We always had plenty of everything to share with family and neighbors and hobos alike. Food was put up for the winter, with rows of jars four deep lining the fruit-house shelves. Hand-sewn quilts were stacked to burrow under on cold nights, and more were being made on the quilting frame crowded into the kitchen. Feed sacks turned up as pillowcases and dishtowels and aprons. Grandpa would take me with him to buy feed for the chickens so I could pick out the sacks I liked. When Grandma ran the sturdy flowered prints through her Singer treadle sewing machine, rose and yellow and lilac sundresses flowed out the other side.
After I squeezed the last bit of Ipana from the tube, Grandma made do by using soda and a sprinkle of salt on my toothbrush, and if the bottle of Fitch’s shampoo ran out, she washed my hair with Ivory soap. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” I often heard her say.
But there was still a chicken in our pot.
And homemade dumplings too.
Grandma was taking me and Vonnie to Flat Mountain with her, leaving Grandpa to fend for himself and tend the animals. She finished up the packing, sending me to the fruit house for a quart of bread and butter pickles to fill an empty spot in one of the boxes. After checking on Uncle Ed, she started up to bed. Before long she came back down and headed toward the bathroom, reappearing with the bottle of rubbing alcohol safely tucked under her arm.
“Safe’s a whole lot better than sorry,” she muttered, and started back up the stairs.
Next morning Uncle Ed’s complexion had improved to a gassy yellow, so we started before daylight, stopping along the way to get pint bottles of milk for him and nickel packs of peanuts and bottles of Orange Crush and Grapette soda pop for us. The sign on the ESSO filling station said gas was thirteen cents a gallon. Grandma said she expected we could get it cheaper on down the road apiece, but Uncle Ed pulled in despite her, telling the man to fill ’er up, and yes, he most assuredly could check the oil while he was at it. Grandma knew some battles weren’t worth fighting, and since she was depending on Uncle Ed’s good graces to get us there, she didn’t let on she noticed.
Vonnie and I played cow poker, each of us counting cows in fields along our side of the road. If you passed a cemetery on your side, you had to bury all your cows and start over. Bushes or other lumps could be mistaken for cows, so lots of arguing and a fair amount of cheating went on until we aggravated Grandma so much she put a stop to the game. She handed us the shoebox that held paper dolls and coloring books with pictures of open-mouthed children frozen in place as they frolicked around a Maypole. When we lost interest, we looked for Burma Shave ads, six wood signs stuck in the ground along the roadside, each with a line of a poem.
This one had a word Grandma didn’t allow me to say. I liked it best:
SHE WILL FLOOD
YOUR FACE
WITH KISSES
BECAUSE YOU SMELL
SO DARN DELICIOUS
BURMA SHAVE
We turned off the highway onto a dirt road that drew itself up the mountain in fits and starts, stopping for cattle gates that had to be opened and closed before going on. We rounded a curve, and the house appeared of a sudden, a grand place in a clearing of piney woods halfway up Flat Mountain. A massive stone chimney rose from the center of the house, which sat squat and square, a moat-like porch encircling the whole place. Homemade rockers were scattered all around, and I counted four oversized picnic tables with trestle benches, one on each side of the porch. At each corner, a swing hung kitty-cornered so you could look out on the sunrise or sunset depending on what you fancied at the time.
Uncle Ed said he didn’t know why in tarnation a body would want so many tables and chairs.
“Teel always did like a lot of company,” Grandma said.
Inside the house, pine shelves lined the walls. Plates stood along the back of the lower shelf, with baskets and tins filled with kitchen needs in front. Below the bottom shelf, hooks held iron pots and skillets. All the rooms had shelves—the ones in the bedroom held a sewing basket full of wooden spools of thread, folded clothes, rows of books, a jar of buttons, and an assorted collection of empty mason jars. Hooks underneath held a double-barreled shotgun. Three print dresses and one of navy serge hung next to a man’s black gabardine suit that had a curious long jacket.
A celadon-green Hoosier cabinet sat against one wall. Another piece I admired was a walnut trunk that had flowers and birds carved all over. Uncle Teel made that trunk for her as a wedding present, Aunt Annie said, and she used it to store her fancywork. She tilted up the lid to show us. From the looks of it, Aunt Annie spent all her spare time doing fancywork. The trunk was almost full, and doilies and antimacassars decorated every chair and table. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Uncle Teel’s long johns had morning-glory vines embroidered around the back flap.
The house had a place for everything and everything was in place, just the way Grandma liked, yet there was an unsettling smell of stale cooking odors and the fetid
