A Family Trip

IF PA HADN’T of been such a stickler on money, we might of got away with the whole thing and I wouldn’t of got my picture in the papers so that all the kids teased the life out of me in the schoolyard for two weeks afterwards. But maybe it didn’t matter about the money, because Pa said if that was what his mother wanted, that was what he was gonna do and there wasn’t any man could stop him. I agreed. When Pa set his mind to doin’ something, nobody could stop him. And if he promised you he’d do something for you, he did it.

Ma always tells how that’s how they got married, on account of Pa’s promise. When he was almost thirty and she wasn’t even as old as I am now and she was Tom Wilkins’ kid sister (Tom’s my Pa’s oldest and best friend), Pa used to bounce her up and down on his knee and she used to make him promise not to get married till she grew up. So he waited. Ma thinks it’s real funny he did and she always tells the story in front of Pa but he don’t laugh much. Sometimes he’ll smile a bit, but most of the time he just sort of grunts. He’s never once broken a promise he made to me either, and that includes get-tin’ strapped.

So I guess it wasn’t really the money but the principle of the thing. Pa’s a big one on principles. He’s got lots. I don’t understand most of them that have to do with politics and religion, but I knew that his principle this time was a good one. I would of told him that too if he’d asked me, but Pa, he don’t need no encouragement.

Ma, she didn’t say anything either. When the time come she just packed up a lunch for the three of us, put on her Sunday clothes, and told me to wash and comb my hair. I didn’t feel like arguin’, so I did.

“Now go help your Pa.”

So I did that, too—I was meaning to the first thing when it happened. Grandma wasn’t a very big lady—not even as tall as I am now. I’m twelve and Grandma was eighty something. I’m not sure how much. I didn’t like to kiss her. Her skin sort of hung from her face so that I was always afraid it was just all gonna fall off sometime, or stick to my lips. She lived in the room in back of the kitchen. Nobody ever went in there until she died, and she just used to show up three times a day for meals, once a day after school so I could give her her kiss and she could ask me if I knew my multiplication tables (I couldn’t understand that too well, ’cause I’d known my tables ever since third grade, and she always asked for the same ones—seven and nine—and she always stopped me before I finished anyway), and once every night she’d come into the living room and talk with my Ma while they watched TV together.

They got along real well, laughing and stuff, but Pa never did say much to her, except to ask what he could do for her. It didn’t even seem like she needed much done for her, really. She hardly ate a peck and always wore the same dress and I guess that was why Pa figured the least he could do for her was to do the one thing she’d asked him to do.

Me, I didn’t argue. When she died that morning, Pa just said, “Let’s go,” and he didn’t have to say any more. Ma’s butting in about washing and stuff just wasted time from getting things done quick and proper, the way Pa always does things. “Quick and proper,” he always says, “that’s the only way to get things done.”

“You get the feet.”

Pa carried her under the shoulders and it hardly felt like she weighed anything. Getting her into the back seat, I had to let go of one of her legs to open the door, and it bumped on the ground. I knew how careful and respectful you’re supposed to be to dead people, and I looked up quick at Pa.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Nothin’,” I said.

We propped her up in the back seat and Ma locked the front door and walked down the steps past the garden.

“Grandma always loved my roses,” Ma said, picking one. She fixed it between Grandma’s hands.

Pa nodded. “Get in,” he said.

Ma got in the front seat and I got in the back next to Grandma and leaned up against the front seat and watched Pa drive. He’s the best driver I ever seen. When the speed limit’s sixty-five he keeps the car at a steady seventy the whole time. It never goes more’n a mile over or under. Ma doesn’t like him to drive fast, but she didn’t say anything this time. She knew better. I kept my eyes on Pa’s foot to watch how he regulates it to keep the speed so even. I bet if you put a feather on Pa’s foot it’d stay there for a thousand miles. Except sometimes when he really lets her rip—that’s when we go for rides together, just the two of us. Boy, do we have fun then. Sometimes when we’re on a straightaway he keeps his foot on the gas and even lets me turn the wheel. You ought to read the speedometer then—Ma’d have fits if she ever saw how fast we go.

He’s never even got one ticket in his whole life. You ought to hear him talk to a cop—it’s like with the argument over the money. He’s like that over everything. Around our way he’s known as Loghead Harris. Not to his face, of course, but I never seen a man could beat him in an argument.

He’s almost always right about who’s gonna win the football and baseball games, and even though he belongs to the Electrical Workers Union and always talks about how the Depression wouldn’t of come if Al Smith had been President, he’s got some Republican friends, and he always predicts who’s gonna win for President and things. Even when Truman won, he knew it. And nobody’s more loyal to his friends than my Pa. He coached our baseball team last spring and helped Jim Evans’ father put on his new roof and last winter during the big snowstorm when nobody knew what to do he delivered Mary Burns’ baby right in her bedroom with everybody yelling and screaming. I don’t think anybody even realized he’d done it all till him and me (I helped bring him hot water and blankets and stuff) were back in our own house. He didn’t say anything then either but just flicked on the TV and told the weatherman off. That was when the phone rang and they thanked him. He was right then, too—I mean about the weather, ’cause the weatherman said it would stop by the morning and my Pa told him he was full of it, that it would go until the next night and then some.

I like Pa. Even though he don’t talk to me much the way he used to. I think that’s ’cause he wishes he were younger (he married my Ma when he was past forty) and he thinks about what he’s gonna do when he retires from working in a few years. There’s lots to do around the house, but I know there’s not really enough and even a good argument with Tom Wilkins every day won’t really keep him busy and I’m kind of scared, ’cause he has some temper and I’m afraid if he’s around all the time he’ll find out about my smoking and even if he don’t he’ll find something to get after me for.

Anyway, after a while Ma give me a sandwich and a plum. The sandwich was peanut butter without much jelly. It was real dry and I wanted a Coke but Pa didn’t want to stop. He said he wanted to get to the funeral parlor before five o’clock. So we just kept driving on down toward Kentucky. The car radio was busted and I was getting bored so I counted the number of silos I could see going by and then I asked some questions about Grandma when she was young and with my Grandpa and Ma answered me. I was only leading up to the big question, though, and when I asked that one, Pa answered.

“Because she wanted to be buried in Kentucky next to Grandpa on the same day she died.”

He said it so gruff-like that I just shut up and counted silos again. He wasn’t angry, though. I could tell that. Just doing what he felt he had to do. Which I guess I can understand, since some day when my Ma dies I’d like to do something nice for her, too—not nice only, but something special that she’d like and be proud of me for. I’ll have a lot of money by then and make her a real good funeral, maybe like the one they gave Bill Rooney’s dad last year, with all these black Cadillac limousines. Unless she wants it in our own house. I’d even do it there, if that’s what she wants.

I could tell when we were getting near Louisville because I’d gone there once two years ago when Pa went to a union convention, and I remembered especially the bridge going across the state line, because I thought it would be all modern, only it was more like a wood bridge made out of old gray steel girders and I remembered how it was metal underneath too and I was scared the trucks coming the other way would slide into our lane. I should of been scared of other things, ’cause that was when Pa began to stick up for his principles.

“That’s a dollar, mister,” the policeman at the tollbooth said when we’d drove up and stopped. Pa had handed him seventy-five cents. “There’s four of you.”

“She don’t count,” Pa said, pointing to Grandma. “She’s dead.”

“Look, mister, quit the kiddin and fork over another quarter. There’s cars behind you.”

But Pa wouldn’t pay for anyone he didn’t have to and the policeman finally got out of his booth and peered into the back seat, straight at Grandma. He looked at me too with a funny kind of smile, like he was half mad and half sick. I didn’t smile back at him, though, seeing the way he talked to Pa. The policeman, he got all excited, yellin’ at Pa and goin back and forth to the tollbooth, making telephone calls. My Pa and the policeman argued quite a bit, Pa standin’ his ground. He wouldn’t back down. Me, I looked out the back window at all the cars lined up behind us. They were honkin’ away and I felt pretty important, being in the car that was holding everything up.

Ma just sat there and looked straight ahead. I guess she was proud of Pa, too. He sure did his damndest to save that quarter. He told the guy all kinds of reasons about how hearses didn’t pay and how if dead people counted, why weren’t they included in censuses, and then the policeman started talking about it being illegal to transport a dead body without a certificate. But Pa argued about that, too. He told him how it was his mother and he could do what he wanted with her, especially since what he wanted was only what she wanted him to do. He didn’t see how it was anybody else’s business. I agreed. Nobody’s gonna be able to tell me what to do with my Ma when she dies.

Pa kept talkin’ to the man in the tollbooth and before long more police cars were there and we had to turn around and go to this little town a mile or two away and I stood around in this doctor’s waiting room while Pa kept insisting he was only letting them do it to save time (he didn’t flinch a bit when they spoke about being able to put him in jail for what he did). Ma stayed in the car. I tried to duck the first time a guy took a picture but the second flashbulb went off before I even saw the sneaky guy, and then when Pa had the certificate and they’d switched Grandma into a pine box and put her into the trunk they got another picture. If I knew it was gonna get into the papers that the kids from school’s parents read, I would of punched the guy.

But the main thing was that we got away without Pa going to jail and that we got into Kentucky to Grandma’s funeral parlor before five o’clock. It wasn’t much of a funeral—just the three of us and an old friend of Grandpa’s who looked like he was at least a hundred years old and the minister and this nice old man who owned the parlor and give me some candy. I never saw Pa so serious. Ma neither. I guess she knew Pa done right.

Even when the kids teased me and showed the picture around I didn’t mind too much, ’cause I remembered how proud Pa was all the way home. Kind of relaxed too—I haven’t seen him like that for a long time. He let me sit in the front seat and we stopped once outside of Greenfield and I had fried shrimp and a Coke and Pa kept winkin’ at Ma—not really smiling, but just proud, and repeating what he said to the policeman at the tollbooth the second time when he handed him seventy-five cents: that he guessed that was the right amount unless they were gonna stop the line again and look in the trunk.

Pa was right. Nobody looked in the trunk.