Bodark Creek - 31. Chapter 31

My children were growing up in a very different way from how I was raised. For one thing, they were living on a farm, not in town and around a mill. And while Rosalind, Charley, and I all had jobs we had to do every day, if they didn’t get done, it’s not like animals didn’t get fed or didn’t get back to where they belonged. The worst thing that happened was that one of us would get in trouble.

Del and Neal got most of the heavy work on the farm, because they were older and stronger. But Patricia and Joann had jobs that were more important than mine had been helping Mama in the kitchen. My daughters did a lot of that, too, and I taught them everything I could about cooking and baking. My sons could fry an egg if they needed to or boil up oatmeal. But they were much better with a cow when it was in a pen than when it needed to be put in the oven. And they possibly could have watched me bake for fifteen years without ever learning how to make dough.

“What’s yeast for?” Patricia once asked Del. She was probably ten, which would have made him sixteen.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something you put in cake?”

“But why?” she went on. Del just looked at her.

“It doesn’t matter,” he finally insisted.

“Don’t you want to know?” she teased.

“Do you want to know how to make bulls not make babies?”

“Yes,” Pat said.

Del laughed. “I’m gonna stay away from you when you get older.”

There were some things on the farm, I would have stayed away from, too, but Martin taught me all he could about them. And he kept teaching Del and Neal as things about farming changed. The same way Pat and Joann kept teaching me.

I never would have said, “Mama, let’s cook this.” Or “Mama, look at the cake in this magazine. Let’s make that.” For one thing, I don’t remember there being a lot of magazines around when I was growing up. We might see one at school or in the town library, but not in our kitchen. And most of Mama’s recipes were in her head. Rosalind and I could beg, “Please make Aunt Evie’s sugar cookies,” or “Please make your grandmama’s pound cake.” But if Mama said “No,” it’s not like we could bake these things ourselves. We couldn’t even light the stove because it wasn’t as easy as striking a match and turning on the gas. Lighting the stove meant carrying in wood and knowing how to kindle a fire. Still, at the same ages Rosalind and I had once been, Pat and Joann surprised me one morning by baking a cake for my birthday. Martin and I never even heard them get up.

That wasn’t all that changed. Rosalind and I weren’t expected to finish school, especially if something bad happened in our family, and we needed to help out. Charley was never expected to go past eighth grade, and if he found a job before then, that was all right, too. The big surprise was that Charley read as much as he did and wrote as much. None of my other brothers could catch him. But a lot of that, he said, came from having too much time to pass in the Navy. “And you can only play poker so many hours a day.”

Martin also quit after eighth grade, along with his sisters. The youngest one was my age, but I barely remember seeing her at school because she didn’t go if she didn’t want to. “And there were always better things to do on the farm,” she told me. “Even in terrible weather, who’d want to swap places with someone stuck inside?”

I would, especially in bad weather. There were years when I had to run out in the rain to feed the chickens or out in the cold to make sure all our gates were latched. Any of those times, I would have rather been in a warm schoolroom. So I made sure my children only missed going to school when they honestly had to.

“Daddy really needs help today,” Neal would say.

“But you’re not gonna be the one to give it to him.”

“Come on, Mama. I can make up my work.”

“You wanna be a goat all your life?” Del would finish for me. He liked learning a lot more than Neal ever did. And though Neal would give Del a nasty look or hit his brother on the arm, they’d both end up going to school that day.

There was also no question about either of them quitting early. By the time the war was over, boys and girls were all expected to graduate. People thought badly of you if you didn’t. Even Martin admitted there were things he had to do on the farm that he couldn’t figure out without reading and arithmetic.

I read when I could, mostly for a little while at night, with Martin sleeping beside me. Or if it happened to be quiet in the kitchen, and I had a few minutes free. But it was almost never quiet in our house or on the farm, and I always seemed to be busy.

“I don’t remember my brother and sisters making so much noise,” Martin would tell us. “And there were a lot more people living in this house then.”

Martin had grown up with his mama and daddy, his three sisters, his brother, and a couple of orphaned cousins.

“Well, maybe your mama and daddy were stricter,” Del would answer, though it’s not like Martin had really asked a question. “And weren’t children supposed to be ‘not heard’ from back then?”

“We were quiet in the house at least,” Martin admitted.

“Aunt Cordie and Aunt Emily are sure making up for that now,” Patricia liked to joke, because everyone knew how much Martin’s sisters loved to talk.

“Or maybe you’re not remembering it right,” Joann would add. “Maybe you were every bit as noisy as we are, but you won’t admit it now.”

“Maybe he can’t,” Neal said, “because he was always the one causing trouble.”

That would make everyone laugh, and Martin would go along with it. He could let himself be made fun of because he knew that none of his children would ever talk back to him when it counted. At least, not while they were young. Still, there were things he stayed out of, like sometimes teaching the girls. When certain things came up, Martin would leave Pat and Joann to me, and I didn’t have to ask “Why?” It was how he’d been raised.

And maybe I was closer to my girls than to Del and Neal. And maybe Martin was nearer to our boys than to Pat and Joann. But I know that both of us were closer to all of our children than my mama and daddy ever were to Rosalind, Charley, and me. It wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong or that they were any different from other mamas and daddies. Maybe a little of it was that Daddy was so much older than we were. He was almost fifty the year I was born, and Mama was already thirty-six. But something else had changed, and it was the way that families looked at themselves.

When I was growing up, everyone worked hard, and we all tried to be good to each other, but we never thought much about being a family. Mama and Daddy were always working at the mill or busy in our house, and we celebrated birthdays and Christmas and Easter and went to meetings and dances at the church. But we never planned everything together. Mama and Daddy would never say, “We’re all gonna spend this Sunday together.”

I didn’t talk with Rosalind much about the changes because I wasn’t sure she really saw them. Dock still spent much more time with Albie than my sister did. But I noticed the changes with Martin’s sisters and even with my brothers. When I asked if they were purposely making time to be with their children, some of them didn’t even realize what had happened. Sonny said, “I thought that’s the way it always was.”

“Not really,” I pointed out.

When I asked Martin about it, he said, “I know we’re doing things a little different from my mama and daddy.” But he couldn’t tell me what things or why, and he didn’t really go out of his way to look for them. He spent as much time as he could with our children and taught them everything he thought might be useful, concentrating first on the farm because that’s what he knew best. But he also made room for things he saw other mamas and daddies doing.

“We’ve got keep up,” he’d say. “The world won’t come to us.”

Maybe not the way he meant. But in so many other ways, it kept doing just that.