They Folded Us In
Chapter 17
The worn chenille of my grandmother’s lavender bedspread felt soft beneath my hands as I sat on the edge of the bed, its tufted loops a comforting texture. Every day I sat there staring at the picture tree on Maggie’s dresser. The brass tree displayed photographs of her five Killingsworth children. I leaned over, eye to eye, with my elbows on the dresser and hands folded under my chin so that I could stare deeply into my mother’s face. Maggie called me “melancholy.” She said I should stop staring at that picture and find something to do outside. I kept staring. My mother looked so pretty in the photograph. It was my mother’s face, but not the one that put me on the bus.
I didn’t know what melancholy meant then. I only knew it had something to do with missing my mother, and it made Maggie sad. After the ache in my stomach eased, I slipped off the bed to find something to do.
This was the first summer I’d ever been away from home for more than a week or two. At home, Saturday mornings disappeared while I lay on the floor, munching Cap’n Crunch and watching cartoons. At the farm, the days stretched on forever. I missed snacks. By midmorning, my stomach was growling. Farm people didn’t snack. They expected one meal to last until the next one. At home, Mom piled snacks on the kitchen counter right at eye level. Maggie’s kitchen counter held a meat grinder, cutting boards, and whatever she’d just brought in from the garden. Nothing came in a cellophane wrapper. I tried explaining Twinkies to Maggie. She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind while I described the yellow cake with the creamy filling in the middle. I even explained how you tried to eat the filling first, but it was a trick, so you ended up having to eat the whole thing. The next morning, she found me on the porch with my hands cupped around my eyes, peering through the screen. She opened the screen door and handed me a rolled-up slice of white bread with mayonnaise and sugar smeared inside.
“Here’s your Twinkie.”
I ate every bite, but it wasn’t a Twinkie.
Granddaddy reminded me of a mime. He rarely needed words; his movements said everything. When he and Mark came in from the fields for dinner, Granddaddy swept the red dirt from Mark’s clothes with a broom. Then he handed the broom to Mark, mimed for him to sweep, lifted his chin, stretched out his arms like a man waiting to be measured for a suit, and stood perfectly still while Mark brushed away the dirt. Next, they washed their faces and hands at the spigot, slipped off their boots before stepping onto Maggie’s spotless linoleum floor, and took their places at the table. On the farm, the noon meal was called dinner. Supper was the evening meal. We held hands while Maggie thanked God for His bountiful blessings. Granddaddy answered with a low grunt that sounded nothing like “Amen,” but I never questioned whether it counted. Everyone else acted as if it did. Apparently God understood.
The men didn’t come to the table to visit. Dinner was all business. Granddaddy tucked a napkin into the neck of his T-shirt. It always made me smile that he worried about getting food on his shirt while a ring of red dirt still circled his face where he’d missed washing. Then he grabbed a chicken leg and stripped every bit of meat from the bone in one swoop. The smacking sounds that followed should have bothered me, but somehow they didn’t. They sounded like a man who had worked hard all morning and was finally feeding his hunger.
Maggie ignored the men and focused on me. “Sit up straight and load your fork.” Loading my fork was not something I enjoyed. I didn’t like my food touching. I liked eating one thing at a time. She made me spear a little carrot, then some meat, then maybe a bit of tomato before I could take a bite. “Chew it together,” she’d say. That wasn’t all. The last step was taking a nibble of the green onion lying across my plate. “It’ll make your blood healthy,” Maggie promised. By the time I was halfway through my meal, the men had already drained their iced tea, helped themselves to seconds, and finished eating.
Somewhere between Maggie’s biscuits and listening to her read the Reader’s Digest aloud, I had found my giggle box again. As I took my position under the piano bench for Granddaddy’s naptime, I tried to hold in my giggles. Tucked under there, I watched him stretch out his long body on Maggie’s braided rug in the living room. An oscillating fan clicked as it swept from side to side, stirring the hot air. He knew I was watching, but he pretended not to. He lay flat on his back with his arms bent at the elbows, his forearms pointing straight toward the ceiling, and his hands hanging limp. I knew he wasn’t really asleep until those arms finally gave up and flopped onto the rug. Every single time they did, I dissolved into giggles, trying to smother the laughter with my hand. Granddaddy opened one eye, stared at me without a word, blew his nose like a freight train, fastened the buckles on his overalls, and went back to work. Maggie would grin and ask, “Did you enjoy Granddaddy’s catnap?”
Whenever Mark was around, I followed him like a shadow, soaking up everything he knew. He taught me how to open pasture gates, climb fences, and slip through barbed wire by stepping on the bottom strand. “Girl, don’t climb that haystack. Girl, don’t step on that trap,” he’d say. He explained that if I climbed the haystack in the barn, it could tumble on top of me and smother me, and nobody would find my dead body until winter. We set the big iron traps and tested them with sticks. They snapped shut so hard that the sticks broke into pieces. “Sister, that could be your leg bone.” He showed me what not to touch—bull nettle, poison ivy, or anything that slithered. Whenever we came across a snake hole, he poked around it with a long stick he’d whittled with his pocketknife.
The heat in western Oklahoma is hard to describe. Even the wind came in hot gusts, carrying dust that burned against your skin. Our adventures eventually turned into a search for a cool spot, and Buffalo Creek became our favorite swimming hole. My older cousins will remember the old rope swing. Long before Mark and I came along, decades of children swinging out over the water had worn flat spots into the creek bank. By the time it was our turn, we didn’t have to wonder where to land. I thought the creek was paradise. Mark would soar out over the muddy water, let go, and come down on the other side of the creek. I wasn’t nearly as brave, but I followed anyway. Afterward, I tromped through the shallow water, turning over rocks and old logs.
“Girl, you’re gonna get bugs playing in that still water,” Mark warned.
He was right. I screamed all the way to the house. Yes, there was blood. Maggie peeled leeches off my legs. Seeing those little bloodsuckers fat with my blood cured me of swimming in Buffalo Creek.
Since Buffalo Creek lost its appeal, we looked for other adventures to fill our days. We walked for what felt like miles through the blazing sun, dodging cow patties and swatting flies as we followed the cow paths. Some days we were cowboys and Indians. On other days we were gypsies, wandering wherever they took us. Years of hooves had carved crimson paths across Granddaddy’s pasture. They twisted and branched in every direction, looking as though they led nowhere, but if we followed one long enough, it always ended at a shade tree or a stock tank. We’d swim in the cows’ drinking water until we cooled off, watching dragonflies skim across the water with us. Then we’d set out again. Before we reached the next tank, our clothes were already dry.
Spending the day with Mark meant accepting a steady stream of stunts and dares. One of his favorites was making me touch my tongue to a salt lick. Before long, I started spotting them first so I could dare him before he dared me. When I lost, I only touched the very tip of my tongue to the salt lick.
Gross.
By supper, I could barely hold my head up. I never once snuck out of bed, and I was asleep the minute my head hit the pillow. There wasn’t even a closet for the Boogeyman. No television. No TV dinners. Just sunshine, chores, and Maggie’s cooking. My people were what we called frosty. They said little. They fed me instead of hugging me and handed me a chore instead of a conversation. Somehow, all of it filled more than my stomach.
It never crossed our minds that our seventy-something grandparents were already tired before two frightened children landed on their doorstep. I decided that if I worked hard, they would let me stay. So I tried not to complain, did my chores, and did my best to become part of their world. Mark wanted to stay too, and we imagined a new life as farm kids, going to school in Sweetwater.
We didn’t know how long we would be there, and they never told us. They simply folded us in.
These pictures are from earlier summers than the one in this story. I’m thankful my mother left me with my Maggie and Joe for at least a week every summer.
Another wonderful story! Your writing is so vivid with descriptions that I feel as though I were there myself!
When I first met your grandparents, I believe they lived in Sweetwater, but not on the farm.
Thank you for sharing!