Tales from a Free-Range Childhood Read online

  “You boys stay in the car,” she ordered. “I will be right back.” Then she looked straight at me. “You are the oldest, so you are in charge. Keep things under control, will you?”

  Joe and I both knew why she did not want us in the store with her. This way, we were not going to have the opportunity to make any begging suggestions about what went into the grocery cart. The only good thing was that maybe she would finish shopping more quickly and not leave us in the car for what seemed like hours at a time.

  She really was not gone long, and I was surprised that she had two large brown grocery bags full of stuff when she returned to the car. She handed the bags into the backseat but did not get in the car.

  “You boys stay right here. I need to run into Josephine’s Dress Shop and see about some shoes. I do not have one decent shoe to wear tonight.” She looked straight at me and said it again: “You are still in charge.” And she was gone.

  This time, she did not come back quickly. She stayed and stayed and stayed. I almost thought about going to look for her at the dress shop, but I knew that she would only fuss at me for being impatient, and it would then take her even longer to finish in the store. Joe and I waited.

  We had no games to play. We had no books to read. You could not turn the radio on in the Plymouth without the key being turned on. We were stuck. We were also starving. Lunchtime at school always came early in the school day, and now it was almost four o’clock. I could hear my own stomach pleading for a snack.

  I was in the front seat, and Joe was in the back, where the grocery bags had been stashed. Being in charge, I made the suggestion: “Let’s look in the groceries and see if there is something we can eat so we won’t die before we get home.”

  I climbed over the seat, and we inspected the contents of the two bags. I knew as soon as we looked into the first bag that this was the right thing to do. Right there was a very easy solution to our starvation problem, and it was one of our favorite things.

  Across the street at Ralph’s Cash Grocery, Lucy Summerow, Ralph’s wife, made homemade pimento cheese that they sold in the dairy case of the store. We all loved Lucy’s pimento cheese. Right there in the grocery bag, we found not one but two of the large-size containers of pimento cheese. Besides the pimento cheese, there were two loaves of Colonial Thin-Sliced Sandwich Bread and two loaves of light brown Roman Meal Bread. We were in luck!

  Joe opened one of the loaves of Roman Meal Bread while I popped the top off of one of the large-size pimento cheese containers. I could take the cardboard lid of the container, bend it slightly, and use it to scoop out a large quantity of pimento cheese. Then, while Joe held the bread, I spread the cheese on one piece of bread, and he added a second slice of bread to the top. In only moments, Joe and I each were eating two fat pimento cheese sandwiches. It was delicious.

  In no time, my brother and I had finished our first sandwich and were chomping our way through the second. That is when I had a wonderful idea: “If we go ahead and eat enough for it to count for our supper, Mama will not have to take time to cook for and feed us when we get home. That way, she can get ready for the circle ladies to come.”

  Memory is surely a tricky and malleable thing, but it seems now that we had at least four sandwiches each, finishing one entire large container of pimento cheese and almost all of a loaf of bread. We had done a good thing. I folded up the essentially empty bread package and put the lid back on the pimento cheese container just as Mama finally returned from Josephine’s.

  She had apparently been a successful shopper, as she was carrying a new shoebox under her arm as she approached the car. We didn’t say anything at all as she got in because we wanted to happily surprise her.

  “I’m sorry I took so long,” she offered. “I just couldn’t find exactly the right thing. I hope the ones I got are going to look good enough.”

  “I know they will be fine!” I offered encouragement.

  We arrived at home, and Joe and I helped carry the groceries into the house.

  “Boys, I am running late. Maybe I better fix the refreshments before I get some supper together. Do you boys want to help me do that? It is my big surprise.”

  We were happy to agree.

  Once the bags were on the kitchen counters, Mama began to gather things she apparently needed for us to fix the refreshments. She got a big cutting board and put it on the kitchen table. She got out several knives—some sharp, some not—and added them to the supplies. Then she opened a drawer and took out a little white cardboard box that we had never seen before. “This is the secret!” she announced.

  When Mama opened the box, we saw that it contained what looked like four cookie cutters, except they were bigger than cookie cutters. If you had used them for cookie cutters, they would have made cookies as large as a slice of bread. And they were very interesting shapes. The four cookie cutters were shaped exactly like the symbols on the playing cards Mama and Daddy used when they got together with friends to play bridge or canasta. I knew what these shapes were called. They were called, “spade,” “heart,” “diamond,” and “club.”

  I asked Mama, “What are you going to do with those big cookie cutters?”

  “They are not cookie cutters,” she smiled. “They are party sandwich cutters. You see, I got Lucy Summerow to make me a special fresh run of her wonderful pimento cheese. That’s what I stopped for at the grocery store. I also got both white and brown bread.

  “I am going to make special pimento cheese sandwiches for the ladies in the circle. You boys can help. We will use one piece of white bread and one piece of brown bread for each one. Then we will cut out the shapes. We can arrange them in a nice pattern on the big tray with some of the white sides up and some of the brown sides up. And boys, you can eat the scraps we trim off while we do this, and you won’t get too hungry until I can fix you some supper.”

  I knew in that moment that there was nothing to be said. There was no excuse to be offered. There was no explanation that was worth even trying to state. And I knew that as soon as she reached into the grocery bags, the rest of this day would not have a happy ending.

  I did the only thing I could think of to do. I excused myself like I needed to go to the bathroom and left the kitchen in a hurry.

  I could hear Mama pick up the first brown paper grocery bag. Then I heard her first words: “What on the face of this earth has happened to my groceries? You boys have eaten up the very special things that I bought to serve to the circle ladies! What in this world am I going to do now?”

  She must have been looking at Joe as she said this because he was quick to answer: “Don’t look at me. I was not in charge!”

  I had to move quickly, as there would not be much time before she came looking. I was at the telephone now, picking it up and dialing four-five-six-six-zero-six-one, the number where Daddy worked at the bank.

  In a moment, he was on the phone. “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Actually”—I tried to be quick without sounding hurried— “I am calling for Mama. She wants to know if you can stop by Whitman’s Bakery and pick up cookies for the circle ladies. What she wants is two dozen each of tea balls, Danish wedding cookies, sugar cookies with sprinkles on them, and pecan cookies with chopped-up pecans in them, and six cream horns!”

  Daddy laughed out loud. “I am almost on the way right now! Tell her I am glad to be helpful.”

  When Mama was really mad, she fell into the habit of asking questions she thought to be unanswerable, instead of making any statements with which you might argue. I had counted on this, and I was right.

  She came into the room where I was in retreat. “Mister-in-charge! We are all in a mess now. Just what do you think can be done to take care of the refreshment situation before the circle ladies get here in less than one hour?”

  I was ready. “It is already done! Since I was in charge, I called Daddy at the bank. He is on the way home right now, and he is bringing eight dozen fresh cookies and six cream horns!�
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  She actually looked relieved. Then she caught herself. “And what are we supposed to do with cream horns?”

  “We don’t need to do anything. Mister-in-charge will take care of it.”

  And I did.

  Chapter 11

  SOMETHING UP HER SLEEVE

  Back in the first grade, we were all in Mrs. Annie Ledbetter’s room. Mrs. Annie Ledbetter was a jolly lady who laughed at almost everything we did and was a wonderful teacher for our first year of school.

  One day I remember well was the first day of the month of February that first-grade year. It was a classroom ritual on the first day of each month for us to watch while Mrs. Ledbetter tore the calendar page of the old month off the Garrett’s Funeral Home calendar, and we looked with delight at the new month that was waiting for us. She would point out special days to come, and everyone who had a birthday that month would get to come up and write their own name on that square of the calendar.

  Mrs. Ledbetter went on, “For first-graders, the most interesting day this month is probably Saint Valentine’s Day, and we need to start getting ready for it this very day. We need to make our Valentine’s Day mailboxes today, so that all of you can begin to give Valentines to one another before we have a big party on that special holiday.”

  Mrs. Ledbetter then passed out red construction paper and white construction paper. She showed us how to fold the white construction paper and cut out sections of the folded paper with scissors so that, when you unfolded the paper and placed it over the red paper, you got wonderful decorative patterns. We were to make mailboxes that looked like decorated pouches and would hold Valentines.

  We all folded our white paper as well as we could in imitation of what we thought we had watched her do. Now we were ready to cut, but disappointment was on the horizon. Mrs. Led-better passed out the stupid little blunt-nosed, loose-jointed scissors. Just as we tried to cut with them, the folded paper flopped over sideways and stuck between the blades of the loose scissors. By the time we got it unstuck, we were all so frustrated that we ended up tearing the white paper into messy sections with our own hands.

  Besides that, she wouldn’t let us use the stapler because we “might catch our fingers.” Instead, she passed around a big jar of white paste that tasted a lot better than it stuck. It even had a little, flat wooden spoon in it just like you got with a Dixie Cup of ice cream. We all ate the paste in no time, and in the end she had to staple our mailboxes together herself so they wouldn’t fall apart.

  We wrote our names on the mailboxes as well as we could. Mrs. Ledbetter thumb-tacked them to the chalk tray along the bottom of the blackboard, and they were ready to receive mail.

  As we left school that afternoon, she reminded us, “The mailboxes are now open, boys and girls. We will be careful to keep our door closed all through this time so no one can come in and take our Valentines. You have to watch out for things like that.”

  As soon as I got home, I reported on the day, and Mama took me down to the Hazelwood Pharmacy to get my Valentines. Hazelwood Pharmacy was not CVS. They did not have two entire aisles of Valentines and candies that had been set up since the day after Christmas. No, at Hazelwood Pharmacy, they had set up a small folding table that was not much bigger than a card table.

  I walked up to the table and immediately started looking. There were some large individual Valentines, each sold with its own red envelope. They had things like little gold metal hearts glued to them and little bows tied through the card itself. You could run your fingers over the surface of the card and feel the raised shape of the flowers pictured there.

  “How about these?” I suggested.

  “Put those down,” was the immediate reply. “Those are not for children. Those Valentines are for people who are going to get married or something.”

  I put them down like they were burning my fingers and went around to the other end of the table. There were slick cardboard books filled with pages that had Valentines printed on them. The shapes were perforated so that they could be punched out. There were no envelopes.

  “What about these?” I tried again.

  “Those are the cheapest ones. I think we can do a little better than that.”

  I was beginning to think that this Valentine business was more complicated than I had expected.

  Mama directed my attention to the center of the table. There in the center was a large pile of red mesh bags. Whoever planned those little bags surely understood exactly how many children were in a North Carolina school classroom. There were twenty-eight little Valentines, each with its own red envelope, and one slightly larger Valentine labeled, “For my teacher.”

  We bought a bag of these Valentines and headed home for supper, to be followed by my own time to prepare Valentines to take to school the following day.

  It took me all of about five minutes to finish. I picked out four of the Valentines very carefully. One had a bear on it and said, “To my friend.” It was to be for Eddie Bryson. One had fire trucks on it. It simply said, “Happy Valentine.” I addressed it to Harold Allen. The third one said, “Let’s play!” and showed several children having what looked like a Valentine’s party. It went to Eddie Curtis. The last one, for Bruce Bowman, had two dogs on it. It didn’t have words on it, just red hearts over the dogs’ heads and “Bow-wow” inside each of the hearts.

  Since I was now finished, I started to put the rest of the Valentines away in the red mesh bag. This bagful would probably last me through elementary school.

  Mama came walking through the kitchen and saw me put the last of the unneeded Valentines away. “What are you doing?” she asked in a very suspicious and accusing-sounding voice.

  “I’m putting away the Valentines that I don’t need. We won’t even have to buy any next year.”

  Mama looked at the four I had addressed. Then she looked at me. “You must not understand how you are supposed to do Valentines,” she started. “You have to fix a Valentine for every person in your classroom.”

  I almost fainted! This was the most ridiculous idea that I ever heard of. Was she crazy? Did she not know what the words on some of those Valentines said? They sounded like promises for life! Did she not know who all the kids were who were in my classroom? I was not going to ruin my life in the first grade. I refused.

  Mama went on. She insisted that I take the Valentines back out and address every one of them, one to each of my twenty-seven classmates, while she watched like a policeman.

  Now, my mother could make me fix the Valentines. She could make me leave home with them on the way to school the next morning. But she did not go all the way inside my classroom with me when I got to school.

  By the time the morning bell rang, all of my Valentines had been mailed. Four of them were mailed in the proper mailboxes inside our classroom. The others were mailed in the trash can inside the boys’ bathroom. I was taking no chances with overcommitment.

  Finally, Valentine’s Day came. Eddie Bryson’s mama was the cupcake mama. She showed up that day with cupcakes we knew she had made sometime over the weekend. They were shriveled up with dried icing and had jelly beans that had half-dissolved down into the icing and bled red coloring halfway to the edge of the cupcake itself. But they were our only source of sugar at the moment, so we all ate a round of them with great appreciation.

  As soon as the first round of cupcakes was finished, Mrs. Ledbetter made the announcement: “Boys and girls, you may now open your Valentine mailboxes.”

  We rushed the blackboard wall. No force on the face of the earth could have stopped what happened next. Some unidentified small voice yelled out, “Wheew! I got twenty!”

  The next voice followed: “That’s nothing. I got twenty-two!”

  At the same time, Mrs. Ledbetter was foolishly waving her hands and saying, “No, no, boys and girls. That is not what Valentine’s Day is all about. It does not matter how many Valentines you get. It is the spirit of the thing that matters!”

  None of her w
ords mattered at all to any of us. We knew in our little six-year-old hearts that the world was all about competition, and we seldom got a chance to enter into the game. This was our chance! We wanted to win. There was no stopping the classroom until every single one of us had had our chance to call out the counted number.

  All of a sudden, the room fell silent. To be sure, no more numbers were being called out, but there seemed to be more to the silence than that. It was the kind of profound silence that pulls your eyes toward it, the kind of silence that is not caused by the absence of sound but by something so negative that it erases the movement of sound itself.

  There, in the center of the silence in the back of the room, stood a little girl named Willie Freedle. Willie Freedle was a little dull-haired girl who came from way back up Allen’s Creek. We watched in silence as Willie Freedle held her Valentine mailbox upside down. She was gently shaking it with one hand and with the other fishing up inside, trying to find something that was simply not there. Willie Freedle did not get one single Valentine.

  About that time, we were interested in sugar again. To break the silence, someone asked about more cupcakes. Cupcakes came out, and we ate.

  Since most of the class was more interested in sugar than in Valentines to begin with, we actually threw the majority of our Valentines into the trash can after they were counted. I can still to this day look back into my memory and watch, as we went out the door when the afternoon bell rang, little Willie Freedle. She was squatted by the trash can digging through the contents. Looking for some Valentines that had no names on them, she collected them, then slipped them into her worn and handed-down book bag. I knew even then that Willie was taking them home so she would have some help in trying to tell a story that night about all the things that had not really happened at school on Saint Valentine’s Day.