~
I was nine when I first saw the gift. It was August, one of the bake-your-ass-off months in Texas. Our Ford Explorer was rattling along the asphalt roads looking for the nearest place to have its radiator overheat. The air conditioning was on high and the car radio on low. My mom didn’t like country music, and my dad didn’t like our hip-hop tunes. So we proceeded on with the low drone of Elvis Presley in the background.
My dad was driving because he was the only one who had enough patience to navigate the backwoods of his birthplace. His name was John Wayne, after a famous cowboy actor. He went by JW just to rule out any confusion. He squinted into the afternoon sun, cursing the fact that he had forgotten his sunglasses. His Comanche Indian ancestry showed in his smooth, bronze skin and the deep black color of his hair. Mom relaxed in the passenger seat next to him, working on a crossword puzzle and looking very chic in her big straw hat and sleek Chanel sunglasses. We sat in the backseat. My thirteen-year-old sister, Melody, was to my right. She was the spitting image of my dad. Her big brown eyes focused on the Tiger Beat magazine she held in her hands. The blast from the air conditioner blew her dark-brown hair, which was layered in the latest Jennifer Aniston haircut. She had a window seat because she was older than me. So unfair, in my opinion—birth order should not determine car placement.
My brother, Eli, was sitting on the other side of me, also with a window seat. Two years older than me, he had the same thick, black hair as my dad and a lighter version of our mom’s sea-blue eyes. He looked out the window through his John Lennon glasses. The headphones connecting to the CD player in his lap were latched onto his head, excluding him from my constant questioning about the end of our trip.
I was stuck in the middle—Jennifer Cloud, doomed to ride without a window. I didn’t inherit my dad’s thick, dark hair or my mom’s beautiful blond locks. Instead, I had what is called a dishwater-blond color. Now why would anyone name a color after dishwater? Go figure. I did, however, have the same deep blue eyes as my mother. My long hair was pulled back into pigtails and braided with yellow bows at the ends to match my dress. This gave Eli something to pull on when he teased me.
“Where are we going?” I asked for the fifth time.
“I told you,” Mom replied, “to Aunt Elma’s house in Mount Vernon, Texas.”
“It’s not aunt,” said Dad. “It’s Aint Elma.” Mom laughed but probably would not succumb to Dad’s East Texas drawl. “Everyone down here has aints and pappies, mawmaws and pawpaws, and most of the boys are just called junior.”
My mom, Mary, was a cookbook editor for a well-known publishing house. She was all prim and proper from being born and raised in Upstate New York and tried to take the twang out of our accents by overannunciating everything.
“We are going to Aunt Elma’s birthday party; the entire family will be there,” Mom said, thoughtfully tucking the pencil she was using in her crossword book and closing it. “It’s kind of a family reunion and a birthday all in one.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“No one knows; she won’t tell,” Dad replied, looking at me in the rearview mirror.
“How do we know how many candles to put on the cake?” I asked, because this was extremely important to a nine-year-old.
“Duh, when a person gets to fifty years old, you just put one candle for every ten years the person has been alive,” explained Eli.
I guess he can hear under those headphones after all.
Melody saw an opportunity to put in her two cents. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What if they are fifty-two?”
“You would round up to the next decade. So that would be six candles. But you stop at eight candles.”
“Why would you stop at eight?” Melody pursed her lips like she was exerting extra effort to make conversation with Eli.
“Jeez, Melody, everyone knows old people can’t blow out more than eight candles in one blow.”
“You’re making that up,” Melody accused.
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
“Brace face!” Eli shouted, showing off his set of perfectly straight white teeth.
“Shut up, Eli!” Melody screamed through clenched teeth, refusing to reveal her mouthful of metal.
“Shut up, Eli,” mocked Eli in his interpretation of Melody’s voice.
“OK, settle down, kids. We are almost there.” Dad sighed as he turned onto a small dirt road. Tall live oak trees lined both sides of the pothole-ridden road. Pine trees and various kinds of brush gathered among the tree trunks like soldiers on the front lines daring anyone to try to break through.
The vast canopies of the live oaks came together above us, forming a tree tunnel that provided relief from the harsh summer sun. We bounced along for about ten minutes, until the tree tunnel opened up and small frame houses began to appear occasionally on either side of the road.
Aunt Elma lived in a small, white frame house surrounded on either side by a bunch of old oak trees with the occasional red-leaf maple tree thrown in for color. Her tiny house sat way back from the road, so you could just make out the porch. Today her front yard looked as if it had been turned into a used car lot. People just parked haphazardly wherever they stopped.
“Good gracious, what a mess!” Mom exclaimed. “I hope Aunt Elma’s yard survives all these cars.”
“Honey, don’t worry, the only kind of grass that grows out here is crabgrass, and even your cooking wouldn’t kill it,” Dad quipped.
“That’s really cute, JW.” Mom pulled her sunglasses down her nose to give Dad the evil eye. He knew very well my mom was a great cook but teased her anyway just to get a rise out of her.
My parents met at a food convention in Las Vegas. Dad had just opened up his own health-food store (which was actually a glorified feed store) and had traveled to Vegas to give a lecture on healthy foods and vitamins. Mom had been working as a grunt at a publishing house and was tagging along with the assistant editor in hopes of meeting some of the up-and-coming chefs so she could edit their future cookbooks. It was love at first sight. The way my dad tells the story, my mom was crossing the meeting room for a drink of water when she accidentally tripped on my dad’s outstretched cowboy boot and landed facedown in his lap. They were married the following week in the Chapel of Love. Since Dad owned a health-food store, Mom moved to Texas and hasn’t worn her pearls since.
As we climbed out of the car, the dust rose up to meet us. There was an old tire swing hanging from one of the big oak trees. Melody complained about the dirt, and Eli took off toward the tire swing. The more dirt, the better, in his opinion. Dad and I unpacked the gifts we had brought for Aint Elma. Melody helped Mom get her homemade chicken casserole out of the car. Apparently when you go to a family reunion, you are required to bring some kind of food. My mom told me most people bring a casserole due to the fact that they are easy to carry. I hoped someone brought cake, ‘cause I wasn’t too big a fan of casseroles.
Today was August 13th. “That’s kinda neat that Aint Elma has the same birthday as me, except mine is in June,” I told Dad.
“That is special,” he said. “But her birthday is really on December twenty-fifth.”
“That’s Christmas. Why are we having a party today?”
“She never has a real birthday party because everyone is busy celebrating Christmas with their families. This year we decided to give her a special party day.”
“I like that idea. A special day, just for Aint Elma to celebrate her birthday.”
Dad placed his hand on my shoulder. “You haven’t seen Aint Elma since you were a baby, but I know you will like her. She used to tell me all kinds of stories when I was a boy. All us kids would pile up in her old, wrought-iron feather bed. It was so fluffy, we sank into it like we were in a jar full of cotton. She would sit in the old rocking chair across from us that creaked when she rocked back and forth. Aint Elma would tell us stories about far-off places. My favorite was the story of the Old We
st.”
“Did she travel a lot?” I asked.
He sighed. “Only in her mind. She had a great imagination, and even though she only had an eighth-grade education, she loved to read. We never could afford to travel. She never had any kids of her own, so she kept us when Mamma had to work late. That was until Mamma Bea got the job in the sewing factory, and we moved to Dallas. But Aint Elma wanted to stay right here in the country. After we moved, I didn’t get to see her much.” Dad had that faraway look in his eyes. “But I sure did love her stories about the cowboys and Indians. The way she told those stories, it was almost as if she had really been there.”
He reached out, making a gun with his index finger and thumb, and acted as if he were pointing the gun at me. “Bang.”
I fell to the ground like I had been shot. Mom gave me a dirty look that I interpreted to mean, “If you get that dress dirty, you are in big trouble.” I stood, and my dad handed me the gift I was to carry into the house. He shut the back to the SUV and tickled me in the ribs as I walked with him toward the porch.
The front porch wrapped all the way around the house like two arms hugging the small frame structure into its bosom. Three wooden steps took us up to the screen door, which was held open by an old milk jug, allowing people and flies to come in at random. I entered the front room of the house. Several elderly people were sitting on the floral sofa and in straight-backed chairs that had been moved into the room. The smell of dust and old roses wafted through the air. I looked around for the faulty flowers but only saw several plastic flower arrangements crammed into glass Coke bottles and various pots and one bunch of fake pansies on top of the old console TV in a birdcage. All eyes turned toward me as I entered the room.
“Where is the bird?” I asked.
“Isn’t that cute,” said one very plump older lady who was stuffed into an easy chair. “The little angel asked where’s the bird. How darlin’ is that?”
“Where’s what?” asked the old man sitting next to her in a fold-out chair. He leaned over like he was trying to hear a secret.
“Never you mind, Earl,” she told him. Then she leaned closer to me and whispered, “He’s a little deaf from the war.”
My dad stepped in behind me. “Howdy, Uncle Earl, Aint Mable.”
“Well, land sakes, it’s JW.” She clapped her hands together and then squeezed up out of the easy chair. Waddling over to my dad, she reached out to hug him, smashing me in the middle.
“It’s been years,” she said.
I had not met many of my relatives. Family get-togethers were few and far between. We enjoyed living close to the big city of Dallas, often referred to as “Big D.” The rest of the family lived here in Mount Vernon, except Mamma Bea. I smelled her White Shoulders perfume before I heard her voice.
“Mamma Bea!” I exclaimed as I squeezed out from the Aint Mable hug.
“You come on over here, dawrlin’,” she said with her arms open to me.
I ran and gave her a hug. She had Dolly Parton hair stacked up high on her head and big, dangling sunflower earrings.
My dad was born and raised in the Texas oil fields. Literally, that is where my grandmother, or as we call her, Mamma Bea, gave birth. There just wasn’t enough time to get back to the house, she explained to me one afternoon after she had a few sweet teas. I later found out Mamma Bea liked to spike her sweet tea with a little Johnnie Walker Red Label.
We were greeted by various “aint thises” and “uncle thats.” Mamma Bea took our gifts and told my mom to put her casserole in the kitchen. Adjacent to the kitchen was a long, pine dining table covered in casseroles. There were green ones, yellow ones, brown ones covered with cheese, some with potato chips on the top, and others with green beans sticking out.
“Gross!” I said in my outdoor voice.
“Jen,” my mom said in her indoor voice through her teeth. Whenever my mom said something she didn’t want anyone else to hear, she partially closed her mouth, clenched her teeth, and said without moving her lips the dreaded words she could not speak. “Go outside and look for your cousin Gertrude; she is about your age.”
Gertrude is the daughter of my dad’s cousin Trish. Apparently they lived in a town called Mount Pleasant, but my mom told us it wasn’t pleasant ‘cause they lived in a trailer. Dad told me a trailer was a house that was on wheels, and you could move it from place to place. I thought this was very cool and efficient.
I wanted to know where Gertrude’s dad lived. Mom told me Cousin Trish was divorced and it was a good thing too, ‘cause he ended up in prison (she said this through clenched teeth).
I made my way to the backyard, where many cousins, second cousins, nephews, and nieces were sitting in fold-out lawn chairs. Babies played on quilts spread out in the brown grass, which would have been green except for the massive drought that was scouring the Texas landscape. My dad told me I’d played with Gertie as a baby, but I didn’t have a clue what she looked like. I didn’t see any girls who looked around my age. I stood fidgeting for a few minutes, glancing around and hoping Gertie would make an appearance.
At the back of the yard, a tall row of shrubs formed a wall like a sentry standing guard. I later learned these bushes are called Photinia. An old white picket fence peeked out from behind the red-tipped bushes. A flash of something metal caught my eye, so I went to investigate. I pushed the long branch of the bush out of the way, revealing a short, round-top gate. Hanging by a rusty nail centered on the gate was a small, hand-painted metal sign that read “Elma’s garden—enter at your own risk.” What did that mean? How dangerous could a garden be? I was adventurous, right? Maybe she had some kind of child-eating plant or a monster rabbit. I looked into the garden but only saw several large trees, which cast protective shadows that prevented me from seeing more.
Sometimes Eli, Melody, and I would play superheroes. I would be SuperJen, the marvelous hero. I wore my bright-green dance leotard and a big paper S drawn in crayon taped to my chest. A blue towel tied around my neck formed my supercape, and a black Zorro mask left over from Halloween disguised my face. Eli would be my archenemy, Evil Eli. Dressed entirely in black, he would tie Melody up, and I would rescue her from certain demise. Before every rescue I would sing my mantra, “I’m spunky and I’m fierce and I’m smarter than most men. Bad guys run and hide ‘cause here comes SuperJen.”
After mentally reciting my theme song, I proceeded through the gate and into the shadows. I was soon surrounded by rows of beautiful flowers. As I walked down the dirt path, I touched the soft petals of American Beauty roses. My mom loved growing roses. Although our backyard was small, we had several rosebushes lining our fence. I even did a report on the types of roses for my fourth-grade science class. I proceeded on down the path, stopping to admire the tulips, bluebonnets, and many flowers whose names I couldn’t recall. I bent to smell one of the roses. The sweet scent tickled my nose. Why didn’t Aint Elma put these in her house? Why did it smell so old and stuffy when she had all these lovely flowers? And why was this beautiful garden hidden behind a tall hedge?
Soon I came upon the heart of the garden—the vegetables. There were rows of corn, tomato plants, bushels of strawberries, blueberries, and various other vegetables sprouting from the earth. The watermelons were enormous. They were the biggest melons I had ever seen. Who would have thought all this could grow in a dust bowl of heat? How did the old lady take care of this entire garden? Maybe there was a neighbor who helped her out. Go figure.
I wove around a row of tall cornstalks and came to a halt. A huge willow tree grew in the back corner of the garden. The branches hung to the ground like a cascading waterfall. Under the willow sat an odd-looking house. It was about ten feet tall and built from wood that had aged the color of gray skies right before a nasty storm. Someone had tried to paint it green at one time, but most of the paint had chipped off, leaving the building looking worn and tired. The roof was pointed like a doghouse, and the door hung slightly off its hinges. Carved in the wood abov
e the door, a crescent moon hung, with small stars forming a circle around it. The house wasn’t very big. It was about the size of one of the portable toilets that we use at the state fair. The entire structure was covered in lush green vines that trailed down the sides and out into the garden. I thought this was truly the greenest part of the garden.
When I moved closer, I was surprised to see Blue Moon roses growing around the base of the little house. I had never seen a blue rose, and as I reached out to touch one, a twig snapped behind me. Oh Lord, was this the danger the sign had warned me about? Was I about to meet my doom? As I stood there contemplating my fate, the rows of corn parted, and out stepped a girl about my age. We were the same height, but she was a little plump around the middle. She had hair like Ronald McDonald, which accentuated her pale complexion, and she smelled like stale marshmallows. Her blue jeans were torn at the knee, and she wore a pair of bright-red cowboy boots. At least the boots matched her hair. She was wearing a green tank top that was too tight and had a grape-jelly stain down the front.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Gertie. You must be Jennifer. I think we’re third cousins, but my mom says it don’t matter ‘cause blood is blood, no matter how thin.”
“It’s Jenny,” I replied, stifling the scream I’d almost set free a moment earlier.
“Wouldja look at that!” Gertie exclaimed.
“What is it?” I asked.
Gertie laughed. “You’ve never seen an outhouse before?” I shook my head no.
“City folk.” Gertie giggled. “Well, a long time ago, I think when George Washington was alive, they used them fer the bathroom.”
“No way?” I said, disbelieving.
“Yes way. See…” She stepped toward the outhouse. The door gave a loud creak as she pulled it open. Sure enough, there were two round holes side by side in a long bench. There was even a small wooden rod for toilet paper. “You jus’ poop right in them holes, and it drops down into the dirt. That’s why it’s so green back here, on accounta all the poop fertilizes them plants.”
It smelled kinda funny, and I was wondering why on earth there were two holes. How could anyone want to do his business with someone sitting right next to him?
A noise came from behind the bushes.
“Quick, get in,” Gertie said. Before I knew it, she grabbed my arm and pulled me into the outhouse.
I started to protest, but Gertie put her finger to her lips. “Shush, they’re gonna hear us.”
“Who is going to hear us?” I asked.
“Them garden gnomes. I heard they were mean little buggers.”
Now I might only have been nine, but garden gnomes? Get real. As I sat there, the smell of potties past and Gertie’s marshmallow mildew burned my nose.
Gertie whispered, “Do you think it’s safe?” Just then the ground started to shake.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“I think it’s an earthquake,” she said. The walls started to creak and rattle. The door flew open, and we were thrown out into the dirt, both screaming like we were on some scary carnival ride. I skinned both knees, and Gertie had snot running down her face.
“Boy, are you gonna get a butt whoopin’!” I heard a voice say.
“Butt whoopin’ fer sure,” said another voice. I looked up to see two small boys with skin the color of Milk Duds. They had on matching Hulk Hogan T-shirts and high-top tennis shoes that lit up when they walked.
“What ch’all doin’ back here?” Gertie shouted.
“Mamma said you gots to come, on accounta Aint Elma’s gonna open her gif’s.” I noticed one boy had lost both his front teeth, and the other one had only lost one front tooth. Good, I thought, I can tell them apart.
“This here is Cousin Jenny.” Gertie made introductions as she brushed off the dirt. “These are my half brothers from my mom’s second husband. He was a wrastler.”
“Oh, like Hulk Hogan?” I asked, pointing to their shirts.
“No, a cattle wrastler,” she replied. “He got caught stealing some cattle, and the judge said he had to work off his badness far away from here in some town called Penitentiary. I ain’t never been there, but Mamma went up once. Mamma said she couldn’t handle him bein’ so far away, so she got a deevorce, and now she can kiss whomever she wants.”
The boys gathered around me to get a closer look. Two Teeth said, “My mom said your mom is a damn Yankee bitch.”
“Yeah,” One Tooth chimed in, then they started to dance around me chanting, “Yankee bitch, Yankee bitch.”
Gertie raised her fists like a prizefighter. “Y’all better stop right now, or I’m gonna knock out the rest of your teeth.” I’m not sure if this was how they lost the first teeth, but it definitely shut them up.
“I’m gonna tell Mom,” cried Two Teeth, and they took off toward the house.
Gertie took off after the twins. I looked down at my pretty yellow dress, now covered in big dirt splotches. I sighed and slowly made my way back to the house.
I found my mom sitting in a porch swing sipping on a glass of lemonade.
“There you are, Jen,” she said, then did a double take. “What on earth happened to you?”
I couldn’t tell her I had been vomited up by an outhouse. “I fell,” was my only reply.
“Aunt Elma has been asking to see you, and now your hair is a mess and your dress is torn.”
I hadn’t noticed the tear in my dress. Oops. Mom always prided herself on the fact that our clothes were always name brand and usually came from the Saks Fifth Avenue clearance rack. She told me it reminded her of New York, where the finer clothes were made.
We walked into the house through the back door, passed through the casserole kitchen, and ended up in the living room. The wilted-rose smell was back, along with mothballs and bleach. My nose began to run immediately. Aunt Elma was sitting in a floral winged-back chair surrounded by gifts and discarded wrapping paper. Her hair was snow white and pulled back in a tight bun that rested at the nape of her neck. Her frail bones barely held the housedress she wore, and her knobby knees poked out from under the skirt hem. She was the oldest person I had ever seen. Her wrinkles had wrinkles, and they were everywhere. Someone had put a crown on her head that blinked “Happy Birthday.”
“Come here, dear, so I can get a better look at you.”
I believed the wolf said the very same thing to Little Red Riding Hood right before he tried to eat her. I looked down at her furry house slippers. They had bunny ears on them. I guessed that anyone who wore bunny slippers couldn’t be all that bad. As I moved closer to her, I noticed she was wearing an interesting necklace. A silver chain hung around her neck, and a medallion peeked out from the open buttons at the collar of her dress. The round piece looked as if it were made from a smooth stone, and it rested in the hollow at her throat. The medallion was engraved similar to the carving I remembered from the outhouse. She smiled at me, and I thought the necklace twinkled a bit. I looked into her watery blue eyes. Aint Elma reached out and put her bony hands on either side of my face. At first I felt a warm, tingling feeling on my cheeks. The warmth moved down my neck and began spreading into my arms.
“You have the gift,” she said, pulling her hands away from my face and clasping them together.
“The what?” I asked.
“The gift, the gift!” Her voice grew louder with enthusiasm.
“She wants you to hand her a gift, dork face,” said One Tooth, who was now standing next to me. I reached for the nearest package.
“Here you go,” I said, placing a gift wrapped in blue polka-dotted paper into her hands. She smiled at me, and I made a quick retreat.