overtaken me when I heard a strange sound. It was coming from the other side of the wall right beside the bed where I was trying to sleep.

  The sound got louder. It went, Skreeek, skreeek, skreeek! over and over again. What could be making this sound on the outside wall of the house on the second story above the ground?

  Before I could get up my courage to ask the question, Uncle Sonny said, “Listen! Do you hear that? They’re coming!”

  “What’s coming?” I almost wailed.

  “Those little critters!” was the quick answer.

  “What little critters?”

  “The ones that live up in the woods.”

  I couldn’t stand this. “What do they look like?”

  “They are not very big. Five or six of them could get under your bed. They are hairy and scaly all over, and they have big claws. That’s the sound you hear. They are climbing up the outside of the wall. They have huge eyes that glow in the dark and rows and rows of long, sharp teeth.”

  “What are they going to do?” I was nearly crying now.

  “They are looking for a little hole.”

  “What kind of a little hole?”

  He sounded like he was about to chuckle. “A little hole that comes out under your bed!”

  It was terrible! I buried myself as deeply under the covers as it was possible to get. I tried to lie as flat as I could, so that it would not look like anyone was in the feather bed. I was terrified to even wiggle my little finger.

  Was it possible to sleep like this? Would they give up and go away soon? Would I be dead or alive in the morning? It never entered my mind that it was a strange thing that Uncle Sonny seemed not to be afraid of the little critters.

  As time passed, I realized that I needed to go to the bathroom. Since the actual bathroom was the outdoor outhouse, I knew that there would be an emergency bucket somewhere under the bed. There was no way to get to the bucket, since the screeching noise had stopped and I was certain that the little critters were now hiding silently under my bed. I would simply have to hold it. I might explode in the night, but this would be better than being eaten bite by bite by little hairy things that would disappear back into the woods and leave no sign of me at all.

  I did indeed hold it all night. By morning, it was misery beyond description. Uncle Sonny seemed to be happily and soundly still asleep. As soon as I could hear my grandma up and moving downstairs in the kitchen, I leapt out of bed, ran down the stairs, tore out the door to the outhouse, and thought I might actually fill it up.

  When I got back to the house, there was no escaping the obvious questions from her: “What in the world were you doing? Is something wrong with you?”

  There was no choice but to answer the questions. I told her all about the terrible little creatures and the night of misery that I had endured.

  She laughed. Then she shook her head and said, “You are going to have to learn to ignore Sonny, that’s all there is to it. Now, come on with me.”

  She led me around to the backside of the house just below the end where I had tried to sleep the night before.

  There near the back of the house stood a large sugar maple tree. It had a broad-crowned top and long limbs, some of which actually touched the walls of the house. As she pointed up at the tree, a gust of wind rounded the house and the biggest of the long limbs rubbed along the upper wall. Skreeek, skreeek. The sound was unmistakable.

  “Is that what scared you?” The question was simple.

  “I guess it was.” I hung my head as I answered. I had been scared silly by a maple tree. The realization made me feel like the dumbest child in the world.

  After that, I slept just fine and even laughed with Uncle Sonny when we heard the same sound coming back night after night. “They’re coming!” I would call out to him, and he would laugh.

  At the end of the week, I was picked up by the whole family and went back home. Of course, there were Mama’s questions, every one of which was another version of the same thing: “What did you do at your grandma’s house all week?” I told her everything I could
think of telling, but I left out one thing: I could not bring myself to admit that I had stayed up all night and nearly wet the bed because I had been scared by a tree limb. It was just too embarrassing.

  It was a few days later when I was playing with Joe that I had a wonderful realization: I had a little brother. He was a usable little brother, and the time would come when he would get to come with me to stay at Grandma’s house, and I would be totally ready for him.

  I did not have long to wait. The very next summer, we were visiting at Grandma and Granddaddy’s house when Uncle Sonny happened to be away from home. We were getting ready to go home when Grandma asked a question. It was directed to me. “We are here at home by ourselves this week. Would you like to stay and spend the night with us? You haven’t been here to stay for a little while.”

  Before I could answer, Joe piped up, “Can I stay, too? He gets to stay, and I never get to stay! Can I stay, too?”

  Before Mama could answer, I jumped in: “Let him stay! He is a big boy now. Let him stay, and I will take care of him!”

  And the plan was made. Mama and Daddy left the two of us on a Friday afternoon with the promise that they would come to get us on Sunday. We didn’t have any clean clothes with us, but Mama declared that we would be fine for only two days, and we could sleep in our underwear.

  Joe and I played all around Grandma’s house for the rest of the afternoon. Then she called us to the kitchen for supper. Granddaddy was also there, of course, but he did not have a lot to say to children. At the table, I brought up the sleeping arrangement. It was confirmed by Grandma that I would be in charge of Joe and that the two of us would share the upstairs sleeping room of the house.

  Grandma now had a little silver flashlight to give to us to find our way to bed. I lingered at the table to be sure it was good and dark before we headed up the stairs. It would be better that way.