Bodark Creek - 20. Chapter 20

As wrong as we had all been about money, Mrs. Seiler was right about Albie. The older he got, the more different he was. He looked all right, and some things he did were just fine. He could talk with other children and play with them. But he didn’t seem to think the same way they did, and you could tell that even before he was two.

But he got a good first birthday present. The mill opened again, and almost everyone went back to work. The new owners were some of the original owners, and they were loyal to our families. Still, they couldn’t hire as many people as they had before, and they couldn’t pay as much. But everyone was so happy to have the mill open again that they didn’t care. “Now everything’s fine,” they insisted. “Everything will be all right.”

And to be truthful, Texas did a lot better in the Depression than even places as close as Oklahoma. And our part of Texas was luckier than most. But because I didn’t have a job when the mill closed, I didn’t have a job to get back. And I didn’t have enough money left to go on in school, even if there had been one in town that was open. So I took care of Albie, and that saved us the little we used to give Mrs. Seiler. Dock was home a lot, too, because he was one of the people who wasn’t hired back. But Rosalind got her old job, along with Sonny and Dougie and Walter, and they all tried to get Dock back on the hiring list.

“Four people from one family is a lot,” the owners told them, which made pretty good sense. “And we’d like to look out for everyone.”

Dock took it pretty well. He was a good carpenter, so he could find odd jobs, and he had my brothers’ car to get him around. But other men needed work, too, so Dock’s jobs were never steady. He built cheap furniture for a couple of months, before that company went out of business. And he helped board up some of the empty stores in town, to protect them till other businesses opened. He even tried selling some furniture he built on his own, but no one really needed it. Mostly, he stayed with Albie and me.

And if there was something wrong with Albie – and we all had to admit that there was – Dock thought he knew where it came from. On our side of the family, some of the babies died, and some didn’t live long enough to grow up, but there wasn’t anything like this. With Dock’s family, there was a history.

“My cousin Samuel was never quite right,” Dock told us. “He was my oldest sister Gennie’s second son. He fell into a creek when he was sixteen, and it took us over a year to find his body. And my granddaddy on my daddy’s side got feeble well before his time. I remember, when I was little, helping my mama wash and dress him. And he couldn’t even have been forty.”

“It can’t all be your family’s fault,” Rosalind told him. “There must be things we don’t know about our side.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Dock said. “It’s happened.”

So taking care of Albie became Dock’s main job. Even when Sonny or Dougie found him day work, he sometimes had to let it go. He’d thank them nicely, always being polite. Then he’d say, “Albie isn’t feeling right today. I need to look after him.”

“Addy can do that,” they’d point out, and even Rosalind would agree.

“No, he’s my son,” Dock would insist.

“What do you do all day?” Rosalind would ask, not that she didn’t know. We were always busy. There was cooking and cleaning and baking and washing. And there was always something for Dock to fix on the house. We were also growing more in our garden than we used to, and Dock made sure we canned everything we didn’t eat. He was constantly building shelves, everywhere they could fit, and salvaging jars, when he wasn’t chasing after Albie. That boy could run faster than any one of our dogs.

Once it was clear that something was wrong with Albie, Rosalind decided not to have any more children. That was hard, because she really wanted more, and we didn’t know anyone who had less than four or five. Families were getting smaller, but not just because of money. As Walter said, “Babies aren’t dying as much. And when you know you’re not going to lose three or four, you don’t have to try for a dozen.”

We didn’t know anyone who’d lost a baby in the last ten years. And no one had lost a wife giving birth, either. So to say, “We’re not having any more children,” to a man who already didn’t have a steady job wasn’t easy. I don’t think any of my brothers would have stood for it.

“I just can’t take chances,” Rosalind told me, even before she went to Dock.

“Couldn’t you try once more?”

“What if he’s just like Albie? What if they all are? Could you live with that?”

“Have you talked with Dock?” I asked. “He knows a lot about families.”

“I’m going to. I’m just waiting for an easy time.”

I knew a little more about marriage by then. And I knew there were ways of not having babies that didn’t mean breaking a marriage up. I also knew that Dock and Rosalind really loved each other, because of the way he slept all curled around her. I’d see that because I sometimes had to use the bathroom at night, and the only way to get to it was to go through their room. But I didn’t know how Dock and Rosalind really managed it. Or what it took out of Dock to know that Albie, damaged as he was, would be his only child.

I tried talking with him about it. At least, I tried once. One of the families at church had lost both its mother and father in a horrible fire, and there were three young children to be raised. “Would you want to take one in?” I asked Dock. “It would be like having another of your own.”

He thought about it. “But he’d never really be ours,” he finally said. “And it’s hard enough asking Rosalind to feed the four of us. Let alone work to feed another child.”

“I think she’d do it,” I said. “If you asked.”

“Maybe I will. But don’t you go saying anything about it first.”

I didn’t. But if Dock ever asked, I never heard about it. And I’m almost sure Rosalind would have told me.

By that time I was kind of thinking about other things anyway. I’m not exactly certain when I first remember seeing Martin. And I can’t really say I liked him from the start, because I wasn’t thinking about him that way. For one thing, he was thirteen years older than I was, so he was never with us in school. And I wouldn’t have just run into him in town, because he mostly worked on his family’s farm. I mainly saw him in church, but as someone else’s older brother. But he remembered watching me for years.

“When I was maybe nineteen,” he said, “I told my sisters, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’”

I laughed at that. “But I wouldn’t have been more than six or seven.”

Martin laughed, too. “My sisters thought I was crazy as well. But I was raised in a house full of girls. And I could always tell which ones were going to be pretty.”

He didn’t just wait for me though. He’d partly told his sisters that to put them off, especially when they were trying to introduce him to their friends. Growing up, Martin was very shy.

There wasn’t much reason. He was handsome enough, with almost dark brown hair. He was thin and not as tall as our older son turned out to be, but Martin always seemed taller than anyone else because he was so skinny. Though he was strong and could lift me as quickly as I did one of our babies. His hands were always rough and his face a little red from the sun, and even when his hair was just washed, it didn’t sit quite straight. He was always pushing it back, or I was pushing it down. He had good eyes though and never needed glasses. And he was so proud of his teeth, he never smoked or drank coffee. Mostly, though, he was a very honest man. There were people who’d say things against him, like ‘He’s so quiet. What do you ever have to talk about?’ but no one could ever say that he stole or lied. I could have done a lot worse than marry Martin, and I might have done a little better. But at the time, he seemed a very good choice.