Contested Swap
Chapter 19
We had been on the farm for two months. Maggie said her cooking had returned the meat to my bones. Just when things were feeling normal, our summer changed. Try as she might, no amount of cooking was adding meat to Granddaddy’s bones, and we learned he needed to go to the hospital.
The winter before, my mom took us to the hospital every day. The sharp smell of disinfectant was a long way from the earthy smell of Granddaddy’s farm. I wasn’t used to seeing him lying in bed, much less with a tube in his nose. Since he rarely spoke to me, his silence was nothing new. But when he caught me eyeing the tube, he turned his head away. My face flushed when I realized he had caught me staring. I looked at the floor and tried to ignore the tubes and bags hanging beside his bed.
Maggie pinned get-well cards all over the hospital drapes, as if she wanted everyone there to know how much her Joe mattered. On the wall, I saw the Santa I had made with cotton balls, taped up with the other cousins’ artwork. I recognized the pillowcase under his head, and a quilt from home covered his feet.
On weekends, the hospital was so full of relatives and friends that we had to take turns visiting. Whenever we rode the elevator, somebody asked my mom about Joe. The halls and waiting room seemed full of Killingsworths. Coats were piled high on chairs, and the aunts ran back and forth to the vending machines, bringing the grownups hot coffee in paper cups with little wings for handles.
I know now from Maggie’s journals that Granddaddy had spent years going in and out of the hospital for surgeries and infections; some stays stretched into months. That summer, an infection from an earlier surgery had sent him back to Oklahoma City. I didn’t want him sick, but I wasn’t ready to face my life at home either.
Back home in Oklahoma City, Dad was in the hospital receiving treatment, and Mom had started a new full-time job at Tinker Air Force Base. Nobody explained Dad's treatment to me, and I didn’t ask.
I relaxed when I heard we couldn’t go home yet, but my relief disappeared when I heard the new plan. Mark and I would finish the summer with Dad’s parents, Lola and Jesse French. Things must have been terrible at home if Mom was willing to send us to their farm without her supervision. We rarely visited them, but when we did, she patrolled Mark and me like a drill sergeant. She ordered us to stop climbing on things and inspected our food before we ate it. According to Mom, Grandma French undercooked the chicken. It always looked gray and gross, but we were never there long enough for me to starve.
When Mark and I went outside to play, Mom followed us. She was constantly ordering us off haystacks, combines, tractors, and whatever other farm machinery was parked near the house. She warned us that one wrong slip could cost us an arm or a leg. When she asked Dad to help supervise us, he just rolled his eyes. We picked up on that eye-roll and went full-on monkey.
Sometimes when we visited the French farm, my dad’s brother dropped in to see us. My Uncle Glen arrived by air. He owned a crop-dusting business and flew his own plane. He had a stocky build, and his booming voice entered a room before he did. Mark and I listened for the sound of his plane. When it circled over the house, we grabbed the orange flags and ran down the half-mile dirt drive to the two-lane highway. Mom, the safety marshal, chased after us, warning us that standing in the road was dangerous. Our job was to stop traffic so Uncle Glen could land on the highway in front of the house. Mark ran north with his flag, and I ran south with mine.
We could see Uncle Glen flying over with his head sticking out of the window. Add a red scarf flapping behind him, and he could have been Snoopy. Mark and I stood in the middle of the highway, waving our orange flags at no one. The road was empty.
The plane’s tires bounced on the pavement when it landed, then Uncle Glen taxied toward us. Before the propeller stopped turning, we were begging Mom to let us go for a ride. She told us that standing on a highway was dangerous enough. We tried to get Dad to convince her, but he didn’t even try to win that argument.
My favorite place to play at the French farm was in the cotton wagons. They had heavy wooden floors and tall slatted sides that I climbed like fences. Chicken wire had been wrapped around parts of them, and the floorboards were split and worn, with huge rusty nails sticking through. Their original colors had faded to pastel pink and baby blue, but I could still make out the words ‘King Cotton’ beneath the faded paint. Mom thought they were dangerous. I thought they were beautiful. Maybe that was where my lifelong love of worn, weathered wood began. If I heard her say it once, I heard it a thousand times: “Stepping on a rusty nail requires a shot.” After one visit, she found my bloody sock and a hole in my red Keds that matched the hole in my heel. Her warning became real when she took me straight to the doctor’s office for a tetanus shot.
Surrounding the wagons were white beehive boxes. My dad had kept bees during his FFA days in high school, and the hives remained long after he left home. Grandma French kept a jar of honey on her table with a chunk of honeycomb inside. I snuck bites of the waxy comb. I didn’t know if you were supposed to eat that part, but I liked it.
One visit mom was sitting on the shaded porch, watching me wander through the cornfield. Mark told me the corn had worms, so I went looking for them. What we didn’t know was that Uncle Glen had been called in to dust. As I inspected the corn, I heard his plane and looked up as he flew low over the field, dusting the corn—and me. I looked like a powdered doughnut. Uncle Glen was lucky he wasn’t planning to land anywhere near my mom. He said I would be fine; he had been breathing the dust for decades. At least I was not bitten by another mosquito the rest of the summer.
Our swap day arrived. I could not watch while Maggie packed our things. At the same time, she was packing her own suitcase, so distracted she didn’t even correct me when I pouted. I was not happy about our new location—the French farm with Jesse and Lola Bell. What would I eat? What if I got hurt? I had never stayed at the French farm without my mom. Thank goodness I had Mark.
We met at the church parking lot, and the granddads moved our things from the Pontiac to the back of Jesse’s truck. I stood fidgeting between my grandmothers. Lola answered every question Maggie asked with, “Well, I guess,” followed by a weird, breathy chuckle. When they started discussing the weather, I pressed my body against Maggie. Forget this farmer talk. What about me? The lump in my throat came back when she pushed me toward Lola.
My little body betrayed me. I stood there shaking until a voice I didn’t recognize roared out of me. “I am not going!” What were these adults thinking? Somehow, we crossed the parking lot and the back door of the truck opened. They might as well have been trying to put a cat in a bathtub. I refused to get in. I braced both arms and legs against the doorway. Mark pulled my arm, and Grandma Lola shoved me from behind as I screamed across the parking lot at Maggie, “I could get myself killed there! Don’t make me go!”
“Shut up, stupid,” Mark said.
I lost the battle. They finally got me into the truck. I slumped against the seat, worn out from the fight. As we headed toward the French farm, dark clouds gathered on the horizon.
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