At the Far End of Nowhere Read online

  After breakfast, I watch TV with Spence—The Lone Ranger and cartoons, and we snack on cereal right out of the box. Finally, Daddy comes in and chases us outside.

  “Too much television will rot you children’s brains,” Daddy says. “There’s a cathode ray tube inside the television making those pictures you see on the screen. Who knows how much radiation is coming at you through that TV screen.”

  Jimmie gives us a basket and tells us to go get the eggs and give the chickens some more feed.

  In the big henhouse, the gray speckled hen is nesting on her eggs. I hand the basket over to Spence. “I’m scared of that hen. She always tries to peck me when I try to get the eggs out from under her. If you get the eggs, I’ll scoop the chicken feed out of the bin.”

  “Oh, all right,” says Spence. “You’re such a sissy, Lissy.” Spence plunges his hand under the gray hen. She makes a fuss and pecks at Spence, but he retrieves her eggs and moves on to the other nests.

  The feed bin is built into the wall of the henhouse. The bin’s almost as tall as I am, and when I open the lid, I can see that the feed is low and the scoop is way down inside there with the grain. I hoist myself up against the front of the bin. I hold onto the top of the bin with both hands, balance myself just below my waist, and flip the whole top of my body forward and down into the bin. That’s the only way I can reach the bottom. It’s getting dark outside, and I have to feel around for the hard metal of the scoop, but what my fingertips touch is something cold and scaly. And it moves!

  “Spence! There’s a snake in the bin!” I yank my hand away and swing back up and down onto the henhouse floor.

  Spence comes running over and takes a look down into the bin. “Yep. It’s a snake, all right. A big black snake coiled up down there. Looks kind of like an old rubber boot.”

  We head back to the house with the basket of eggs and report the snake to Daddy and Jimmie. Jimmie goes back to the chicken house with a sharpened hoe. Spence goes along with her. I follow along, but keep my distance while Jimmie chops up the snake, tosses it out in the field, and comes back to feed the chickens. Me and Spence forget all about our moon launch. And before we know it, the day is gone.

  On Sunday, I walk to Sunday school with Spence. Spence and me wear our perfect attendance pins fastened to our Sunday best clothes. Sometimes we stay for the church service, sit together on a hard pew, and secretly time the minister’s sermon with Lovenia’s gold watch.

  My daddy and Jimmie always stay home on Sunday mornings. After church, we have a big Sunday dinner with fried chicken, all kinds of vegetables, and Jimmie’s special lemon meringue pie for dessert.

  On Sunday afternoons, I like to read, or watch old Shirley Temple movies on TV. If it’s windy, I like to go out in the field and let the wind blow me around. One Sunday, I find a flattened patch of wheat in our south field, hollowed out by the wind. I bring a library book with me, but I don’t read it. It is late in the afternoon, and the sun, like the wheat, is golden. I lay me down to sleep, and hear the wind singing my name.

  When I wake up, it’s getting dark, and the wind is blowing stronger. I stand up in the field, spread my arms, and dance with the wind. Daddy says the soul rides on the breath. I think the wind must be the earth’s soul. It’s so powerful! It holds me up when I lean against it, and I think I can feel God’s soul riding on it.

  I hear the wind whisper, “Soon, Lissa. Soon.” But then it’s just Jimmie, calling from the back porch, “Supper. Supper’s ready!” From here, she and the house look small and far away.

  Then it’s Monday—Blue Monday, my daddy calls it—and there’s school and school and more school. And before I know it, we’re helping Jimmie plant the vegetable gardens and rake the straw off the early spring strawberries.

  My daddy all-of-a-sudden decides to help Jimmie with the tilling. He hooks up the disc harrow and cranks up Granddaddy’s old tractor. He needs somebody to sit on back of the harrow to weigh it down, so the discs can dig into the soil and slice up the plowed earth. Spence is off somewhere else.

  I volunteer to sit on the board at the back of the harrow, but my daddy makes too sharp a turn with the tractor. The harrow careens up at a steep angle off the ground, and I’m too light to hold it down. I just sit there—still as still—until Daddy backs up a little, and the tiller goes back down flat and even on the dirt.

  “You saved my life,” my daddy tells me. “If you had gotten scared and jumped off, that tractor would have flipped over on me. You are a brave little girl.” Even Jimmie says, “Yes, that was brave of you. You are a brave little soldier.” I don’t usually feel very brave, but what my daddy and Jimmie say makes me feel good about myself.

  In June, the yellow school bus drops Spence and me off from school one last time. We run up the driveway, change into our summer shorts, toss our loose-leaf notebooks on the trash heap out by the grape arbor. Spence lights a match to all our school papers. We dance around the fire, slap our palms to our mouths, and let out Indian war whoops, “Whoooo! Whoooo! Whoooo!” We are released from school—me from second grade, Spence from fourth grade—for the summer!

  In the summer, Spence and me help Jimmie sell vegetables from her gardens. We hang up a little blackboard sign by the road at the bottom of our front lawn. Fresh Vegetables. Picked While U Wait. Sugar Corn 60 Cents a Dozen. When a car comes rolling up our driveway, Jimmie finds out what the customer wants, and then we run out and help Jimmie pick it fresh. Jimmie always prices the corn ten cents more than what the local store is selling it for.

  “Customers are willing to pay a little more to get their vegetables fresh,” Jimmie tells us. “And we always give them a baker’s dozen, thirteen ears, in case there’s a bad one.”

  We put the money from the customers in a big piggy bank that we keep on a shelf in the pantry. By the end of the summer, the piggy is stuffed with coins and one-dollar bills. Jimmie lets us use the money to buy our school supplies in September.

  Jimmie has taken over her dad’s chicken-and-egg route. On Friday nights, she and her sister, Aunt Essie, kill chickens out back, then pluck them and clean them in a big washtub beside the back-porch steps.

  My daddy doesn’t take part in any of this. He doesn’t like to kill things or see them killed.

  “You can tell a lot about a person,” Daddy says, “from the look on his face when he kills a helpless animal. Some folks will frown or will look perturbed, or intent or resolved—or even pained—when they lay a chicken’s neck on the chopping block and drive the hatchet down. But others…yes, I’ve seen some others who seem to take pleasure from killing.

  “I saw one man down in Charles County, a grizzly-looking farmhand, smile as he wielded the hatchet. I saw his face split into a wide, triumphant grin as the blade found its mark and blood erupted from that chicken’s severed neck.

  “And there’s some men that take sport in watching beheaded chickens squawking and running in circles—run, flop, run, flop—until they collapse into a trembling feathery heap. Some actually make bets as to which chicken will run the longest before it drops.”

  So that’s why, on Friday nights while Jimmie and Essie are out back killing chickens, Daddy holes himself up in the dining/living room, shuts all the windows and doors tight, and tries to block out unwanted sounds coming from the chicken massacre that’s going on outside. He reads article after article from his watchmaker’s journal or from Popular Mechanics. I’ve even seen him read the same page over and over again, the same way I sometimes count certain numbers over and over to ward off evil thoughts and keep myself safe.

  Jimmie is the one who catches the chickens and chops off their heads. I watch her, and she doesn’t smile when she does it. She just looks determined to get the job done in time for Saturday’s delivery. Essie helps with the plucking and cleaning, plopping the naked white chickens into a big metal washtub to soak. Sometimes, Essie and Jimmie sing old Methodist hymns while they work. It’s usually past my bedtime before they’re finished.


  On some Saturday mornings, after I fix Daddy’s breakfast and say grace on his lap, I walk over a little footbridge to Aunt Essie’s next door for breakfast. Jimmie stays behind to load up the trunk of the Oldsmobile with chickens, and, in the summer, fresh vegetables.

  I carry a tin of chewable milk of magnesia tablets in my dress pocket. At Aunt Essie’s, I have squash pancakes covered with super-thick syrup that sometimes makes me get carsick. One time, I had to throw up out the car window right after our first stop. That’s why, now, on chicken route days, Daddy always makes me take a tin of milk of magnesia tablets with me, in case I start to feel sick in the car.

  I sit up front next to Jimmie as she drives along the route. Our first stop is at what Jimmie calls a “mansion.” We drive up a long curving driveway, past tennis courts and a swimming pool, to a big beautiful stone house.

  Jimmie raps on the screen door at the back and calls out, “Hello, anybody home?”

  A lady in a white uniform—Jimmie tells me she is the cook—comes to the door and holds it open for us.

  I am carrying paper bags of peas and string beans I helped Jimmie pick early this morning, when everything was soaking wet with dew.

  “You can put those bags over there,” the cook tells me, and points to a big round wooden table.

  Enormous copper pots and pans, polished shiny bright, hang from a thick wooden beam above the table. The kitchen has a gigantic stove and an oven big enough to cook Hansel and Gretel at the same time.

  Jimmie carries in chickens, boxes of eggs, and bushel baskets of fresh corn and tomatoes.

  After that, we drive across a bridge over a big lake that Jimmie calls The Reservoir.

  “Jimmie, what’s a reservoir?”

  “It’s a big pool where people get their drinking water. This one is man-made.”

  “Can you go swimming in there?”

  “It’s not for swimming. But some people go fishing there.”

  “Oh, yeah. I see some rowboats out there.”

  After The Reservoir, we are in the suburbs. We stop at a few homes where customers live in new ranch houses and split-levels. Then we drive downtown to an old neighborhood with big shade trees and wide sidewalks.

  Mrs. Tyson, one of our regular customers, lives on Mount Royal Avenue in what Jimmie calls “a brownstone apartment building” that has wide front steps, a balcony with a fancy black railing, flowers in window boxes, and a turret like a castle. Mrs. Tyson is an old lady who does sewing.

  “Hello there, Lissa,” she says. “Would you like to see what I’m working on now?”

  I nod, and she pulls out a miniature trunk and opens the lid for me.

  “Look, see what I’ve got tucked in here.” One by one, she pulls out a whole collection of doll clothes—an apricot-colored silk slip and matching panties, a crocheted traveling outfit, an embroidered satin coat, and a fur muff.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  I just shake my head and say, “It’s beautiful!”

  “This is what you call a bridal trousseau. It’s all the outfits the bride doll takes with her to wear on her honeymoon.

  “And this,” she points to a tiny pink satin heart at the bottom of the trunk, “is a lily of the valley sachet. It makes everything smell nice. Would you like to meet the bride?”

  “Oh, yes!” I clap my hands.

  Mrs. Tyson opens a small cabinet and pulls out a bride doll dressed in a white wedding dress with a lacy white petticoat and a full-length veil.

  “Can I touch her, Mrs. Tyson?”

  “Certainly, Lissa,” she says, and holds the doll out to me.

  “Lissa, let’s make sure your hands are clean,” Jimmie says. She inspects my hands. “Okay, go ahead. But be very gentle with her.”

  I cradle the doll in my arms.

  “I’m raffling her off for my women’s society. The proceeds will go toward a fund for homeless girls. It’s five dollars a ticket, and if you win, you get the bride doll and her trousseau. I’ve sewn everything by hand.”

  “Oh, Jimmie, please, please. Can we get a ticket for her? She’s so beautiful.”

  “Well, honey, five dollars is kind of steep for us right now. I don’t know.”

  I can tell that Jimmie would like to get the doll for me, but she doesn’t like to spend a lot of money.

  “Tell you what,” Mrs. Tyson says. “How about you throw in an extra tomato or two—you know how I love your tomatoes—and I’ll let you have a ticket half price, two dollars and fifty cents.”

  “Well, I do like to support a good cause,” Jimmie says. “It’s a deal!”

  I’m so excited. Maybe I will win, and maybe I won’t. But even if I don’t win, I’m happy, happy, happy. Jimmie did this for me.

  Tonight is one of those hot, sticky summer nights. After supper, I sit on the front porch, across from Spence, in the red swing. My daddy made it with all the edges rounded, so it wouldn’t hurt us.

  Spence’s and my feet are pumping the swing. We are wearing shorts, and sometimes our bare knees just touch. We are pretending we are traveling to the Land of Oz.

  I can hear the creak-creak of Aunt Essie’s rocker on the floor-boards. Jimmie sits next to her in a green metal porch chair. Jimmie’s skin is tanned as dark as Tonto’s on The Lone Ranger; her fingers move over peas or limas or mending—it’s too dark to for me to see what.

  The lighted front porch is safe, like a fortress with a concrete railing that protects our family from the spooky night shadows, the whispering leaves, and the lonely road. From time to time, a car whooshes past, and I can see the tire swing Daddy roped up for me and Spence on one of the front-yard maples.

  Like most nights, Aunt Essie comes over from next door after supper to visit with Jimmie. Aunt Essie is a widow, and she doesn’t have any children. She’s wearing an apron, and she has an almanac spread open on her lap. She licks the first finger on one of her plump hands, turns the pages, and reads out loud. She works her way through the weather forecasts, and then all the ads—salve for boils, and praying hands for your dashboard, and where you can send away to get your horoscope charted.

  My daddy doesn’t care for Aunt Essie’s company, so he excuses himself and goes inside to smoke a cigar and read the evening paper in his armchair.

  In my head, I can see exactly what he’s doing inside. He’s doing his rituals. First, he’s screwing his watchmaker’s loupe into his left eye socket, clamping down on the loupe to keep it in place. Now he’s folding the newspaper precisely—my daddy insists that things should be precise. He uses the nails on his thumb and forefinger to make sharp creases in the folds and to get the paper folded into exact quarters so it is an efficient size for reading. Most every night is the same.

  Tonight’s an especially hot night, and the air is thick with lightning bugs. I overhear my aunt saying there will be a new moon. I lean forward in the swing and whisper to Spence, “I’m going to look out for that new moon. I’ve never seen one.”

  Spence shakes his head and gives me a big brother I-know-better-than-you laugh. “You’re a real dummy, Liss. You will never see a new moon. It’s invisible from the planet Earth.”

  Spence reads all kinds of science books, and he fills his notebooks with pencil sketches of planets and solar systems and rocket ships. Even though we didn’t get Spence’s spaceship built last fall, Spence stills says he is going to be the first man on the moon when he grows up. I figure he ought to know what he is talking about, and I give up on the idea of ever seeing a new moon.

  Just as Spence and me are pumping faster and faster to travel as fast as the speed of light over the deadly poppy fields, I hear leaves shivering and branches snapping in the treetops. Then I hear a rebel yell so loud it almost explodes my ears. Our dog, Jupiter—we call him Jupy, and Spence says he’s a mutt, a mixed breed, part greyhound—is lying on the porch steps. Jupy throws his head back and howls. I am so scared I draw back into myself, kind of like a turtle, away from Spence and everybody.

  Jimmi
e calls out, “Who’s there?”

  “Oh, that’s just Lonny, jumping around in the trees,” Aunt Essie says. “That boy loves to climb trees. He can jump from one tree to the other.”

  Jimmie says Lonny is the neighborhood orphan. His mother died when he was born, and his daddy used to beat on him. Then, when he was a teenager, his daddy got killed from driving drunk and crashing into a cement culvert on this very same road. Aunt Essie takes pity on Lonny. In return for helping her out with chores, Aunt Essie gives him an allowance, and lets him live in an old beat-up aluminum trailer that sits on cinder blocks out behind her apple orchard.

  Now, I see—in a flash of heat lightning—the white parts of Jupy racing back and forth between the tree trunks, circling the trunk on the right, leaping up on it. His body is long, and he stretches it up the tree trunk. His front legs are slim like my wrists, and they climb way up the trunk. The nails of his front paws scratch at the bark. He is yapping up at Lonny.

  Jimmie calls up to Lonny, “You ought to be careful up there, or you’re liable to break your fool neck.” Her voice is strong and sure—just the opposite of mine. She’s not afraid of Lonny the way I am.

  But he’s so tall—already a six-footer. He’s too young for a driver’s license, but he has a shiny black souped-up Ford that he works on in Aunt Essie’s driveway; he put a Hollywood muffler on it. Whenever the fire department siren goes off, Lonny revs up his car and roars off to chase the fire engine.

  Lonny’s voice is low and deep, and he has a sullen way of walking—not straight and proud, but hunched over and scowling. Sometimes, he’s nice to me and gives me rides on his bicycle handlebars. At the Sunday school picnic, he tries, I think, to protect me. He tells Jimmie she ought to get me out of Dempsey’s pool because I am turning blue. I don’t know how to swim, so I just stand in the shallow part and shiver.

  I am glad Jimmie knows how to put Lonny in his place. She can also drive a tractor as well as any man, and she wears her hair tied back in a knot and doesn’t worry about how she looks all the time or frizz her hair or rinse the gray hairs blue the way Aunt Essie does.