The Weed Patch
Tammy Wilson
Part I
Rose Trumbull went to work as Uncle Baldwin’s housekeeper in 1936, well after he had amassed a sizeable spread of farmland and divorced Aunt Ernestine. At that time he needed a cook and housekeeper and Rose Trumbull, then seventeen, needed a job and a house. The arrangement worked well. Before we knew it, she moved in as a substitute wife, making us wonder what he had accomplished by dismissing Ernestine in the first place.
“There’s nothing so vulgar as a fool and his money,” Mama said.
Our mother, Bernice Parsons, was Baldwin’s younger sister, so she had long observed the pitfalls of too much money and too little taste. She had grown up with his brute peculiarities and watched the affect of his spending habits. As if on cue, Baldwin and his new housekeeper took center stage like mismatched show horses, sashaying a pride that was truly painful to watch. I was only nine at the time, but I remember it well.
Aunt Ernestine had no children, but she enjoyed entertaining me and my two brothers, especially in summer when we were out of school and our parents were busy with farm work. Winnie was Uncle Baldwin’s namesake with the same straight slicked-back hair, square jaw and rife tendency to put on weight. You would have thought he was Baldwin’s own son, which deemed him the favored nephew. At Christmas, Winnie received a superior gift, a toy tractor with intricate, moving parts. I might receive a dime-store tea service or a brittle celluloid doll; our older brother Kenny, a box of dominoes.
Mama, a practical farm wife, seldom wore makeup or fancy attire, but she relished the prospect of her children reaping the privileges of wealth. Whoever Uncle Baldwin entrusted with his worldly goods would be set up like a prince, or princess, though I didn’t spend much time imagining such a life. I, Gladiola Parsons, was a mere farm girl with a flowery name shortened to the ugly, unpronounceable “Iola.”
Our father, a shy, down-in-the-heel farmer, shook his head when he heard Mama talk up Winnie’s potential.
“It’s bad luck to count your chickens,” he said.
He had intimate details of bad fortune, having lived a lean boyhood near Paducah, A series of floods had left him with a stolid, practical streak that wouldn’t let him get involved in speculation—especially when it concerned his brother-in-law’s money. He stepped aside and let Baldwin strut the pecking order.
Mama spent a good bit of time speculating who might get what, since her brother had so much wealth to spread around. Wondering how Uncle Baldwin would divide his riches became a game both she and her sister Agnes savored while sipping lemonade on the front porch.
“I’d build me a fine new house with plenty of cedar closets,” Agnes said. “Then I’d fill them up with furs and cashmere sweaters. And oh yes! I’d get me a new car. I told Walter the other day that Plymouth’s beginning to sound like a corn picker.”
Mama was less interested in worldly goods. “Give me a ticket to the Holy Land. Book the Queen Mary.”
Agnes’s belly shook in amusement. “As if you’re going to leave Lincoln County! What on earth would you do in Palestine, sister?”
“Why get closer to the Lord!” Then she broke into a chorus of “A Closer Walk with Thee.”
Mama had never traveled more than fifty miles from home, so there wasn’t a slim chance she’d ever visit a foreign shore, but it didn’t stop her dreams of seeing Bethlehem and dipping her toes in the River Jordan. A regular churchgoer, she could quote most any passage in the Bible, but when Rose Trumbull moved in with Uncle Baldwin, she forgot the Old Testament lesson about how God pardoned King David. Mama chose to lump fornication and adultery with all of the other sins, especially when it came to Bible characters. To her they were pre-ordained saints. Sins of the flesh aren’t as dire as killing, she said, “Because they tended to create life rather than take it,” though she didn’t elaborate on how or why.
Agnes, whose only child had died in the Spanish Flu epidemic, took interest in us though her profound loss left her incapable of warmth. Unlike Mama, she was more intrigued by what life had to offer the here and now. Thus she kept her hair permed, her nails buffed and relegated most of the farm chores to her husband, Walter.
Before Uncle Baldwin’s divorce, both Mama and Agnes got along with Aunt Ernestine, but they never considered her a sister because she wasn’t blood relation. Having born no children made her suspect, but her access to all that money truly chafed them.
“With her means, you’d think she’d do more for herself,” Agnes said. “I’ve seen schoolmarms look more stylish.”
Then Mama would click her tongue and repeat her line about rich fools, though in this case, Ernestine was being criticized for withholding rather than flaunting her money.
In truth, the two of them thoroughly resented Aunt Ernestine for squandering her opportunities. Her clothes shouted homemade, her shoes begged for polish and her dust-colored hair was wrenched into the shape of a patty-pan squash, more befitting a scullery maid than a rich man’s wife.
I felt sorry for Aunt Ernestine, especially when those two conspired to pick her apart. She had certain talents, but most importantly, she had a kind heart. Every summer she would take the time to show me how to cut patterns from newspaper and make a calico frock for my dolls, which was far more attention than Agnes had ever paid me.
Ernestine’s house offered a special brand of wonderment—brass light switches wired to their Delco plant, an indoor flushing toilet and full-room carpets. Her sewing room, a would-be nursery next to the upstairs bedroom, held racks of spooled thread. Her black sewing machine became a fount of tailor-made wizardry
“Why do you sew when you could go out and buy store-bought?” I asked.
Her brows fluttered to her hairline. “Have you ever noticed the shoddy workmanship on ready-made?”
While Aunt Ernestine and I sewed, Winnie, age six, and Kenny, almost eleven, would busy themselves with an old crystal set and a stereograph left over from Grandmother Keefe. They discussed faraway places like a two-man travelogue. “The Ruins of Angkor Wat,” “The Great Pyramids at Giza,” “The Ancient Splendor of Constantinople.” Kenny read the captions before peering into the eyepiece. “When I grow up, I want to see stuff like that.”
“What are you going to do, join the French Foreign Legion?” Winnie asked.
“You’re nuts. I don’t speak French.”
“You’re not too dumb to learn, are you?”
“Who’s calling who dumb?” Kenny shouted.
Their scuffle sent Aunt Ernestine to the upstairs railing. “Boys! Don’t let Baldwin catch you kicking up dust.”
She let us play hide-and-seek indoors, play with antique gadgets and make ginger snaps, allowing Uncle Baldwin to dish out whatever discipline was necessary. Luckily, he rarely darkened the threshold except to ask what was for supper. The size of him was a testament to very few missed meals.
Every July week, we spent at their large foursquare farm house, chasing barn cats, helping out with chores and generally staying out of the way of Uncle Baldwin. But when her birthday arrived during one stay, she turned strangely distant.
“I’m going away for a while. This will tide you over,” she said, stacking cold cuts in the icebox.
“Where to? Can we come?” Winnie asked.
“I’m afraid not, sweetie. Now Iola, you know your way around the kitchen. Take care of your brothers,” she said in a hurried voice.
After he left for the day, she steered their old touring car behind the barn, then waved goodbye as she toted a picnic basket into the cornfield. I watched tassels dance over her head as she plowed through the scratchy curtain of leaves. I had overheard the perils of turning older. Uncle Baldwin would bellow through the house, drag her by the boots and strike her with a wash stick or whatever else was handy. Taking cover between the cornrows was one way to keep her senses and her dignity. “I have no desire to subject myself to such cruel men’s customs.”
The beatings had turned harsher with time, especially after Aunt Ernestine put on weight. It was as if he resented her turning into a mature woman though she was a full three years younger than he was. It didn’t matter. He had a burr that nobody could curry out, not that anybody would try. As a boy, he’d bullied his sisters. “We were quicker than he was and outran him,” she said. “It was almost as dreadful as the time he fell in the stickers.”
He’d been flogged by a turkey gobbler and fell into a thistle patch, a trauma he never forgot. “That’s why he hates weeds so,” Mama said. In contrast, she settled for our genial father, Homer Parsons, a lean man of few words and mild manners. When he wasn’t busy with farm chores, he lit his pipe and skimmed copies of the Prairie Farmer.
Of course we kids knew where Aunt Ernestine had gone that steamy afternoon. We’d scouted her hideout, walking straight down the rows, taking care to keep the cornstalks upright. We’d tested her sleeping pallet and tasted water from the jug that smelled like a storm cellar, and peered into her market basket filled with that morning’s biscuits along with hoop cheese and bologna.
Later, when Uncle Baldwin appeared for lunch and Aunt Ernestine was nowhere to be found, we told him she had gone trading with Mama.
“Ha! Spending money won’t do her any good. She’ll still be thirty-eight.”
Spittle formed white bubbles at the corners of his lips as his words lathered up inside of him like his mouth had been cleaned with a cake of soap.
Lucky for us all, he never checked behind the barn or down the corn rows.
When she failed to turn up for supper, Baldwin took us back home where he stayed for supper, knowing full well that Ernestine had skipped out on purpose.
“Do you suppose I should call the sheriff and report her as a missing person?” he asked.
“Don’t bother,” Mama said. “She’ll be back tomorrow.”
I had seen pictures of Aunt Ernestine in her younger years. She had been attractive in a plain sort of way, but time and gravity had caught up with her. Her forehead grew wrinkles as she fretted and stewed over her martial trouble. Sadly, she couldn’t deny the fact that she’d picked the wrong man. The marriage lasted twenty years and not a day longer. In December 1936, she filed for divorce. In court it was revealed that Uncle Baldwin had committed physical and mental cruelty as well as “adultery on numerous occasions.”
“What’s adultery?” Winnie asked.
“One of the Ten Commandments,” Kenny said. “Look it up in Exodus.”
He did. “But I still don’t know what it is. Iola, do you know?”
I tried to help, though I wasn’t completely sure myself. “I think it’s wanting your neighbor’s wife.”
“You mean Mrs. Wampler?” Winnie scratched his head. “What would I want with her?”
“Jeez Louise.” Kenny said, muffling laughter. “I don’t know. Maybe you’d want to fish in her pond sometime.”
“If I wanted to do that, I’d ask,” he said.
“This is when you don’t ask,” Kenny said.
That seemed to satisfy Winnie until he said, “Did Uncle Baldwin fish without asking?”
“I guess so. That’s why Aunt Ernestine got mad,” I said.
Mama had said she wasn’t too sure about the adultery business, but knew plenty about the cruelty from their growing-up years. “Baldwin liked to aggravate us to death.”
“Why didn’t you slug him back?” I asked.
“He was ten years older. You think I could whip a big boy like that?”
When the lawyers finished, Uncle Baldwin had given Aunt Ernestine one of his farmsteads, $10,000 cash and furnishings, which she interpreted to include the light fixtures, brass switch plates and full-room wool carpets—her first and only display of true avarice. The one moveable thing she left behind was that dismal water jug accompanied by a note reading, “See you in Hell.”
The family was scandalized by her gall. Mama in particular was horrified. It was one thing to live in a bad marriage, she said, but quite another to air the embarrassing details. Mama was horrified. “To think she’s a Christian woman!”
Agnes took charge of the Christmas ham that year, though Baldwin, still licking his wounds, failed to play Santa Claus for us kids as he had in years past.
“It’s about time we dispensed with that foolishness anyway,” she said, spooning sweet potatoes into a china bowl. “The kids are too big for Santa Claus.”
“I beg to differ,” Mama said. “We’re never too big to believe, isn’t that right, but all the same, it’s just not Christmas without Baldwin.”
“What do you suppose Ernestine is up to?” Mama said.
“I miss her,” I said innocently.
Agnes wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Well I sure don’t, not after what she did to embarrass this family.”
“How about what he did to her?” I said.
Agnes looked as if she could choke me. “I declare. How about some family loyalty around here?”
“Baldwin is your blood uncle,” Mama said quietly.
I couldn’t understand why everyone could excuse my uncle’s boorish behavior by judging his victim so harshly. Ernestine had endured more than any human being should have, and I truly missed her, especially when I smelled ginger snaps or saw colorful calico. She had been an aunt, a grandmother and a sometimes-mother rolled into one. Now, sadly, she was gone.
After the divorce, she settled in Shelbyville and quit attending Prairie Creek Presbyterian Church. I’d caught sight of her in town. She looked like she was carrying a heavy load, though the only visible thing weighing her down was a wool tweed coat. I wanted to call out her name, tell her she was missed, but Mama was with me. I knew better than to stir the pot.
By the mid 1930s, Uncle Baldwin could buy and sell most anyone in four counties. Shortly after hew as declared single, spare women multiplied. Some offered to do his laundry, others catered complete meals to his doorstep, all delivered with a wink and a smile. When he paraded some of them around the neighborhood, Aunt Ernestine’s testimony about adultery took on new truth. He’d done this before. Mama and Agnes speculated who his next sweet patootie would be, whether she’d be younger, thinner, prettier or sillier than the last.
“He’s just being a man. I’ll bet a fig pie he doesn’t marry any of them,” Agnes said.
The rest of us watched from the sidelines, wondering who might replace Aunt Ernestine. This review of Midwest femininity included everything from a refined city widow wearing patent-leather shoes to a fancy blonde milliner named Jeanette who claimed she knew Mary Pickford as a child in Cleveland. We believed that lie until Agnes read that Miss Pickford was from Toronto, but what really put Jeanette on thin ice, however, was telling Uncle Baldwin that she had no interest in housework. They finally parted ways when she refused to help him walk the beans.
“A woman that proud isn’t worth having around,” he grumbled.
Others came and went until he hired Rose. Though a third his age, she was as much for show as for culinary skill. Agnes was sure that he didn’t pay her much. He was stingy in most ways but outrageously spendthrift in others. Once he had an old boxcar dismantled for scrap metal to cobble into a shed. Another time he traded his Pierce-Arrow for a new Lincoln because he liked the look of a sleek greyhound on the radiator.
Baldwin’s choices were a matter of priority, my father said. “A fellow can’t catch a pretty girl with a machine shed.”
“Looks like he doesn’t have to,” Kenny said. “He’s got Rose.”
After Ernestine’s raid on their house, Baldwin auctioned off their rambling old farmhouse as if shedding an out-of-style overcoat. As if to spite himself, he moved a sagging tenant cottage to a prime spot along the state highway and left the furnace behind. None of the walls were plumb and the floors were as wavy as pond water on a windy day, but as Baldwin explained, “Fancy houses don’t pay the bills.”
Aunt Agnes said hoboes lived better.
When it turned cold, he and Rose carried space heaters from room to room in an endless journey of nomadic necessity. In this way, she froze with a rich man just as she’d done back home with her poorhouse Irish kin. The Trumbulls had immigrated after the First War and she made up for what her folks lacked in success. Inside of two months, she was sharing Uncle Baldwin’s dinner table, his closets and his bank account. She put down Olson rugs, the kind braided from old clothes, and bought some other furnishings, all cheap but serviceable, including Grand Rapids furniture, mail-order draperies and glassware won at the movie house. It wasn’t long until Agnes made an inspection visit and declared the place a complete abomination. “That girl wouldn’t know good taste if it stepped up and smacked her in the face.”
Rose’s spending increased. Wherever Uncle Baldwin went, she went and whenever he bought a new suit of clothes, she did the same. She was no more attractive than Aunt Ernestine had been in her youth, but unlike her predecessor, Rose commanded attention. She spoke in a loud voice. Her hair fell in chestnut finger waves and her eyes a similar shade of brown. What her skin lacked, rouge and lipstick made up for. Winnie laughed that she wouldn’t be bad looking if she wasn’t cursed with squirrel ears “and cheeks wide enough to store nuts.”
“That’s a mean thing to say,” Kenny said. He was already in his teens, and defended her looks. “She’s better looking than most.”
Before long, we all took note of the spell she’d cast on our uncle.
One evening in late spring, Mama took me with her to canvas our part of the county for the Mother’s March against infantile paralysis. In a flash of community spirit, she had agreed to help with the drive. We both piled into Dad’s pickup and headed up the road.
“We might as well get this one out of the way,” she said, pulling up Baldwin’s driveway.
Rose appeared at the kitchen door wearing a ruffled apron shockingly splattered with what appeared to be blood. “Excuse how I look. Those Early Girls are about to wear me out.” She wiped her forehead. “Won’t you come in?”
Her kitchen a jumble of boiling pots, steaming jars and a mishmash of ripe strawberries, some whole, some capped, most quartered and crushed. When Mama told her what we’d come for, Rose excused herself, stepped into the back bedroom and returned with a jingling coffee can.
“Bernice, I don’t have but a couple of dimes. Will a few quarters do?”
While Mama and I watched, Rose fetched five whole dollars in change. My heart leapt as I held the coins filled my hand. That much money would buy a pair of crutches or leg braces. Like Lazarus, some poor crippled child might rise and walk again.
We thanked her for the donation. Later, as we headed back down the lane, I remarked on Rose’s generosity.
“Don’t be fooled. She’s just letting her new money talk,” Mama said.
In those days our folks farmed for Uncle Baldwin plus their own sixty acres of corn, wheat and soybeans. Dad had been born in the bottomland of the Ohio River where times are either flush or flushed out. The flood of 1913 had dealt such a blow that by the time he’d moved up here and married Mama, he was grateful to become his brother-in-law’s tenant with food on the table. After so many years farming for him, they couldn’t say much about his housekeeper or his style of sinning.
The first time Uncle Baldwin brought Rose to church, he picked the same front pew where he and Ernestine had sat for years. Reverend Crotts, a spare Presbyterian minister with a Charlie McCarthy haircut, nodded in their direction. They were hard to miss. Uncle Baldwin was wearing one of his Chicago suits and Rose was wearing a white hat that hovered over her head like an upturned birdbath, fluted and veiled.
“That Trumbull girl thinks she’s something,” Agnes said, fingering her own cotton collar. “Did you see what she has on? Why she’ll have that brother of ours flat broke inside of a year!” Then she turned to me and said, “Remember dear, you can’t make a velvet purse out of a sow’s ear.”
I nodded as if I agreed.
Standing in the sharp shadow of the church steeple, those two were being more than cruel, but Rose had it coming. Who would wear such a fancy hat and not expect to be the talked about? It was the height of fashion, but no one wore such bonnets in Lincoln County, much less to Prairie Creek Presbyterian Church.
Mama took note of Uncle Baldwin’s attire. “Who does he think he is fancied up in that zoot suit? This isn’t Chicago. I declare that brother of ours grows sillier by the minute.”
The couple was the brunt of jokes told at the grain elevator, the store and the post office—most anywhere neighbors gathered. Agnes had repeated them for Mama’s benefit. “What’s Baldwin Keefe’s favorite church hymn? He a-rose!” Or, “I hear Baldwin Keefe’s got him a new piece of furniture—a Trumbull bed!”
It was the uneven ways of sour times. Those who didn’t have money joked about those who did, all the while wishing they could be so flamboyant. They did this to anyone perceived as rich, and in our immediate part of the world, Baldwin Keefe was the primary target.
I decided that if I was ever wealthy, I’d try to hold it in a little, show some dignity so people wouldn’t talk so harshly. I’d die of embarrassment, yet Rose seemed to revel in the attention.
One day shortly after my twelfth birthday, I went to the post office to fetch a postage-due letter. There was Rose dressed like Wallis Warfield Simpson the Second in a fashionable jersey number with open-toed pumps. She was toting an olive-colored package.
After we exchanged pleasantries and I pointed to the box. “Is it Christmas?”
Of course it was a silly thing to say. It was nearly Decoration Day, a full seven months before December.
She smiled back, her teeth a perfect strand of large pearls. “Honey, it don’t have to be Christmas to go shopping.”
The box was the size of an ice cube tray. I caught a glimpse of the return address in bold script: Marshall Field & Company.
“Frango mints,” she said. “Your uncle discovered them the last time we were in Chicago, but we ran out, and I wrote for them to send more. Have you ever tried them?”
I shook my head. I had never been to Chicago, much less heard of Frango mints.
“They’re really good if you like mint with your chocolate.” She waved to Mama in the pickup. “You tell your mother to come over and try some. Tell her it’s something special from the big city.”
When I got back in the cab, I told her about the candy.
“Hmmph!” She started the motor. “You’d never see Ernestine wasting good money on mail-order foolishness.”
“I thought you didn’t like her,” I asked.
Mama gave me a look. “I didn’t like what she did, but she was a credit upside this.”
Of all Uncle Baldwin’s female admirers, none had been as strong-willed as Rose. Before long, the rest of the flock was reduced to also-rans. Yet, I had to give the devil her due; she did her share of the work, keeping up with the house and garden and helping “Mr. Keefe,” as she called him, by delivering refreshments to the field. Sometimes she put on work clothes, hopped on a tractor and convoyed equipment from one farm to the other. It was clear that she wouldn’t be camping in the cornfield.
In June 1940 Rose threw a lavish 21st birthday dinner for herself and invited all of the family and several neighbors. Mama thought it presumptuous of “that girl,” knowing full well we’d feel obliged to bring presents, but we went anyway, taking her a lovely damask tablecloth. Rose seemed pleased with the gift, of course, and thanked Mama profusely. I sensed her gratitude was more for the acknowledgement of her as Baldwin’s consort than for the gift.
Rose had prepared a virtual smorgasbord. “She sure does know how to win a man’s heart,” Dad said. Then Mama pinched his forearm.
Kenny surprised us all by giving Rose a beautiful Irish lace handkerchief. I couldn’t help but notice how she raved about the gift, spreading it over the top of an upholstered chair for all to see. “Kenny is such a thoughtful boy for his age.”
The gesture was unlike Kenny, who rarely acknowledged anyone’s birthday but his own.
“That was a nicer gift than you gave Agnes,” I told him later.
He grinned, saying that Aunt Rose deserved as much.
In 1940 Uncle Baldwin decided to take a road trip. Now that Germany had invaded most of Europe, it would soon be ’17 all over again, he said. Gasoline would be in short supply, so he bought a small silver travel trailer that resembled a giant bullet, hitched it to the back of his Lincoln and headed to the Gulf of Mexico “while the getting was still good.”. The two of them visited Pensacola, Biloxi, New Orleans and Corpus Christi, some of the places we kids had come to know from the old stereograph. Before long our mailbox sprouted postcards. One in particular featured a photograph of Rose and Uncle Baldwin in beach wear, standing next to the Catch of the Day, no doubt the commercial haul for the entire wharf. The site of our doughy, sun-starved uncle in swimming togs was an utter embarrassment upside the trim and youthful Rose.
Kenny tacked the card on his dresser mirror, slipping the Baldwin side of the card under the edge of the mirror. “I need something to liven up this drab old room.”
“You mean funny it up. They look like Laurel and Hardy,” Winnie said.
“Very funny. Ha ha.”
Mama said Winnie could claim the next card that arrived. He didn’t have to wait long. Rose and Baldwin showered us with views of hotels, tourist cabins, dance piers and alligator farms in tropical fruit colors: dusky oranges, hot pinks and vibrant greens. One exceptionally colorful one came from a place called Weekee Wachee. It featured mermaids under water. I discovered it in our mailbox as we were heading to town, and Winnie and I argued for the better part of three miles about whether the Florida mermaids were real.
“If they’re fake, how did they take the picture?” he wanted to know.
Kenny, who had just turned fifteen, was driving. “They use underwater cameras.”
“You can’t hold a camera under water any more than you can a wristwatch,” I said. “They’ll get ruined.”
Kenny said he knew different. He had heard of special underwater equipment. They used breathing tubes at the mermaid farm. “They’re in that picture if you look hard enough.”
“Let me see,” I said.
“Hey! It’s not your card. Mama said I got to have the next one,” Winnie protested.
“I’m not taking it. I’m borrowing it,” I said.
We fussed back and forth for another half mile until Kenny grabbed the card and tossed it out the window. Astonished, Winnie and I watched it flutter into the roadside weeds.
“You bully! You’re a bigger jerk than Uncle Baldwin,” he screamed.
The next day, Winnie begged Dad to drive the pickup slowly along the stretch of road so he could search for the missing postcard, but it was never found. “It’s all Kenny’s fault. He just didn’t want me to have any.” He sulked for the better part of the afternoon, telling Kenny that he should pay up for being so mean.
“OK, here.” He tossed him a nickel. “Go buy yourself a stupid postcard.”
“They don’t have that kind around here and I’m not going to Florida,” Winnie said.
“Pity. I’d be glad to help you pack.”
“And I’ll be glad not to see your mug around here anymore.”
Mama called from the kitchen. “Can’t you boys ever get along?”
By the time planting time arrived, Baldwin and Rose were back home to boast of their adventures. They spoke of eating gulf shrimp the size of a man’s fist, driving past cotton fields as white as snowdrifts and seeing orange groves loaded with gorgeous blooms that smelled like a wedding in progress. I wanted to ask them if the fragrance had put them in the mood to get married, but my better sense told me to mind my own business.
There was such a thing as common law, Mama said, and Uncle Baldwin and Rose were on their way to becoming just that. When I pressed her to explain, she said common law was “nothing a respectable woman would consider.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it takes seven years of living in sin to qualify.”
Rose and Uncle Baldwin, fresh from their Southern journey, joined us for Sunday dinner, when Winnie mentioned the Catch of the Day postcard. “Next time you go to Florida, can I go along? I want to hook me some of those big saltwater fish.”
Uncle Baldwin smiled. “You need to get some age on you first, boy. One of those big ol’ fish would pull you in with them.”
“I’d like to catch a shark like you, only Mama says you didn’t really catch them. She said you paid some fisherman to take your picture with all his fish.”
“Oh she did, did she?” He sat down his butter knife. “Son if you make enough money someday you can charter your own fishing boat. Heck, you might even buy one.”
“Can I be a common law too?” he asked.
“A what?” Baldwin asked.
I bit my lower lip as Kenny nearly spewed his drink to choke back laughter.
“Mama says—“ Winnie continued.
Dad pointed at him. “That’s enough, son.”
Back in the kitchen, Mama grabbed Winnie by the scruff of the neck. “Do you have to repeat everything you hear?”
The summer before Pearl Harbor, Baldwin and Rose spent a couple of weeks out West, leaving Mama and Dad to tend to the chores which, in turn, meant extra chores for us kids. I was fourteen, Kenny almost sixteen. He was old enough to be driving a tractor and other heavier work, but he was sent to weed the green beans and tomatoes with Winnie and me. Kenny hated gardening. He said it was women’s work. As we chopped weeds, it wasn’t long until the subject of Rose Trumbull came up. “It’s downright disgusting, her and that old man. He’s old enough to be her granddad.”
“How old is that?” Winnie asked.
Kenny figured on his fingers. “She’s twenty-two. He’s at least sixty.”
Winnie whistled.
“She’s old enough to know what she’s doing,” I said.
Kenny swatted gnats away from his face. “Are you crazy? She’s only six years older than I am. That would be like me and a woman Aunt Agnes’s age. She ought to find somebody younger.”
“You mean somebody like you?” Winnie gave him a squinty grin.
“I can get plenty of dates, pipsqueak.”
“I haven’t seen any. Where you hiding them?”
Kenny threw a clod at his brother. Winnie scrambled to throw one back and before I knew what was happening, they were pushing against the pole bean trellises.
“Whoa!” I called.
I wasn’t much bigger than Winnie, but I grabbed him under the armpits and lifted him off the ground. Kenny pulled him from my grasp. Winnie kicked furiously. “You aren’t the boss of me.”
Postcards filtered in from exotic places in Colorado—Pike’s Peak, Indian cliff dwellings and a particularly odd-looking set of rock formations called the Garden of the Gods. Red, yellow and brown monoliths dwarfed automobiles in the photographs.
Mama studied it warily, “Why do you suppose they call it such a religious name as that? There’s not a cross in sight.”
“Maybe they mean Indian gods,” I said.
By this time Kenny had given in to allowing Winnie to keep the cards, which he carefully collected in an album. As Mama said, “A boy his age needs something to keep himself out of mischief.”
Uncle Baldwin’s holdings eventually crossed the fifteen-hundred acre mark. His hired hands were busy clearing fence rows, cutting hedges and laying tile to drain the low-lying spots—anything to increase the yield. But after so many years of acquiring more and more farmland, he was looking to new avenues. For some time, he had his eyes on a John Deere dealership in town and that August, he bought the store.
Bored with farm chores, Kenny begged Uncle Baldwin to hire him. Before long, Kenny went to work sorting and straightening tractor parts for a few dollars a week. He was glad to have his own money to go to the movies and other amusements. He came home most every evening boasting about how much fun it was to work for Uncle Baldwin. When business slowed, he was sent to help on his farm. “We walk beans and hoe weeds,” he reported. Unusually cheerful.
Winnie and I looked at each other. We knew that Kenny was trying to impress us with his town job, but there was no way he could enjoy field work. By the time school took up that autumn, he grew more distant. When he bought himself a bottle of Old Spice cologne, it was clear that he had left us behind.
“Next thing you know he’ll have real dates,” Winnie predicted. Then he told me about a box of Frango mints on the dresser. “They came from Rose,” he said. “I saw Kenny making eyes at her during church.”
I chalked the remark up to boyish imagination until I was heading out to gather eggs and spotted Winnie sprinting up our lane.
His eyes as big as disks on a harrow as he gasped for breath. “I saw Kenny… and Rose out behind the boxcar shed. He had his arm around her. They were smooching.”
“You’re making that up.” I wanted to believe my own words.
“No honest. I saw them. Kenny caught me and made me promise not to tell, cross my heart and hope to die.”
I shifted the egg basket to the other hand. “Why are you telling me?”
“Because it ain’t right what they’re doing, is it Iola?”
“Keep that story to yourself,” I said, and headed toward the hen house.
Of all the trouble Kenny could invite, this was top of the list. I was fourteen, but I didn’t have anything remotely close to a boyfriend, and here was my sixteen-year-old brother dogging after a full-grown woman. My stomach soured to think of it.
That evening when the folks were downstairs listening to the radio, I found Kenny sprawled out on his bed and reading true crime magazines. A rotary fan was billowing stuffy air through the curtains.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
He rolled toward me.
“I know about Rose. Winnie says he saw you behind their machine shed.”
“That little twerp has been running his trap.”
“I told him to keep quiet about it.”
His legs extended well over the narrow mattress. He punched his pillow.
“You’ve got to leave her alone,” I said.
“Who are you, my big sister?”
I folded my arms. “Somebody needs to be. She’s trouble, Kenny.”
“If I need any advice, I’ll send you a telegram.” He tossed a magazine across the bed. It landed unevenly.
“She’s not his wife, you know.”
“She might as well be.”
“What’s it to you?” he asked.
“Are you crazy? Uncle Baldwin will kill you if he finds out.”
“I can hold my own.”
“Oh sure. Uncle Baldwin has more than a hundred pounds on you. Winnie says you were smooching with her.
Is that true?”
“What if it is?” His half-confession took my breath away.
“Then you’re a blooming idiot. You get him upset, we can forget about him leaving us anything.”
“You’re just like Mama and Agnes. All you women care about is getting your mitts on that old man’s money.”
That wasn’t exactly true. I’d never speculated on money like they had, though I wouldn’t turn it down. Nobody would to turn down that kind of fortune.
“I’m no greedier than the next person, but I’m not stealing his girlfriend, either. If you’re smart, you’ll leave her alone.”
“You mind your own business and I’ll take care of mine.”
I should’ve known that he was beyond reach. He’d crossed into a new place where I didn’t want to follow, but least I’d warned him good and strong. He didn’t need to drag the rest of us into trouble.
Kenny stayed on at Uncle Baldwin’s, and he worked hard. On days he wasn’t at the implement store, he walked Baldwin’s fields or the fence rows, decapitating and grinding the thistles into the rich, black topsoil. It was as if they were the enemy in some kind of silent war he was bent on winning.
As Uncle Baldwin always said, the only good thistle was a dead one, and anyone who ever worked for him was well aware of that and his other rules: hands off his woman and never serve him turkey, stemming, of course, to his turkey-flogging experience as a child. I didn’t mention the business about Rose and Kenny for the rest of that summer, not even to Winnie.
Early one morning in September, Mama received a phone call. Winnie and I were out slopping the hogs when we heard a commotion. Seconds later we saw her arms flailing out the back door. “Homer, come quick! It’s Kenny!”
Dad ran up from the barn lot. The two of them hopped into the pickup and tore off down the road. When they got there, they said, our brother was on the back steps, being kicked repeatedly by Uncle Baldwin. Kenny’s nose was busted, he was begging him to stop, and they could hear Rose howling like a whipped hound from the kitchen.
Baldwin grabbed Kenny in a chokehold as Mama buckled in on herself begging him to let go. Dad called for one of the hired men and they shoved Baldwin down the steps and managed to pull Kenny free. Dad threatened to call the sheriff and press charges, but when the hired man explained what the row was about, the shock of it exploded in Dad’s mind. He thrashed after Kenny and then Baldwin who had sprained something in his tumble down the steps.
Before the three of them could leave, Uncle Baldwin got up and staggered toward the pickup, hollering, “You little son of a bitch! You’ll burn in Hell if I ever catch your ass over here again.”
Mama wrung her hands for the rest of the day, wondering what would become of us all. “It’s not some simple family row. He’s our bread and butter, Kenny. What on earth were you thinking?”
The answer, of course, was that he wasn’t.
Silence fell over our house until the next morning when Dad told him to get cleaned up for town. “We’re going to the recruiter’s.”
“Homer no! He’s only a boy,” Mama said.
“A boy with a man’s pants.” Dad grabbed the truck keys and stalked past her.
By the time Kenny’s bruises had faded, he was packing for Great Lakes Naval Air Station. We saw him off early on a Tuesday in late September. Mama had been up all night, fretting about the war in Europe. Surely we would be in the thick of it soon. Kenny might get seriously harmed, but that could happen anyway being near Uncle Baldwin.
That evening, after they had returned from town, Dad took Mama’s place saying grace, and when he had finished, Winnie asked, “Is Kenny going to war?”
“Hush,” Mama said. With a handkerchief in one hand and a fork in the other, she wasn’t in a mood for such discussion.
Winnie hung his head and sobbed.
Dad passed the gravy. “It’s for the best.”
I had never seen my father cry, but his chin was quivering that day. It was all I could do to not join him.
That fall Hitler’s plowed into Russia while the Japanese slashed nerves across the Pacific. Mama, clinging to her pride, stewed about Kenny having to leave home before he had a chance to finish high school and lamented the unfortunate business with Rose Trumbull. “What will people think?”
“The same thing they’ve thought about your brother all along,” Dad said.
Mama’s jaw dropped. “Why Homer Parsons! My brother’s been good enough to give you steady work all these years.”
“And Bernice, dear, you’ve been good to accept it.” Then he walked calmly into the front room and lit his pipe.
I had never seen my father take charge of situations so directly. It was as if Kenny’s absence had somehow emboldened my father.
Chagrined at what she called his brutish insensitivity, Mama kept busy cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry as she endured a cloud of regret that refused to dissipate. Kenny’s trouble had affected her whole life, she said, saying how she would buy this or that “if our ship ever comes in.”
“Ours has shipped out with Kenny on it,” Dad replied.
With our brother gone, Winnie had room to stretch out in the garret room they had shared. Kenny’s dresser was cleared off, including that postcard of Rose and Uncle Baldwin. Like Mama, Winnie became sullen, withdrawn, as if he were responsible. He daydreamed and faltered in school. If he hadn’t tattled, he said, things would be different.
“You can’t unwind time,” I said.
“But if I hadn’t been up there he wouldn’t have gotten caught. He’d still be here instead of going off to war.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” When I touched his shoulder, I noticed that much of his boyish pudginess was gone.
We posted a blue star on the front window and not long afterward, Kenny wrote that he was shipping out from Norfolk. Mama went on a crying jag for a whole afternoon.
Aunt Agnes came to comfort Mama. Before she left, they, as usual, proceeded to blame “that hussy” for everything that had gone wrong, past, present and future. She had squandered Uncle Baldwin’s money and now she’d squandered Kenny’s education and future. I wanted to point out to them how Kenny had invited his own troubles, but I thought better of it and kept quiet.
We received each shred of news as welcome relief that he was still alive, defying the danger, beating the odds. We received word that Kenny’s ship had dropped anchor in the Mediterranean. “Postcard-perfect here, but none to be had,” he wrote.
Winnie, whose collection had grown to fill more than an album, was sorely disappointed. “I’d like to have some cards of stuff we used to see on the stereograph,” but Mama reminded him that postcards weren’t for sale in a war zone.
We hadn’t seen Rose for months, and for good reason. The hired hands told Dad that Uncle Baldwin had tried to kill her for cheating on him, this time with one of the fellows at the dealership. Just like he’d done on Ernestine’s birthdays, he took his belt to her doubly hard and almost succeeded. The general agreement was that she had it coming.
Early in 1941, Uncle Baldwin had come down with sugar diabetes, which meant he wasn’t the bull he’d once been much to Rose’s good fortune. Her bruises were healed sufficiently for her to invite us over for Thanksgiving.
“’Tis the season to forgive and forget,” she said.
We took it to mean that she and Uncle Baldwin had come to terms, though we hadn’t seen them at church since Kenny left. Now that he had been hurled into a world war, Baldwin figured that enemy fire would be sufficient punishment for him and the other fellow who, at last report, had received a draft notice in short order.
Mama, praising the Lord, wouldn’t turn down a chance to make amends with her brother. When we showed up for dinner that Thursday, she hugged him and told him how sorry she was that we hadn’t seen one another, though it took extra effort to reach around Baldwin’s heavy frame. Rose’s starchy cooking was clearly taking its toll on Uncle Baldwin’s waistline. A profusion of dishes covered every surface.
“Rose, you must’ve been busy for days,” Mama remarked. “I don’t know when I’ve seen such variety.”
Actually we’d all experienced Rose’s hospitality plenty of times. Rose was just being herself, not knowing when to stop or when too much of a good thing became bad.
To our knowledge, she never invited her people, which was just as well. The Trumbulls weren’t our kind, Mama said. Seeing them pray to the Virgin Mary would have been more than she and Agnes would’ve wished to endure.
That Christmas I sent Kenny a card with a drawing of a church with an onion dome and white glittery snow, hoping it wouldn’t remind him too much of a Nazi village. I wrote about seeing Uncle Baldwin, how he’d proffered a large box of Marshall Field candies, a particular treat given sugar rationing. And Winnie and I had each received a silver dollar. “How about that? For once the pair of us got equal treatment,” I wrote.
Kenny responded. “How’s Rose these days? Ain’t she worried about us boys?”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that she hadn’t ever so much as asked about him. Rose was Rose. After several letters of not hearing her whereabouts, he finally quit asking.