The boys listened with seeming meekness. Then, accompanied by me, they repaired to the interior of the barn where they proceeded to disassemble the bicycles into several hundred odd pieces.
Discovered in this outrage, as they soon were, the two youths pleaded for time. Given a matter of a week, they promised, and they would convert those childish playthings, the bicycles, into a thing of great beauty and utility. Exasperated and exhausted, the adult relatives gave their consent without striking a blow.
The week passed in a hubbub of furious activity. The boys acquired several sheets of stout roofing tin. They got hold of a quantity of hard wood and steel rod and paint, and the basic parts of an old gasoline water pump. Assisted by me, they pounded and sawed, shaped and soldered, painted and sawed and bolted together. And by the eve of the seventh day, so very real—though often misdirected—was their genius, they had created an automobile.
It looked like an automobile—save for the wheels—down to the minutest detail. It ran quite as well as many of the automobiles of that day.
Our adult kin were both dumbfounded and delighted as we made a brief trial run up and down the barn corridor. All unsuspecting of the ultimate and abysmal objectives of the two youths, they made no protest when the latter announced that the first full-scale demonstration would be held on the morrow.
Both my cousins and I spent the night at Newt’s house. The following morning, attired in our Sunday’s best, we marched haughtily into the barn. We tuned and oiled the motor of our automobile until it purred like a cat. We wiped the gleaming red body free of the last speck of dust. Then, we climbed into the front seat, with me in the middle, and drove grandly out into the yard.
We circled it twice, allowing our beaming relatives and the neighbors they had pridefully summoned to feast their eyes upon us. With this, the promised demonstration taken care of, we suddenly roared full-speed to our previously determined destination—the open door to the food cellar.
The door was flush with the ground and opened into a long steep flight of stairs leading under the house. We went crashing and smashing down them, shedding fenders and other of the automobile’s components as well as sizeable bits of our own epidermis. Then, at the bottom, where the steps ended in an upright door, the engine shot from beneath the hood and we shot over it. The whole house shook with the impact of flying bodies and machinery, and the explosions of fruit and vegetable jars.
Bruised, bleeding and besmeared, we managed to claw our way back to daylight and the fearsome reception awaiting us. But the automobile had so wrecked the stairs and jammed into the lower door that no one could get back down into the cellar.
As soon as he could do anything but curse, Newt announced that he was through. “I give up, by God,” he stated, and he declared that since the family was cut off from its supply of fruit and vegetables, they could all simply die of scurvy and the sooner the better. “There’s a hell of a lot worse ways of dying,” he pointed out grimly, and no one could gainsay him.
Fortunately, after a few weeks of meat and gravy and the like, and when scurvy seemed actually imminent, he was persuaded to adopt a more sensible course. The result was a new entrance to the cellar through the kitchen floor, a new door and new stairs—and complete physical exhaustion for my cousins and me. For Newt, naturally, did not lift a finger on the job. He was one of the three foremen—Pa and Bob being the other two. And so well did they handle their duties, we were hardly able to stir from our beds for a week.
The one last piece of orneriness which my cousins and I collaborated in almost got us all killed. It came about after much reading and discussion of the literature of parachuting, an art then in its infancy.
Mom and we kids were preparing to join Pop in Oklahoma, and the various connections of the family had gathered at Newt’s house for a farewell Sunday dinner. When the meal was over, my cousins and I slipped out to the barn loft where, earlier, we had concealed three bed sheets and a length of clothesline rope. In no time at all we had parachutes—I don’t know what else to call them—tied to our shoulders, and were ascending the sixty-foot tower of the cow lot windmill.
It was a cold, windy fall day. Shivering, I looked at the stock tank adjacent to the mill, studied the four-foot depth of water which was supposed to “break” our fall. Shivering, a little sick at my stomach, I wanted to withdraw. But my colleagues jeered me hideously. At one and the same time, they swore that I was a damned cowardly calf and a mighty brave kiddo. So up the tower I went.
My cousins followed me, goosing and punching one another. Arrived at the top, they ordered me to move around the platform to make room for them. I tried to, but the platform was small. The only way I could hang on was by reaching up and grasping the direction-arm of the windmill fan.
The action coincided with a sudden, sharp gust of wind, and this, with my weight, resulted in disengaging the locking device. Before I knew what was happening, the mill had begun to spin and I was swung out into space, jerked and flung first one way then another.
My cousins ducked and cursed frantically as my flailing feet almost knocked them from their perch. Shouting at me to “drop in the tank, dammit,” they both tried to scramble down the ladder at the same time. Neither would give way to the other, and they jammed there, tangled in a mass of sheets and clothesline. I continued to swing this way and that, screaming, my eyes clenched tightly.
The back door of the house opened and people streamed out.
Pa, Newt and Bob were in the vanguard—the first two waving their canes, Bob brandishing a long hickory ferrule which he was seldom without and usually found use for. Behind this trio came one of my aunts, carrying a buggy whip, another equipped with a piece of harness strap, and Mom and Ma armed with switches, a plentiful supply of which was always kept around the house.
They might not know how to get us down from the tower, as soon became apparent. But they had plans for us, obviously, when we did get down. All my mother’s family were like that, and yet they were warmhearted, children-loving people, too. It was simply second nature with them to attack every situation with acid words on their lips and a weapon in their hands.
Gathered around the base of the tower, around the tank, they shouted up incoherent directions and threats. Mom tried to climb up after me and was dragged back. Pa and Newt gave the wooden uprights a severe caning.
Above the turmoil there suddenly came the sound of splintering wood, and the step to which my cousins were clinging gave way. They went plummeting down into the tank, landing squarely on their backs. The water rose out of the vessel and descended upon the waiting posse. The latter, cursing and screaming according to sex, latched on to the two youths and proceeded, as the saying was, to tan their hides.
This exercise, coupled with the cold water, so calmed my relatives that they at last thought to relatch the lock on the mill. I was able to swing back to the platform, and thence descend to earth where, everything considered, I got off pretty lightly since everyone was exhausted.
8
My sister Freddie was born during a severe economic depression. It was a hard winter for the nation in general and for the Thompsons in particular. Pop had begun to dabble in the oil business, and not very profitably. Mom was in the hospital much of the time.
Our house had twelve rooms (Pop had felt that we needed something larger with the advent of Freddie), and the fires of hell couldn’t have kept it warm. The plumbing was constantly freezing and bursting. I froze and burst out with cold sores which my schoolmates promptly diagnosed as cancer. Looking back, I find my cold sores to have been the one cheerful facet of that winter. I had but to wave my festered hands and the toughest bully in school fled before me shrieking.
There were repercussions with my recovery, but even these worked out to my advantage. I got a great deal of splendid exercise in racing up alleys and shinnying over back fences. My reflexes became trigger quick. Without losing the look and the feel of it, much of my awkwardness disappeared.
To t
ake Mom’s place while she was in the hospital Pop hired a woman who, with undeserved generosity, shall be known herein as Mrs. Cole. A large puffy woman with a ragged topknot of walnut-stained hair, she was the indigent relative of some friend of Pop. That was all the recommendation he needed.
I came home from school one night and found her lying on the lounge in the front room. She was wearing house slippers and a shapeless mother-hubbard. She waved at me limply and remained prone.
“Let’s see, now,” she said. “You’re Johnnie, ain’t you?”
“Huh-uh. I’m Jimmie.”
“You hadn’t ought to say huh-uh, Johnnie. You ought to say yes ma’am and no ma’am.”
“Why?” I said.
Mrs. Cole frowned slightly but made no answer. She intended, apparently, to make friends with me. “I got awful bad rheumatism, Johnnie. I can’t do much. You’re sure going to help me a lot, ain’t you?”
I said I guessed I was. “What you want done?”
“Help me set up, Johnnie.”
I took her by the hands and helped her to sit erect. Groaning and panting prodigiously, she got to her feet. With a kind of funny feeling in my throat, I watched her go into Mom’s room and close the door.
After a few minutes she came out, smelling strongly of medicine or something, moving much more spryly. Maxine came in and was put through the same rigmarole that I had been. At first Maxine said no, she wasn’t going to be a good girl and help a lot. Then she said maybe she would.
“What time does your pappy come home?” Mrs. Cole inquired. And learning that he was due any minute, she went into the kitchen. When Pop arrived she was setting the table, obviously suppressing great pain.
Pop was impressed and alarmed. “You’d better sit down awhile,” he suggested. “There’s no hurry about supper.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Cole in a piteous voice.
“But you’re sick. Do you want me to get a doctor?”
Mrs. Cole said she was past the point of being aided by doctors. “I’ll be all right, Mr. Thompson. I been sufferin’ for twenty years and I reckon I can stand a few more. Don’t you worry none. I ain’t going to be no burden on you.”
“Why, of course you won’t be,” Pop declared warmly. “You just sit down, now, and I’ll fix things. Jimmie, run down to the store and get some beans, peas, corn, catsup and…”
He and Mrs. Cole ate about a quart each of the “succotash.” Maxine and I sopped up a little of the juice with some bread. Afterwards, we went to the store and charged a chocolate pie and a pound of wienies, and ate sitting out on the steps.
Pop had to leave town for a few days early the next morning. He did not disturb Mrs. Cole when he left, and when we arose she was still abed. She was pretty sick, I guess, with a hangover from her “medicine,” and declared pitifully that she could not arise.
“Just don’t bother me, now,” she whined. “Warm you up some of that nice good succotash.”
Maxine and I bought some pie, soda pop and potato chips for our breakfast. We had Hershey bars and bologna for lunch. By supper time, Mrs. Cole was getting pretty hungry herself and became active long enough to open a can of chili and fry some hamburger.
Things went on like that for weeks. Pop had to be out of town the greater part of the time, and when he wasn’t he spent little time at home. His mind was more than occupied with financial matters. Anyway, he had never been inclined to concern himself with family routine except on the periodic sprees I have mentioned. And those weren’t much fun without Mom around.
Once in a while he would ask us how we were feeling or if we shouldn’t clean up a little, but I doubt if he heard our answers. We couldn’t see Mom often, and then for only a few minutes, and we were made fairly presentable for those visits.
So we went on for weeks, unfed, unwashed and in the main unschooled, for Mrs. Cole never knew whether we went or not, and the attendance laws (if there were any) were unenforced. We slept with our clothes on, a labor-saving and warmth-promoting trick Mrs. Cole had taught us. We ate almost nothing but pie, chili and hamburger. We spent our days in prowling the dime stores, seeing picture shows and loafing.
One noon while we were seated on the porch eating a lunch of pie and pop, Mom came home. She had left the hospital without the doctor’s permission. She had had a premonition, she said, that she was needed at home.
Maxine and I dashed out to the taxi, jumping up and down with delight. We asked her if she was going to stay with us, and we tried to take Freddie away from her, and—and then we kind of stood back, shuffling our feet.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” I said. “What you crying about?”
“N-nothing,” said Mom. “Oh, you poor babies! Where is that woman?”
“Mrs. Cole? She’s still in bed. She don’t get up this early.”
Mom’s eyes flashed, and she brushed her nose angrily against Freddie’s blanket. “Oh, doesn’t she?” she said. “Well!”
She was so weak she could hardly walk, but she went up the stairs ahead of us. She laid Freddie down on the lounge and looked around the living room. An angry moan, like that of a spurred horse, broke from her lips. She moaned again as she surveyed the filthy dining room. Glancing into the kitchen, she moaned loudest of all.
Stepping to the door of her bedroom, she drew back her fist. But she lowered it in a gentle knock, and the second knock was no more than firm.
Inside the room the bed creaked, and Mrs. Cole grunted sleepily.
“Now, you just stop botherin’ me,” she whined. “I told you not to call me till you seen your pappy comin’.”
A terrible smile spread over Mom’s face. She knocked again.
“You hear me?” called Mrs. Cole. “You want anything to eat, go down to the store an’ get it. I got all I can do lookin’ after myself.”
Mom knocked again.
“Now you better get away from there,” Mrs. Cole shouted. “Go to a pitcher show. Go down by the river an’ play. Get away from there afore I come out to you!”
Mom began knocking steadily, and Mrs. Cole’s warnings grew more dire. At last she arose, lumbered to the door and flung it open.
As I have indicated she was not a fast-thinking woman, and it was fixed in her mind that it was Maxine and I who had been doing the knocking. So, glaring angrily at Mom, she spoke the words that were intended for us.
“Now, you’re gonna get it,” she declared. “I’ll warm your britches for you. You won’t be able to set down for a week when—when—when—”
“Go ahead,” said Mom. “Cat got your tongue?”
“W-who—who are you?”
“I’m these children’s mother,” said Mom. “I’m the wife of the man who hired you to look after them. I’m the wife of the man who’s been paying you good money to turn my home into a pigsty. I’m the wife of the man who—I’m the—I could murder you!” yelled Mom.
And she damned near did.
Shrieking objurgations at Mrs. Cole just to look at us kids, just to look at this house, she gave the housekeeper a kind of bearing down shake which brought her heavily to her knees. She boxed her ears, then, until her topknot came undone. And then Mom began kicking her. Mrs. Cole fell to her face and tried to crawl away, and Mom followed, kicking, giving her a crack upon the ears when the opportunity presented. Finally, her strength exhausted, she stumbled and sat down upon her.
Very wisely Mrs. Cole lay still, and Mom was sitting on her, weeping hysterically, when Pop and the doctor arrived. Pop had been out of his office when Mom left the hospital. He had hurried home as soon as he was notified of her unauthorized departure.
Mom was put to bed. The doctor examined Mrs. Cole. He had had a few words with Mom and he was an observant man. So, in Pop’s presence, he told Mrs. Cole that he was slighting his duty in not reporting her to the police. Her rheumatism and other ailments were myths, he said. She had better start getting more exercise and lay off whatever she was drinking.
Mrs. Cole departed, swiftly and me
ekly. But her memory lingered on. It was months before Pop could acquire the nerve to interfere in household matters, and he was pretty diffident about it then.
9
One Saturday morning, a few weeks after the Cole affair, Mom, Maxine and I were eating breakfast when a polite knock sounded on our back door. Maxine and I hollered “come in” and Mom shushed us and went to answer the door.
We heard a soft voice inquire, “Begging your pardon, but do you have any work I can do?” And Mom’s reply, “Well, I don’t know. We can’t really afford to hire anyone, right now.” Then, following a heavy silence, she said, “But don’t you want to come in out of the cold?”
A woman with a little boy of about four came in. Negroes. The woman was about twenty-five, and her eyes looked almost as large as her pinched, starved face. She wore only a shawl around the shoulders of her patched but spotless gingham dress, although the weather was below zero. The boy, a wizened but cheerful-looking little fellow, was little more warmly garbed.
Mom told them to sit down, and went over to the stove and got busy. That was one thing about Mom. She never wasted words when action would do the trick. She cooked them an enormous breakfast and cleared out, shooing us ahead of her. Digging back in the closets, she produced an armful of her and my discarded garments, old and outworn but still serviceable.
“Now, you just put these on before you leave,” she said, when she took them into the kitchen. “You’ll catch your death of cold running around the way you are!”
“Yes’m,” the woman said. “Now what work do you want me to do?”
“That’s all right,” said Mom.
“No, ma’am. It won’t be all right unless I do some work.”
“Oh, well,” said Mom. “You can wash the dishes if you want to.”