“They won’t get any Rumford until the end of the week,” Grandpa explained before Grandma had a chance to ask.
“What did you get me then?”
“Didn’t get none of it. You told me not to.”
“For goodness’ sake, Clev, you know I can’t make biscuits without baking powder. I don’t see why on earth you didn’t bring me what they had. I could’ve made do.”
Grandpa winked at me.
“Guess me and you better go get your Grandma some of that sorry old Clabber Girl if we want any biscuits around this house.” He chuckled as he went out the door, me right behind him.
Somehow Grandma managed to make biscuits despite having to use the Clabber Girl.
“Not fit to eat,” she muttered, dumping the pan of biscuits in a big bowl. She folded a napkin over them, either to keep them warm or hide them. I wasn’t sure which. When the biscuits were passed around, I could not see one bit of difference.
But I kept that to myself.
Hursey had been home from boarding school all summer, filling the house with his friends. How word got around I didn’t know, but it never failed. Half a dozen teenage boys, most a few years older than him, soon had their feet stuck under Grandma’s supper table, their hands soaring and diving like birds. You’d think a table full of deaf boys would be quiet, but not so. Our house soon filled with their boisterous laughter and grunts, their fists slapping into palms for emphasis, faces contorted into exaggerated expressions of anger and joy and surprise. Those who could speak often talked out loud while signing, sometimes all at once, and those who couldn’t speak mimed the words. My brother had started at West Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind in Romney, West Virginia, when he was seven, coming home only for Christmas and summer vacations. Grandma said it was a crying shame families had to send little children away to boarding school where they didn’t know a solitary soul. But Mother really didn’t have a choice. It was the only place Hursey could get an education. He had started school late like most deaf kids we knew, but even still, he excelled there, skipping several grades.
At Romney, in addition to the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic, students were taught a trade. The boys who were average or below were trained to be bakers. Another choice, reserved for the smart ones, was to work in the print shop. There may have been other choices, but those are the ones I remember.
My brother was trained as a printer.
I could spell the alphabet on my hands before I knew how to say my ABCs, and I learned a lot of signs, but I never got real good at it. Because my brother had already learned how to talk before he was deaf, his speech was pretty good and he read lips, so we could talk with him without signing.
Besides, I was seven years younger, and he ignored me as much as I’d let him.
Although I was always glad to see him, I sometimes liked it better when he wasn’t there. My brother sucked up all the attention when he was home. And Grandma liked him best, although she’d never admit to it.
“Why, look at the shape he’s in,” she’d say.
I was never sure what she meant by that. Hursey looked in fine shape to me. The hearing girls in East Beckley were always trying to get him to notice them. They’d come around pretending to have an interest in me and Vonnie, teaching us to twirl a baton, or play badminton with us in the yard, all the while casting glances to see if Hursey was watching. He was.
Hursey liked to play the field. I never knew him to go steady with anyone while he was in school, but he may have at Romney and I didn’t know about it. He only dated Rayjeana for a month or so before he lost interest and started seeing Dorothy Wiseman, who sometimes taught Sunday school at St. Mary’s. Grandma liked to see him going out with good Christian girls like Rayjeana and Dorothy, even if both of them were Methodists, but Dorothy was her favorite—maybe because she lived right next door and Grandma could keep an eye on them. She also liked two other East Beckley girls he dated, Sue Cox and Eldana Jones. But like most teenage summer romances, they all ended when summer did and Hursey had to go back to school.
Mother was driving Hursey back to Romney, and Grandma and me and Vonnie had come along to keep her company. Besides, we weren’t ones to turn down a trip out of town. He’d just got his driver’s license, so Mother let him drive before we hit any bad roads. We couldn’t find an Esso station, but we spotted a Sunoco where the sign said gas was thirteen cents a gallon. Grandma said she expected we could get it cheaper on down the road a piece. She always said that, but we pulled in anyway. Mother leaned over to tell the man to fill it up and please check the oil.
“What’s wrong with him? He deaf and dumb?” The man was asking Mother, but he nodded toward my brother.
My brother could read lips, so he knew what the man said. He also knew that dumb meant a person couldn’t speak, but it was still a word he was sensitive to. Besides, he wasn’t dumb. He knew how to talk before the meningitis left him deaf, so he could speak quite well.
Hursey was used to being insulted and slighted.
