Right away Hursey let me know he wasn’t going to play any silly girl games, so that left my favorite doll Peggy out, but he let me tag along. He took a suit of Grandpa’s underwear off the clothesline and stuffed it with straw. The head was a flour sack with eyes and a mustache drawn on with a piece of coal. Hursey said the War would be over soon because Hitler had been killed.
When I asked who Hitler was, he said if I wasn’t a dumb girl I’d know about Hitler. But I didn’t care about Hitler anymore. I didn’t care about being called a dumb girl.
The War would be over.
My mother would be coming home.
Hursey named the straw man Hitler and hung him from a noose looped over an apple tree branch. We marched around the tree, spitting out hateful words and throwing rotten apples at Hitler until we worked our little mob all the way up to an assassination. Hursey struck a stolen kitchen match and held the fire to Hitler’s feet. The straw man flamed, slowly at first, then the whole body crackled and blazed. The wind picked up a burning clump of straw and dropped it on a pup tent we had set up to play army. It went up with an impressive whoosh.
Grandpa, hearing me squall, came running from the garden and grabbed the water hose to douse the flames before the roof of the fruit house caught fire. That’s where we stored jars of canned goods and cured hams and barrels of apples and potatoes and cabbages, enough to see us through the winter.
Grandma told me if she ever caught me near a match I’d soon wish she hadn’t.
I’d never had a spanking.
But that put the possibility in my mind.
Hursey was the one that made the straw Hitler. He had stolen the match and set the fire, but I never heard Grandma say a thing to him, although to be fair I suppose she could have. He got away with murder because he was deaf, or so I told myself. But deep down I believed it was because Grandma favored boys. She favored Uncle Vertis too. Everybody knew that, but Grandma claimed there was no truth to it whatsoever—she said she simply had higher expectations for the girls.
And we accepted it—higher expectations and all.
The War was soon over and Mother came home, blending back into our lives without fanfare. Of course, Grandma had cleaned the house top to bottom because she said she didn’t want Mother to think we’d been living in a pigsty. And she fixed Mother’s favorites for dinner—pot roast with potatoes and carrots and onions, tomato dumplings, mustard greens with fatback, macaroni and cheese, and cornbread muffins, finished off with lemon custard pie for dessert.
Although I had missed my mother, it took time to feel like she wasn’t a visitor who’d be gone any day now. I was barely four when she left to go work as a Rosie the Riveter, so my memory of her living with us before she went to New York was dim. It was strange to hear her voice when I woke up in the mornings. My ears would perk up until I was sure I wasn’t dreaming.
But I wasn’t. She was home to stay.
And stay at home with us is what she did. After my father’s death, Mother had an income from the almost brand-new Social Security program President Roosevelt had started, and she also provided the house we all lived in, which she had paid for with the thousand dollars she got from my father’s death and the rest from money saved up from her Rosie the Riveter job. She worked part-time sales jobs off and on—Marie’s Dress Shop, The Vogue, and a shoe store I don’t remember the name of—but she was always home when I got out of school.
Everybody pitched in. Grandpa had a small pension from the mines, and Grandma sold butter and eggs to neighbors. Although it wasn’t a lot of money, we didn’t need a lot. We made or grew most everything we needed. And when she lived with us off and on, Aunt Lila contributed part of her income from working as a beauty operator. She was good at it, and the mayor’s wife and other Beckley socialites lined up for her to do their hair. She bought me and Vonnie fancy fur-trimmed coats and muffs and boot skates.
But Aunt Lila didn’t come home with Mother. Once again she’d stayed behind with Eddie Kamphey, the fellow she’d married up there in Buffalo, and we still weren’t supposed to know about him or the marriage. So we pretended to be in the dark, our faces once again masks of not knowing. I don’t know how my sister felt, but I liked knowing things I wasn’t supposed to know. It made me feel like I had some power nobody else knew about.
18
Gypsy Skirt
Their wagons were painted with pictures of dancing girls, skirts billowed out, and of horses, walleyed and prancing, sleek dark men astride their bare backs. The caravan was at the bottom of the hill when I first spotted it. The horses, stocky and short-legged, strained as they muscled the heavy wagons up the sloping road. I ran straight home to tell Sissy the news before somebody beat me to it.
The gypsies were back.
Every year they came, usually toward spring, and watching their caravan ride into town was almost as good as the circus.
Like migrating birds returned to a favored nesting site, they camped in the same place each year, out in a field near Joe’s Grocery. I couldn’t go there or to Joe’s either because I wasn’t allowed to cross the 19-21 Bypass, which we called the hard
