The next day, Sunday, we drove to Onatanka to see a sign painter who owed Uncle Les a favor. We found the man, Mr. Kincaid, up in the hills behind a sweet potato farm.
We pulled the truck into an open-sided shed, then followed Mr. Kincaid’s directions to a small green lake where Uncle Les swore there were fish so big, they’d bite off my toes if I didn’t keep my shoes on.
I had never fished before, and the smell of the bait and the flapping of the fish in Daddy’s hand as he worked the hooks free made my stomach roll. But I still kept throwing my line back in, hoping for a pull on it, because Daddy acted so proud when I caught one.
“They’ll taste good for supper,” he said, dropping a bluegill in the bucket and stringing another worm on my hook.
As the day wore on, the sun beat down on us and a breeze whipped little waves against the sandy bank. When we had a bucket of catfish and bluegill, we made our way back to the sign painter’s shed.
I wiped my fishy-smelling hands on the front of my clothes, thinking Nana would have a conniption if she saw the mud all over my dress and the rip from the barbed wire fence.
Mr. Kincaid, a wiry man with black hair that stuck up in spikes, leaned back with his elbows against his workbench as Daddy and I inspected the truck.
On the side, he’d painted a red circle with a yellow lightning bolt slashed through it. Then he had lettered
HAROLD CLARK, ELECTRICIAN
HOME, FARM, AND INDUSTRIAL WIRING
I looked at Daddy. Wouldn’t that show those Green boys back home?
“How much I owe you?” Daddy asked, reaching for his billfold.
“Not a thing,” Mr. Kincaid said, scratching at a dried smear of yellow paint streaking his cheek. “Just tell Les Clark we’re even.”
Down the road, Daddy pulled in at the sweet potato farm and bought a half peck of sweet potatoes from an old man with a glass eye.
“You like these?” Daddy asked, setting the sack in the seat between us.
“I like them at Thanksgiving, the way Nana fixes them,” I said, which made me wonder what Daddy and I would do at Thanksgiving, way out here in Oklahoma.
I rubbed my sunburned nose with my stinky-fish hands. I wanted to get cleaned up, then do girl things with Aunty Rose—paint our nails and look at patterns.
The truck growled as Daddy shifted into low for the switchback down out of the hills.
“You missing home?” he asked, glancing across the seat at me.
Daddy was getting pretty good at reading my mind.
I nodded.
“Me too,” he said, his voice sounding like he’d been running.
“How can you be homesick, Daddy?” I stared out the window, the feathery trees that crowded the side of the road so close, I could reach out and touch them.
“I know I’ve been gone a long time,” he said. “But in the service, even in wartime, they take care of you. A man doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal’s coming from. It may taste like old shoes, but it’s coming from the mess three times a day regular as a ticking clock.”
The words poured out of him. “A man doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going to sleep, or get his clothes, or anything except doing his job and staying alive. Now, when your mama lived.…”
His voice broke, and he stared at the horizon for a few seconds, then he went on, talking fast. “When she lived, I didn’t have a second’s doubt about anything. We were partners. We each took care of the other one. Now—”
When I glanced at Daddy, his face was all twisted up. I looked away, feeling it wasn’t polite to stare. Daddy made a funny noise, back in his throat. He looked at me, his eyes sparkling with tears, but then he grinned.
“You know what, Mae Bug?” he said, hitting the brakes and pulling onto a track that ran down to the river. “I think I’m mainly hungry.”
I hung on to the door handle as we bounced over gopher holes and head-high weeds scraped against the running boards.
Had Daddy gone crazy?
He rocked the truck to a stop on the flat stretch of gravel that ran along a slow, pretty little stream.
“We’ll make us a bonfire and cook these fish and sweet potatoes. Might even catch crawdads for crawdaddy stew.”
Daddy slid out of the truck and came around to my side, opening the door.
“Whatever we cook, it’ll beat sitting in a furnished apartment with no furniture and eating cold stuff out of quart jars that makes us homesick just to look at it.”
I felt all weak-kneed from the way Daddy was pouncing on the truth and laying it out in front of us. I guess that’s why I started crying. I wrapped my arms around Daddy’s waist, burying my face, feeling the racking of his body as he wept too.
When we were finally done, I listened to the quiet running of the river. Here we stood, hundreds of miles from home, with not much to our names but a truck with some fancy painting on it.
Daddy handed me his handkerchief. After I’d used it, I gave it back. His nose blowing scared a bird out of the bushes, which made us laugh as it went squawking off over the creek.
We walked along the bank, picking up driftwood. Then we started a fire, and while it burned down to embers for cooking our potatoes, we pulled off our shoes and waded in the shallow, sandy-bottomed creek.
As the cool water swirled around our ankles, I considered telling Daddy about Grandpa’s catching the water moccasin but decided not to. I asked about Mama instead. At home, she didn’t seem so … missing. But with Daddy and me off by ourselves, I thought about her a lot more.
“Daddy, do you remember marrying Mama?” I asked.
Daddy’s voice sounded funny when he said, “Sure, I do.”
“Would you tell me about it?” I asked, without looking at him.
After a while, he said, “Well, we got married at the church. Your mama’s friend, Marian, and my buddy from high school, Tom Luther, stood up with us. Old Bob Hewett performed the ceremony. At six o’clock in the evening.”
We had stopped walking and stood with the water’s current tangling our feet. I bent down for a bright blue pebble that winked in the water.
“What did Mama look like?” I asked, studying the stone, rubbing it with my thumb.
“Well, she looked a lot like you’re starting to look,” he said, putting his hand on my head. “She pushed her hair up real pretty, with flowers in it. She made me proud.”
Daddy bent down and picked up a pebble too. “Your mama always felt close to her family,” he said, his back to me. “So I kind of made them mine. Like I had two sets of folks.”
I rubbed my arms in the sudden late-day chill.
Daddy smacked his neck. “Mosquitoes are hungry.”
He looked at me then, and we smiled at each other.
“When you came along,” he said, “I thought Will and Mae would pop with pride. I think they would have given me the world. Just because I was your daddy.
“But love’s not always a good thing,” Daddy said, reading my thoughts. “Your grandpa loved Treva so much, he went crazy when she died. Did you know he wouldn’t let me see you when I came home?”
I caught my breath. “When did you come home?”
“After your mama died. As soon as they could get me off the ship. I was on a shakedown cruise up the coast. You didn’t know that?”
I shook my head.
“I rode the train for three days, about dead with grief. Feeling so sorry for you. And Mae and Will. But when I got home, Will wouldn’t see me. Wouldn’t let me see you. And about that time, the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, and all leaves were canceled. So I had to just get back on that ship and take my feelings out on the enemy. I couldn’t hardly raise a little girl on a destroyer in the middle of the ocean,” Daddy said. “And I knew you’d get plenty of love with Will and Mae.”
He was sure right about that.
“Why’d you come back now, Daddy?”
“Because the war’s over, Mae Bug.”
I made a sound, half laugh, half cry. The war wasn’t over. It was still going on right inside me. Grandpa in the north, Daddy in the south.
“I mean, why’d you come back for me?”
“Because it seemed right.”
I waited for more. That didn’t sound like much of a reason for turning a person’s world upside down.
“That’s the only way I know to explain it, Mae Bug.”
He stood there in the rippling water, his pants rolled up to his knees, looking at me with a plea for understanding in his eyes.
Maybe it did seem right. But it didn’t seem enough. I needed Nana and Grandpa and Aunty Rose too.
“And what about the baby?” I asked. “Why is he set apart like he doesn’t belong?”
Fierceness crossed Daddy’s face. “I swear I don’t know. I guess your grandpa just went crazy.” His voice whipped with anger. “But he sure shamed me. For two cents I’d just dig up that little casket and move it right over by your mama where it belongs.”
I cringed at the thought of the storm that would rip our family apart for good if Daddy did any such thing.
I heard him breathing and he said finally, in a calmer voice, “I guess we better clean those fish and get them in the fire.”
After our meal, as we lay on a flat rock and watched young hawks ride the updraft, I half shut my eyes and nearly fell asleep, finding it easier to sleep out in the open, with the water babbling around me, than penned up in the apartment.
“Sing about that gypsy, Daddy,” I said, staring at the first star in the twilight. I hated the idea of the blue-eyed baby being left behind, but I was starting to like the gypsy Davy and his big guitar.