Aunt Mimi possessed a horror of silence, which she battled with endless chat. The Typhoid Mary of the Telephone started her calls at 6:30 each morning. After she finished with Mother she must have knocked off everyone in her social and church circle. Then she’d often hop in her car and head for our house.
Both sisters hungered for information, news and rank gossip. Mother refused to pass on the gossip. She said Aunt Mimi could do that. Also, Mother rarely believed much of what she heard.
“Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see,” she often counseled me.
Big Ken was courting his housekeeper, Ceil. Little Terry loved her. Kenny and Wade had mixed emotions. Aunt Mimi needed to report fully on those developments. We thought she’d be cool to Ceil, but she surprised everyone by welcoming her. The big issues brought out the best in Aunt Mimi. The boys needed a young woman’s care and love. Ceil, brave woman, was ready to try.
Julia Ellen was bound and determined to marry the gorgeous but penniless Russell. Aunt Mimi exhausted every argument in her arsenal. She tried waiting her out. Julia Ellen, usually a docile and obedient daughter, wouldn’t budge.
“She’ll ruin her life,” Aunt Mimi wailed to Mom.
“At least she’s ruining it with someone handsome.”
“Juts, you are no help at all. You talk to her.”
“I did talk to her.”
“Well, talk to her again! She thinks he’s Don Juan.”
“Don Guano!” I giggled as I slapped more peanut butter on the bread. I loved playing with language and made jokes and puns constantly. Adults often began to grind their teeth in my presence. I thought I was hysterical.
Mother frowned. “Who asked you? If you can’t behave, you can take that sandwich and eat outside.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“And that’s another thing, Juts. Calling you Mom. Mom is vulgar. It’s what the lower classes say. Mother. It should be Mother.”
“We are the lower classes,” I fired back.
“We most certainly are not. We have slender resources but impeccable blood.”
She was so predictable. I sassed back. “The best blood is Teddy blood.”
“What is she talking about?” Aunt Mimi was cross.
“Kid, out of here.”
I picked up my sandwich in one hand, my glass of milk in the other. At the top of the backyard, where the yard met the hayfield, Dad had built a huge outdoor brick fireplace and grill to display his considerable cooking abilities. I walked up the hill and sat on the side of the fireplace.
Tuffy followed me. Chap, sound asleep in his house, couldn’t be bothered to open an eye.
I wondered if Mother was explaining Teddy blood to Sis. Citation’s great-grandfather on the top line, the sire line, was Teddy. Mom said Teddy blood was the best. She also bemoaned the American obsession with speed. A horse needs speed and stamina. Otherwise, they’re like Jaguars, pretty to look at but always breaking down.
Aunt Mimi didn’t share Mother’s love for horses or boxing or baseball. But they shared a love of color, clothes and interior decoration.
I could just hear Mom explaining the great sire Teddy to a fidgety sister whose main worries were, in descending order of importance: Her candidacy for sainthood; Julia Ellen’s marriage; the boys; Mearl’s house-painting business; her wardrobe; the irritating appearance of more gray hair than she felt necessary to display.
I also figured she’d take a swipe at my bloodlines, which, although every bit as good as hers, were outside the boundaries of marriage.
As much as the Buckingham sisters did for me—and I was grateful—I wanted to be on my own. I didn’t want to hear about my beginnings, a failing attached to me although I had nothing to do with it. I wearied of their pettiness, bickering and power struggles.
As for visiting Mother Brown, that continued to be a season in purgatory. The good thing was that I’d read every National Geographic from the 1940s on.
The developers were gobbling up farmland that I loved. The valley below me was dotted with homes, although the farm still held out in the middle. Our road was extended. New homes, much bigger than ours, appeared.
I hated it. I begged Daddy to move near Hanover Shoe Farm. He said we couldn’t afford to.
Nothing stayed the same. Even I was changing. Clothes that had fit the year before didn’t fit this year. The boys and I traded T-shirts, shorts, jeans among us. Dreams I’d dreamed were supplanted by new ones. I no longer wanted a hotpad business. I thought I’d run a yard service, since I’d made money that spring and summer trimming hedges, planting bulbs and mowing lawns. Small but strong, I accomplished a lot more than grownups thought I would, and I liked any kind of outside work, so I did a good job. I’d mow your lawn for a dollar. The dollars rolled in. I was saving to buy a farm in Virginia. That dream remained constant, fired, no doubt, by that first visit back in 1949 and by the one thing my mother said about my father’s family: FFV. First Families of Virginia.
I could read anything. I ripped through books, especially history books and military history, at the rate of five a week. I could only go to the Martin Memorial Library on Saturdays, the day I “helped” Dad at the store. Mom still allowed only two books per week from the city library but I could take what I wanted from the school library since she wouldn’t have to carry them.
Except now I was big enough to really work. I could keep inventory, sweep the aisles, restock shelves and trim the fat off meat. I was too short to work on the huge butcher block, so Dad stood me on a wooden milk crate to teach me how to do it properly. When I was halfway decent at fat trimming, he taught me how to cut away from the bone. Those knives sparkled from use and honing. I was careful.
He taught me how to grade meat. We also rode around to the various cattle farmers. Grading on the hoof is a lot harder than grading once you’ve opened up the animal. Dad was terrific at it. The faces of farmers when he rolled into the driveway told me Dad was special. People smiled and laughed. He was liked and respected. I wanted people to treat me like that, too.
The farmers called me “Sidekick.”
The boys seethed with jealousy, especially when I made the rounds with Dad. However, Kenny’s feet could reach the pedals of the old tripod tractor, so he bragged that he could drive it. It was my turn to seethe with jealousy.
One summer evening Kenny crowed over the fields he’d plowed that day. Wade and I called him a liar, which launched us into a wicked fistfight.
As Kenny was now almost a foot taller than I was, though skinny as a rail, I weathered a few of these blows and then decided to take another tack.
“Kenny, I want proof. If you can drive the tractor, I’ll give you my piggy bank.”
He let up on Wade. “You mean it?”
“Swear.”
“On the Bible?”
“A stack.”
“The Catholic Bible, not the Lutheran Bible.” He leaned over me.
“Swear on the Catholic Bible.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Ha!” Kenny was spending that money in his head before he had it.
The grown-ups were on the porch, and we were far enough away that they paid us no mind. As for our fights, we fought all the time, nothing new there.
Kenny crawled up onto the tractor. Wade and I got on behind him. You’ve seen the ads: “Nothing runs like a Deere.” It’s true. John Deeres are the best tractors in the world and gruesomely expensive, but they run forever. This particular model, with its two small wheels together in the front, was already close to twenty years old. The tripod design worked fine for row crops on fairly even ground. A pitch and roll in the ground made for heavy going.
Those old tractors didn’t have power steering and sophisticated hydraulics. You needed to be strong to steer one, which was an effective deterrent in keeping children off the machines.
I’d extracted a promise from Kenny that if he failed, I’d get to clean out the contents of his piggy bank. Wade informed me the piggy bank was empty. So I bet on his stag-handled pocketknife. I wanted his air rifle, but I knew he’d never part with it.
The deal set, Kenny pulled out the choke and flicked the small lever on the right. The old tractor rumbled; a cloud of black smoke belched from the exhaust pipe in front of us. He pushed in the choke, pushed down hard on the clutch and shifted into what he thought was first gear, but wasn’t. He somehow popped it into third.
When he lifted up off the clutch—he was standing up to reach it—he sat down hard because that tractor reared up on its rear wheels, lurched forward and shot down the plowed field.
Big Ken flew off the porch, followed by Dad and Uncle Mearl. The women, smart thinkers, ran back in the house for hydrogen peroxide, methiolate and bandages.
“Downshift,” Wade hollered.
Kenny, straining to hold the machine between the rows, couldn’t even think of it.
Every time he ran over a row we flew up like birds off a line, only to resettle in our various positions: Kenny on the seat. Wade hanging on behind and me clinging to Wade.
I looked behind. The PTO wasn’t turning. I bailed out.
Wade, frozen, clutched his brother’s waist. Kenny was running out of field. He turned right to swing back, but he couldn’t turn the wheel the whole way, so instead of a U-turn he turned at a right angle and the tractor flew straight for the steep drainage ditch by the side of the dirt road.
I raced after the tractor. I should have been scared for the boys, but I was too busy enjoying the spectacle. I knew Kenny was going to smash its nose into that ditch, and he did. The machine stood up, nose down, then settled with a heavy thump, rear tires spinning, more smoke billowing out of the exhaust pipe. Kenny hung on. The way he stayed in that seat was a miracle. Wade was thrown clear into the ditch.
Kenny, although shook up, was far more worried about his father, who bore down on him.
Big Ken leaped into the ditch, reached up and clicked off the tractor. He yanked Kenny out of the seat, taking the strap to him in front of all of us.
When Big Ken lost his temper, you shut up fast.
Little Kenny bawled. By the time Aunt Mimi reached the ditch some of Ken’s anger had abated. Now Aunt Mimi was bullshit mad. She climbed down in the ditch, grabbed Ken’s arm and told him to lay off.
He listened.
Dad and Uncle Mearl inspected the tractor. Dad thought Ken wailed at the boys too much, but he said raising a son was a hard business. You couldn’t coddle boys, but you didn’t want to brutalize them, either. I took from that that Dad was glad to have a daughter.
Mom and Aunt Mimi took the boys back to the house to clean them up, dress their scratches and scrapes.
I squared off at Uncle Ken. “I bet him he couldn’t drive the tractor, so you’d better beat me too.”
An instant silence fell over the four of us in the ditch.
“Oh, you did?”
“I did.”
Dad moved next to me just in case. “Didn’t you think about what could happen?”
“No, sir. I was tired of him bragging that he could drive it, so I bet him he couldn’t.”
“What did you bet?” Ken, shirt off and looking twice as powerful, asked.
“His stag-handled pocketknife against my piggy bank.”
“Well, I guess you won yourself a stag-handled pocketknife.”
“You aren’t going to strap me?”
“No. He didn’t have to listen to you. Now go on and get your knife. You tell him I said so.”
The men pushed the tractor out of the ditch, no easy task. The front grille was pushed in, one headlight was snapped off and there were other odds and ends of damage. At least it wasn’t going to cost a lot of money to fix it.
That night I slept with the pocketknife under my pillow. Mother told me I ought to give it back.
I said I’d won it fair and square. He wouldn’t have given me back my piggy bank if he’d won.
I kept the knife.
I did, however, take some money from my piggy bank and buy Kenny a lime-colored plastic squirt gun, which he immediately used on me.