When he was sixty-eight, my Grandfather Atlee decided to sell the store in Banks and retire to Yamhill. He and Frank, as he called my grandmother, had worked hard all their lives; they weren’t getting any younger, and they had earned a rest.
I was sorry about the store, where I could help myself to gumdrops. Grandpa Atlee, a small, spry man with a bald head (but not as interesting as Uncle Fred’s bald head) and a bushy moustache, always lifted me to the counter to sit with my legs dangling, happy and proud when he told his customers, “Yes, sir. She’s the only granddaughter I got, and she’s a crackerjack.”
My grandparents packed up their belongings and moved into two of the upstairs bedrooms for the winter until they could find a house in Yamhill. I was glad to have them; so was Mother. That winter she escaped many of her farm chores to keep books for Yamhill’s general merchandise store, where she was surrounded by people to talk to.
A gentle dumpling of a grandmother who worried about her tendency to “put on flesh,” my grandmother sang Civil War songs she had learned in her childhood: “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” and “John Brown’s Body.” I begged for a story. Her story was always the same:
I’ll tell you a story about Mother Morey.
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another
About Jack and his brother.
And now my story is done.
Grandma Atlee taught me to sew. My stitches were uneven, my seams crooked, but turning scraps of cloth into blocks for a doll’s quilt gave me real satisfaction.
Grandfather took me on his knee and, using my fingers to count, taught me “arithmeticking.” We progressed to adding and subtracting without fingers, and then to writing down the numbers on the backs of old envelopes.
In the spring, my grandparents moved to a house I could walk to alone, pausing at the door of the carpenter shop to say hello to Bob Perry and to watch him work with saws, hammers, chisels, and planes. At the blacksmith shop I stopped to watch the smith pump the bellows that made the coals on his hearth glow, then heat a horseshoe, bend it, and nail it to the hoof of a patient horse. Once, when he was not busy, he made me a ring from a horseshoe nail. At my grandparents’ house, I paused to smell the warm red roses.
Most of all, I enjoyed time with my grandfather when he worked in his vegetable garden, which was full of wonder and beauty: fat pods of peas, new potatoes to gather when he turned the soil, brown lettuce and pale cucumbers that Grandma floated in a bowl of diluted vinegar with a bit of sugar, ruby-veined beets and feathery carrots to be harvested for winter, tomatoes to eat warm from the sun, green onions to eat with homemade bread, corn for people instead of cattle, string beans twining their way up tepees of sticks, small muskmelons the size of baseballs, round mottled watermelons, and strawberries. Wherever my grandfather lived, he grew strawberries.
Across the fence, Mrs. Roberts raised sunflowers for seeds to feed her noisy parrot. Grandpa explained that these plate-sized yellow flowers followed the course of the sun during the day. That was why they were called sunflowers. I often stood looking up at those heavy blossoms, watching to see if I could catch them following the sun. I could never stand still that long, but by evening there they were, facing the sun setting behind the Coast Range. I was determined to catch them the next day, but I never succeeded. I was too active. Grandpa sometimes paid me a nickel to sit still for five minutes.
One summer day, my grandfather took me on a mysterious journey. He wouldn’t say why. We walked a mile to the train depot. Through the depot window we could hear the chittering telegraph sending and receiving messages over the humming wires strung along poles that stretched the wires far, far away.
“When’s the train coming, Grandpa?” I asked, wild with excitement.
“Hold your horses,” said Grandpa. “It’ll come. Don’t you worry.”
At last the train could be heard, chuffing and tooting, and then seen, trailing smoke as it pulled into the station and waited, panting, until the conductor shouted “’Board!” and we were off on our mysterious journey.
In McMinnville, seven miles away, we joined a crowd headed for a big tent and found seats on narrow bleachers.
It was a dog and pony show: music, clowns, dogs in costumes walking on their hind legs, pretty ladies leading ponies in fancy trappings, all marching, dancing around and around a big wooden ring in the center of the tent.
I was dazzled. There was so much excitement, so much to see, I couldn’t take it all in. My fingers grew sticky from Cracker Jack as I perched on the narrow board and tried to grasp every bit of this grand and lavish spectacle.
The best part of the whole show was a clown wearing great flapping shoes who led a fox terrier with a stubby tail. On the end of this dog’s tail was an electric bulb, and then—the light was turned on! The little dog trotted happily around the ring with the light on the end of his tail flicking on and off, on and off. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt, and I couldn’t wait to tell my parents about the wonderful sight I had seen in McMinnville.
That summer I walked back and forth between the farm and my grandparents’ house almost every day. One day I asked if I could take off my shoes and stockings when I went to visit. “Yes,” answered Mother, somewhat absentmindedly. “Don’t step on any thistles, and come home in time for supper.”
I dropped my shoes and stockings on the porch, wiggled my toes, and set off down the board sidewalk between the privet hedges, heavy with fragrance, to the road. The dust, which came up to my ankles, was as warm and as soft as feathers. I kicked up little clouds and was happy.
Then my feet began to grow warmer until I was uncomfortable. I didn’t think of turning back. On a farm, no one ever gave up. No matter how we felt, livestock had to be cared for, fields plowed, crops sown, fruit and vegetables canned.
My feet became so hot I was in pain. I started to run, leaving a trail of dust behind me. As I ran past the blacksmith shop, I began to cry. The smith, a horse’s foot between his thighs, stopped pounding on a horseshoe to stare. Asking for help from someone not a relative did not occur to me, any more than turning back, even though my feet felt as if they were burning. By now I was covered with dust. Tears streamed down my face, leaving muddy tracks. I began to shriek with pain, but there was nothing to do but run on. “Grandpa! Grandpa!” I screamed.
Finally my grandfather heard me and came running to see what was wrong. When he grasped what had happened, he plucked me out of the dust and carried me into the house, out of the sun. “Poor little young ’un,” he said. “You poor little young ’un.”
“Oh, you poor child,” said my grandmother when she saw my red feet.
My grandfather sat me on a chair and fetched a pan of cold water for my feet. My grandmother washed mud and dust from my face before she hurried to make me a glass of lemonade. I sat with my feet in the pan of water, drinking lemonade and feeling much better. The house was cool, and I was surrounded by love. “There. That’s the ticket,” said Grandpa when I stopped crying.
That was the year Mother had said the stork was going to bring me a little brother or sister. Suddenly, one winter day, I was sent to my grandparents’ house, with my nightgown, to spend the night—a real treat for me, because Grandma always read aloud from the newspaper the “Burgess Bedtime Story,” all about Old Mother West Wind, Grandfather Frog, and rabbits that went lipperty-lop into the old brier patch. Grandpa let me look at colored pictures in his dictionary, pages of foreign flags and breeds of horses, cows, and dogs.
I stayed all the next day, even though Grandma had walked back to the farm. When she returned, she cooked Thanksgiving dinner, which she packed in a basket. Grandpa balanced the basket on his shoulder, and we walked the muddy road home. What fun, I thought, dinner arriving in a clothes basket.
At home, I was shocked to see Mother, pale and with her black hair tumbled on the pillow, in the four-poster bed in the downstairs bedroom. I had never before seen Mother in bed in the daytime. She managed a weak smile and told me she had not been feeling well, but she could come to the dinner table.
Later that winter, when it occurred to me to ask when the stork was going to bring my little brother or sister, Mother merely said, “The stork changed its mind.”
When I was an adult, Mother told me what had really happened. She had had a difficult miscarriage. Father, with the help of “Central,” reached a doctor, who, after hours of anguish for my parents, arrived too drunk to be of any help. Furious, Father telephoned my Uncle Ray, who opened his pharmacy in the night and brought to the farm the medicine a sober doctor would have prescribed. He gave it to Mother illegally and, the next morning, forced the doctor to sign the prescription. No little brother or sister ever came to our house.