Bodark Creek - 9. Chapter 9

For Rosalind and me, the best thing about Walter getting married was it gave us another place to go. As Walter said, it wasn’t very big. There was a kitchen, and there was a room with Walter and Stefanie’s bed. But that room didn’t even have a door, and it wasn’t as big as the one Rosalind and I shared with Charley. Their kitchen was smaller than ours, too, with only a stove, a couple of shelves, and a wooden table with four chairs.

“It’s bigger than my day bed, anyhow,” Walter kept joking.

The house had been a bunkhouse for a farm when the whole area we lived in was a farm. But that was before the mill was built.

“At least, they don’t charge me much,” Walter said. “Which is good, seeing they don’t pay me much.”

“Be happy you have a job,” Daddy told him. “And one that’s not going away.”

Daddy said that when he was Walter’s age, he was always looking for work. “They were just beginning to build factories, so all the jobs were on farms. And you never knew who’d hire you from year to year.

Stefanie didn’t work in the mill. Her mama didn’t have a job, either. She mainly looked after Stefanie’s sisters and brothers. “How come you work?” I asked Mama.

“Because I always have,” she said. “And we need the money.”

“Did your mama work?” I asked Walter.

“She was too busy having babies. Then they were always dying.”

Before she got married, Stefanie was in school with me, but she’d just finished. Her daddy was a foreman at the mill which was maybe why her mama didn’t have to work. Still, their house wasn’t much bigger than ours, and Stefanie shared a room with her two sisters. There was another room for her two brothers, and her mama and daddy had a room. But after that, there was only their front room and kitchen. In Hattiesburg, Walter said he’d always slept with Sonny and Dougie, sharing a bed with Dougie. When Mama and Daddy moved us to Texas, Sonny took their old room. They didn’t have to move the furniture, because it all belonged to the Mill.

“No point in buying your own furniture,” Walter said, “when people are ready to give it to you.”

That didn’t mean we couldn’t buy other things for the house. Or build them, like Daddy and Uncle Georg did. But when you moved, everything you made had to stay.

“It only makes sense,” Mama explained.

The first thing Walter did for his house was plant a garden. Before that, only an old man lived there, and he didn’t care for gardens. But Stefanie liked canning and thought it would save a little money. So Walter dug up a piece of the yard, and Rosalind and I helped plant vegetables.

“Just don’t plant anything I won’t eat,” Walter warned, which Stefanie thought was really funny. Of course, she thought everything he said was funny. “I’m just so lucky I got to marry him,” she told me one afternoon.

Walter was happy, too, though he had to admit that Mama cooked better. “Some days, even I cook better than Stefanie, and Sonny says I can’t burn potatoes.”

“Why would you want to burn potatoes?” I asked.

“That’s the joke,” he said.

Stefanie’s sisters and brothers were all younger, so she’d learned to cook and bake to help her mama. But she’d learned very differently from Rosalind and me, so when we tried to help, we mainly got in her way. “You can watch,” she’d tell us, “but please don’t do anything.”

“I can cut things up for you,” I said. “I’m good at that.”

“All right. Only don’t make everything so small.”

So I learned Mama’s way, and I learned Stefanie’s. And I suppose it didn’t hurt knowing more than one way. But I liked Mama’s best.

“She fries that in a pan?” Mama would ask when I told her something Stefanie did.

“Right on top of the stove.”

“What a waste of good meat.”

“My mama used to do the same thing,” Daddy would say.

“You’re mama cooked over an open fire,” Mama said, and Daddy had to admit that was true.

“Outside?” I asked.

“In a fireplace.”

“Like in the front room? I’ll bet she was a worse cook than Stefanie.”

Daddy laughed, but said his mama was a very good cook. “Things were just different then.”

“When did people start using stoves?” I asked. But he couldn’t remember.

The other great thing about Walter and Stefanie’s house was that it was so close by. I just had to cross two streets, and I was there. It was faster than going to church or school, and Mama always let me go. “I’m going to Walter and Stefanie’s,” I’d say, and I could go after school, or after dinner, and sometimes I could even stay overnight.

“Are you sure Stefanie doesn’t mind?” Mama would ask. But Stefanie would say, “I like having Addy with me. She reminds me of my sisters.”

Stefanie’s family lived on the other side of the church, so there were too many streets for her sisters to cross alone. And her younger sister was hardly more than Charley’s age. Still, when she stayed overnight, she got to sleep with Stefanie and Walter, where I always slept on a chair in the corner of their room. The back of the chair folded down, and it was soft, so it was almost like a bed. Of course, if Rosalind and I slept over together, she got the chair, and I had to sleep on the floor.

“It’s only fair,” Rosalind said. “I’m older.”

It wasn’t worth fighting with Rosalind.

“Where are they going to put a baby?” Mama asked one day.

“Are they going to have a baby?” I asked. That was exciting.

“That’s all they need,” Daddy said.

“What’s wrong with babies?” I wanted to know.

“Nothing. But you can’t have one till you’re not one yourself.”

I knew he wasn’t talking about Walter, so that’s when I knew Daddy still didn’t like Stefanie.

“She’s fine,” Walter would tell him. But he never tried convincing Daddy.

When Walter got married, two other things happened. At Thanksgiving, we got a letter from Dougie, saying he was getting married. Then at Christmas, we got one from Sonny.

“My sons always do things backwards,” Daddy said. “The oldest getting married last.”

“Is that important?” I asked.

“Only to your daddy,” Mama said.

Walter told me later that, “Dougie only got married ‘cause I did. Then Sonny felt he had to, ‘cause of Dougie.

“Who did they marry?” I asked.

“Just girls,” he said.

“Girls?” I told Mama. “Is that all we are?”

“Hush, Addy,” she said. “Don’t cause trouble.”