Daddy started coming around about every day. Sometimes I’d just carry out two glasses of tea and lean against the fender, listening to how his job hunting was going. Nobody wanted him to wire their house. If they were getting electricity, they’d already signed up with the Green boys, who had a fancy truck with their names on it and a business card that said they’d been wiring electricity since 1937.
Other days, I rode with him into Huxley or wherever he was going. And sometimes I’d go down and see Grandmother and Grandfather Clark and Aunt Belle.
But every time Grandpa heard the Model A turn in the drive, if he was in the house, he’d duck out the side door and disappear to the barn or across the road to the sheep pasture. Likewise, when I got home from visiting the Clarks, sometimes staying for a day or two at a time, Grandpa never made the least mention of my absence.
Nana listened when I talked about things I did with my daddy, like going to the barbershop, then tossing peanuts to the pigeons around the courthouse square. But I could tell she wanted to ease me onto other subjects as soon as it seemed polite.
When Grandpa and Nana weren’t around, Aunty Rose rained questions on me about the Clarks and what I did with Daddy. When I turned the questions back on her, though, and asked what made the trouble between the families, her tongue turned to stone.
During this back-and-forth time, the hottest summer on record sat down on southern Illinois like a flatiron straight off the stove. The radio talked about it every day. Old folks dropping down on the streets of Huxley from heatstroke, people getting into fights over nothing, cattle sickening in the heat.
One Tuesday afternoon in early August, I lay on my bed reading the book that Grandfather Clark had given me for my birthday. A breeze through the south windows teased my sweaty legs. The house was quiet as Nana and Aunty Rose and even Grandpa gave up on working during the heat of the day.
I liked all the stories in the birthday book, but I kept coming back to the one of the baby getting carried off by the eagle. I pored over the illustration of the mother climbing the rocks, her face lifted upward, as she went to get her baby back.
“Want to ride down to Lorrimer’s with me?”
Grandpa stood in the doorway, crease lines from his nap still on his face.
I smacked the book shut and rolled over on my stomach, hiding it beneath me.
“Sure,” I squeaked.
His brows curved in puzzlement, then his face closed as he figured out the book was somehow part of my other life. The only book we had was the Good Book.
I put on my shoes and met Grandpa by the car. As we turned south, we raised a cloud of nose-tickling dust. In the dry sheep pasture, my black-faced lamb nibbled a clump of clover sticking up in the mat of brown grass.
At Lorrimer’s, Grandpa went around back to get the chicken feed and I went inside. The store was empty, smelling of dust and heat. Mrs. Lorrimer hunched over a radio, listening to a ball game.
Although Nana said I should never ask for anything, I asked Mrs. Lorrimer for a chunk of ice from the soda pop cooler.
“Sure, hon, help yourself,” she said, glancing up. “The iceman comes tomorrow.” She leaned closer to the radio as the announcer’s voice rose in excitement.
“All right!” she said, standing up, her freckled face flushed. “You a Cardinals fan?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. How else could I answer in the face of such generosity?
She nodded. “Well, our man Stan just hit a homer. Almost knocked it out of Sportsman’s Park. Isn’t that something?”
“Sure is,” I said, nearly singing with joy as my arm plunged into the icy cooler water. The bottles rattled against one another as I sloshed around, trying to find a good hunk of ice.
I lifted out one about the size of a muskmelon, though it was some smaller by the time we got home and sat around the well curb, in the shade of the hickory tree, rubbing the ice on our faces and arms.
By the time the chunk had become a marble, Aunty Rose and Nana were laughing, and Grandpa went off to the machine shed whistling.
I crunched the very last sliver of ice between my back teeth and petted Jacky with my toes, wondering what my daddy was doing to stay cool.
* * *
On Wednesday, Daddy picked me up right after breakfast.
“You a good mechanic?” he asked, turning south.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Are you?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He pushed back the bill of his cap. “I can fix anything ’cept a broken heart.”
Daddy leaned forward, seeming to urge Grandfather Clark’s old car to go faster. He was singing under his breath.
Hey, lolly, lolly, lolly. Hey, lolly, lolly lo.
The sky was bright blue, and I put my hand out the window, opening my fingers to let the breeze brush between them.
Daddy sang louder.
I leaned my head back. I didn’t know anybody who sang as fine. Even singers on the radio had people helping them—playing the piano or filling in the background. But Daddy did it all by himself. He just opened his mouth and music came dancing out.
“Sing with me,” he said, raising his chest up for an even louder chorus.
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “I can’t make music.”
He looked at me, his flecked eyes determined.
“Sure, you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
He hit a pothole and had to turn his attention back to the road.
“Try,” he said after a minute, reaching over and touching my arm. “Just sing the first four words.”
To please him, I opened my mouth and put the words Hey, lolly, lolly, lolly out in the air.
Suddenly the sun didn’t seem as bright.
The lines around Daddy’s eyes said he noticed it too.
“Well,” he said, shifting gears. “You make me want to sing, so you can be my inspiration. How’s that?”
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s the best way to do it.”
After we turned east, he sang about Ezekiel’s wheel until we bounced up the driveway at Grandmother and Grandfather Clark’s house. In my heart, I sang with him, proud of my red-haired, skinny daddy with magic in his voice.
We parked under a crab apple tree next to a shed with peeling paint.
“Our mechanical project is in here,” Daddy said.
When he rolled open the door, sunlight fell on the rear end of a car, heavy with dust, cobwebs, and bird poop.
“Well, there she is.”
“That car’s a mess, Daddy,” I said, sneezing from the dust he raised as he walked around to the front. “Does it run?”
“Nope.” Daddy sounded almost happy about it.
“How long has it been in there?”
“Since before the war.” He’d disappeared into the shadows, then the car rolled a few inches backward. “Reckon you can steer,” he asked, “while I push it into the shade?”
Grandpa sometimes let me sit close to him and steer the Packard if there wasn’t anybody coming.
“I’ll try,” I said.
Daddy had to show me how to cut the wheel so the car went into the shade as he pushed.
I couldn’t see through the filthy windows, so I just had to do what he told me.
When I got out, I saw that the old car was even a worse mess in the light. The fenders were so rusted, they looked like brown lace.
“What happened to the fenders?” I asked, knocking a clump of bird poop off with a corncob.
“Grasshoppers ate ’em back in ’36. Grasshoppers were pretty near starving that year. You ever hear about that?”
“I never did,” I said, not letting on to his tease. “Want me to start chipping the dirt daubers’ nests off?”
“That’d be good,” he said.
Daddy stripped off his shirt, propped up the hood, and bent over the engine.
Pretty soon, sweat stained his undershirt and his dungarees blossomed with grease spots.
My hands and clothes were filthy from leaning against the car to attack the dried mud tunnels left by the dirt daubers.
Aunt Belle brought us out a jug of tea about midmorning, and I went back to the house with her to wash my hands at the washstand on the back porch.
Inside, Grandmother Clark offered me a piece of bread and strawberry jelly and asked me if I didn’t want to stay inside a while.
“I think I’ll take a jelly sandwich over to Daddy,” I said.
So we slathered the red jelly onto a piece of bread and I went back to where Daddy was working.
“Got you a jelly sandwich,” I said to his back.
He straightened up from where he’d been bent over the engine. His eyes lit up at the sight of the strawberry jelly.
“Here,” I offered, holding the piece of bread out.
He looked at his hands, which were black. He had grease streaks on his face and down the front of his grimy undershirt.
“Fold it up and I can eat it in three bites,” he instructed, opening his mouth.
He ended up with jelly on his nose.
“I’ve never been this dirty in my life,” I declared, wiping my sticky hands on my shorts. “It’s kind of fun.”
We went in for lunch, but otherwise we worked all afternoon.
I gave up trying to clean the outside of the car and helped Daddy take the engine apart. He handed me pieces of metal—bolts and wing nuts and shafts—that I rinsed in gasoline, then scrubbed with an old toothbrush. Eventually the black grease came out of the cracks, and I laid the gleaming pieces on a blanket.
“Do I need to keep these in any special order, Daddy?”
“Nah. I know where they all go.”
“You sure?”
“Yep,” he said, seating a socket wrench over a nut.
We worked at taking the engine apart on Wednesday and Thursday. Then on Friday and Saturday, we put it back together, making a trip to Huxley once for spark plugs and a belt. I went home every night, and Aunty Rose said I smelled like a grease monkey, and Grandpa looked closely at my hands as we washed together.
I could tell by his stiffness that he didn’t like what he saw. Grandpa wasn’t mechanical, and when something needed to be fixed, he had one of Uncle Retus’s boys come down, or he took it to a mechanic in town.
One night, I heard Nana rearing through the wall. “… Seems like he’d have more sense than to let a girl get in the grease.”
* * *
Sunday morning, Nana had to take a brush and lye soap to my hands to make them presentable for church.
“Are you mad at me, Nana?” I asked as she bent over my hands, scrubbing around my fingernails.
She looked up. “No, I’m not mad at you.”
“Then are you mad at my daddy?”
She sighed. “He just doesn’t show good sense,” she said.
After church, like always, I set the table with our Sunday dishes while Nana fried chicken and Aunty Rose got ready to go out with Charles Michael and their friends.
Grandpa was in his rocker in the sunroom, reading the New Testament.
After I’d put the silverware around, I went in the sunroom and leaned against Grandpa’s arm.
He sat up straighter and made a place for me to sit on his knee, which I hadn’t done for a long time. He laid the Bible down.
“My daddy has been home for a month now,” I said, settling on his knee.
Grandpa’s granite blue eyes met mine, and for a minute, I thought he was going to ignore my conversation. Then he nodded. Not a very big nod—but enough to say he’d heard me.
“I guess we’re just going to have to get used to it,” I stated after a while.
Grandpa looked away, staring at the wall calendar like he’d never seen a picture of a waterfall before. Then he looked back at me.
“I reckon,” he said with a sigh.
My heart lightened. I leaned forward and gave him a quick hug, then ran to help Nana take up the dinner.
* * *
On Monday, I didn’t even hear the car. I just heard Daddy’s voice calling “Anybody home?” through the screen door to the kitchen.
Grandpa was in the field, Aunty Rose was upstairs cleaning out her wardrobe, and Nana was over at Uncle Retus’s, helping wallpaper the kitchen.
“Did you walk?” I asked, holding the screen open for him.
“Why would I walk when I got a good car?” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “You better come see.”
Daddy had washed and waxed the old car until it gleamed. Except for the rusted places, it looked beautiful. I circled it, remembering what a mess it had been when he rolled it out of the shed.
“Does it run right?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Runs as good as it’s ever going to run again. Doesn’t run like a new car, of course. But it’s fifteen years old. You want to go for a ride? Try it out? Since you helped with the work.”
“Sure,” I said. “Can Aunty Rose come?”
“That would be fine.”
Aunty Rose pulled on a clean blouse and brushed her hair. She brushed mine too and clipped in barrettes. We wrote Nana a note, saying we were out riding with my daddy.
Aunty Rose sat in the back, and we rolled down all the windows. Daddy drove as fast as he could on the rough roads, showing off the car.
“Daddy took it all apart,” I told Aunty Rose. “Every little bit and piece, and fixed it.”
“You helped,” Daddy said.
I looked over the backseat at Aunty Rose. She was frowning.
“Willa Mae’s a girl, Harold. Treva wouldn’t want her fixing cars.”
A line of red moved up Daddy’s neck. He opened his mouth, then shut it.
“Wish you had a radio,” Aunty Rose said. “Charles Michael’s car has a radio.”
“Daddy doesn’t need a radio,” I said. “He can sing.”
We rode in silence for a while, and I was thinking it would have been more fun without Aunty Rose.
“Maybe you could get a job as a mechanic someplace, Harold,” Aunty Rose said, by way of making up. “Good mechanics are hard to find, I hear.”
“I’ve looked into it. But nobody needs a mechanic right now. Not around here, at least. And I’ve still got my mind set on wiring houses, being an electrician.”
“Maybe you could work for the Greens,” she said. “They’re the ones who do all the wiring.”
“I don’t want to work for the Greens.”
When we got back to the house, Aunty Rose thanked Daddy for the ride and ran in to start dinner.
Daddy got out of the car and we stood leaning against the fender.
“I may not be by for a few days, Mae Bug,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders.
“How come?”
“I’m going to Vincennes, Indiana, to an army surplus auction.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Well, I might sell this car and buy a truck,” he said. “If it works out. And if I do buy a truck,” he added, “I might have to do some work on it before I drive it home.”
That was a lot of “mights,” but I thought I saw where Daddy was leading. If he had a truck, he could get a sign painted on it just like the Green boys, then he could give them a run for their money. But it seemed like bad luck to talk about it, so I just said okay, I’d see him when he got back.