Clear Springs (8 page)

They stayed in a hotel. The night was hot and full of fear, and they couldn’t sleep. They parted before daylight. At home, my mother kept busy, afraid she would never see her husband again. She saw her life stretching before her on the farm, with her in-laws. She did not get a letter from him for a month. During that time, President Truman announced the dropping of atom bombs. “It was the hardest time I ever lived through,” she says. “I was nuts.”

We spent the days in our new house, and Mama carried water from the dairy, for we did not yet have running water. She was afraid to be alone with us at night, so we all slept at my grandparents’ house for as long as Daddy was away.

When he came home on a furlough, he was in his uniform, with his long white seabag. He slept and slept. He told us he had not been able to sleep on the ocean because of the blasts of the guns. His ears hurt. He had been on the U.S.S.
Shaw
, a destroyer that had been sunk at
Pearl Harbor, then raised and reoutfitted. Loud, echoing crashes reverberated deafeningly in the old metal hull. In those tight quarters, the sailors had to try to sleep wherever they could string a hammock or curl up. Daddy made a pallet on a metal table in the mess and cushioned it with cereal boxes. He was an ammunitions passer, working belowdecks—he couldn’t see out but sent along ammunition in an assembly line. The shells went up a dumbwaiter onto the deck where the heavy guns were. He said that down below, he could not know what was coming, a kamikaze or what. The noises battered his ears.

I remember him packing his clothes to go away again after that furlough. He rolled up each item and stuffed it into his seabag. It was an enormous bag, with many items of clothing in it. He wasn’t patient when working with his hands, and he couldn’t get the clothes rolled precisely enough to fit them all in the bag. Frustrated, he dumped them out and started again, rolling up the jumpers and bell-bottoms as tightly as he could.

Mama has often said that when he first got to California he had his choice of a battleship or a destroyer. He chose the destroyer. She says, “The battleship was the one that carried the bumb over, and on the way back it sunk. The boys he trained with died.” She always says “bumb” for “bomb.”

Daddy told us about the high waves, higher than those in a storm at sea we saw in a movie. He told us about a tribal chieftain he saw on a Pacific island. The chieftain wore mostly feathers. Daddy told about swabbing the decks. He told about the Panama Canal. Of the fighting itself, he would not speak.

While he was away, he sent Mama some chewing gum. He had always hated to hear her chew gum. It irritated his sensitive ears. But he wrote, “I’d give anything just to hear you crack this gum.” He also sent her a Heath bar, for fun. In his letters, he addressed her as “Sugar.”

One day, Mama and Granny stood across the road at the mailbox. I ran out from the new house through the woods to the road to meet them. Mama was clutching a letter, and they were both crying. She told me Daddy had been transferred from the Army to the Navy—or that is the way I remember it anyway, even though it makes no sense. Mama doesn’t remember that. She remembers a different crying scene at the mailbox, when all the factory whistles were suddenly blowing.

I said, “Mama, what are you crying for?”

She said, “The war’s over.”

At the end of the war, crowds of sailors gave their Navy garb the heave-ho. In San Francisco they tossed their uniforms in the streets, then many fell drunk in the gutters. My father, picking his way through the drunks, gathered up an assortment of discarded garments and sent them home; they were good clothes with a lot of wear left in them.

This frugality was the tone of my family’s life in the late forties and fifties, those energetic, prosperous postwar times when the discharged soldiers and sailors raced home to plow their wives and sow new houses on subdivided pastures. But Daddy wasn’t released when the war ended; he had to live on a ship at Norfolk, Virginia, for months. While he was away, my mother got a hundred dollars a month from the government for family support. Of the eleven hundred dollars she received, she saved eight hundred. For three hundred dollars, she fed and clothed two children, operated a car, and met her incidental expenses. Mama had plans for her savings. She saw a chance to make a better living than was possible on her in-laws’ modest farm. “I wanted your Daddy to run a little business of some kind,” she says. “Something that would bring in some money and let him stand on his own feet instead of just doing what Bob told him to.”

Before Daddy returned from the Navy, Mama said to his father, “Please, whatever you do, don’t let Wilburn get involved in cows again. There’s no money in it and this farm’s not big enough to support us all.” She pleaded with him, knowing she had no power. If they replenished the livestock, they would have to upgrade the dairy, now that pasteurization was the law. The expense would take her savings. “I could see myself being tied down with a piddling bunch of milk cows for the rest of my life,” she says now.

At one point in his Navy travels, Daddy wrote Mama that he would take her out to see the world. He mentioned reenlisting. This vague promise excited her; it might be a chance of getting away from her in-laws. But she knew that with only one child to count on, my grandparents were especially fearful of the changes brought about by the Depression and the war. Granny was well aware of the dangers of moving away. One of her cousins had gone to Detroit to work and had brought his aged parents up there with him. Then the unthinkable occurred—his father died and his mother was too feeble to go back to Kentucky with the body for burial. His body arrived at the depot the same night that Daddy caught the train for Portsmouth, Virginia, after his leave from the service. In her diary, where I learned these facts, Granny did not record her emotions, but these terrifying journeys, I’m sure, stayed fresh in her imagination.

Uncle Sam had spirited my father off the farm for a time, and while Mama waited for his return, she dared to dream of something different. She never seriously expected Daddy to reenlist, but now that she had two small children, she felt it was urgent to earn more money so that we could have a better childhood than she did, and she felt that he should resist his father’s authority. When Daddy got home, she chattered on excitedly to him about the possibilities of going into business for himself—a filling station, an auto-repair shop, a grocery, perhaps. She was full of ideas, garnered and simmered during his long absence. But he had his own notions.

Within a week after his arrival, he went with his father to the stockyard, just as he had always done. Granddaddy was trading mules. They went again. Once or twice a week, they attended sales at the stockyard. They crossed the Mississippi River to Missouri to look at cows. Within a month, they had bought a brindle cow together. Mama was crestfallen.

Daddy seemed restless and undecided. The G.I. Bill entitled him to an education, so he enrolled in automotive mechanics, a night class at the high school. But he quickly learned that he hated working on cars.

“
Why
didn’t he go to college?” I asked my mother recently. It was less a question than a sputter of fury over this lost opportunity. How different our lives might have been, I thought.

Mama scoffed at the idea. “Why, he couldn’t go to college. He had a family to support!”

The nearest college was twenty miles away, and he didn’t have a high school diploma because he had failed the final algebra exam. He
had always made good grades, but he was too humiliated—and proud, I imagine—to try to make up that one course later.

Daddy dawdled on the farm that summer. It seemed to my mother that the more she tried to encourage him to launch out in a new direction, the more noncommittal he was about his plans.

“Why don’t you see about getting Wilburn a job at the Merit?” Mama asked Granddaddy. “It would pay regular.”

Bob shook his head doubtfully. “Answer to a boss? I never seed the good to come of such.” He added, “Besides, Wilburn wouldn’t be able to do that kind of work.”

My mother is angry when she tells me about this now. “Bob didn’t seem to think Wilburn could do anything except milk cows and work on the farm,” she says. “He never praised him or encouraged him. They both worried about him because he’d had scarlet fever, and they held him down. But he was smart, and he could have done something different.”

As the days following his return from the Navy went by, it grew clearer that he was thinking about cows and mules and crops. He and his father planted corn. He set out a small patch of tobacco, which he had never done before. I can imagine his state of mind then. There was nothing as comfortable and secure as the fields he knew. I can see how he sank back into the soil. It must have been easy. The awkward challenge of training with strangers at the Great Lakes base and the dark journeys on the blank ocean were all history. Back home, he knew everybody; nobody spoke with a brogue. The two weeks he was in New York, based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, had startled his soul. “He said he was amazed by how lonesome a big city could be,” my mother says. “It was more than he could take in.” I imagine that he had gone out to see the world and after a year realized he didn’t need to go anywhere again. He had everything he wanted here at home. He told Mama it wasn’t worth the trouble of going out there. He saw so many terrible things she didn’t need to see. The roaring of the guns still reverberated in his ears and woke him out of deep sleep.

Mama was exasperated. By the end of the summer, she realized he wouldn’t give up dairy farming. She knew she couldn’t talk him out of it, but she thought if he was determined to farm, he should buy some more land. When a piece of land directly across the road came up for sale, she jumped. She knew they could buy it with her savings. It was a fine piece of land. It had an easy roll to it, no troublesome creeks, easy access to the highway. It wouldn’t even need a barn or a house, since it
was adjacent to the present farm. It seemed an ideal solution, she thought. They wouldn’t have to abandon his parents, but they could have more land to work.

Mr. Coleman owned the property. One day, my parents were walking down the road past his house, and they saw him sitting in his porch swing. They called out howdies.

“I want to sell you that piece of land across from you,” he said, his swing creaking slowly. “Come on up here and sign the deed,” he said.

Daddy grinned and shook his head no. Mama was saying, “Yes, yes.” But Daddy wouldn’t say anything.

He didn’t take her seriously. He found objections. He found other things to do. He didn’t want to go into debt, which he might have to do if he had to outfit his own farm and hire some hands. “I’d need boys to work it,” he told her. “All I’ve got is two little girls.” Then, his father, who had taught him what everything was worth, recoiled at the price. In the end, Mr. Coleman sold the land to another neighbor, who grew corn on it.

This was the thirty acres that the chicken tower was built on eventually. In the 1940s, after the war, when America was on the threshold of prosperity, my family could have bought that land for what would now seem mere chicken feed. And where would the chicken tower be now? What if? It is frustrating, even now, to think of my father’s unwillingness to take the smallest risk after the war, except for the adventure of setting out some tobacco plants. If our family had bought that land, bringing our holdings to a total of eighty-three acres, maybe we would not have ultimately dispersed. Maybe the larger farm would have been enough to hold us there. But maybe it did depend on a speedy production of sons. I was supposed to be that first son, meant to carry on the farm; the name was ready and waiting to be slapped onto the firstborn, surely a boy. Were they so hopeful of a son they hadn’t even thought of a girl’s name?

When another farm in the neighborhood came up for sale, Mama again urged Daddy to take a chance. From her view, this place was even better than Mr. Coleman’s acreage. It was a working farm, with a house and barn. And it was over half a mile away from her in-laws. She spoke of the place to Granny. “Wilburn needs to settle down to something and get a start,” she said. “He’s not doing anything.”

Granny was patching some work pants, and her face froze in shock. She said, “But what if he was to get sick? Who would take care of him way off yonder?”

Mama says this comment pierced her heart. Granny gave her no credit—not even for being able to nurse her husband if he caught cold. Looking back, I imagine that my grandparents were so desperate in clinging to their only son that they could not envision the second and third generation moving even a few furlongs off. Perhaps their own move from Clear Springs had been such a jolt that they could not abide this scattering. Who knew where it would end, once encouraged? After all, the Bradshaws, Granny’s maternal kin, had gone out to Texas in the 1880s and had never come back. Billy Bradshaw had been shot and killed out there, leaving three little children fatherless.

Daddy dismissed Mama’s newest notion. He wouldn’t even discuss it. He simply proceeded—in stubborn silence—with what he had always done. Ingrained parsimony guided him like a divining rod. I suppose that close to the forefront of his mind was the awareness that his parents were often sickly. He may have imagined that he would inherit the farm in the not-too-distant future, so he probably thought it made no sense to gamble. He could get by where he was. It was what he knew. And he knew he wasn’t really tying himself down, because he could still get out of the fields and take little runs to town and the stockyards. Like his father, he had a flair for trading, which was integral to a thrifty farm. Granddaddy was often sick in bed with his chronic bronchitis, but he always got better by Third Monday, the monthly gathering of farmers and stock dealers. Daddy and Granddaddy would go to sales at the stockyard and bid on a cow and come within five dollars of buying it, but then not buy it. They did not bid foolishly. They would buy a pair of mules in the morning and sell them for a profit in the afternoon, before the mules had even had a chance to eat.