Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  Saturday night was different. Grandma wound sections of my hair around strips of rags. The next morning, after I’d had my oatmeal and put on my Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, she unwound the rags from my head. Curls as tight as a screen-door spring spiraled down my back. When she plaited my pigtails for school, she’d dip her fingers into sugar water to stiffen the braids so they wouldn’t come undone.

  Sometimes when I sweated, I got a little sticky behind the ears.

  On the Sundays Grandpa didn’t preach at Cales Chapel, we went to the one-room Pentecostal Holiness Church in East Beckley for Sunday-morning services, and then back for more preaching Sunday night, and again on Wednesday night for prayer meeting. The children sat in the back pew and the adults met up front. Every week we were supposed to memorize a verse of Scripture. Most of the kids said, “Jesus wept.” After all, it was the shortest verse in the Bible. But Grandma saw to it I had a proper verse to recite every Sunday so the church ladies wouldn’t have cause to wag their heads about her.

  “Let not your heart be troubled . . .”

  “For God so loved the world . . .”

  “And I say unto you, ask, and it shall be given you . . .”

  I got to thinking. That last verse couldn’t be true. Grandpa and Grandma had more faith than anyone I knew, yet they didn’t seem to get much of anything they prayed for, even though they never asked for anything for themselves. It seemed to me if God made that great big promise, He should stick to it and not try to wiggle His way out of it because He thought you didn’t need it or it wouldn’t be good for you. When I asked Grandma, she said God answers all prayers, but He doesn’t always give you the answer you want.

  Grandma always took up for God.

  When Grandma’s best friend, a jolly roly-poly of a woman, helped her plan a Home Missionary Society meeting, they laughed and carried on worse than me and Sissy. Her first name was Clovis, but Grandma called her Sister Wood. I thought it was funny she didn’t call her by her first name, them being such good friends and all.

  “Well, Clovis is a silly name,” I said.

  “Clovis is a perfectly fine name. Not a thing wrong with it,” Grandma said. “You know,” she said, changing the conversation, “this would be a fine day for you and your grandpa to go find us a tree. The Lord’s birthday will be upon us before we know it.”

  “I do believe your grandma wants me and you out of her way for a while,” Grandpa said.

  “No such thing,” Grandma said. “If I wanted rid of you, I could put you to doing a dozen things that need attending to around here. I expect that’d make the both of you disappear fast as a magician’s rabbit. I’d let you pare these apples for me if I didn’t know what the outcome would be. We’d end up with half the apple wasting on the peel and one of you missing a piece of finger.”

  “To my mind it’s a tad too soon to be cutting a tree, but if that’s what you want, no doubt we can find you one,” Grandpa said.

  “Well, you could scout one out,” Grandma said, dumping the cut-up apples into a skillet sizzling with butter, brown sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon to make apple upside-down cake or apple pie filling, I wasn’t sure which.

  I was hoping for fried apple pies. Grandma made them by rolling out six-inch pie crusts, putting a spoonful or so of the apple mixture on one side, then folding the crust over and crimping it with the tines of a dinner fork. She’d fry the little pies in lard, sprinkle sugar over them, and wrap them in a twist of waxed paper. Vonnie and I each carried one to keep our mittened hands warm on the way to school, eating them after our lunch of sausage and jam biscuits.

  I looked out the door to see if it had snowed yet, caught unawares by the clenching bite of winter. The early morning sky had a thin, washed-out look to it, but there was no snow.

  Grandpa followed me onto the porch. He turned his face up and sniffed the air. “Smells like it’s gonna snow,” he said, sniffing another time or two.

  “What does gonna snow smell like?”

  “Well, you tell me.”

  I wrinkled my nose and inhaled a little.

  Grandpa took a deep breath. “Hard to describe, but there’s something different about it. Brings to mind the skin of a green apple.”

  I tried it again, sucking my lungs full of the icy air and holding it until the cold forced it out of me in one big whoosh.

  “Takes some doing, but you’ll get the hang of it.”

  The cold clamped down inside my head for a few paralyzing seconds.

  “Careful now, you don’t want to get your brain froze up,” Grandpa said, stuffing the legs of my snowsuit into Vonnie’s outgrown galoshes.

  The pine tree I wanted was too tall, and the one Grandpa picked was too short. He held his arm straight up in the air to show me how tall it could be. We looked until we found one that went just past his fingertips. Grandpa reckoned it would do. He cut it down and dragged it to the car. When we got home, we put the tree in the sitting room off the guest bedroom because it stayed chilly in there, putting the scraggly side to the back when we placed it on the stand.

  Grandpa turned the tree another inch or so to the right and looked over at Grandma, who nodded approval. “Most everything’s got two sides to it,” she said, glancing sidewise to see if I was paying attention. “Make sure it’s your good side you’re showing to the world. Put your best foot forward.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.

  Grandma sat down, ready to pare another pan of the Golden Delicious apples I’d picked up from Sissy’s yard, looking for recently fallen ones. The ground lay covered with rotting apples, most of them buzzing with crazed honey bees drunk on the fermenting fruit. We didn’t have Golden Delicious apples because Grandma said they went bad too quick, but we had Jonathans and Winesaps and a sweet, hard-fleshed yellow apple that had dark freckles on the peel, but I didn’t know the name of that one.

  The apple turned in her hand as the knife, honed on Grandpa’s razor strop, skimmed just under the gold skin. Vonnie and I watched the peel reel out in an unbroken curl that pooled on the floor at our feet. Before she could get to it, I snatched it up and threw it over my shoulder. Holding my hands over my eyes, I peeked through my fingers to see how it landed.

  It was plain as day. A perfect S.

  “That means you’re going to marry Grant Slack,” Vonnie said.

  “Am not. He doesn’t even like me.”

  “Then I reckon he’ll just have to get used to you. Or it could be Steve Bibb. But no, it has to be the last name that starts with an S,” she said, making up that rule as she went.

  And so it was decided. I was to marry dark-haired and dreamy Grant Slack.

  At least until I threw another apple peel.

  Grandma said her mother’s apple peels were so thin you could read a newspaper through them. I never thought to test Grandma’s, but I’m sure they came close. It was a matter of pride not to leave a layer of apple flesh on the peel because that would be considered wasteful. Waste not, want not, is what Grandma always said.

  Vonnie and I decorated the tree with delicate pearl beads strung on fine wire in the shape of crosses and stars, ornaments brought over by Grandpa’s German forefathers and passed on to him by his mother, Sarah Ellen Wiseman, who died in our spare bedroom when I was too little to remember. The angel on top of the tree had no legs, but a cardboard tube under her white satin dress fit over the tiptop branch. Along with the big family Bible, the nativity scene was set up on the library table next to a stand that held a Webster’s unabridged dictionary almost as big as me.

  Grandma let me and Vonnie help her make gingerbread men with raisin eyes and molasses cookies sparkled with sugar. We packed some of the cookies in a box of popped corn addressed to Mother and Aunt Lila in New York, and sent another big box addressed to “USA ARMED FORCES OVERSEAS.”

  Grandpa said he’d do his part by helping us eat the rest.

  My mother couldn’t come home for Christmas because President Roosevelt needed her to stay in New York and
build airplanes for the War.

  A big box waited at the post office. Grandpa pulled me there in my red wagon, but the box rode in my place on the way home. When I opened it Christmas morning, it was full of presents wrapped in red-striped paper, each with a candy cane on top.

  All except two of the presents were from Santa. There was a china-faced doll with eyes that clicked open when you picked her up, a blue-plaid skirt with pleats and a fuzzy angora sweater to match, a set of watercolors in a tin container, new underpants with the days of the week embroidered on them, flannel pajamas with feet, a set of books with pictures and stories, and a wooden puzzle map of the United States. I named the new doll Iva Kathleen after my mother and placed her in a dresser drawer with several other fancy dolls that she and Aunt Lila had sent from New York. They were only taken out for an occasional well-chaperoned buggy ride around the yard or to get their picture taken. They weren’t the kind of dolls who would sit beside you on the dirt and help you make a windowsill full of mud pies. They lived sheltered lives that didn’t include dirty hands and bare feet. I liked my old doll Peggy better. She didn’t mind having mud on her underpants, a scabby nose, and skint-up knees.

  Peggy lived barefoot and fancy free. She took after me.

  I sat on the floor, turning the forty-eight states face down until I could recognize each by its shape. New York, where my mother was working, didn’t look all that far away from West Virginia. Somehow I liked knowing that. When Sissy came by, showing off the puffed wax lips she’d bought at Calloway’s store, I saw an opportunity to get them for myself. I’d have to hurry though, before she decided to wear them. She was biting the tops off tiny paraffin bottles and sucking out the green or red sugar water that was supposed to resemble soda pop but didn’t.

  “Bet I can name more states by their shape than you can,” I said.

  “What you got to bet?” Her eyes narrowed.

  “My Mallo Cup against those dumb wax lips?”

  It was a gamble, but she went for it.

  I wore the pouty red lips around the house, admiring myself in every mirror I passed before chewing the fake mouth into a waxy gob. I don’t believe I swallowed, but I may have.

  To ease my guilt, I gave Sissy half of my Mallo Cup.

  But not the biggest half.

  My present from Aunt Lila that Christmas was a ten-carat-gold ring with a topaz birthstone. It fit perfect on my middle finger. I saved the present from my mother for last—a lavender blue music box cushioned in layers of tissue paper. I turned it over to wind it up. A silver label said the song it played was called “Clair de Lune.” I listened to it every night before I went to sleep.

  It was my lullaby.

  5

  Forcing the Forsythia

  The ground still had Christmas snow on it when Grandpa left to go back in the mines. Grandma sent him off with a dinner bucket of sausage biscuits, a thermos of steamy potato soup, and three leftover gingerbread men who were missing a couple of eyes. She looked worried to me but she didn’t let on.

  “Why does Grandpa have to go back in the mines?” I asked.

  “It won’t be for long,” Grandma said, brushing crumbs from the table with a whisk broom. “Just a few months so’s he can qualify for a little pension coming in every month.”

  Grandpa was retired, and he was sick with silicosis, or black lung, as some had started to call it, which made him cough real bad. But once more he’d have to go down into the dank of the mines and breathe coal dust into lungs already turning to charcoal.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “No use to try,” Grandma said. “There’s no sense to be made of it.”

  At the end of the day, Grandpa returned—grit in the corners of his eyes, his graying hair turned dark again with the oily dust. Many days he had to work low coal, veins in mountain tunnels too low for a man to stand upright.

  Stopping outside the gate, he hacked a sharp-edged cough into a big kerchief pulled from a pocket in his bib overalls. He walked up the porch steps, still bent in the shape of the mines, working his mouth to form a smile.

  One day not long after, Mother walked right in and surprised us. She was home for a whole month, she said, because the airplane plant where she worked in New York had closed to get ready to build a different plane. “Nobody left there but a skeleton crew to get the place cleaned out,” she explained.

  I pictured bony people sweeping the floors and dusting propellers, all of them wearing red bandanas tied around their hairless skulls.

  Aunt Lila got put on the skeleton crew, so she’d had to stay. At least that’s what Mother told us. Although it wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t the whole truth either. Aunt Lila was working the skeleton crew, but the real reason she didn’t come home was that she had got herself married to a New York fellow by the name of Eddie Kamphey. We weren’t supposed to know a thing about it, but we did. We knew lots we weren’t supposed to, but we never let on.

  Mother burst in the back door, bringing with her the cold March air and a basket filled with whip-like branches.

  “What are you doing with all those switches?” I asked, wondering if she was putting up a supply for the winter.

  “They aren’t switches,” she said with a laugh. “They’re branches from a flower bush. I’m going to show you how to force the forsythia.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Don’t get ants in your pants,” she said. “I’m going to show you right now.”

  I watched her pare the bark from the bottom four or five inches of each branch and place the whole bunch in a tall blue vase. “Feel here,” she said, her finger gingerly running mine over a bud just beginning to swell. “The buds need to feel like that before you cut the branches. Now you go put some wrist-warm water in the vase. Make sure it covers up the bare part.”

  The spigot ran bone-cold at first, gradually turning warm to hot. I held my wrist to the stream of water and closed my eyes, all the while slowly turning the faucet to cool the water. When I couldn’t feel it hot or cold, I filled the vase an inch or so past the stripped off bark and carried it back to Mother.

  She nodded approval. “Now put it in the sitting room where it’ll be out of the way.”

  “What about forcing the forsythia?”

  “Be patient,” she answered. “That comes later.”

  It was only a few weeks until Easter. To celebrate Christ rising from the tomb and Grandpa from the mines, Grandma said she figured she had enough butter-and-egg money saved up for him to get himself a new suit.

  We watched out the kitchen window until the tailor finally got off the city bus up on Worley Road and walked down the red dog road to our house. He carried a beat-up leather satchel stuffed with drawings and swatches and chalk and a measuring tape.

  We all gathered in the front room to watch. After careful deliberation, Grandpa chose the perfect cut and fabric and fit. The tailor measured and pinned and jotted and measured some more, muttering foreign words through a row of pins bobbing up and down in his mouth. Grandpa’s new suit would be the dark-gray pinstripe worsted-wool three-piece double-vent cuffed-trousers notched-lapel model, with a watch pocket in the vest.

  After the tailor left, I watched as Grandma poured Argo starch powder from a maroon cardboard box into boiling water, stirring until it was thick and shiny. She dropped a shirt into the pot, poked it down with a big wooden fork, then fished it out and dropped it into a metal tub until it was cool enough to wring and hang out to dry. The long, double clothesline sagged with a week’s worth of just-washed clothes.

  “We are either the cleanest bunch on earth or the dirtiest,” Grandma said.

  I believe she was leaning toward the dirtiest.

  I curled up in the swing, looking at Rosie the Riveter on the cover of a brand new copy of The Saturday Evening Post. They should have put my mother on that magazine.

  The shirts on the line flung empty arms into the wind until the rigor mortis of the starch set in. Off to one
side, Grandpa’s khaki workpants did a stiff-kneed country jig, one knee up then down, up then down, then kick way out. The warm wind died down. Lightning bugs blinked Morse code back and forth in the dusk.

  “Come wash up,” Grandma called out from the back door into the lavender twilight. “And don’t be dawdling.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.

  After supper Grandpa got out his wood shoe-shine box and began to polish his black wingtips with a little spit and a can of black polish so intoxicating the Pentecostals might have outlawed it if they’d known about it. Once the polish dried, he whipped a felt-covered brush back and forth to coax out the shine. He held the shoe up to let me see myself reflected in the mirrored depths.

  Grandpa’s face reflected darkly behind my lighter one as he held the shoe in front of our faces. I watched as he put his shoe-shining kit back in order, the polishes and brushes and cloths lined up just so. For the first time I noticed his black hair was thinning and a little gray showed in the mustache he always wore. Although he was strong from working hard all his life, at five feet seven or eight and one hundred fifty pounds soaking wet, as he said, Grandpa wasn’t a big man, yet he stood like a giant in my eyes. Although I wanted to be just like him, I looked closely and could not find a single feature to match up with one of mine. And yet I knew that if you skinned us inside out, you’d find we were both stuffed full of peach pancakes and thick bacon from breakfast and the blood that ran through him ran through me and joined us like only people in your family can be, and not all of them even, and not all the time. But me and Grandpa were. He taught me that the places and people we come from sear into our very being and follow us all the days of our lives. That faith and family twine around our limbs like grapevines. That they are the ties that bind.