Bodark Creek - 1. Chapter 1

For a long time, I thought Mary and Billie died in an elevator accident. I was two, so didn’t really understand. I just knew they were gone. Actually, they died of hookworm, something that sounds terrible even now. Mary was fifteen and Billie twenty-three. They were my half-sisters, but I never think of them that way.

I was born in 1908, Mary and Billie died two years later, and two weeks after that we moved to Bodark Creek. “We” were Mama, Daddy, my older sister Rosalind, and me. We moved from Hattiesburg, Mississippi because Mama was sad about Mary and Billie. At least, that’s what I was told. Really, Mama was afraid that Rosalind and I would catch whatever killed Mary and Billie, and she was so afraid that she didn’t want to tell us. That’s why she made up the elevator.

I can’t remember Mama telling me that story, but I remember Rosalind repeating it. So much of what I learned before I went to school came from my sister. “Tell me about the elevator,” I’d say. Or “Tell me about the train.”

“The train” brought us to Texas. I’d never been on one before, and I was too young to remember this one, but I know what Rosalind told me. She remembered the conductor, because of his uniform. And she remembered Mama feeding us all day from a picnic basket. And she remembered it getting dark outside, then light again, and all of us still sitting in our seats.

“The elevator” was probably in a real department store, but not in Hattiesburg. It might have been Jackson or New Orleans, and it must have been something Mama heard about, because I almost never saw her with a newspaper. Rosalind said the car suddenly broke loose from its cable and fell seven floors, killing everyone instantly. That was always so important, she said it more than once. “They were killed instantly. They never knew what happened, it was so instantly.” She’d close her eyes, and you could tell she was saying it just as Mama had. “They asked the operator to go up one more floor, and the next thing they knew, they were in Heaven.”

“I’d like to go to Heaven that way,” I’d tell Mama.

“Shush, Addy,” Mama would say. “It will be a long time before you’re in Heaven.”

Rosalind was only four years older than I was, but she seemed to know so much more. She went to school during the day, when Mama and Daddy were at the mill, and I stayed with Mrs. Seiler. When Rosalind came home, she had books and drawings and pages covered with letters. “That’s how you learn to write,” she’d say. “You make curves and lines, and you do it over and over.” I’d try, but I’d always break the points on my pencils. Rosalind would get a little knife and sharpen them, then I’d break them all over again.

I sometimes practiced at Mrs. Seiler’s, but she never wanted to help. She didn’t like answering my questions, either, and mainly wanted me to play with her granddaughter. When we were noisy, or when we did something she didn’t like, she’d say, “Oh, Lord, Oh, Lord.” But every day when she walked me home, she’d tell Mama, “You have the sweetest child.”

That was something else Rosalind told me, and she repeated her stories so often, there are some things I only think I remember. More likely, Rosalind told them to me after we went to bed. That’s where she mostly told me stories, when we were lying in the dark. The first thing I really remember is when our brother Charley was born.

I was four, Rosalind was eight, and I had no idea where Charley came from. Rosalind must have known, because she saw Mama getting fat then skinny again. I saw it, too, and might even have said things about it, but I didn’t remember afterwards.

I was with Mrs. Seiler that day. “You’re going to stay here tonight,” she said.

“Where’s Rosalind?” I asked. “I can’t go to sleep without her.”

“I’ll tell you a story tonight,” Mrs. Seiler said, though if she did, it was probably something from the Bible. The next day, she took me home, and there was Charley.

I’d seen babies before. Almost every family had one, and when I asked Mama, “Where’s ours?” she’d say, “You’re our baby. You’re the baby in our family.” But I wasn’t a baby at all. I was much bigger.

Charley was a real baby, but I couldn’t play with him or even hold him. I could touch him, and Mama would let Charley suck on one of my fingers. But only if it was clean, and only for a while, because then he’d start to spit up. During the day, Charley went to Mrs. Seiler’s with me, but he mostly slept. It wasn’t until he started crawling around that we could finally play together.

By then, we’d moved to our new house. It was just across the street from the old one and wasn’t really new. Both of them were owned by the Bodark Creek Cotton Mill, where Mama and Daddy worked. But the old house had two rooms upstairs and two rooms down, and Daddy didn’t like Mama carrying Charley up and down the narrow stairs.

Our new house also had four rooms, a front room, the kitchen, and two bedrooms. But all the rooms were connected, so you could run in circles if you didn’t make Mama angry. Daddy didn’t care. He thought it was funny, unless he was trying to sleep. Each room also had an outside door, so you could go from the bedroom that Rosalind and I shared to the outhouse in the backyard without having to go through the kitchen. That’s where we spent most of our time anyhow, especially in the winter. It was always the warmest.

The other thing in the backyard was the storm cellar, where we absolutely weren’t allowed to play. Mama kept some of her canning there, and we went in during the really big storms, because none of the houses in our part of town had basements. But most of the time it was shut. We didn’t need the storm cellar for games anyway. It was a lot more fun to play hide ‘n’ go seek in the woods.

They were right at the end of our yard, which was just at the end of our street. You could take a shortcut through the woods to the cotton mill, or you could walk the long way around. On the other side of the woods was the railroad tracks, and from our house you could hear the trains go all the time. You could also watch the engines being pumped full of water, but first you had to get through the woods without getting lost. That wasn’t really hard, since we played in them almost every day.

When Charley was old enough, I asked Mama if we’d be getting another baby brother. That’s how I thought it worked in our family. First, you got two girls, then two boys. Mama just laughed. “Hush, Addy,” she told me, and I knew I’d never get anywhere after that. Sometimes it took her a while to say it, and sometimes she said it straight out. But once she did, I knew she’d never answer my question.