Are You Sitting Down? (33 page)

By now, we could load up the couple of dishes Marline had prepared to take and join the others at Mom’s house for the holiday, but a quiet house with no kids is not something grown ups take for granted.
Marline winked at me with a shy laugh once we finished with Santa’s gifts.
Walking over to me, she slipped one hand around my waist and began unbuttoning my shirt with the other.
I leaned down to kiss her on the neck
.
Rather than waste time going upstairs to the bedroom, we fell into each other on the sofa.

Our lovemaking was usually quick and quiet, for fear of waking the
children
.
It was always in our bedroom in the mi
d
dle of the night, and happened only if one of us had awoke
n
from sleep and was possibly in the mood to wake the other.
Chances like these where we were all alone were fully taken advantage of.
It was like old times.
We were loud and reckless.
We laughed, and best of all, we took our time.

*
*
*
*

An hour later, we were showering together, another r
o
mantic act which didn’t take place often.
The touch of Marline’s body against mine was much more satisfying than Danyele’s had been.
I loved Marline.
We dressed and put on our coats although the drive over to Mom’s house took less than a mi
n
ute.

Mom greeted us at the front door, having probably spied out the window at our car pulling out of
our
drive.
Seba
s
tian was waiting in the drive for us.
Mom had more than likely asked him to go out and help us with
the
gifts
and
food we had to br
ought
.
He waved to us as we pulled in.

“Merry Christmas,” Mom said on the front porch, hu
g
ging both of our necks as if she had not seen either of us in months.

I followed Sebastian to the tree with the gifts, while Marline and Mom disappeared in the kitchen with the food.
I heard Ellen greeting Marline from the kitchen.
Travis and Clare stood up from their seat on the couch to greet me, each hugging my neck.
Clare was holding Jake.
I shook his little hand and said hello, giving his jaws a tickle to make him grin. Robbie and Rachel each clung to a leg, giving me a squeeze.
They had been playing
o
n the floor with
Daniel
and
Nicole
su
r
rounded
with an a
r
ray of action figures and dolls.

Out of all of my siblings, I felt the closest to Ellen and S
e
bastian.
Ellen was closer to my age and had a family much like mine.
We’d gone to the same college and both had profe
s
sional jobs right here in our hometown.
Sebastian and I were co
m
pletely different, but I liked being the older brother he could look up to.
He related to me much more than he did
to
Travis, and he knew he could come to me if he needed to.
Since he had stayed here in town, I saw much more of him than I did Travis.

Although Clare lived here in
Ruby Dregs
too, the wall between us was one she had built between herself and every member of the family.
She was the youngest, the rebel, the outsider, and I think she preferred being that way.
Marline enjoyed helping her in ways that Clare might not want to seek out help from Mom, so Clare confided in Marline a lot and I liked that.
A good role model was important for someone who
wa
s a young mother.
The kids liked Clare too, and enjoyed playing with little Jake, so we liked having her as a babysitter sometimes.

Travis was more of an outsider than Clare.
I imagine
d
being gay had a lot to do with that.
He moved away right out of high school, so he missed out on a lot of the daily activities that the rest of the family
had lived through
since we all live
d
here
so
close to one another.
I didn’t understand him, but mainly because I didn’t know any other people like him.
Gay people, that is.
There were kids at school who got picked on and called “faggot,” but they were feminine.
Travis was never like them at all.
I never once thought he was gay until he told all of
us
shortly after graduating from high school.

My relationship with Travis felt like
that of
a distant cousin you only see or speak to at holidays.
Sure, I saw him several times a year when he came to visit.
He always stopped by to say hello to the kids.
He never missed a birthday.
He had helped out with moving Sebastian into
his
new apartment, but he still felt like that
far-away
relative that never call
ed
or wr
o
te.
I loved him like a brother, but there was that
detachment
between us.
The miles and the years between us didn’
t help either.

Once I had pried the twins from my legs and they went back to playing with their cousins, I walked into the kitchen to say hello to Ellen.
She stood up from her barstool to hug me and kiss my cheek.

“How are things?”
I asked her with the sincerity in my eyes that said she better not give me a canned answer.

“They’re good,” she said with a slight grin, looking away with a bit of embarrassment I had not intended.

I scratched her back lovingly and left it at that.

“Everything smells good, Mom,” I said changing the subject to take the focus off Ellen.

“Thanks, Sweetie.
I stayed up all night slaving over the stove,” she said with a wink.

She thanked Marline for the pumpkin cheesecake and pecan pie we had brought.
The kitchen island was practically overflowing with food and steaming like a hot sauna.
The side counter was a bakery and candy shop of colorful desserts.
Never mind the gift giving.
I lived for the holidays just because of all the food.

“Let’s eat,” Mom called to everyone still in the living room.
Those two words were a Christmas carol dear to my heart.

The four
grand
kids lined up first.
Mom, Marline, and Ellen helped them with their plates and brought drinks to the kids’ table for them.
Sebastian was quick in line once the kids were out of the way.
Clare and Travis followed, with Marline and I right behind them.
Mom finally encouraged Ellen to go ahead of her.
Once we were all seated, and Sebastian was up for se
c
onds, Mom had finally fixed her own plate and sat down with us.
She was always the last to sit after making sure ever
y
one else was taken care of, refilling drinks and bringing second helpings to the kids so they didn’t have to get up.

The White family holiday dinner was as down home as it could possibly get in this small town.
We weren’t a family who went out and hunted for holiday turkey in the fields, unless you count bargain shopping at the grocery story.
We were a paper plate, plastic fork, and
Styrofoam
cup clan
i
n
stead
.
Mom would never admit that half the side dishes were store bought.
We all knew Mr. Greer smoked the ham. Travis had even bought a fried turkey this year.

The days of a Norman Rockwell painting with a small fa
m
ily gathered around the candle-lit mahogany dinner table eagerly watching Dad carve and slice a ham or turkey were over.
I don’t remember us ever having a holiday dinner like that,
as much as television commercials and postcards
pictured
it being,
but it didn’t matter.
All of us being together for any meal was
just as
heart warming.

Looking around the room at my family now, enjoying the company of each other, was a nice way to end the year.
It was a
single time and
moment to forget the thing
s
outside of this house that hindered us.
Marline asked Clare about work.
Mom asked Ellen how the kids were doing in school.
Sebastian and I talked about football.
Ellen asked Travis how things were in
Memphis
.
In the background, the kids shared their Christmas wishes, advertisements they’d seen for new toys, and what they asked Santa to bring.
These were all conversations we could have at any time of the year.
We had had them.
But somehow it being Christmas changed the meaning of our words entirely tonight.

No weight on my shoulders from the stresses and worries of the day could take away the happiness and love I felt right now for my family.
Not even the knock at the front door could fade the smile in my heart
or
on my face.

Lorraine
 

I
n 1963
,
I was sixteen and became a mother just a year la
t
er.
I was still a baby myself
.
I remember times were hard back then, but I don’t think kids these days have it any easier.
We were much more appreciative of the few things we had then because Frank and I worked hard for them.
Frank was a good man.
He kept us
fed
and kept Martin in clean diapers.
The electricity and the heat never got cut off.
Outside of these needs, we did without.

My family grew up very poor.
Daddy was a farmer and Mama was a housewife when she wasn’t helping out on the farm too.
She tended to the chickens, collecting the
ir
eggs, and would milk the cows and pick whichever vegetables were in season.
She had no qualms about ringing a chicken’s neck or slitting a hog’s throat to put
meat
on the table.
I had three brothers and three sisters, so large families in the house were quite comforting to me by the time I was raising kids of my own.

My brothers plowed the fields and picked cotton right beside Daddy.
My sisters sold vegetables at our produce stand at the end of the street, when we weren’t helping Mama with chores around the house.
The farm claimed the life of one of my brothers.
Jessie was sitting on top of the wheel guard of the tractor while Billy was driving and working soy beans.
Jessie was going to turn around so he could look behind the tractor but he lost his footing.
He fell forward and the large
tractor
wheel pulled him under.
Billy reached for him but it was too late; the tractor rolled over him and crushed his rib cage.
Billy never drove the tractor again after that day.

Christmases were small but special around the house that Daddy built.
The boys got baseball cards with gum in the package.
The girls got an apple, an orange, and a stick of pe
p
permint candy.
The very best year was when Mama got a new pair of shoes and the girls were given a chair.
Just one chair, but it was special because Dad
dy
and our brothers
ha
d whittled it from
pieces of scrap wood using their very own pocket knives.
One of my older sisters still has that chair today.

In the winter, Daddy worked down at the docks on the
Mi
s
sissippi River
unloading steamboats for the mills.
When
Billy
turned fifteen,
he was
old enough to work there too and went with him.
The girls stayed home with Mama keeping the house warm and the barn clean.
We fed the animals and learned how to sew, and played checkers with milk tops on a board we’d drawn on the floor with chalk.
My younger brother Hank was not yet old enough to work the docks, so he stayed home and worked around the house.

One winter, Daddy was offered a job by one of the steamboat captains.
His boat was low on men because of a bad case of influenza.
He needed men to go down the
Mississippi
to
B
i
loxi
.
A steel mill here and in
Memphis
was in dire need of a shipment that was too heavy for any other boat to haul. Daddy would be gone for twelve days, but he’d make twice what he made at the docks all winter long.
My brother Billy
was
asked to go too and
would be paid
the same wage
as Daddy
.
Hank would stay home with us to be “the man of the house” as Da
d
dy called it.

“Takes three days to get down there. We’ll spend three or four days down there loading. Two days back to
Memphis
.
We’ll spend a day or two there unloading.
One more day to get back here and a day to unload the rest
down at the docks
,” Daddy told Mama.

She didn’t want him to go.
They’d never spent a night apart since the day they married, but she knew how important the money was to him.
She knew what it meant to the family.

“With making this much money, I could take the rest of the winter off and be at home with you
.
We could put Billy’s pay into savings
,” he said to allure her.

“Come back to me,” she
told him
.

“I will.
I’ll come back to all of you,” he said.

I remember all of us standing on the dock next to Mama waving good-bye to Daddy and Billy as the steamboat rolled away from land.
Thankfully, it had been a mild winter and the river had not frozen across.
Thin layers of fragile ice clung to the banks but broke apart when waves from the steamboat’s paddle reached land.
I took a small polished pebble from the banks of the river and slipped it into my pocket as a souvenir from that day.

Two or three days passed quietly, until one night Hank was out in the barn late.
With four women in the house and him b
e
ing the only man around, Mama didn’t worry about him.
She said he needed his time away from us and the house.
Inside the house, we had all settled down to rest when there was a
loud
knock at the door.
Mama did not call out because she thought it might have just been Hank locked outside.
But then, the knock came again.

“Hank!
Why are you knocking so loud? The door is unlocked,” Mom called out opening the door.

When the door opened, Hank rushed in carrying a young woman in his arms.
He
said he
heard the dog barking at som
e
thing at the end of the road and he walked down to the mailbox to investigate.
He found the woman lying
unconscious
in
the road that led up to our house
.
She was wearing a raggedy ye
l
lowed nightgown with holes in it.
It was stained with fresh blood between her legs, and her stomach was swollen like a watermelon.
She was about to give birth.
Mama grabbed some extra bed sheets from the cupboard and covered our dining table so that Hank could put her down.

We did not own a telephone, so Mama gave Hank the keys to the truck and told him to drive to the sheriff’s house which was just a few miles down the road.
She summoned us to start boiling large pots of water.
I washed the woman’s face with
a cold rag
while Mama gently slapped her face to get her to wake up.
A burst of agony filled the air as the woman came to.
She jerked and pulled under the weight of God because we could not see anything or anyone holding her down.
Besides the v
o
cal screams
and grunts
that escaped
the woman’s
mouth, Mama determined the poor woman could not speak.

M
ama
hushed her and pulled the hair from her face, telling her to push gently.
My sisters and I stood there in ho
r
ror.
We had never seen a woman give birth before.
The limp and shiny body that appeared from between her legs glistened like a fat catalpa worm.
M
ama
used her cutting shears to snip
the
slimy
hose that kept the baby attached to the woman.
She sent us away to pull the pots of water off the stove and to fill a dish pan to prepare a bath for the baby.
I watched over my shoulder as Mama pulled mucous from the infant’s mouth with her own hands.
She held the baby over her shoulder and gave him a swift tap on the back.
The baby cried.
The woman on the table fainted.

By the time Hank had returned with the sheriff, we’d helped Mama wash the goo from the baby.
It was a little girl.
We were watching her sleep in Mama’s arms while the woman on the table was sleeping too.
The sheriff pointed to the woman and Mama called him over with her finger.
She whispered in his ear and then he whispered to Hank.
Hank and the sheriff wrapped the bed sheets up around the woman and carefully carried her outside.
We never saw the woman again.

After asking everyone around town, the sheriff could not find anyone to identify the poor lady and claim the infant.
She was buried in a pine box in the small cemetery which was lost in the woods down the road.
Upon Daddy and Billy’s return, to their surprise Daddy had a new daughter and Billy had a new sister.
Daddy did not believe Mama when she told him the odd story of how the woman had come to us that night, but we all vouched for her.

“Another mouth to feed,” Daddy groaned.

“I can’t give her up to an orphanage, Paul.
God sent that woman to our doorstep for a reason.
I just know this baby is a blessing,” Mama said.

Mama named her Benita, which meant “blessed one.”

Benita was raised in our house never knowing she wasn’t related to us by blood, and none of us ever treated her any differently.
Her childhood was no different than ours.
Mama and Daddy loved her like another daughter.
We fought and made up with her like another sister.
When Benita became a
young
girl
, it was then that she turned very different toward
the
fa
m
ily.