Carry Me Home (7 page)

Chapter 10

T
he Army lost Jimmy! That’s what the letter we got in the mail from them says. Mary, she got a letter saying they lost Floyd too, and Dad says every other family of them ninety-nine boys got the same letter, saying their soldier is lost too.

After Ma gets that letter and reads it out loud to me and Dad, she lets Dad put his arms around her, and she flops against him like a bug splattering on a windshield. “We always pay for our mistakes,” she cries. Her head is laying sideways on Dad’s shoulder. “We always pay.” Dad pulls her off him and gives her a little shake. “You aren’t paying for anything, Eileen. You hear me?”

I don’t know what the hell Ma and Dad are talking about, but I know I don’t like the way it makes my guts feel. I don’t stick around to hear what else Dad says to Ma. I call Lucky and we go upstairs. I help him get up on our bed and pull the quilt over us. I hold Lucky real tight, and he licks the tears offa my face. “Lucky,” I say, “I wish me and you were over in that place. We’d find Jimmy and Floyd and the rest of them guys, for sure.” Lucky barks a little, and that means, “You damn bet we would, Earwig.”

Pert’ near every day Ma writes a letter to Washington asking ’em if they found Jimmy yet, and I pedal it down to the post office. They don’t answer, but Ma, she keeps writing anyway.

Ma ain’t the same no more. She wears the same dresses, and she wears the same pin-curled hair, but she don’t look the same. Her face looks all hard, like it’s made of Bakelite, and Dad says she’s getting too skinny. She don’t act the same no more either. She don’t fuss at me about washing behind my ears, or changing my socks, and she don’t tell me to finish my vegetables so I can stay healthy and not get the polio, which is all over Willowridge again, dropping kids like flies.

Dad says we gotta get up each morning and do the same things we always do. He says we have to do this so we don’t get all buggy and fall off our rockers. So that’s what we do. We get up every goddamn morning, even if we don’t want to, and I let Lucky out to take a piss and a crap while Ma makes breakfast and Dad shaves. After we eat, Dad goes off to the garage, I tie Lucky up by his doghouse, and then me and Ma get busy in the store.

We gotta keep busy, so it’s probably a good thing when we have to start messing with those ration books that the government comes up with so we don’t hog up all the food, leaving the soldiers shit out of luck. They call off school for a couple days so the teachers can start figuring out who-all needs sugar and how much each of us needs. That means Eddie don’t got to go to school.

Ma is busy pricing Karo syrup (that she says she knows is gonna sell like hotcakes when people can’t buy as much sugar) when Eddie comes in. Eddie is eight years old now, and in the third grade.

Eddie don’t talk to me first. He goes right up to Ma, and says, “Good morning, Mrs. Gunderman. Would you like to buy some Victory Seeds?” Eddie says it just like he’s one of them salesmen that come around now and then, selling Bibles or them encyclopedia books.

Mrs. Lark is in the store, and so is Mrs. Flannery, and they both go over to Eddie so they can get a good look at them green packages with a big red V on ’em. “Our school’s selling them,” Eddie says. “The seeds are to plant in Victory Gardens. Whatever room sells the most gets to carry the flag on Fridays when we march around the school.”

Mrs. Lark, she don’t know nothing about Victory Gardens ’cause she don’t keep a radio. Like she says, she can’t sit around listening to a radio all day when she’s got cows to milk and fields to plant. So Eddie tells her about the Victory Gardens Roosevelt is asking everybody to plant. Eddie talks real good. He don’t get all balled up with his words like I know I would if I had to sell them seeds.

“Well, I’ll be,” Mrs. Lark says. She rubs her hand on the leg of her trousers, and she takes a package of string-bean seeds. “Where are people planting these gardens? Most people in town don’t have yards big enough for much of a garden.”

“Well, Mrs. Lark,” Eddie says, “in some towns, folks with more land than they are using are divvying it up, borrowing a little plot to families so they can grow some food for themselves. They have to plant and weed their plot themselves and pick the stuff when it’s ripe. Lots of times, they have to give the landowner some of the stuff too, just as a way of saying thank you, I guess.”

“I’ll be,” Mrs. Lark says. Then she says that she has a lot of land, and that people can use her land for a big-ass Victory Garden. Mrs. Lark don’t say big-ass, but that’s what she means, ’cause she’s talking about donating a lot of acres.

Ma and Mrs. Flannery say that’s right nice of her for offering her land, and Mrs. Flannery says she’ll place an announcment in the paper so people know about the Victory Garden, since she’s going to the paper anyway to place an ad to sell their old Ford.

After Eddie sells them ladies some seeds, he asks Ma if I can go along with him while he sells more ’cause he wants his room to carry the flag. Ma says she guesses I can, since it’s for a good cause.

We go door to door, selling them seeds, and we put the dimes and nickels in our pockets. We sell so many packages that by the time Eddie’s legs are tired, our pockets are lumpy as an old man’s knuckles.

“Hey, Earlwig,” Eddie says as we walk back toward home. “Know what?”

“What?”

“At school now, sometimes a teacher goes into the hall and blows a horn, real loud. Then we gotta hurry up and crawl under our desks.”

“How come?”

“’Cause. Teacher says it’s an air-raid drill. I guess we got to do it so we’re practiced up in case them Jap or German planes get over here and start bombing us. If we get under our desks, then we ain’t going to get killed, I guess.”

This makes me all skittery inside. “Well, what if you ain’t got no desk? I ain’t got no goddamn desk.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s gotta be a desk, because if we’re in the lunchroom, then we gotta dive under the lunchroom tables.”

“That’s good,” I say, “’cause I ain’t got no desk.”

I walk Eddie home, even if his ma don’t say I gotta anymore. I walk him home ’cause Eddie wants to show me something in his new Captain Midnight Flight Control Newspaper. Eddie’s real lucky to get Cap’s newspaper in the mail. I want to get it too, but Ma says it don’t pay ’cause it’s mostly words, and I can’t read worth a damn. She don’t say damn, though.

“Wait until you see what we can get, Earlwig,” Eddie says, as he’s looking for the right page.

“Hey, Eddie,” I say. “You think now that you ain’t such a little kid no more, you could call me by my real name, instead of ‘Earlwig’?”

“Sure, Earl,” Eddie says.

“Not ‘Earl.’ ‘Earwig.’ It don’t seem right, no one calling me Earwig no more.”

“Sure, Earlwig,” Eddie says, then he whacks himself between the eyes. “I forgot already. But I’ll start remembering.”

Eddie finds the right page and jabs his fat finger down on a picture. “See this thing that looks like a spyglass? It’s a MJC-ten plane spotter. You look in this end, and you can see planes in it.”

“Now, that’d be good to have,” I say to Eddie. “Then if the Jap or the German planes come to bomb us, we’d see ’em and know when to dive under a table or a desk even if there weren’t no teacher around to blow a horn.”

Me and Eddie like Captain Midnight best of all the heroes ’cause he flies a plane, just like Charles A. Lindbergh. Captain Midnight don’t just fly to get across the ocean, though. He flies places to fight evil. He even fights dirty Nazis and Japs. Me and Eddie are lucky ’cause we are members of the Secret Squadron. We even got certificates to prove it.

“Know how we are saving up for decoder rings?” Eddie says. “Well, I was thinking maybe we shouldn’t send our premiums in for those decoder rings after all. Maybe we should save them to get ourselves two swell plane spotters instead.”

“Yeah, Eddie, let’s do that.”

“If we get enough premiums, we could each get a plane spotter
and
a code-o-graph. How swell would that be, Earwig?”

I grin ’cause Eddie remembered to call me by my real name. “That would be real swell, Eddie. You think we could get enough premiums for both?”

“If we drink up enough Ovaltine, we could. Too bad you still can’t get premium points at Skelly gas stations like in the old days. Then your dad could have given us a whole mess of them and we wouldn’t have to drink so much, huh, Earwig?”

“Yep,” I say. “Man, Eddie, if we get code-o-graphs, then we can call up Washington if them bombers come, just like Chuck does when him and the Cap is in trouble. Washington’ll send help then, sure as shit.”

Eddie’s ma calls up the stairs, “Eddie, your soup is getting cold. Earl, you want to stay for lunch?”

“No thank you, ma’am,” I shout, real polite-like. “I gotta go bring Dad his lunch.” When I’m going out the door, I hear Eddie tell his ma he don’t want no plain old milk for lunch. He wants Ovaltine.

A couple days later, Ma tells me I gotta watch the store for a little bit ’cause she’s got to get down to the high school and sign up for the sugar ration. She scoops up the papers she’s got on the counter that she says are forms so the government knows how many people we got in our house, and how big and old we are, so they know how much sugar we gotta have.

“Ma, what if I gotta make change?”

Ma is busy tying her scarf under her chin. She rolls her eyes. “Earl, I’ve showed you a thousand times. Just do your best, and ask the customer to help double-check your figures if you aren’t sure.”

No one comes into the store while Ma’s gone, except for Eva Leigh. Little LJ’s got a big head now, with hair that only grows on the top. If you run your hand over that hair, it stands straight up and follows your hand around like a puppy. LJ walks now too, but if Eva Leigh lets him loose, he rips crap off the shelves, so even though he’s a walking baby, Eva Leigh still pokes out her hip and props him on it, ’cept now he’s heavy enough that she’s gotta lean herself way over in the other direction so he don’t tip her over. LJ kicks his legs and screams to get down unless she gives him a cracker or something from her purse to shut him up. Once I even see’d him bite her shoulder when he wanted down, and it made me hope that he ain’t getting the orneries like his dad.

Even with LJ fussing at her hip, Eva Leigh don’t look so skittery no more. Not since that nasty Luke got drafted and sent off to Germany. She don’t droop so much when she walks either. I heared her tell Ma after Luke left that, awful as it is, and as much as she misses him, it sure is nice not being scared that she’s gonna do something wrong and get hit.

“Morning, Mrs. Leigh. You look real pretty today, with your hair all curled up like that.”

“Thank you, Earl.” Eva Leigh smiles, with her new lips that are painted the color of a rose. “Where’s your mother?” Eva Leigh is roaming around the store. She puts a couple cans of evaporated milk and a box of Tide on the counter. I know I’m gonna have to make change if Ma don’t get back before she’s done shopping, but I know too that if I have trouble, Eva Leigh will help me and be nice about it.

“She went to the school to sign up for them sugar books.”

“Oh,” she says. “I did that this morning.”

“I can check you out, though, Mrs. Leigh. If you help me make the change, I can do that.”

“I’ve got to have it written down, Earl. But I’ll help.” Oh, boy, I think. I never even thought of having to get the book out of the drawer. That would be the charge book. When folks are broke ’cause the weather’s been bad and wrecked their crops or mudded up the woods so they can’t get wood hauled, they ask Ma to put what they owe down in that book. When times was hard, that book just sat on the counter and never got put away. Ma was right proud after those hard times passed and people who got their stuff wrote up in that book told her that they wouldn’t forget how she kept ’em eating through that bad Depression. Now when Ma rings ’em up, they sometimes hand her a little extra and tell her to put it on their old bill. Ma says people know when they’ve been done a good turn, and then they do a good turn back. Even if a Piggly Wiggly goes up in Ripley, those people say that they is still gonna shop at Gunderman’s Grocery.

“I won’t have to charge for much longer, though,” Eva Leigh says to me. Then she comes right up to the counter and says, “I got a job, Earl!” Her eyes got a sparkle in ’em that I ain’t never see’d there before. “My sister-in-law, Luke’s sister Ruby, she got me a job at the Ten Pin Bowling Alley where she works. I’m going to take the bowlers’ money and rent out shoes and balls. Things like that.”

“Ruby Leigh, she’s a relation of yours?” I try not to sound all shocked ’cause the town whore is her relation, but it comes out sounding that way anyway.

“Yes, she’s Luke’s sister. Earl, I know what people say about Ruby, and, well, I guess most of the stuff they say about her is true, but Ruby’s got a heart of gold. She’s always been good to me. It was real nice of her to get me that job.”

“It sure was.”

“I start tonight. I’m so nervous!” Eva Leigh giggles some. “I’ve never had a job before, Earl.”

“You’ll do real good at that job, Mrs. Leigh. You can count change, so you’ll do real good.”

Ma says that good girls like Molly and Mary shouldn’t be seen with girls like Ruby Leigh. Ruby don’t come into the store much, ’cause she lives with her ma, Elsie Leigh, and her ma does most of the grocery shopping. One time, though, I see’d Eva Leigh and Ruby Leigh in the store at the same time, but I didn’t figure they was relation. Lots of times people who ain’t relation shop in the store at the same time. After they left, Ma said that Eva Leigh shouldn’t lower herself by even walking next to Ruby Leigh. I was too busy thinking about Ruby Leigh’s big titties and rocking hips to pay much mind to what Ma was saying.

“I know it’s silly, me being a married woman and a mama, but still, just knowing I got this job now, well, it makes me feel different. More grown-up, or something.” I force myself to stop thinking about Ruby Leigh’s big titties, ’cause Eva Leigh is looking straight at me and it gives me the nerves to think she might figure out what I’m thinking.