Better Than Starbucks!

from THUNDER: Memoirs of Home

“The Hoover Boys” Part II

 

Across widening fields and shady yards, the two farmhouses watched the children come like plums. First a blossom that blushed in warm colors, then brown limbs that needed tending. The white ashy sky that had given ragtime and marriage, a casual tip of a fedora, was skipping over a bank of fragrant honeysuckle where sound stumbled and got up speechless.

 

Just as silently the shears went missing. Then the finger of a Jersey glove. Recalling the nearly forgotten faraway cities of freedom and brotherly love, neither household thought America could have fed the world yet left only a dollar for the local church. Days still seeking the future held onto moonlighted nights and evenings of only a few brown eggs, rationed sugar and poultices on red patches of measles. In deepening dark, a hoot owl hooted. A whippoorwill called from the long, dusty shadows of the land, eaves newly aging and unsure of what must be shared or given outright. White men and dark loaded jars onto wagons and trucks and the dull, yellowing evening covered them up.

 

Till dark my grandfather made fields where there were no fields. Early he scoured close to the spring, the mossy shoulders of dipping knolls that rested cool below the scattered sandstone and stringy yuccas. And when he ran up against the red oaks that insisted the spring belonged to them, he tended the land of his neighbor. This quietening ditty of expansion was neither new to the neighbors whose several hundred acre estate had wandered all the way to the north swamp, but the children on either side of the long snaky ditch beside the road barely listened anyway. Poked with testy blackberry shoots, sassafras and some veins of wiregrass holding fast, reluctant sandy corners lay down. The land bore fruit and sun fell upon long vines.
 

Children’s the Lord’s blessing, said the new reverend, brushing by a half-strangled tie, a newly hung portrait of Coolidge’s benefactor, eyes still glowing haughtily with old magnanimity. And despite the missing shears, the church, smoky and fragrant with homemade preserves, was obsequious with hope.

 

Better keep a fire tonight in the orchard. That goes for me, too, Willie, says the neighbor as though speaking to his own grandfather, then returning like a distant cousin to the sprawling house to peek under the mattress upon which his mother lay twisted beside her cane, the roses half-signifying at the dark rattling window.

 

Granddaddy had bristled, his eyes fretting and ripe as he stepped out of the church into the flappy October wind. Holding onto their mother’s jewels, the young women struggled to keep on their new hats. A few like my grandmother had stayed home near the dining room stove because the youngest was teething. Pinstripes and young men buckled. From the juiced-up cities of the north, the huge, low-hanging clouds of 1929 were rolling in, their slippery solemn whispers and complaints eventually blowing into Battery. The blushes that had followed the War’s end and a subsequent feeling of resurgence now began to turn into lines and forks where direction wandered into the underbrush.

 

A large plate of dusty dreams, the changing climate eventually entered the swirling curtains of the new house my grandfather had built several years before mostly himself, an early proprietorship which both tested his spirit and gave him joy. He had slaved with a couple of breezy neighbors standing by and telling him what he was doing wrong. No, it don’ go there, the short, lazy one said, catching granddaddy’s work shoe with a winey spray of tobacco.

 

Slowly the man who never knew his father was becoming himself and finding his home. The mother who had secretly held him in a place only he could occupy was turning into a basket of tomatoes, a rippling row of black-eyed peas brashy with light. He blew out air as tirelessly as an old bellows. The air was spirited, forgetful, moving as effortlessly as Saturday moves into Monday and the Monday after that, then only seeking the comfort of an armchair by the window where he could brush it across his face with his straw hat. A plump yellow girl had come wobbling through the house as though she had always been there. He drew her to his side like the page of a bible, prayerful but thinking also of the peas that needed fertilizer. The dung of the mule would not be enough.
 

The local bank was closed, and the only dollar bills passed hand to hand alongside woods or in the field. Avoiding the girl’s long Shirley Temples and growing fonder of Job, my grandfather rubbed large brown hands that were also calloused and sore.

 

A garden coming in during drought, the women and children and boys laughed in back rooms, along porches where the earth eroded clean, yet in the thinning air a couple of the boys (though never the elder, maybe my father) were becoming irritable, new plantings where the burrs were setting in despite the lack of rain. Why so many tomatoes, one nagged. Farming is the old man’s way. With this he grabbed a catalog to admire the pistols and shotguns, resorted to the privacy of the privy in lieu of a Tombstone he also admired, which then especially the family couldn’t afford.

 

With some help from my mother’s great-uncle who was the local carpenter and one of the locals who kept a bottle in his back pocket (there were several men who did), granddaddy had sawed and hacked the cedar planks into the earth on stump land and brush. He pounded hard into night above the slightly gullied slope where thunderstorms insisted they should leap over the large farm of the whites and cut a deep gash in the black lower land. Must be plumb, says the uncle red as a beet. He sneaked a swig that was both sweet and tart.