Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  I smiled and said a big hello to Sister Wood to show Grandma I was over my pouting, then I hurried to get the Jesus fan.

  The ladies fanned, swishing the cardboard back and forth in front of glistening faces. They dabbed runs of sweat from powdered necks with soft blue or peach or lilac handkerchiefs decorated with crocheted lace edges or embroidered flowers or maybe initials and birds.

  “Ladies don’t sweat,” Grandma reminded me. “Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.”

  Grandma had a natural dignity in how she carried herself, how she presented herself to the world. She said she didn’t want the Lord catching her doing anything that didn’t glorify His name. She didn’t want anybody else to catch her either. She must have thought all the neighbors had a spy glass trained right on Grandpa as he went to feed the chickens and on her as she took the clothes off the line and even on me as I trudged up our red dog road to Sylvia Elementary School.

  I wasn’t supposed to kick too high or turn cartwheels or cross my legs when I sat down, and my scratchy wool skirt should always cover my knobby knees. I couldn’t say heck or dang or anything else she thought substituted for a bad word.

  Grandma didn’t like for me to whistle either.

  “A whistling girl or a crowing hen is neither fit for God nor men,” she’d say.

  Grandma put a lot of stock in what other people thought of us.

  She said a preacher’s family should always be above reproach.

  And that was especially true for me and Vonnie.

  Hursey, home for the summer, was threatening to tear a page out of the Bobbsey Twins book I was reading because he claimed I’d lost a piece of his jigsaw puzzle, while I tried to convince him that I hadn’t done any such thing. The argument had progressed to the did, did not, did too stage. Grandma tired of our bickering and sent us outside so she could have some peace and quiet.

  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 road, and neither was Sissy, so we watched the gypsies from our side. They set up camp with practiced speed, and by nightfall there was a cluster of tents circled around the wagons and horses, a fire blazing in the center.

  After a week or so, Carlotta appeared in my class at school. I didn’t know how old she was, although she seemed older than the rest of us. She was a big girl, dark olive skin, hooded eyes that burned like coal, and heavy black hair that hung past her shoulders. When I stood next to her I felt colorless, my pale skin and eyes and hair boring. But what made Carlotta irresistible to me was the way she dressed. Gold hoops threaded through holes in her ears and colored bangles ringed both arms almost to her elbows.

  One skirt I admired to the point of it being a sin had tiers of red and purple and magenta, each gathered onto the next, with sequins and ribbons and rickrack sewn in meandering rows. When she walked, gussets of lace flowed around her ankles and tiny mirrors on the hem danced in the light.

  I wanted Grandma to m
ake me a skirt like that, but she never would. She laughed and said she expected I’d be a sight to see swarping around in a gypsy skirt.

  Carlotta didn’t come to school every day, and she was way behind in most everything. Shy and quiet in class, she never answered a question or asked one either. I got to be her friend, at least sort of, because on the way home from school I told the boys who taunted her to shut up their big fat mouths. She slowed, deliberately I thought, so I could catch up, and we walked all the way to my house together. Carlotta waited while I ran in to ask Mother if I could go to Peggy’s house. I would go to Peggy’s after I went to Carlotta’s, so I convinced myself it wasn’t lying. It wasn’t telling the whole truth either, but it was the best I could do.

  Mother was sitting on the floor stripping layers of white enamel from the baseboards in the dining room. Our house had layers of enamel covering the oak floors and trim. Mother spent hours scraping that old paint off. She’d already finished the stairs and banister railings. It was a lot of work, but it would be worth it once done, or so she said.

  She looked up, swiping her hair back with her sleeve. “You can go, but make sure you get yourself home on time.”

  I had the run of the neighborhood as long as I got home in time for meals, did not go inside anyone’s house, and stayed within hollering distance. Otherwise, I needed permission. Mother and Grandma and Grandpa had to know where I was going and who I was going with and what I was going for and who else was going to be there. I tried to back out of the room before she had a chance to add her usual, “You be careful and don’t you go anywhere else and you make sure you are back in this house before suppertime and don’t you be running on that red dog road.” She hollered after me, “I mean it now.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, crossing my fingers ahead of time for lies I would tell.

  I was pretty sure I was the only liar in our family. Grandpa was a Pentecostal preacher and he never lied, or at least I’d never caught him at it. He caught me though, and it wasn’t the first time either. Before he handed me a nickel for the offering at church and one to spend at Beaver’s General Store, he asked if I’d studied my Sunday school lesson.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  Grandpa allowed he didn’t believe that was possible without divine intervention. He knew for a fact my lesson paper had been in the backseat of the car since services last Sunday and here it was Saturday already.

  “I was planning on reading it. Honest I was. It was just a little white lie.”

  “I don’t care how you color it,” he said, “a lie is a lie.”

  He unpeeled the blue and white wrapper from a cake of Ivory soap. Although he had threatened to wash my mouth out before, this time he meant business. Hoping to wash the lying out of me once and for all, he ran the soap under the spigot to juice it up, then swiped it over my stuck-out tongue. I ran to the sink and splashed water in my mouth, sputtering and spitting bubbles. Seeing me froth at the mouth started Grandpa chuckling and that got me and Grandma to laughing. When we got over it, I complained my mouth tasted like old dishwater.

  “Lies,” my grandpa said, “should always leave a bad taste in your mouth.”

  In church the next day Grandpa preached on “The Truth about Lies.” It could have been a coincidence.

  On the way home we stopped for our usual cone of ice cream, and he didn’t mention lying a single time. One thing about Grandpa, he didn’t carry a grudge.

  With the taste of soap hardly out of my lying mouth, I followed Carlotta through the field, then over the hard road, brazenly crossing the line I wasn’t allowed to cross. A small tent near the highway had a sign out that said:

  FORTUNES TOLD INSIDE

  MADAM VADOMA KNOWS ALL,

  SEES ALL, TELLS ALL

  A woman in gypsy dress sat outside the tent husking a bushel basket of corn while she waited to unveil the past, present, and future for anyone with a couple of dimes to spare.

  Carlotta weaved through a maze of tents and wagons and horses, and as I scrambled to keep up with her, I tried not to notice the dark eyes peering at me. We ducked inside a tent that had the front flap partway open. A rug unrolled on the dirt floor was spattered with red and purple cushions. An old woman dressed in a loose print dress like my grandma sometimes wore around the house sat carving some small thing she turned this way and that in her hand. Rings covered her fingers—one ivory with a skull carved in it, another a circle of dark wood, and others of turquoise and silver. Carlotta told me the woman was her grandmother, and she was carving faces on citronella nuts to sell or trade for food. Carlotta spoke in words I didn’t understand, and the woman looked up and nodded, reaching out to touch my blonde hair.

  The gypsies stirred up a fire in the center of the camp from embers left from the night before. A man appeared, holding chickens he killed and cleaned and cut into pieces with two knives he used at the same time. Grandma was good at cutting up chickens, but she could learn a thing or two from him. Others brought onions and carrots, and one man carried a burlap bag of potatoes thrown over his shoulder. A boy had a bunch of turnips that looked like they’d just been pulled out of the ground. One by one he tossed them in the air and the chicken man sliced off the root with a chop of his knife, catching the turnip before it could hit the dirt.

  Everything went into the pot, including Madam Vadoma’s corn, still on the cob, along with a generous amount of paprika and a handful of salt from a round box with a picture of a girl holding an umbrella, just like ours at home. A woman added something that looked like little onions, but Carlotta said it was garlic.

  A boy, still wearing yesterday’s dirt on his face, ran by.

  “Lotty, there’s a game over in the field,” he hollered. He ran off, all elbows and knees, while Carlotta and I followed the noise to a bunch of girls and boys playing kickball behind the camp. They played rougher than I was used to, cussing and elbowing to get at the ball.

  I didn’t let on I thought that was rude.

  Everybody’s got their own ways of doing.

  As the aroma of the stew spread, the gypsies began to gather around the fire, bowls and spoons clattering in their hands. Loaves of store-bought bread were stacked on a table next to the kettle. I watched as they put bread in their bowls, ladled stew on top, then added an ear of corn. A woman spooned a little into a bowl and handed it to me, watching as she motioned me to eat. It was different from anything I ever tasted—the ordinary vegetables and meat had lost all familiarity. A fire started at the back of my throat and burned down a wick to the bottom of my belly. My eyes watered, but I took another swallow.

  The woman laughed, tilting her head back to show off a mouthful of gold teeth.

  It was past time for me to start for home. I knew if I went to Peggy’s now I’d be late getting home. Instead, I walked up her street and touched the gate as I walked by so I could say I’d been by her house if anybody asked, although I hoped they didn’t. On the way home I started to think I’d make a fine gypsy. I liked Carlotta’s skirts, and I liked the music and the dancing too. They had horses, and I even had a taste for the heat of goulash stew. I’d already decided to be a Methodist when I grew up, so I’d need to find out if they allowed gypsies, although I didn’t think it would be a problem. I pulled the last piece of Double-Bubble from my pocket and put it in my mouth to mask my gypsy breath.

  Sometimes at night you could hear the music all the way to Sissy’s house, and we sat in her yard and listened until her daddy called us in. When Grandpa drove home from prayer meeting, I’d ask him to drive past the camp, although it was out of our way, so I could see the gypsies around the fire, drawn to the light like a flock of bright moths. One man played a little accordion Grandma said was a concertina. Others fingered guitars strung with many strings. The girls danced, lifting their chins and holding their arms up as they circled the flames.

  When the gypsies were in town, things went missing. Pants and shirts disappeared off the Harveys’ clothesline. The Bledsoes’ str
awberry patch was picked clean one night, and Sissy’s grandma, Ma Moles, had her garden plundered and her pawpaw tree stripped almost bare. But even worse, Grandpa said unless he was mistaken, we were missing two white leghorns and a guinea hen. My heart flopped over. In my mind I could see white feathers flying as the man plucked the chickens for the stew. Caught in the web of my deceit, I couldn’t say a word.

  One night someone dug up two potato hills in our garden, and left several bunches of parsnips on the ground to ruin. Apples thrown at Queenie lay rotting near the doghouse where she was tied. Grandpa decided to see if he could catch the culprit.

  Nothing happened the first night or the second, but the third night I woke up to Queenie barking. I sneaked down to the porch and saw Grandpa softly snoring in the swing, a flashlight in his hand and his double barrel shotgun propped between his knees. He woke right up when I touched his shoulder. When he heard Queenie, he told me not to move or he’d skin me alive when he got back. I made sure to stay put until he disappeared from sight around the far side of the house.

  Crouched behind the blue hydrangea bush at the corner of the porch, I was near the garden but could still scoot back to the swing if Grandpa headed in my direction. I saw his flashlight search over the cabbage and potatoes and rhubarb.

  Then it froze.

  Grandpa hollered, and two shapes took off toward the tall rows of corn.

  A shot blasted a hole through the quiet and the shadowy forms toppled.

  My knees folded and I sat down so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I was too scared to breathe until I saw one of the thieves get on his knees and start sobbing and begging Grandpa not to shoot him, while the other one cowered nearby.

  “Why, you’re hardly more than babies,” I heard Grandpa say. He knelt next to them, telling them they didn’t have anything to be fearful of—he didn’t plan on shooting either one of them or calling the law on them—at least not this time.