Children were part of everything that went on in Yamhill. In winter we went to dances in the Masonic Hall, where, after sliding on the dance floor, we fell asleep on benches along the wall and were covered with coats. We sang or recited in church programs, and afterward ate drumsticks at potluck suppers.
On May Day, we took part in a pageant at the high school and ran around with bunches of wildflowers, which we left at people’s doors. On Memorial Day, we went with our families to the old cemetery at Pike, where the graves of our pioneer ancestors were pointed out to us. We played among their tombstones while the adults weeded their graves. On the Fourth of July, we took part in a parade with little girls, dressed in their best, riding on the bed of a truck disguised with bunting as a float. I recall a man nailing a board across our stomachs so we couldn’t fall off. Each girl wore a ribbon bearing the name of a state. I probably brought disgrace to Ohio as the only state whose white stockings had dirty knees.
School did not open until after the prune harvest, when the whole town turned out with picnic lunches to pick prunes to be hauled off to the dryer. Children played among the laden trees but were careful to stay away from the yellowjackets. I stayed away from them but loved to watch them suckling at the plump purple bosoms of fallen prunes.
I went to birthday parties where boys wore sailor suits and girls wore their best dresses, with big bows held to their hair by metal clasps. The curly-haired girls were lucky. Their bows stayed in place. We were always accompanied by our mothers, also dressed for the occasion. Sedately, we played London Bridge, drop-the-handkerchief, and ring-around-the-rosy. I could have played all day. Mothers chatted, and those with straight-haired daughters darted out to adjust slipping hair ribbons. Ice cream and cake were served, and we all went home.
Once I received a written invitation to come to play with Elma, the daughter of the town electrician. Elma had a little electric stove in which we baked, with the help of her mother, a little cake. The stove was plugged into a fascinating electric socket near the floor. All the houses I knew had one electric bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. After the cake was baked and the stove unplugged, Elma’s father cautioned us that we must not touch the socket, which in those days did not have a built-in plug but had, instead, a tiny metal door. I could not keep my eyes off that door, which hid a round hole lined with metal the color of the sun. Finally, when no one was looking, I opened the door and stuck my finger in the hole. Then everyone looked, for I received a terrible electric shock, a shock that made me shriek. Everyone was nice about it, and Elma’s mother comforted me, but I was ashamed. I did not mean to be naughty; I was only curious and did not think anyone would notice if I stuck my finger in just once.
My one companion was my cousin Winston; we were “practically twins” because we were born a month apart. But Winston, who took after my father’s side of the family, was large, good-natured, and deliberate in thought and movement. I, who took after Mother’s side of the family, was small, impetuous, and quick.
Sunday afternoons in winter, Winston sometimes came to our house to play in the sitting room, where Father always built a fire in the iron stove on cold Sundays when the house was surrounded by bare dripping trees, sodden earth, and endless rain. Mother read a magazine, and Father, in work clothes because he had to milk the cows, lay dozing on the floor behind the stove. He had so little time for rest.
One especially dreary Sunday, Winston and I were trying to amuse ourselves by drawing pictures on my blackboard. We were whining because we couldn’t think of anything to draw.
“Why don’t you see which of you can draw the best bird?” Mother thoughtlessly asked without looking up from her magazine.
I seized the chalk and quickly drew, near the top of the blackboard, several spread-eagled M’s, which to me looked like birds in flight.
Winston took the chalk and slowly and deliberately drew a fence below my birds. Then he carefully drew a bird perched on the fence. It was all there: head, wings, beak, eyes, and tail. I thought it was a silly bird. No bird had such big eyes.
To better admire his bird, Winston climbed up on a chair and sat with his legs sticking straight out in front of him. “My bird is better than your bird,” he informed me.
“It is not!”
“Now, children,” said Mother, perhaps regretting having pitted us against each other.
“Your birds are just scribbles in the sky,” he said. The superiority of that boy!
“They are not!” I told him. “Mine are better than yours.” No bird looked like Winston’s bird, but birds in flight looked like mine, I thought. Anyone watching barn swallows wheeling and swooping would know.
“Mine’s best.” Winston, stolid and insistent, was not going to give in.
“It is not!” Before Winston knew what was happening to him, I grabbed him by the ankles and yanked him off the chair. He hit his head on the seat and began to howl. I knew instantly I had done a very bad thing.
“Beverly!” Mother was shocked.
Father sprang from the floor, seized me by my arm, and, with my feet scarcely touching the floor, yanked me through the cold dining room and deserted kitchen into the bathroom, where he sat down on the edge of the tub, turned me over his knee, and spanked me.
Now it was my turn to howl. “I’ll be good, Daddy,” I sobbed. “I’ll be good!”
“By grab, you’ll never do a thing like that again,” he said, and left me shivering, weeping, sniveling, alone in the cold—but still unconvinced that Winston’s bird was better than mine. I didn’t care what anybody said. Mine were better. I knew they were. I also knew I deserved that spanking, so I had no reason to complain about it or feel sorry for myself.
Eventually I came out of the bathroom and was made to tell Winston I was sorry. My feelings were hurt because Mother had already brushed and braided her long black hair. I always looked forward to doing this for her on Sunday evening.
Winston and I shared another experience, one which I enjoyed. I am not so sure about Winston. Because there was so little to do for amusement in small towns, a woman made a business of traveling around the Valley with a set of child-sized wedding clothes, staging Tom Thumb weddings. Mothers of boys and girls the clothes would fit were notified and assembled with their children in “Grandma” Bedwell’s yard. I was dressed as the bride, Winston the groom. The long white dress with a veil and train seemed so beautiful to me. Winston’s black cutaway jacket, long black trousers, white waistcoat, shirt with a stiff collar, and black bow tie were uncomfortable.
The taking of snapshots was the point of the whole event, and there we are, side by side, in my Baby Book, with Winston scowling; Winston scowling harder, seated on an apple box with Beverly’s hand on his shoulder; Beverly seated on the apple box with Winston looking sulky, his hand on her shoulder; Beverly standing alone, hands clasped in front of her, eyes modestly lowered.
I longed to play, really play, with other children. A cousin, I somehow felt, did not count as “other children.” One spring morning, when I expressed my wish, Mother told me the stork was going to bring me a new brother or sister to play with. For a farm child, I was remarkably naïve. I accepted her story about the stork without question because many of the birth announcements that came to our mailbox showed a picture of a stork carrying in its beak a baby suspended in a diaper.
“How will you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked.
“Boy babies cry louder,” Mother explained.
That afternoon, Winston came to play. Outdoors, under the lilac bushes, I told him my interesting new information about babies.
Winston had a sister, Donna—a nice enough kid but too little to count for much, I thought—so he knew more about these things than I. “That’s not true,” he said.
I was indignant. “It is so true. Mamma told me.”
“It is not true,” said Winston, surprisingly superior. He took down his pants and said, “There. See, that’s how you tell a boy.”
I was astonished and interested. Winston was right. Didn’t Mother know about this? Somehow I had a feeling she did but was hiding something from me.
I had no answer for Winston, so I merely said, “Oh.” Then I lifted my skirt and pulled down my bloomers. Companionably, we pee-peed under the lilac bushes, adjusted our clothes, and never mentioned the matter again. And I never asked my mother another question about babies.
Years later, when I told Mother this story, she said, “My land, I had no idea anything like that was going on under the lilac bushes.”