Billie Standish Was Here

To Dan

M
  y name is Billie Standish. William Marie Standish.

It's pretty clear what my parents' expectations were. The “Marie” was a nod to Daddy's mother because she died two months before I was born. Otherwise, who knows? I might have been William Edward.

My parents were told at my birth there would be no more babies. So you might say my name was down payment for using up their one chance to have a son.

For a long time I was mostly invisible. That was okay, though. Once you've figured out you can't do anything right it's just good sense not to call undue notice your way. Why step out of the shadows and get yelled at for blocking somebody's light?

Besides, my mama's always had the kind of temper that gets the nearest dog kicked once in a while just for being there. Being invisible had its benefits.

My parents are farmers like most folks around Cumberland, so it wasn't hard to stay out of sight. Working to cobble together a living between what little land they owned and what they could rent didn't exactly get them home for weekends and paid vacations.

Most families either had sons or made do with fewer acres. Not ours. Mama rode a tractor as many hours as Daddy, and they worked as much ground as any two people could. It had them gone early and home late and dog tired pretty much year-round, but it also kept us living at least a little better than some. I didn't have to go home from school at lunchtime and eat potatoes or cold cereal like some kids did.

We weren't rich by anybody's yardstick. I knew better than to ask for new clothes unless my shoes were absolutely too tight or the queen of England was invited to our house for supper. But I always went back to school in the fall with new stuff. I had a few extras. I had enough.

Providing enough and having a girl instead of a boy had put a lot of calluses on Mama's hands, though, and she was willing to grant me title of ownership to every single one of them. She could work in the fields, I couldn't. Her call, but my fault. There's no figuring it out. Believe me, I've tried.

You'd think free maid service would count for
something, but it never seemed to pay down my account even a little bit.

They say I stayed with my Grandma Wharton a lot when I was little, but she died when I was seven and I barely remember. I've mainly been on my own since then when Mama and Daddy are gone planting, gone cultivating, gone harvesting. Gone plowing or mending fences. Just gone.

Nothing much bigger than a silent fart can get past the neighbors in a town this size, though, so I suppose I was looked after in a way.

The summer of 1968, I was eleven years old. The last day of school was May 24 and also the fifth day in a row I walked home in a bone-soaking rain. I had to strip to the skin and hang my wet stuff on the clothesline strung across the back porch before I went on into the house. And then find something to do. Find anything to do. Fill enough hours to keep from feeling alone as a castaway washed up on a deserted island.

A week after the last day of school the house was spotless and the television was making a funny whining noise after it ran for a couple of hours. I had memorized every freckle and measured the progress of every pimple on my face. And it was still raining.

Cats and dogs. Lizards and groundhogs. A real toad-strangler. A gully-washer. I spent part of one afternoon thinking up all the stupid nicknames for rain that I could
and then I dragged out the Bible and read the story of Noah all the way down to the rainbow. When I was done the clock next to my bed told me I still had three more hours to fill before time to cook supper.

Labor Day was at least a lifetime away from that first week of June.

The fourth of the month, a Tuesday, Mama shook me awake just after dawn. She said, “This goes to the back door,” and handed me a key. “If you go outside today—and I
do
wish you'd at least get the mail for once—lock the house.”

Mama's tongue is sharp enough to wedge criticism into any remark.

I mumbled, “Why?” Then I pulled the covers over my head and mouthed the answer along with her.

“Because I said so.”

I knew that. It was the explanation for everything she told me to do. What I hadn't known was that the back door even had a lock. To my knowledge it had never been used in my lifetime.

I could see her with my eyes closed, slicing the air with her hip bones and elbows as she crossed me off the list in her head and moved on. Another chore taken care of.

I listened for both pickup doors to slam, Mama
-Daddy
, then jumped up and threw on shorts to go with the panties
and T-shirt I'd slept in. I raked my hair back in front of the dresser mirror long enough to see that the zit on my right cheek was the size of Mount Olympus, same as the day before.

I had pretty much lived behind my bedroom door the past couple of weeks. It felt safer somehow than rattling around loose in the house by myself, and the big mirror across the back of my dresser was there any time I needed a reminder that I existed. Even so, when I got to the back porch and was locked in I thought I'd suffocate before I figured out the latch. There's a big difference between a cave and a cage—ask any lion at the zoo.

I hurdled the back step and ran like the house was trying to swallow me. It still wasn't easy to breathe and, while I stood in the middle of the driveway working on that, I noticed something else not right.

The snot-nosed brats weren't fighting in the yard next door, even though the sun was shining for the first time in weeks. It was pretty muddy, sure, but I'd seen that woman line 'em up and hose 'em down at the end of the day rather than keep them inside with her.

I couldn't hear any cars either, so I shut my eyes to listen. A few anemic birds were chirping, but that was it. In Cumberland,
somebody's
dog is
always
barking. But not that day.

I went to the front hedge and looked up and down
the street, and it might have been a painting. Even the trees were still, leaves too wet and heavy to move.

I'd seen
Candid Camera
on TV and it felt like I was in the middle of some practical joke. But people trying to make a living off row crops just don't waste time pulling pranks on the neighbors' kids. I knew that.

I went back and locked the door, then started walking down the middle of the street so I'd see anything that started my way. I like a scary movie now and then, but I always hate the jump-out-and-grab-somebody scenes.

I would guess most little towns in Missouri are past their heydays. In Cumberland's case, a bunch of burnt-out skeleton buildings along Main Street stand ready to testify that the town has seen better times. A handful of empty houses gone to seed, a few scattered vacant lots—they're just different parts of the same story. Cumberland isn't exactly material for picture magazines anytime, but it looked downright spooky that day.

That day
every
house I passed looked to be abandoned. Dingy little boxes, most of them needing fresh white paint . . . an occasional outburst of aluminum siding in some color that would startle God. No sign of life in any window.

Most of the lots in town are fenced into little chain-link prison yards for all creatures under three feet tall. All that individual territory staked out looked really ridiculous with nobody around.

It doesn't take long to walk the town, and I did all four blocks by four blocks without sharing air with anything but birds and squirrels.

I got to the schoolhouse, then walked around to the playground and sat down in a swing where I could see the state blacktop that swipes the west edge of town. Ten minutes or so went by without one single person passing through.

The thought occurred that maybe I should be afraid, but that's not exactly something you
decide
and there just wasn't anything real to wrap fear around. It was pretty clear there was nothing around to jump out at me. This wasn't like any movie I'd ever seen.

The world had turned inside out. Overnight. Or at least during the ten days I'd spent in my cocoon. Everybody else had disappeared and left me exposed.

Sitting there in that swing, I started to feel like I might shrink as the sky grew wider and the sun stared me down. I had to get up and move before I got stuck in the moment and it went on forever. I could be a speck of dust in no time.

I started to recite as I walked past houses a second time: The Millers and the Statons and the Hises, the Athertons and the McCombses . . . I just saw Mama this morning. I just saw Mama this morning.

A shiver ran down my back.

I peeked in a couple of windows on the way home and sure enough, all the furniture was gone. The doors were locked, too, so there wasn't much to do but keep walking.

I tried to remember if I'd heard more trucks than usual driving around town, but that was like trying to recollect how many times in the last week a train had gone through and rattled the windows. It was such an ordinary sound I wouldn't notice. Mama was right—I should have at least left the house to get the mail once in a while. There sure hadn't been any announcements on the transistor radio in my room. And the girl in the mirror hadn't told me anything.

I was about to turn up our driveway when somebody yelled my name, and I must have jumped a couple of feet.

Lydia Jenkins was in the flower garden back of her house across the street. I didn't know her very well but I guess I was pretty glad to see her just the same.

She was old even then so it took her a while to get across the garden. She looked like every grandma in the world—a lumpy flowered cotton dress cinched in the middle with a belt, legs shapeless as tree trunks hobbling along over the uneven ground, using her hoe for a cane. She leaned on the fence, squinted her wrinkles at the sky and said, “Lordy, Lordy. If I was to be asked, I'd say it's about time we had some sun, wouldn't you?”

I said, “Yeah, I guess,” then blurted out, “Where is everybody, Miss Lydia?”

She laughed like it was a joke. “Why . . . gone, Billie Marie.” She always called me that when we spoke, even though everybody else just called me Billie. She told me, “The Millers and the Corlews were the last to go, just yesterday. Suppose it's only you folks and me 'n' Curtis now.”

I didn't say anything and she appeared to search my face. “Surely you noticed? People been loadin' up and movin' out for pretty near two weeks now.”

I shook my head. “Nobody told me.”