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Granddad smelled of cow manure and Burma Shave.
It was a warm,
friendly smell, because he was both a farmer and a barber. But smells didn’t
matter to me much. Besides, there was no one except other farmers to
compare him with, anyway.
I’m Katie, and
I’d sure like to find out why grown-ups always talk around kids like we weren’t
there at all. Sometimes, I feel I’m just a flyspeck on the wall Granddad
squished with a rolled up newspaper, and Miss Edna will wash me away on cleaning
day.
Do old people think we don’t understand
what they’re saying, or that we’re too little to remember? I’ve thought about it
a lot, and sometimes I think I remember most everything, but not the thing I
most want to know. I do know that my living here on the farm will probably be as
short as my stay in Kansas City with my real mama was. She didn’t want me, and
she left me here on Morris Farm.
It’s not that
being here is so terrible. Farms are nice with lots of animals and not
many people. Animals are nicer than people. It’s just that I can’t remember my
mama’s face, and no one ever told me why she went away and left me. I
need to know why, ‘cause I sure don’t want it to happen
again.
It doesn’t bother me that grown-ups keep secrets
like when Miss Edna and Granddad talk about Mr. Weber down the road a piece
courting Miss Ida, or about Mrs. Lena being in the family way for the twelve
time. Those things don’t matter much.
I mean like when the
two of them argue, a lot, in the same kitchen, yet really apart with their
words, and Granddad says, “Don’t ever mention Dianna’s name to me again, after
what she did.” So I do know Mama’s name, though not her face. But just when I
think maybe I’ll get some answers to the questions I’m afraid to ask about my
mama, Miss Edna says, “Hush! The child.”
Then I know I’m
not going to get any answers at all, because they’ll stare all stony-faced and
mad at each other, and not talking any more. Not that they ever talk much,
anyway.
I have to find out why my mama left me. I
keep waiting for some clues, but I most never get them. I have nightmares at
night. By day, when I climb up in the gnarly old mulberry tree, I think about
it, too. Maybe some evil pirates came and took my mama away, and she’s trying
hard to find me, but she can’t escape. I think I got that out of one of Miss
Edna’s storybooks. Or maybe I was kidnapped and brought to this farm, and my
mama is out there looking for me.
I tied a little flag on
the mailbox out on the muddy road, hoping maybe one day she’d drive her wagon by
and see it. So far, she hasn’t come, and it’s been at least a couple of years
that I can remember back. Before that I can’t remember anything, so I guess I
was old enough to walk and talk, but not old enough to remember much when I came
here. Nobody ever said.
Besides, how would I know her if I
saw her? Miss Edna once grabbed up a picture I found and put it away real
fast. But I caught a glimpse of what looked like me still as a baby about a year
or two old, and I hoped the pretty lady next to me was my mama. I’ve never been
brave enough to ask why she left me here, or why Miss Edna hid that
picture.
Listening to Miss Edna count all my sins every
day, though, I believe I have it figured out. It must have been because I
was a naughty baby, so my mama didn’t want me. They never mentioned a daddy,
even when they wouldn’t talk about Dianna, so I’m not sure if I had one. But even after all my thinking, and pretending and trying
to help her find me, I can only come up with one reason that my mama might have
left me. I must have been a terribly bad baby, and she just couldn’t
stand me anymore. There just couldn’t be any other reason I can come up
with.
So now, what do I do? I’m no dummy. I’m
going to have to pretend all the time that I’m the best little girl in
the world. I’ll be so good that Miss Edna and Granddad will never want to send
me away. I’ll be so good that Jesus will see it all and never let someone throw
me away again. I’ll be so good that everyone wants to steal me away from
Granddad and Miss Edna. But they’ll have to cry, because I’ll never leave
Granddad. I hope I can be good enough that he’ll never leave
me.
The funny thing is that no matter how hard I try
to be good, trouble always finds me, even when I’m hiding from it.
I‘m three-years old now, and big
enough to follow in Granddad’s footsteps by daytime when he tends the milk-warm
animals of the barn and then works in his crop fields. But by evening, men from
other farms gather around the old, round wooden table Miss Edna and Granddad
brought in a covered wagon from Indiana. A coal oil lamp glows in the center,
casting wavering shadows around the room. I watch Granddad cut hair, shave
faces, or trim beards of his farming neighbors, while pipe smoke turns the air
all blue.
I love listening to their man-talk of Depression, farm
reports, news events, and their ideas about problems of the world, the country,
and especially Milan and Green City, Missouri.
They know so much I
don’t know, and their deep voices make me curious about things, whether I
understand what they say or not. I huddle in a shadowy corner on a little
three-legged stool, hoping no one will notice me and send me to bed.
I
don’t know if Miss Edna or Granddad are related in some way, or just old people
willing to take in a little girl who had no place else to go. No one ever told
me, and I wondered if other mamas ever gave away their children, too, but I
didn’t know of any. I soon found that whether she was related or not, Miss Edna
would never have allowed me to call her Grandmother. Maybe she thought it made
her sound old. Granddad told me I could call him Granddad, rather than Mr. Bill,
and he didn’t seem to mind at all.
Miss Edna had a way of shaking her
finger at everyone to make her words stick, but she wasn’t exactly mean, just
far away somehow, as though everything and everybody were too much
bother. She was tall and very skinny, with her hair getting mixed
with both black and white, “…because of me,” she’d say when she was fussing.
Sometimes she sort of looked pinched around her mouth.
One thing she
always fussed about was Granddad’s having the Kansas City Star newspaper mailed
to their farm. “It’s an extra expense we can ill afford,” she cautioned, “with
the child and all.”
“It’s little enough, Miss Edna,” Granddad said.
“How else can we know what’s happening in the world? Besides, my barbering
customers like to read up on news as much as I do. We need to know what’s going
on, what with this Depression and threats of war, even if we’re living out here
in the boondocks.”
I never was sure what the “boondocks” were, or if
I was the
“child” they talked about in whispers. But this was one of the few
arguments Granddad won, because he called the newspaper “…a business expense,”
and because he stood tall, tanned, and straight as a tree when something riled
him up.
It was my job to run out to the
county dirt road every afternoon and wait for the mailman to bring Granddad’s
newspaper. Mr. Sam, the mailman, drove a battered old truck that
jounced along the ruts on sunny days and slithered from side to side and
sometimes into the run-off ditches at the side of the road on snowy or rainy
days. He had a big beard connected to bushy sideburns, and was
tanned dark from the Mid-western sun. He always greeted me with, “And how’s our
little girl today?”
I figured out that he said “our little
girl” because there were few children among the farms, so these farm men and
their wives seemed to think that I belonged to them all, especially since I
didn’t really belong to anybody. I sort of liked him to say that.
Mr. Sam would, on nice days, invite me to ride with him to the next farm and
walk back. It was a treat for me, and we’d sing together some favorite hymns on
the way. Old Mr. Forbes’ farm was on the next ridge over, with a valley, a
holler, between them. We’d still be singing when the old man hobbled out to get
his mail. He’d speak kindly to me, and they’d both caution me not to stop in the
little stream down in the holler.
“I seen a water moccasin down there,
Katie-girl,” Mr. Forbes would say. “Use the bridge. Don’t go wading across, like
you usually want to. Miss Edna will whup you if you get your shoes and stockings
dirty again.”
So I would jump out, wave to them both, and skip the
half-mile back to Granddad’s farm, carrying his newspaper. And sometimes I’d
stop on the wooden plank bridge that had no sides to it, and peer over to see if
I could spot the water moccasin slithering among the mosses and rocks, or a
bullfrog, or birds nesting in the bull rushes.
Miss Edna always
waited for me at the top of the hill, with her arm lifted to shield her eyes
from the sun. Her homespun apron flapped in the breeze. Somehow I always
remembered Miss Edna that way, even long after she was gone--silhouetted against
the bright Missouri sky. She would take me inside, pour a glass of milk and give
me a biscuit before we settled down to the daily lessons she’d planned for me to
read in the Bible.
“What you can learn is all you’ll ever have to help
you through life,” Miss Edna would say at every day’s beginning.
“Learning is never
wasted.”
“Miss Edna,” I’d asked once. “How did you know how to teach me to
read?”
She paused a moment and frowned, and I was afraid I shouldn’t
have asked, but there was no way to get the words back in my mouth.
“Why, you’re just full of questions, aren’t you?” Then her sharp voice softened
a bit and she said, “I was a schoolteacher for a country school when I met
Granddad. I loved teaching. But, in those faraway days, lady teachers could no
longer teach children if they married.”
“Why not?”
Miss
Edna twisted her fingers together a while. “Because they were no longer pure. It
was a stupid rule, since they didn’t make men teachers quit when they
married and were no longer pure. Men were even allowed time off to court a
bride.”
I could tell I’d hit on a sore point, because she looked all
squinched up in her eyes. She shook her head and scowled at me, as
though I could have done something about this unfairness. I was always scared if
I thought Miss Edna was mad at me.
“It was unfair,” she said, “that at
some point in your professional life, lady teachers had to choose to remain an
old maid teaching other people’s children, or to have a husband and family of
their own. I chose to marry Bill Morris, and look at me now.”
I was
almost afraid to look at her because her voice didn’t sound like the
happily-ever-after kind of marriage we’d read about in the fairy tale books. I
could tell that maybe it was a hard choice for Miss Edna, and she sounded still
mad about it, too. I figured out that she was mad at Granddad for some reason,
and I relaxed my attention a moment. At least it wasn’t me, this time.
But that wasn’t good for her to be mad at Granddad, either, since she never
seemed very happy about her place in life. But at three, I accepted every word
Miss Edna told me. “It’s just the way of the world,” she’d say. “Just a woman’s
lot in life.”
I was glad I was just a little girl. Maybe I wouldn’t
ever have to be a woman and have a woman’s lot.
Miss Edna taught me
to read from the Bible. I thought there were lots of big words to learn, and she
made me sound out each part to her satisfaction, but it got easier as we read
together every single day. I had to answer her questions about the meaning,
afterward. There were fairy stories and nursery rhymes she kept in a special
bookcase for “…teaching little girls, not for little girls to touch.” She also
taught me poetry, though the poems seemed almost a chore. She made me memorize a
new poem every week, for my “edification and elocution,” she said. Edification
and elocution must have been really important, because every Friday afternoon,
I’d have to recite the poems when Miss Edna’s “church ladies” came to call.
They were the only people ever let in through the front door to the parlor.
Everyone else, including neighbors, farmers wanting barbering, and me, had to
use the back door into the kitchen, through a screened-in porch which held the
pedal machine that separated out cream for sale and Miss Edna’s scrubbing
washtub hanging from a nail on the porch wall. The washtub moved to the kitchen
on Saturday night for baths. Miss Edna poured in more hot water from an old
teakettle, carefully, so she wouldn’t burn my knee or back, but with her face
turned away. She always put a screen around me to “protect my innocence,”
whatever that meant.
But the “church ladies” came into
the parlor from the front door and I, who was invited into the parlor
only on those days, watched breathlessly from behind a curtain that
temporarily hid the more frugal kitchen. It was exciting to watch the ladies
“put on airs” as they paraded in. At least, that’s what Granddad called it. I
quickly learned that it wasn’t smart to repeat anything Granddad said about Miss
Edna, or anything Miss Edna said about Granddad. It scared me that they didn’t
talk the same way together that they did separately.
I thought the
church ladies quite elegant. It was all I could do to sit still and try to be
quiet, which was Miss Edna’s rule. They wore long skirts and tidy white blouses
with stick up starched sleeves that got tight at the wrists, and huge hats with
feathers and little birds or flowers on the brim. I hoped they hadn’t killed
real birds for their hats, but I was afraid to ask. I tried to walk behind them
when they sat down to see if I could tell if they were stuffed, but I was afraid
to touch and find out for sure.
Each one of them had some kind of
brooch or cameo at her high neckline. And of course, Miss Edna dressed just like
they did for this weekly occasion. I wondered if these were favorite clothes
they’d saved from their young girl days just for special occasions and church,
or if they were costumes from some storybook because, like Miss Edna, they wore
only homespun housedresses and aprons the rest of the time. The ladies took
teensy little steps in their long tight dresses, like they were hobbled. I’d
seen Granddad hobble a horse to keep him from wiggling while he was harnessed,
so I knew a hobble when I saw one.
The ladies looked very
old to me, including Miss Edna. I peeked from the curtain to watch them sit
primly on the edge of the best sofas and chairs where, shortly before the ladies
arrived, Miss Edna had whisked off and hidden the old sheets that covered them
all the rest of the week. There were pretty, hand-crocheted doilies on
everything, including the backs of the sofas. I wanted to touch to see how the
doilies were made, but I knew I’d better not. The ladies would sip tea and
nibble “crumpets,” but I think they were really just biscuits Miss Edna baked.
They talked an hour about Jesus and the Bible, then the latest gossip, and then
it was my turn.
Miss Edna invited me inside the parlor. Of course, she
had me dress in my Sunday clothes, and she brushed my unruly dark hair
painfully into a semblance of order, and admonished me to “…sit still,
don’t fidget, and don’t get dirty,” beforehand. Sitting still was a big problem,
since Granddad said my normal gait was a bounce, a skip, and a run.
The ladies called for me to “say my piece,” and I recited it just as Miss Edna
taught me, with expressions and hand flourishes that I didn’t completely
understand. They listened quiet-like and dabbed at their eyes with
their lace hankies. There was rarely a dry eye in the parlor, and I never
figured out why they cried, even when my recitation for the week was a happy or
funny poem. My favorite, and theirs, too, I think, was “Little Orphan Annie,”
because they asked me to say that one again, even after whatever new poem I’d
learned.
“Poor little one,” said Miss Pansy, squeezing my
hand as I went around to do the required curtsey to each of the ladies. Her face
always looked pinched, like she ate from the kumquat tree, and she touched
everything, even me, a lot.
“She’s such a smart little thing,” said
Miss Tate, the chubbiest of the ladies who kept straightening her cummerbund
like she thought it would show up smaller. “I can’t figure out why no one wants
her.” She patted me on the head. I hated that.
Miss Edna nodded and
said, “Yes, she’s quite precocious. That’s about all she has in her favor. I
know she’s young, but it would be a shame not to teach her when she’s so eager
to learn.”
Miss Francis, the quiet one, said, “Do you think you’ll
ever find her a home?”
Miss Edna didn’t answer, and that scared me,
too. Doesn’t she want to keep me here with her and Granddad? Where else could
I go? Maybe they weren’t really talking about me.
It was a bother that they always fussed over me, and they talked as
though I wasn’t right there in the room. I wanted to interrupt them and say,
“Hey, I’m here. Please talk to me,” but I didn’t dare. Miss Edna would
have said it was rude.
Miss Pearl fluttered her hankie next to her
heart at all times. She said it was to better take the vapors. “Dear Edna,” she
said, “you have such forbearance to take the child at our age. God will most
certainly bless you.”
“Please,” I asked. “What’s forbearance?” I liked
hearing a new word.
No one answered me. They just looked uncomfortable
and clucked around like a bunch of disturbed hens in the henhouse.
“Little girls should be seen and not heard,” caroled Miss Edna. “You may be
excused to go out and play.” She always said the same thing, “Be sure to change
into your play clothes, Katie. Don’t get your Sunday dress
dirty.”
I made my escape as quickly as I could with
every one of these old ladies wanting to touch my hair, or pinch my cheek, or
cry a tear or two into their silky lace hankies with initials embroidered on. I
didn’t like the cheek-pinchers much. But Miss Edna said I had to be polite to
every one of them, because they were her only friends out here in the wilds of
Missouri. At the first sign of a pause in the conversation, I’d dash to my
little suitcase and put on my play clothes.
Even in play
clothes, no part of my body could ever show. Miss Edna always had me dress
behind a screen, alone, even though I had trouble with buttons, some in the
back, so they usually didn’t match up right. I wore a hand-me-down dress from
some girl named Agnes I didn’t know who lived in Milan, Missouri. It reached
almost to my ankles. “You’ll grow into it,” Miss Edna said. Then there were the
long white cotton stockings that went all the way up to “there.” To hold up the
stockings, there were little rubber clips that were hard to hook together. Miss
Edna called them supporters. They hung from a narrow belt underneath my dress,
but they could take my skinny fingers all of ten minutes just to fumble each one
of them into the metal clasps that held them up. On top of it all, I had to wear
a long-sleeved, red slipover sweater with a huge hole in the front, plus a
sunbonnet.
By the time I was dressed, the ladies had usually
disappeared, and I could run out the back way unnoticed. I didn’t want anyone to
notice me anyway, because I hated that big hole in the sweater. If I objected,
though, Miss Edna always said it was still plenty good enough because it kept my
arms covered. It seemed every summer day was too hot for a sweater, but I had to
wear it anyway, just as I had to wear shoes laced over my long stockings when I
wished I could go barefoot.
When I sat in the outhouse, I looked
through the Sears and Roebuck catalog hanging there on a nail, and I dreamed of
a bareback sundress like the girls in the catalog wore. I peeked at them as the
catalog disappeared page by page. I always saved those pages with little girl
clothes for last. I had never seen anything like them. The little girls were
always smiling and holding their mother’s hands. I wondered what that would be
like. Did they all have mothers? Why didn’t I? Was mine dead, or just
lost?
But Miss Edna scoffed at the mere idea of the
Sears, Roebuck clothes and said, “No decent little girl would show off her legs
or back or any part of her body, sun or no sun, heat or no heat.” Under Miss
Edna’s guidance, I learned that the human body was something very shameful, and
I carefully hid from everyone while bathing or dressing. Baring anything, even
bare feet, was sinful in her eyes, and therefore, in mine, as well.
When she put her lips in a straight, flat line, I knew I had somehow displeased
her, and I quaked in my knees. After all, I sure didn’t want her to get mad at
me if I was a bad girl, because then she might leave me, too. The threat of
being abandoned always seemed to hang over my head in everything I did. What
if my mama never came back for me, and what if Miss Edna and Granddad got tired
of having me on the farm? What if I couldn’t be a good enough girl? I
promised every night to God that I’d try harder, but I didn’t know if God helped
little girls out of trouble they usually managed to get into all by
themselves.
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Konigsberg before WWII
