Bodark Creek - 16. Chapter 16

After Mama died, Daddy wanted to quit the mill. He was sixty-eight and had been working almost since he was born, first on his family’s farm, then building furniture, finally in the mills. But we didn’t have any money and didn’t even own the house we lived in. Rosalind was twenty by then and was working in the kindergarten. Charley was twelve, so he was still in school with me. Sonny was a foreman, Dougie and Leon machinists, and Frances, Walter, Virginia, and Ruth were weavers.

But we were all mill workers, living in mill houses, and raising mill families. With so many people in our family working, you’d think there would have been enough money to let Daddy stop. But there wasn’t. “Who else will take care of you and Charley?” he asked. “This should be a lesson for all of us. Though I not sure what we’re supposed to learn.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten married the second time,” Dougie told Daddy. Dougie was about the only one who could fool around like that.

“Wait till you’re forty-two,” Daddy told him. “Then see if you’re ready to give up your wife.”

Dougie was already thirty-four and didn’t like the idea at all.

And no one had expected Mama to die. With Daddy’s first wife, everyone knew she was sick. But Mama had always been healthy. It was almost like Aunt Evie had taken all the sickness and protected her. Still, their mama had died young, because of her heart, so maybe we were all looking the wrong way.

With Daddy, everyone was watching him get older. You could see him get more and more tired, and cranky, and sometimes not even make sense. “I’d like to help out,” I heard Walter tell Sonny. “But with the new one on the way...”

Walter already had two daughters, and he wasn’t finished yet. Frances, Sonny, and Dougie were, but Rosalind, Charley, and I hadn’t even started. Daddy was surrounded by grandchildren, and he liked that fine. But it also made him seem much older.

So Charley and I went to school, Rosalind worked, and we all shared the jobs Mama used to do. So much was easier than it had been before, because so much had changed. The house had electricity, and a telephone, and a radio. We didn’t use the outhouse or the outside pump, though we still carried coal to the stove, and we didn’t have a refrigerator yet. We didn’t have an automobile, either, but Sonny and Dougie and Walter shared a second-hand one. “If they’d sell that thing and just give me what they paid for it,” Daddy said, “I could quit at the mill.”

“Then how would we get around?” I wanted to ask. Instead, I told him I was almost finished with school. Soon, I’d have a job.

That almost didn’t happen, because that winter was a terrible one for the flu. I’d been sick before – we all had – but never like that. First, I got a cold, but it stayed much longer than usual. Then I got a worse cold, and when that finally went away, I got the flu. There wasn’t a lot they could do for the flu then. You stayed in bed and tried to keep warm if you had chills or cool if you had fever. And you tried to stay away from everyone else. Rosalind moved to the front room, and Charley slept with Daddy. And Rosalind brought me books, and Charley my work from school, though all I really wanted to do was sleep.

“You can’t,” Rosalind told me. “You’ve got to fight or this will turn into pneumonia. And you know what happens then.”

Yes. People died of pneumonia all the time, and I didn’t want to get it. But I was too weak to do much more than smile when people came to the door of my room. Rosalind took care of me, and cleaned up after me, and that was embarrassing because I was at the age where I wanted as much privacy as possible. Not that I ever had a lot, sharing a room. Still, I was glad Rosalind was there, and when spring came, I started to get better.

“You’ve missed a lot,” my teachers said when I went back to school. “You really should be held back.” But a lot of my friends had missed school, and most of us were pretty good at it. So the school held classes during the summer, and we all caught up.

The next winter, the flu was just as bad. It seemed to get worse each year, and we passed colds around so fast our school was almost shut down. If that could have changed anything, I wish it had been. I didn’t get sick, but Dougie’s wife Virginia did. She caught the flu from one of their daughters, then gave it to the other one, and almost gave it to Dougie and their son.

“It’s all we can do to keep going,” Dougie told us. He’d work a full day, then come home and stay up half the night worrying. “Gordy and I cook, and if you think the food’s good, you’ve got another think coming. It’s a wonder that doesn’t make us all sick.”

It didn’t, though there was a time when Dougie said, “If it weren’t for the girls and Gordy, I’m not sure I’d want to be alive.” This was after Virginia died.

“You can’t talk like that,” Sonny told him. “You can’t even think that way. Even if you didn’t have your family, there’s the rest of us to think of.”

“The rest of you can go to hell,” Dougie said, as tired as I’d ever seen him. It didn’t take Daddy telling us to realize Dougie wasn’t thinking right.

“It’s hard, when your wife dies,” Daddy said. “Even harder the first time, when you don’t know who’s going to bring up your family. If it hadn’t been for Frances, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

We got by ‘cause everyone took care of everyone else. Myra and Ruth took in Dougie’s daughters, and Gordon moved in with us. That put Charley permanently into Daddy’s bed.

“It wouldn’t be bad if he weren’t so used to sleeping with someone else. He just wraps himself around me.”

“That’s how I sleep with Rosalind,” I told Charley. “And you used to crawl in between us.”

“Yeah, but I was three years old.”

We all made Dougie’s family feel like part of a larger one, but I know that didn’t make up for losing their mama. Virginia was forty when she died, twelve years younger than Mama, and somehow that made it harder for her daughters. Gordon didn’t let it show, maybe from being sixteen and a boy, but the girls were eight and eleven. Even their brother couldn’t explain.

Then my sister Frances died. She was almost halfway between Virginia and Mama, forty-seven, and it just seemed too much. It wasn’t even winter. It was early spring, when the worst of the flu season had passed. But she caught a late cold, and it became one of those bad pneumonias that nothing could help, and it was over in a couple of days. Her daughter Audrey was already grown, and William wasn’t far behind. So when Frances died, Leon took them all back to Hattiesburg.

“That’s where we spent most of our lives, and it’s where my family is. So that’s where we need to be.”

Everyone was so surprised that we really couldn’t say anything. It was even worse than losing Frances, if anything could be. We were losing a whole part of our family.

“It’s not fair,” Rosalind told me. “I’m not even used to missing Frances and Virginia. I won’t have this.” But Leon wouldn’t change his mind.

“I miss Mama more,” I told Rosalind, and she agreed. And it seemed foolish to mention my not seeing William.

“I wish we could at least have gone to the funeral,” Rosalind said. “Maybe that would make it easier.”

But Frances had been buried in Hattiesburg. And there was nothing we could do about that, either.