We didn’t get to the creek that Sunday because a light rain started to fall right after church and kept on all day. And the following Sunday the preacher and his wife—Mr. and Mrs. Bradley—came to dinner, which required a mountain of work.
On Saturday, Aunty Rose and I cleaned like hired girls. We polished furniture until the house reeked of lemon oil. We scrubbed windows with vinegar water until they sparkled. And Aunty Rose ironed the white damask tablecloth until the Blessed Savior himself could have taken a meal off it.
Grandpa teased Nana that maybe he should build a new outhouse special for the preacher and his wife.
While Aunty Rose and I were slaving away, Nana made an angel food cake and two mincemeat pies to cap off her meal of fresh fried chicken, peas and new potatoes from the garden, noodle kugel, biscuits, canned applesauce, and enough lemonade to float a battleship.
And then, of course, after dinner on Sunday, the Bradleys stayed, talking on and on in the front room. I thought they might enjoy going down to the creek, but Nana said they wouldn’t.
About three o’clock they went to rest on Nana and Grandpa’s bed until it was time to get up for a light supper and go back to the church for the evening preaching. We didn’t usually go to evening preaching. In the summer, if the skies were clear, we lay in the grass and studied the stars. Grandpa said we could see God in the Big Dipper better than we could see him at the church house.
But when the preacher came to Sunday dinner, we went to evening preaching.
From my point of view, the only thing good about the Bradleys’ coming was that they wouldn’t be back until February. We had just over thirty families in the Panther Fork congregation to feed the preacher on Sundays, so we could keep him nourished for about eight months without any repeats.
* * *
The third weekend in June, my hopes rose for finally getting to Panther Fork Creek. On Saturday, it didn’t look the least bit like rain. I studied the sky as we drove along County Line Road on the way to Lorrimer’s store to do our Saturday trading.
“Remember about going to the creek tomorrow, Grandpa?” I said, pulling myself up to rest my chin on his shoulder.
“I remember,” he said, shifting into low to get through the ruts.
“Looks like they could be kinder to the roads,” Nana said. “We can’t hardly get through, the way those trucks and Caterpillars cut things up.”
“But think of the electricity, Mom,” Aunty Rose said. “When we get it, we’ll be able to just switch on the light.”
Grandpa’s blue eyes watched Aunty Rose in the rearview mirror. Grandpa wasn’t sold on electricity.
“Think of having a refrigerator, Grandpa,” I said. “We could have ice cubes, and ice cream, and ice-cold lemonade.”
I’d had those things in Huxley when we went to visit our cousins. When we took the ice cubes out of the tray, they cracked and sparkled like cut diamonds. And we ate striped ice cream that came from the store in a box. We sliced the ice cream like bread and laid it out on chilled plates with mint leaves from Aunt Patty’s window box.
“We’ll see,” Grandpa said.
That was all he ever said about the electricity. We’ll see.
There were four other cars at Lorrimer’s and some men standing on the porch. Grandpa got Nana’s crate of eggs out of the trunk and carried it in for her.
Lorrimer’s smelled like chicken feed and Sugar Babies and the sizing that made the material Mrs. Lorrimer kept in the front so stiff and shiny.
“Look,” I said to Aunty Rose as the screen door banged behind us. “They’ve still got that pink stripe.”
“I don’t want it anymore,” Aunty Rose said, brushing the candy-striped fabric with her fingers and turning up her nose. “Charles Michael says he wants me to wear red.”
“Some old bull might get after you,” I said. “Better stay out of Charley Hoyt’s pasture.”
Everybody knew Hoyt had the meanest bull in southern Illinois, so I was giving good advice. But Aunty Rose just cut me a look and went on over to talk to Mary Carmichael, who rode the bus with her to Huxley High School.
Nana came back to where I was, putting her egg money in an envelope, which she tucked into the depths of her pocketbook. Nana was saving her egg money to buy new wallpaper for the front room.
“How much you got to go?” I asked.
“About five dollars is all,” she said, trying to smooth down my hair.
I went out to where Mr. Carmichael was helping Grandpa load chicken mash into the trunk of our car. Grandpa was taller than the other men. He was slender, with a smooth face and deep blue eyes, and handsome enough to be a movie star.
He slammed down the trunk lid, making the dust fly, and gave me three nickels from his overalls pocket.
“Thank you,” I said.
I gave one of the nickels to Nana and one to Aunty Rose. Then I handed over my own to Mrs. Lorrimer, who told me to help myself.
I buried my hand in the icy water of the cooler, making the pop bottles rattle as I searched for a strawberry pop. When I got it, I went out to sit on the porch in one of the metal chairs.
A man I didn’t know was standing with his foot up on the running board of a car, talking to Bert Tiller.
“—said he was coming back. Didn’t say when exactly. But I guess he’s aiming to stay, because he was asking about jobs.”
“Shoot,” Bert said. “I’ve not seen Harold Clark in so long, I might not know him on the street.”
The strawberry pop went up my nose, and I coughed like I was drowning.
The men looked up at me, and Bert’s face turned red. I think he’d forgotten Harold Clark was my daddy until that very minute.
“How you doing, Willa Mae?” he asked.
“Fine,” I whispered through my choking. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” he said. “Howdy, Will.” And his face turned even redder as he came up the steps and disappeared through the door without meeting Grandpa’s eyes.
Grandpa sat down in the chair by me. Suddenly it was so still, I heard a rooster carrying on about a mile off.
Finally he said, “Pop’s good,” and took a swig.
“It sure is,” I said. But I was afraid to drink any more lest I choke again.
Grandpa sat right there by me until Nana and Aunty Rose got through with their business. The Neills and the Reileys pulled in while we were waiting and passed the time of day before they went in the store. The grown-ups seemed to look at me with more interest than usual, but if they had anything to say about my daddy, they were afraid to say it in front of Grandpa.
Grandpa went inside to settle up the bill, and I went right along with him, acting just as natural and happy as you please.
Not a word was mentioned on the ride home, but Nana went so far out of her way to act chipper that she made the butterflies start up in my stomach.
Grandpa spent the afternoon sorting out the sheep and moving them from one pasture to the next. Then I heard him pounding as he mended fence. Nana bent over the beans in the garden, moving slowly down the rows.
I helped Aunty Rose pin a dress pattern to some solid red material that Nana had let her get at Lorrimer’s. Aunty Rose acted like her usual self, so I guessed she hadn’t heard the talk, and I didn’t bring it up.
That night, after supper and after Aunty Rose and Charles Michael had left for Huxley to see a movie, Nana spread a towel on my dressing table and carried in two pans of warm water for my bath. And though it wasn’t quite dark yet, she brought in a lamp.
“So you can see all the dirt,” she said, tracing my cheek with her finger.
After she left, I stripped off my clothes and started washing at the top and worked my way down to the bottom. I used one pan for the soapy washcloth and the other pan for the final rinsing. When I had finished except for my feet, I moved the soapy water to the floor and sat on the vanity bench soaking them, wiggling my toes in the warm water, wondering if Grandpa would still take me to the creek tomorrow.
As I lay in bed a little while later, smelling the fragrance of the Camay soap on my skin and the sunshine in the clean nightgown I’d put on, I eavesdropped through the bedroom wall just like always.
The springs squeaked as Nana sat on the edge of the bed to take off her shoes.
“… Sure had a lot to say about Harold.” Nana’s voice grew strong as she moved to the wardrobe. Her shoes made a clunking sound as she dropped them inside.
“Harold Clark ain’t worth shooting.” Grandpa’s voice came low from his side of the bed against the wall.
My toes curled back and my legs tensed under the sheet at Grandpa’s harsh words.
“Be that as it may.…” Then I couldn’t hear what Nana said as she turned toward the dresser on the opposite wall and started to brush her hair.
“… One thing’s sure.…” Her voice got louder again. “If he comes back, he’ll want to take Willa Mae.…” And about that time a cricket started screeching right outside my window and I couldn’t hear anything else.
Take me where?
I sure wished that old cricket would shut up. I knew he would eventually, and I decided to stay awake until he did so maybe I could hear the rest of the conversation and find out where Nana thought my daddy might take me.
But the next thing I knew sun was creeping across the bay window seat and the sheers swung out a little in the morning breeze.
We had to hurry through breakfast. Afterward, Grandpa, shaved and wearing his white shirt, studied his Sunday school lesson at the dining-room table. The rest of us rushed around getting the dishes done up, the lamp wicks trimmed, the globes washed, and the bedside pots emptied in the ash pile outdoors.
I didn’t have much to do to get ready except pull one of my Sunday dresses over my head, put on clean anklets, and step into my new saddle oxfords. So when I was done, I sat down in a rocker in the front room, staring at Nana’s closed bedroom door, wondering exactly what she was doing that took so long.
Eventually she would come out smelling of lilac dusting powder, her lips as red as a lady cardinal’s. When I hugged her, her body would feel firm because of the foundation garments she wore under her black Sunday dress.
Overhead, Aunty Rose made the floor squeak as she moved around, passing from wardrobe to dressing table and back.
Finally we got in the Packard and headed down to Panther Fork Christian Church, where the preacher and his wife stood on the steps to shake our hands as we went in the front door.
I went forward to sit between Nana and Grandpa, just like always, in the second row. Aunty Rose stayed with the young people back by the door. She said I could start sitting there about any time, but if she thought I was going to be in the same pew as Petey Tyler, she was nuts.
After the opening song, followed by the prayer hymn, Grandpa talked to God while we all stood with our heads bowed. Of all the deacons and elders who took turns praying on Sunday morning, Grandpa did the best job of making a person feel like we had God’s attention for the moment and He was truly listening to our needs and joys.
Everything went just fine until I got into Sunday school class. That’s when Mrs. Mundey said to me, right in front of everybody, that she understood my daddy was coming home soon.
She said, “Willa Mae, I’ll bet that sure warms your heart, don’t it? To think of having your daddy home after all this time?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my cheeks stinging and my fingers crossed behind my back.
“How long has it been?” she asked.
I shook my head, not wanting to answer.
“Have you heard yet just exactly when he’s coming?” she asked.
“Not just exactly,” I said, thinking Mrs. Mundey was dumb as a sack of rocks not to see I didn’t want to talk about it right there.
When we went around the room taking turns reading the Bible verses that were a part of our lesson, I’d lost my place and Marilee had to point me to John 3:16.
After Sunday school, during the preaching and the passing around of the bread and wine, I felt people’s eyes on the back of my head as I sat in my place between Nana and Grandpa.
Leaving the church after services, I stuck close to Grandpa, knowing I was safe from the talk there.
Outside, God had lowered a piece of heaven down to cover Panther Fork. The sweet, soapy smell of roses from the front yard of the parsonage drifted by, and a breeze caught the skirt of my sailor dress as I went down the church house steps. Big sails of white clouds blew by. And across the road in the cemetery, Mama’s angel looked over the hill, blessing us.
As we rode back, I wondered if what folks were saying about my daddy was true. I wondered, but I didn’t talk about it.
At home, I changed into an everyday dress and went to help fix our Sunday dinner.
“I’ll drop the noodles in,” I offered, standing beside Nana at the stove.
“You do that, and I’ll mash the potatoes,” Nana said, catching a line of sweat running down her cheek. “Rose, you go to the garden for radishes. Red and white both.”
The flowered noodle curls fattened up, bubbling the broth, as I dropped them in.
The old hen that Grandpa had lopped the head off of last night and Nana had dressed was cooking in the big iron skillet.
“Better stir those noodles, or they’ll stick,” Nana said, catching me watching Grandpa in the sunroom, still in his Sunday pants and white shirt, reading his New Testament with the words of Jesus printed in red, still without one whisker twitch of acknowledgment about my daddy’s coming.
In a few minutes, Nana handed me the bowl of mashed potatoes to set on the table.
Steam fogged my face, giving off a smell of fresh butter. I ran my finger along the edge of the bowl, finding the little chip that had always been there. Then I set it between the salt and pepper shakers shaped like robins that stayed on the table for every meal.
I stood in the screened doorway, feeling the breeze dry the sweat on my arms. Jacky saw me and flopped his tail, but he didn’t stir from the shade of the hickory tree.
Out in the garden, Aunty Rose jitterbugged down a bean row and swooped up a handful of radishes at the end.
“Wash up,” Nana told Grandpa. “It’s about ready.”
After dinner, as we were stacking the dishes, a car horn sounded in the drive and I ran and pulled back the curtain. But it was only Charles Michael and some other boys that followed Aunty Rose around.
“Mom, don’t let her stare out the window,” Aunty Rose said over her shoulder as she went out the door.
Just to spite her, I pulled the curtain back and had a good look.
Aunty Rose smoothed down her skirt and made her hair bounce in the sunshine.
“—Spring Lake?” I heard Charles Michael ask.
After Aunty Rose left, I drifted into my bedroom and flopped down on the bed, staring at the roses on my wallpaper.
Why had my daddy vanished six years ago? Why hadn’t he come home when Mama died? Why hadn’t he written? Why did Grandpa hate him?
Then I started again at the beginning of my question list, picking at the chenille flowers on my bedspread. I heard Grandpa through the wall, squeaking out the little rod where he hung his tie, getting ready to go to the creek.
I went to find Nana, who was on the back porch putting on old shoes.
“You going to wear a hat?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“You’ll get freckles.”
Grandpa came out and stepped into his boots.
“We’ll ride on the tractor,” he said as he laced them up. “There’s weeds too high to walk through in the back pasture.”
Nana, in her sun hat, sat on one fender of the tractor. I climbed on the other fender, my feet up on Grandpa’s toolbox.
“Hang on,” Nana instructed me. Then she told Grandpa, “Go slow.”
The tangy smell of tractor oil tickled my nose as Grandpa drove slowly through the pasture, going around the cow patties when he could. We went gradually up, cresting one hill and then another, and finally began the long crawl down.
Where Grandpa hadn’t pastured the cattle, I could reach out and snap off the seed heads of the grasses, but Nana shook her head and motioned for me to hold on to the edge of the fender.
At the bottom of the last hill, Panther Fork made a shiny gray ribbon through the trees that lined its bank. We stayed to the tall grass, skirting the plot Grandpa had planted with corn, in spite of Nana’s advice.
Grandpa stopped the tractor in the shade. Two trees had spread their branches so wild grapevine crossed from one tree to the other, making a natural arched doorway to the creek.
We went single file, Grandpa in the lead, mashing down the grass for Nana and me. The scribble of a blue racer snake flickered through the grass.
The rising and falling creek had cut sandy steps in the bank. I ran down them, pulling off my shoes and socks. The cold water gurgled as it broke its path to go around my legs, and the coarse sand on the bottom clasped my feet as if it had missed me.
“Feels good, don’t it?” Nana asked, standing calf deep in the water, holding her skirt bunched in front of her.
My skirt was already soaked around the bottom, the line of wetness inching higher and higher.
Grandpa was rolling up the legs of his overalls as high as they would go, which was a promise of serious wading.
“Can we go up to the rock dome?” I asked.
Grandpa looked at the creek, assessing its depth. “Should be about right,” he said. “We may get a little wet.”
“I’ll wait,” Nana said. “You two are going to come back soaked to your armpits.”
That was exactly what I hoped for, but I kept still.
“Won’t be gone long,” Grandpa told Nana, leading the way upstream.
Nana was right. Three bends in the creek later, the waterline on my dress came up to the armholes, and Grandpa was wet to the waist. But that was because of the drop-off right before the dome, which we both knew was there but pretended to have forgotten.
The sandstone dome, mapped with crack lines and blue-green mineral deposits, arched over our heads like an upside-down bowl. People had written or scratched their names, some up so high, I wondered how they got there. Joseph Mueller, January 4, 1849. Dodie Hender, 1907. Mellie Brown, August 7, 1922.
We read the names out loud every time we came to the dome, and Grandpa always told me that Dodie Hender was young Doc Hender, who nursed people through the flu epidemic of 1918. He dropped dead of exhaustion in his buggy, but his horses went on home and carried him right up to the back door.
After he finished telling the story, he said, “Your Nana will start worrying. We better go back.”
In a quiet patch downstream, Grandpa spotted a big old olive-colored snake, about four feet long, lazing in the shallows. We gave him a wide berth until we could get out of the creek. Once we were on the sandy bank, Grandpa pulled a forked branch off a tree, then started trimming the ends of the fork with his pocketknife.
“What are you doing?” I asked, watching him shape the branch into a thick, long-handled prong.
“Have you ever seen the inside of a water moccasin’s mouth?” he asked.
My heart nearly jumped right out of my chest. Everybody knew moccasins were deadly poison. I shook my head.
“Well, we’ll look,” he told me. “It won’t hurt the snake none.”
And in a flash, before I could say, Don’t mess with that nasty old snake, he slipped the fork over the head of the moccasin, sinking the prongs into the sand and pinning the snake, who thrashed like crazy for a minute, then lay still.
Careful as he could be, and my heart beating so hard I was practically bouncing up and down on the bank, Grandpa bent down and gripped the snake’s head with his hand right behind the fork and lifted up the dangling length of it.
The snake opened its mouth, and Grandpa held its head so firm, I saw the tendons in his forearm stand out. I’d never seen such a wide-open, dangerous-looking, white, cottony depth in all my life, and I knew for certain why they were called cottonmouth water moccasins.
“Ain’t that something?” Grandpa said.
I nodded.
He put the snake back in the water, pinned its head hard with the forked stick, stepped up on the bank, and let it go. The snake shot off downstream.
“You don’t see many cottonmouths around here,” Grandpa said. “Only seen seven or eight in my whole life. But they’re something to look out for.”
The water didn’t feel so comfortable to me as we finished our trip, and I kept watching the swirls and shadows.
“You don’t need to be afraid,” Grandpa said, reading my mind. “You just need to be careful.”
As Nana came into view around the bend, he said, “We won’t worry your Nana by telling her.”
Nana was sitting on the bank, her bottom buried in sand and her feet dangling in the water. The water moccasin had probably swum right by her.
I wouldn’t tell, but I wished I could. I’d like everybody to know that my grandpa was the bravest man alive.