Daddy never did say for sure that we’d be going home until we were packing up the tools after finishing our last job on Wednesday afternoon, so I didn’t get a chance to write with the news. But it was just as well, or they would have worn themselves out watching for us.
Daddy and I traveled home the same way we came, except the truck was loaded with tools and equipment instead of Nana’s canned goods, plus Daddy had almost five hundred dollars in his pocket.
We packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and filled some of Nana’s empty mason jars with drinking water. As we drove through the Ozarks, I wished I had money to buy Nana a pretty chenille bedspread.
“Which bedspread do you like better, Daddy?” I asked, pointing to a clothesline in front of a weathered house in the side of the hill. “Peacocks or butterflies?”
Daddy looked at the display ruffling in the wind. “Either one is nice,” he said.
Daddy didn’t seem to understand that you were supposed to pick one.
“Well, which one would Mama have liked best?”
“She’d have liked the butterfly one,” he said. “She always thought butterflies were real pretty.”
When Daddy told me things Mama liked and did, and how she looked, she seemed to come alive again inside me. At first, the stirring memories would hurt, but the more I touched them, the nicer it felt.
After the interesting things for sale disappeared in the rearview mirror, I read Daddy some stories from my book.
When my voice got hoarse, I opened a jar of water and offered Daddy a drink, then took one myself.
“How much farther to the Mississippi River?” I asked.
“Just a little ways.”
But it seemed to take forever.
Finally a silver twist of water glinted between the hills, and I watched the river grow bigger and broader as we dropped into the valley and wended our way to the bridge that spanned the water.
On the bridge, I hung out the window. A long barge train loaded with golden grain passed beneath us.
“We’re back in our home state, Daddy,” I told him as we drove off the bridge on the other side.
“Yep. We’ve only been gone a month,” he said. “Things don’t look much different.”
We ate the rest of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drank all the water, not because we were hungry or thirsty, but because we didn’t know what else to do.
Daddy tried singing to pass the time, but right then I just wanted him to be still and concentrate on getting us home as fast as he could.
In a while he stopped singing and shifted in his seat, squaring his shoulders. He came up on a truck carrying chicken crates, tooted, and went around. Then he gave our truck more gas and passed everything that turned up in front of us all the way to Huxley.
A few hours later, we stopped at a filling station just west of town. A man who worked there read the sign on the door and asked Daddy if he wanted any more customers. Daddy said sure and got directions to where the man lived.
“He didn’t say a word about the Green boys,” I said as we drove away.
“Maybe they’ve left the country.”
“If they’ve not, maybe you could run them out,” I suggested.
“There’s probably enough work to go around,” Daddy said and smiled. It was nice that he’d landed a job close to home.
“What do you suppose everybody will be doing when we get there?” I asked.
“Well, I reckon your grandma will be doing something in the kitchen. Maybe finishing up the supper dishes.”
“And Aunty Rose will be writing me a letter,” I said. “That’s what she does every night after supper.”
Where would Grandpa be? I thought.
When we turned in the drive, the special purple light that comes right before starry darkness wrapped the house and barn and other buildings. Pale lamplight glowed through the kitchen and sunroom windows.
“You know what, Daddy?” I said. “It sure is dark in the country.”
“Sure is,” he agreed. “And I like that. Maybe all this electricity isn’t such a good idea.”
Daddy’s voice had a cheerfulness to it that suddenly sounded forced. Was he dreading meeting Grandpa again?
As I slid out of the truck, Jacky came charging out of the shadows and bumped against my thigh, nearly knocking me over as he wagged his whole body. He groaned and whined as I patted him and squatted down to hug his head.
“We got company?” I heard Nana say from the back door. “Who’s out there?”
“Nana! It’s me.”
I heard her coming down the steps as I ran toward her. Burying myself in her body and feeling her arms close around me, I shut my eyes. My stomach, my heart, and even my fingers and toes warmed. Something hummed inside me that said the whole world might whirl in noise and darkness, but I was safe at the center.
“Who’s out there?” Grandpa called from the doorway.
“It’s me,” I said, pulling away from Nana and running to him. “And my daddy. We’ve come home.” Grandpa picked me up in his arms and swung me around like I was a little girl.
“Well, sure enough!” he said.
I felt the collar of his denim shirt and the straps of his overalls under my hands.
“Willa Mae? Willa Mae?” Aunty Rose ran out the door, shrieking, and let the screen bang behind her.
Grandpa set me down and Aunty Rose hugged me until I couldn’t breathe and had to push her away.
I heard the truck door slam as Daddy got out.
“Daddy did real good in Oklahoma,” I said, standing back away from everybody and making an announcement. “He made almost five hundred dollars wiring houses. Now he’s brought me home so I can start school.”
Daddy and I had never talked about school starting, but it sounded like as good a reason as any to explain his kindness.
“Well, that’s just fine,” Nana said, her voice practically singing in the darkness.
“School hasn’t started already, has it?” I didn’t want to miss the first day.
“Starts Monday,” Grandpa said. “I went down and mowed the school yard today.”
Silence fell among us. I could feel Nana and Grandpa wanting to get me inside. And Aunty Rose gripped my hand, pulling me toward the door as she danced around.
“Well,” Daddy said, “I know Willa Mae will want to stay here tonight. And I need to see the folks.”
I heard the truck door slam, and I slipped free of Aunty Rose to run and stand by Daddy’s window.
I peered through the open truck window at Daddy’s face, pale in the darkness. He seemed small compared to Grandpa. In Oklahoma, he had seemed bigger.
“Grandmother and Grandfather Clark will sure be glad to see you,” I said. “And Aunt Belle.”
He nodded.
“Will you tell them I said hello?” I asked. “And I’ll see them soon. Thank you for bringing me home, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, putting the truck into reverse. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
I laughed. A bedbug wouldn’t last two seconds in Nana’s house, and Daddy knew it.
“See you later,” I said, leaping onto the running board and putting my hand on his head, as he had done to mine a million times.
Inside, everything was just as I’d left it. The kitchen still smelled of wood from the cookstove. I could taste the grime of our trip on my lips and longed for a good bath. The memory of the big, white bathtub in Oklahoma loomed in my mind.
The floor in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room still squeaked when I passed through. A lamp burned in the middle of the dining-room table, and Aunty Rose’s stationery was spread out just as I’d thought it would be. I grabbed up the robin salt and pepper shakers off the table.
“I just love these old salt and pepper shakers,” I announced, giving each one of them a big smack.
Everybody was staring at me like I’d gone crazy. Then we started laughing. I hung on to Aunty Rose and laughed until tears poured down my face.
Nana warmed up some fried potatoes and lima beans for me and she fried bacon. Everybody watched me eat, and the food tasted so good.
My own bed was a welcome place, and I fell asleep wondering what Daddy was doing.
First thing Saturday morning I went across the pasture with Grandpa and checked on my livestock. The woods to the east glowed with patches of gold leaves, and Jacky went dashing into the undergrowth, on the scent of some animal.
My lamb had filled out in the time I’d been gone and nearly knocked me over trying to get to the bucket of mash Grandpa carried.
“Seems like everything is back in its right place now. Reckon your daddy will stay around here?” Grandpa asked on the way back to the house for breakfast.
“I hope so,” I said.
“Reckon he’ll leave you with us?”
I looked up at Grandpa, longing to find an expression in his eyes that wouldn’t make me choose to live with one or the other.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Even from the road, I could smell Nana’s biscuits, and I ran on ahead, anxious to find Aunty Rose and tell her about sitting on the roof for our meals in Oklahoma.
* * *
Daddy didn’t come around until the next afternoon. We were just finishing up Sunday dinner when I heard the truck. I asked to be excused and ran out to greet him.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Daddy looked as if he’d been enjoying some of Grandmother Clark’s good food the last couple of days. And his eyes shone.
“Come in, Harold,” Nana called, stepping out the door. “We’re just about to have some pie.”
I knew Nana must have asked Grandpa if Daddy could come in and sit down at the table with us, and my heart warmed that Grandpa had said yes.
“Thanks, Mae,” Daddy said. “That sounds real good.”
He got out of the truck, then reached across the seat for a box.
“What’s that?” I asked, bouncing to see.
The box was gray-and-white striped, and the words The Mammoth Department Store were lettered in red.
“Something for you,” Daddy said.
The Mammoth was a store in Huxley that I’d walked by a hundred times, but Nana said everything in there would be too high for us.
“I bought you something special to wear the first day of school,” Daddy said, watching my face. “Open it,” he went on, his voice shaking. “Here. I’ll hold the bottom. You pull off the lid.”
The sound of the lid sliding off and sucking up tissue paper gave me goosebumps.
“Daddy!”
I lifted out the jade-colored dress with a little pink butterfly pattern all through the material and a collar made out of a soft white fabric.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, then wheeled to run into the house, leaving Daddy to bring the box and tissue paper.
“Look!”
I screeched to a stop in the dining room with the dress up against me.
“It’ll fit perfectly and it came from The Mammoth and Daddy bought it for the first day of school.”
I twirled around, holding the dress to my waist, then stopped with one arm stuck out like a model in the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
After a while I quit drinking in the beauty of the dress, the pucker of smocking across the front, the tiny pleats at the waistline, and glanced up at the expressions on everybody’s faces.
Aunty Rose’s eyes gleamed with admiration.
Nana seemed caught up in calculating how she might have made that dress herself. She reached out a hand and rubbed the green paisley between her fingers and stroked the soft collar.
“That’s fine material,” she said.
I wasn’t sure about Grandpa’s expression. He didn’t know much about girls’ dresses, but I saw respect in his eyes.
The next morning, I took a picture postcard of the Mississippi River to school to show everybody. And as we stood around the flagpole I pledged allegiance to the flag with the other students, Marilee on one side of me and Mattie on the other.
I’d never looked finer for a first day. I loved the deep jade color of my dress. I loved the soft feel of the collar at my throat. Most of all I loved how Daddy had picked it out and bought it for me, and that it had butterflies Mama would have liked.