Bodark Creek - 19. Chapter 19

The next year started off so well. Rosalind was married and was going to have a baby. I was twenty-one, so could do almost anything. Walter’s wife had another baby, so now he had four daughters and finally a son.

“It’s not that I really needed a boy,” he said. “But it sure is nice to have one.”

“Now you can stand up straight,” Dougie teased. Though Dougie only had one son himself, and Gordy was adopted.

“He may as well be my daddy,” Gordy joked. “He makes me work hard enough.”

Gordon didn’t have a job at the mill. He’d found work in a new place that fixed automobiles, and he liked it fine.

Sonny only had one son, too, but Lyle was too young for the mill. And Sonny was hoping that his two daughters, who were between Charley’s age and mine, would get married.

“When the time comes,” he added. “Not before. Meanwhile, I’m glad they’re in school.”

I’d been at the mill for over two years, and that summer was going to be my last. It was hard to save money, and the last year Daddy was alive, it was almost impossible. When he couldn’t work any more, Rosalind and I had to pay for everything, which took just about anything we earned. Our older brothers tried to help when they could, and Charley did odd jobs. But mostly, he spent his money on cigarettes.

“At least, I’m not taking yours,” he said. And that was true.

But I saved a little money. And with Rosalind and Dock both at the mill, and Charley on the farm, it seemed like the best time for me to quit. I really wanted to become a nurse, but that would take too long and cost more than I had. So I decided to become a secretary. I just didn’t like the idea of being a teacher.

Then Rosalind’s baby was born. At first, Albie seemed as cute as any little baby could be, and no one could have gotten more attention. There was Rosalind, Dock, and me, and Charley had never really moved to Sonny’s, so he was there all the time. And there was old Mrs. Seiler, who took care of Albie during the day. She was the first one to notice that something was wrong.

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” was all Charley would say. Though Rosalind pointed out that Mrs. Seiler had been watching babies for thirty years.

“That doesn’t mean she knows as much as a doctor,” Charley insisted. “We need to take him to Dr. Mauer.”

But that cost money. And it seemed silly to take a baby to a doctor when the baby wasn’t even sick.

“There’s nothing wrong with him that I can see,” Dr. Mauer finally told us. He was new in town and had just taken over for Dr. Waechter.

“Now I’m not saying the young doctor is wrong,” Mrs. Seiler said when we came home. “But you wait and see.”

That was a terrible thing to say, and it made us all watch Albie even more carefully. But he was just an ordinary little blond boy. He smiled, and drooled, and he’d suck you finger and make funny noises.

In September, I started school. There were three small colleges in town, and one of them had business classes. These were very different from what I studied at regular school. The subjects were far more practical. And being in college, even business college, was completely different from the routine of working at the mill. I was always doing new things, and learning new things, even if what I was doing wasn’t very hard.

“Is it something I’d like?” Rosalind asked.

“You might,” I told her. “Let’s see how I do, and see what kind of job I can find. Maybe you can follow me.”

Rosalind wasn’t sure. “I don’t think I’d like working with people as much as you have to. The one really good thing about weaving is I how little I have to talk.”

“You like to talk,” I said.

“Sometimes. But sometimes I’d rather just work.”

“And what do you think about all day?” Dock asked.

“Nothing,” Rosalind insisted.

“Oh, come one. There must be something.”

“I think about our family,” Rosalind finally answered. “And you and the baby.” That made Dock grin.

September was good, and October just kept getting better. Then, almost on Halloween, the stock market crashed.

Now, I didn’t know what the stock market was, and none of my new classes would have told me. They were about letter writing, and record keeping, and organizing. And none of my brothers knew anything about the stock market, either. All we knew was that something bad had happened, but no one could figure out why.

“It’s city stuff,” Sonny assured us. “We’re barely more than a town, and that’s only because we’re the county seat. Mostly, we’re farmers. And nothing can hurt us.”

“Except not getting any rain,” Dougie said. “Or cotton just dying.”

“Oh, hush up.”

Sonny was partly right, but he didn’t really know any more about business than Charley did about babies. And whatever went wrong with the stock market in New York, it closed the mill in Bodark Creek.

“How could that happen?” everyone asked. We really wanted to understand. People talked about other people borrowing money, and foolishly paying much more than things were worth, and buying on credit. But none of that explained how a mill that had been making money for thirty years, and giving a lot of people jobs, could suddenly be broke. We all learned a new word, “bankrupt,” and we learned it in a hurry.

Though we didn’t have to learn “poor.” People who had money in the banks lost it when they closed, but no one we knew had enough to even worry about a bank. I kept what little I’d saved in a candy box in my bureau, which was good. Because soon we were going to need it all.

The school I was going to closed because it couldn’t pay the teachers. “No one’s gonna need secretaries anyhow,” they said. “Because soon there won’t be any businesses.” I couldn’t imagine that. We had a big town square, and all around the courthouse were stores.

Most of them stayed open. And most people found ways to earn money or to trade for what they needed. Sonny was a carpenter before he became a foreman, and Dougie was still a machinist, so they could fix things. Walter mostly knew weaving, but Sonny and Dougie could always use help, so Walter, Charley, and Dock tailed along.

“Where are we going today?” Charley would call, as our older brothers’ car pulled up on the street.

“Who knows?” Dougie would shout from the driver’s seat. “We’ll just pretend we’re a chain gang.”

And they always found work and always came back with a little money. Or at least enough food for dinner. We were also lucky in that the mill didn’t take away our houses. There was really no point, since no one else wanted to live in them. But since no one was being paid, we also weren’t asked to pay rent. So that wasn’t bad.

And soon there were rumors that the mill would open again. It had been started by farmers, and when they really began making money after twenty years, they sold it for a good profit. But after it closed, they still had their cotton, and they needed somewhere for it to go. So they were looking to take over the mill again.

“They just have to find the money,” Walter told us.

“They have their land,” Sonny pointed out. “They can get cash against that. And when this is over, I tell you, we’ve got to get some land of our own. We’ve got to have a farm.”

“I’m with you,” Dougie agreed. “Only how? If all the farmers with the mill can’t get money, how are we going to? Where are you gonna find an open bank?”

“There have to be banks somewhere,” Sonny said. “There are always rich people.”

“Money simply doesn’t vanish,” Walter insisted.

But a lot of it did, or so we were told. Still, there was one place that always seemed to be doing all right. So while the farmers tried to raise money, and my older brothers went looking for work, Charley joined the Navy. He was only seventeen, and Walter had to sign for him, but no one was worried. There wasn’t any war. There hadn’t been one for ten years, and it didn’t look like anyone could afford to start another. Walter had only one piece of advice to Charley: “Stay away from submarines.”