Maude (22 page)

John shook his head. “We been ready to send out
a posse to look for you, George. We were afraid that
something bad had happened.”

“The transmission fell out of the car near Toledo.
We didn’t have the money to fix it, so we had to push
it off the road and leave it.”

“How did you get here, then?”
“We walked mostly, almost to the city limits,
then a truck picked us up and brought us the rest of the
way.”
“Well, let’s get these things inside and get some
dinner. Bessie was just putting it on the table. She’s
been cooking enough for an army for the last three
days.”
I told Bessie, “The only thing we had to eat today
were some wormy apples we found on a tree, but I
can’t eat anything until I wash off some of this road
dirt.” I held out my arm and turned it palm up. “Look
at it.”
The dirt was sunk into the pores of my skin. It
filled the creases on my wrists and the back of my
fingers, and my fingernails were lined with it. I
couldn’t help it, I started crying. “I’ve never been this
dirty in my life, even when I was a little girl and helped
Daddy at the stable. Most of our clothes were stolen,
and what we have left is filthy from being worn for so
long.”
Bessie said, “I know you’re all starving. Wash up
to your elbows and then we’ll eat. You can all have a
nice bath after dinner and wear some of our things until
you can get more for yourself.”
So that’s what we did. After washing our hands
and faces, we sat at the table, joined hands while John
said the blessing, and then had our meal.
Bessie had outdone herself. There was a platter
piled so high with fried chicken that I guessed three or
four birds had given their lives for us. She’d made a
huge bowl filled with fluffy mashed potatoes with
butter melted around the curves in the top. We emptied
the gravy bowl filled with golden gravy, but Bessie
said there was more staying hot on the stove if we
needed it. One dish held green beans that had been
cooked all day with bacon drippings. Another had a
pile of corn on the cob and next to it a bowl of melted
butter with a little mop in it. There were white
cornbread johnnycakes, fried in a skillet, and a pile of
biscuits, light as a feather. It had been a long, long time
since we’d seen a meal like that!
We ate until we couldn’t hold any more. Then the
men, followed by Paul, went out to sit on the front
porch and smoke while Betty Sue and I took turns
getting a bath. I scrubbed every inch of me until there
wasn’t any more dirt and washed my hair. It felt so
good when I could finally get the brush through it.
When I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I
wanted to cry. My hair jutted out in wild, uneven
clumps.
Bessie gave me clean clothes to wear, and
Maxine found some for Betty Sue. The girls went up
to Maxine’s room. I told Bessie about the trip, how our
things got stolen on the very first night, and about the
tires going flat and the transmission falling out. She
cried with me when I got to the part about not being
able to brush my hair and cutting it off.
While Bessie and I talked, George and Paul got
cleaned up. Paul made us all laugh when he came out
of the bathroom in clothes John gave him, a shirt that
hung down to his knees and pants rolled up about ten
times.
When we were finished with the talking, Bessie
showed me the room George and I would sleep in.
She’d made up a pallet by the wall for Paul. Maxine
had a bed in her room for Betty Sue.
We were all saying good night when John asked
me, “Maude, when did you cut your hair?”
I started giggling and couldn’t stop. “A few days
back. I threw it in a stream somewhere outside of
Toledo.” Bessie and I laughed wildly. Looking back on
it now, I think the laughing did more to feed my soul
where I was hungry than the food did.
It was late when we finally went to bed. I
stretched out on the mattress and sighed. I had to fight
to stay awake long enough for my nightly talk with
God.
“Thank you, Lord for taking care of us and
getting us to a safe place, and thank you again for that
wonderful meal and for the family that prepared it for
us, and thank you for sending your angel, dressed like
a truck driver, to bring us the rest of the way. Bless
Gene in his camp, and Bud at Fort Knox, and Bessie
and John and Maxine, and keep your angels watching
over Gene and Betty Sue and the other boys. Amen.”

At breakfast the next morning John said he wanted to
take George to the factory with him so he could apply
for a job, but George said he was still tired from the
trip and would go tomorrow. His sister gave him a
knowing look but kept quiet. When he made an excuse
the following day, Bessie walked over to the stove and
picked up the big steel coffee pot with its scalding hot
coffee. She held it over his lap and said, “George” in a
way that immediately got the attention of everyone at
the table. “Get ready and go to work with John. You
got a wife and two kids to support, and that Kennett,
Missouri, glad-handing you’ve been doing for the last
thirty years won’t go over here.”

George didn’t say a word, just stood, put on his
hat and walked to the screen door to wait for John. I
looked down at the table and kept quiet, but I had to
hold back a little smile. I’d actually seen a look of fear
on the faces of both John and George. It gave me a
little thrill.

After they left, Bessie poured us both a cup of
coffee and sat with me to talk. She laughed. “I know
how lazy George is. He could get away with it at home.
He thinks he’s like the lilies of the field, not that he
thinks he’s beautiful, but that if he keeps everyone
laughing, that’s enough in the line of helping out. That
won’t work here.”

I knew she was right, and I was grateful she was
strong enough to make George get up and get to a job.
Sometimes, I wished I had the same gift. My life
would have been a lot easier if I’d just been able to
make George behave the way he should have, but I
guess I simply didn’t have it in my nature to boss
people around. George was actually afraid of Bessie.
Nobody in my whole life was ever afraid of me.

When George didn’t come back for three hours,
I told Bessie, “I hope his being gone means he got the
job.”

She gave me a smile. “Don’t worry about it.
John’s a foreman now, and they think right highly of
him. They’ll hire George on his say-so, and I’ll explain
to George that I expect him to work hard enough that
John isn’t embarrassed about it.”

Bessie went to school with Maxine. She was all
excited about it, and I felt relieved to see her smiling
again. I kept Paul home with me for the first day. Even
at ten years old, he hung onto my arm like he was
afraid of everything. Bessie and I went down to
Jefferson to a store called Goodwill. It sold used
clothes and furniture. She said to get enough clothes to
tide us over for a while and she would pay for it.
George could pay her back out of his first check. She
said, “Betty Sue would probably rather pick out her
own things. She can wear Maxine’s clothes for a while.
Maxine has enough for five or six girls.”

I picked out a stack of clothes for myself,
George, and Paul. They even had underwear that
looked almost new. Those two used dresses I took
looked more expensive than any new ones I’d ever
made for myself. They had a lot of fancy seams and
nice buttons. Bessie said a lot of rich people gave their
things to the Goodwill when they got tired of them. It
was hard for me to imagine that. All my life, I only had
new clothes when I’d outgrown the old ones or they
were too worn and frayed to be respectable.

After that, I kept my sewing kit for mending, but
I never made another dress. It was cheaper to get one
at Goodwill than to buy fabric and make one.

George came home with John at the end of the
day, and even though I waited for him to talk about it,
he didn’t say anything about the work he’d been doing.

The evening passed pleasantly enough. Bessie
and John had a big Motorola radio in the front room,
and we all sat around and stared at it while we listened
to Jack Benny. I loved it. I’d heard radios before, at
Clara’s and at the homes of some of my other friends
from church, but since George would never do
anything about getting electric power for our home, we
never had one. It was just like having Jack Benny in
the living room.

On Sunday morning we dressed for church and
went with Bessie, John, and Maxine to their new
church home. Even George went without a fight. He
knew Bessie expected it.

The church met in a rented storefront on Jefferson
Avenue. The windows had been covered with ivorycolored drapes, and instead of the long pews that all
the churches at home had, the old seats that looked
strange to me. Bessie said they came from an old
movie house. They were arranged in a ‘v’ pattern. At
the front was a lectern sitting on a table.

I’d never been in a church that didn’t have its own
building. They didn’t use the name,
Holiness
, either,
but called themselves the
Pentecostal Church
. Once
the service got going, I saw that it was the same as my
church as home, and it filled my heart.

Having a meeting in a storefront was a curiosity
to me, but the members were welcoming, and in only
a few minutes I relaxed and felt at home.

George worked at the factory for two weeks
before he told me how he felt about it. He lay on his
back in the bed and sighed. I could tell he was wanting
to tell me something, so I just said, “What?”

“I hate working at the factory. It’s dirty and
noisy, and you have to punch a time card. I want to do
something else.”

Oh, Lord. What will we do if he quits this job the
way Bud used to quit all the jobs he got when he was
home?
“You should be grateful that God sent you a
job. Don’t you know how many men are still looking
for work? If you weren’t related to John, they never
would have taken you on. How’s it going to look for
him if you up and quit? You might never find another
place. Besides, how would Bessie like it?”

That ended the discussion. When George
brought home his first paycheck, we rented the house
next door to Bessie. It was just like hers, only reversed,
a two-story house with small porches on the front and
back, and a narrow driveway on one side that went to
a garage that bordered the alley out back. The two
houses were like all the others on the block, so close
together that if you reached out of the window of one
house, you could touch someone reaching out of the
other. Bessie told me it was a good deal because it had
four bedrooms, and the landlord would pay for the
water, and George would only have to pay for the
electricity and gas. I’d never thought about paying for
water.

It was as if I’d stepped into another world.
Certainly, it was an easier life for me. I loved the
bathroom, the running water, the flush toilet, with the
box on the wall over it and the pull chain that washed
the bowl. It was like a miracle. I didn’t have to go
outside and draw water from the well at the end of the
porch to carry inside for cooking and laundry and for
baths, then empty the tubs when they were used. The
bathtub was so big, I could lie in it with my legs stuck
almost straight out.

Bessie and I had a good laugh at the idea that we
would need to buy an alarm clock, since we weren’t
allowed to keep a rooster inside the city limits.

There was an icebox in the kitchen, and Bessie
said that she would tell the iceman the next time he
came to add us to his route, so there was no more going
to a root cellar for things that needed to be kept cool in
the summer.

The gas stove was a wonderful thing to me. No
more watching out for snakes in the woodpile when I
needed to build up the fire in the kitchen stove, and no
more going outside when it was freezing cold to get
wood.

In the basement was a huge coal-burning furnace.
Bessie told me that in the winter a truck came and
dropped the coal through a small trap-door into the
little coal room. From there it was shuttled into the
furnace by a large corkscrew-looking thing called a
hopper. George certainly liked the sound of that. No
more cutting firewood for him. I worried about all
these new expenses that we had never had before-rent, electricity, coal, and ice. The depression was
easing its grip on the national economy, but we would
still have to be very careful.

We moved our few things next door and John
drove George around in his truck to places where they
could get used furniture. Bessie loaned us her extra
mattresses for a few days, and Paul slept on a pallet
until George found enough mattresses for us. When he
brought them home, I took a lamp and inspected them,
front and back, before I let him bring them into the
house. I knew enough to make sure there weren’t any
bedbugs. George said he’d expected as much and
examined them before he paid the man, but I doublechecked anyway.

I don’t know if having running water made the
laundry any easier for me. I didn’t have to pump from
a well anymore, but even with a tap and sink in the
basement, I had to carry clothes downstairs, wash
them on the board, rinse them, wring them out, and
then take the wet clothes to the back yard to hang them
in the sun. It wore me out. I tried to get Paul to help
me, but he would run off and hide until I was finished
and George wouldn’t make him do any kind of work
at all.

The second week we were in the house, George
found a nice table and four chairs that were only ten
dollars second hand. George and John brought
something home with them every week until the house
was furnished well enough to get by. The best thing
was the radio, not a big console that sat right on the
floor like Bessie and John had, but one that looked like
a church steeple and sat on the table. We gathered
around it at night and listened to Fred Allen, Fibber
McGee and Molly, and best of all, on Saturdays we
listened to the Grand Ole Opry. It was sponsored by
The National Life and Accident Insurance Company
and Prince Albert Tobacco. When a salesman from
National Life knocked on my door one day, out of my
appreciation for the Opry, I bought a thousand dollar
policy on George. The nice young man came by every
week to collect the dime payments and to mark in the
little passbook he had given me that my premiums
were up to date. A lot of the men who worked in the
factories got killed on the job and I worried about what
would happen to me and the children if I lost George.
I was pretty sure I couldn’t make enough money
sewing and doing laundry to support us.