A Memoir

(An attempt to recollect this life to the best of my fallible faculties in the case that my children and grandchildren, my nieces and nephews, may be interested in pieces of history, particularly family history that preceded them.)

Before Branderham
1963-1969

In those days, there were no car seats- no restraints. There was only freedom.

1

My blocks are square, but not a flat square. My letters are painted on the sides in bright colors. I like to play with my blocks in the Old Gray Goose. The floor of the van is hard and straight when the Old Gray Goose is still, and I can build a tower, but when it is moving down the road the floor jerks and the things I build fall apart.

These days, we live in a little house in Texarkana. It is white and green and just the right size for us. We have a big brown dog that I can ride around the yard. He is stringy and moves like Pinocchio. Mama and Daddy love Spook because he’s so smart that he won’t let me play too near the road.

My brother is in this place with me, toddling around on his little fat legs. When I am lying on the floor of the kitchen looking at my book, he wobbles near me with a can in his hand. Mama is cooking and I like the way it smells. My brother is like a live dolly and he likes to stack the cans from Mama’s cabinet. I am hearing the hum of my father’s voice as he talks and laughs with his friend at the table. The table has metal legs but it doesn’t walk. I am listening to the sounds of Mama’s work. Paddy has moved closer to me. The can slips suddenly from my brother’s small chubby hand.

I am bleeding. My daddy is rushing around. He is not usually a rusher. Daddy’s friend is helping him hurry. We go somewhere.

I am on top of a table, now. It is hard and straight, like the floor of the Old Gray Goose when it’s not moving. Someone begins to stretch wide belts from one side of the table over my body and then to lock them on the other side. In my head I am yelling: Wait! I am on the table! Someone help me, I can’t move! Will I stay here until forever? Maybe I can’t breathe.

I guess I stopped being able to think, because the next thing I know is that I’m in my daddy’s arms, and he is sorry for me.

I don’t know where Mama is.

2

The tall skinny dog is dead. A car hit him. Daddy is crying while he digs the hole. It is dark outside and the night sky is big and wonderful. The pine trees are gathered around us, the sparkly stars are shining over us, and Daddy is going to put the big dead dog in the hole. Now I am sorry for Daddy.

And I wonder- who will keep me out of the road?

3

Someone is holding me. Someone that I don’t know. We need to borrow the phone. Our car is crunched. We were on our way to pick up our maid, Cody, when we crashed in front of this house. I can feel Mama is upset.

Cody’s color is a soft smooth black and I think she’s beautiful, like the velvet night sky. She takes care of me and my wobbly baby brother. Paddy’s eyes are blue and shiny and when he laughs it makes me feel nice.

Cody’s our mother while Mama works at the munitions plant where she makes bullets for the war. Who will pick up Cody, now? Will Cody still watch over me and Paddy?

4

I am crying and searching for Cody. She’s in the kitchen at the table. She is smoking. Daddy and Mama smoke, too. I think everyone smokes. My nose is hurting. “How’d this happen, baby?” Cody’s putting too much of Mama’s cold cream on my face. She thinks maybe I have a broken nose.

I was at our neighbor’s house, jumping on the bed with the other children when I smashed. This is all I know. Cody is sorry, and I love her.

My bed has a cloth across it that is flat with raised bumps on it. I can feel the soft pattern when I run my hand across it. I like to do this. Sometimes when I wake up, I have a print of the shapes on my skin. I wonder if it will go away, and if it does, will it come, again?

5

Daddy is supposed to go to school, but he has a hard time doing it. He doesn’t like to get up. The war made him tired. But, he has a fancy camera and he likes to take pictures. He likes to talk with people, too.

Sometimes he is a milkman. I like to see the inside of his truck. It has large open doors on each side and Daddy wears a special hat when he drives it around to give the people their nice cold cow milk in the clear glass bottles.

Other times he’s a fireman and we take his dinner to the station. The station has a large room where all the men who work on fires eat and play games until a fire comes. When it comes, they hear a bell and they jump around like popcorn until they hop onto the big red truck and go to meet the fire and kill it. Sometimes it makes them sad and they tell each other a lot of jokes to feel better.

6

My daddy’s mother, my grandmother, is tall. She has a beautiful voice. And she loves to play with me and to sing to me, “My Sweet Lolita Labonnie, with big blue eyes and bright red hair! Oh what a little honey!”

I am watching the world go by from the back window of her silver Wildcat. I am enthralled. I see that everything is a different color of gray. Everything except my pretty gum. My gum tastes good, and I don’t notice that I’m eating the whole sack of yummy, sugary, sticky stuff.

Too late, I realize I was supposed to chew a piece and then spit it out into the trash and wait awhile before chewing another piece. I hear them say it may take years for the stuff to work its way through my system. I wonder what this means.

7

My brother is riding his bike! Everyone is amazed. Paddy’s color is the same as mine, only he is gold on the top and I am copper. He’s not four years old and look at him go! No training wheels, they would only get in his way.

I am feeling pressured. I need to ride my bicycle now. I need to ride without training wheels, too. After all, I am the big sister.

I somehow master my bike and ride behind Paddy down the black-topped road beside our house. The road in front of our house is a busy highway through South Side, Arkansas. We live here now to be close to Daddy’s parents because they own a lot of land nearby, and someone has to help them build houses on it.

We live next door to my Daddy’s hunting buddy, and almost next door to our little church. I go to the church to sing, “A Sunbeam, a Sunbeam, I’ll be a sunbeam for life!” I sing out with my whole heart because I like it there. The carpet is dark green and the walls are paneled brown. Sometimes a ray of light will come through the window and I can see tiny pieces of the world floating through the air. Air is not as empty as people think.

I wonder if I really will be a Sunbeam for life.

8

Daddy hunts, and we eat what he kills. Mama is good with food. She can cook squirrel and rabbit and stuff to go with it.

Daddy says I must try the fried rabbit and squirrel. I’m not sure that I want to eat something that I like so very much to see alive. But, I obey and it seems mama can make anything taste fine.

9

We have a little dog. She’s a Boston terrier, white with black spilled over her. Her name is Sugar. I like that name. I like the way it sounds when I say it. She’s sweet, too.

Today, Mama says I can’t play with Sugar. She has to stay in the storage building behind our house because she’s in heat. She’ll only be hotter in that old building, I think.

Now, we are in the car driving along a gravel road. Sugar is running along behind us. I wonder why she isn’t in the car with us. Mama says it’s because she’s in heat and she needs some exercise. This will only make her hotter. I’m thinking, again.

We sail past small real houses and some trailer houses. I am on my knees in the backseat looking through the back window. I think we are going too fast. I think we may lose Sugar. “Please slow down, Mama,” I beg. “I can’t see Sugar! Are you sure you can see her, Mama,” I ask. I probably ask twenty times because that’s how I do it when I’m worried.

Next to Sugar, Paddy is my favorite thing. He can play outside with me and I look after him. I don’t know what we do, only that he is mine. My own dimply laughing brother! I know he is important.

Sometimes, when the wonderful sky is black and glittering and it is bedtime, my Mama will come into our room and sing to us in her pretty voice, “I’m a little teapot short and stout. Here is my handle.” She places her hand on her hip. “Here is my spout.” She throws the opposite arm out to the side and curls her hand downward. “When I get all steamed up, then I shout, just tip me over and pour me out.” We think it is the best show ever! But sometimes Daddy comes, and then we are super excited because he picks Mama up and tips her over! And they laugh and so do we, and I feel warm and safe under the dark sky stretched over us.

10

It is a bright sunshiny day! The kind of day that a sunbeam should feel right at home. It’s late spring and the earth is awake. Mama asks me to keep Paddy on the porch while Daddy is mowing, because it is dangerous to be close to the mower while it is running. I will, because he is my own important brother and I don’t want him to be in danger.

I smell the early summer. I see it in the open field across the road in front of me. The concrete stoop leading to our door is smooth and cool under my bare legs as the large old trees are shading us. The dark sticky highway is glistening, and the steady sound of the mower is soothing. Paddy is squirmy. Nothing is calming to him. He likes to go. He wants off the porch. I don’t want to let him off the porch. “No,” I say. But he doesn’t like no. Suddenly, the sound of the mower makes me afraid.

I hear a thud. It doesn’t sound right. I see Paddy fall. Blood is everywhere. Paddy is limp like a towel. Daddy and Mama are fighting. Blood is filling up the clean places. Mama is being loud and scared.

Now we are flying around the big curve in the mountain, heading to Batesville. Daddy is piloting Mama’s silver mustang. I am riding along with the wind. Mama is holding my bleeding brother.

I am doing what I do when I am nervous. I am talking at the speed of a sunbeam. I don’t know what it is that I am saying, and startlingly my gentle Daddy snaps at me, telling me to “shut up now!” I do. But I am still anxious. Maybe Paddy will die and it will be all my fault, because I am the big sister and a sunbeam, and I should have saved him.

We are in the waiting room. We sit on dark green soft vinyl chairs. I stare at the plain gray-green walls and then at the cool, slick, matching linoleum tiles under my feet. It smells funny. I don’t care for it. There are too many clean smells for anything to be alive in here. Does that mean Paddy is dead? I don’t ask because it is my job to stay shut up.

I notice that Mama and Daddy watch the double doors to our left and they smoke. I am too young to smoke, and I don’t think I want to, but I can watch the doors.

11

After a long time, the doctor pops through the doors. Now I know why we watched them. The doctor has Paddy, or he has what’s left of him. I hope there was enough left to put Paddy back together so I can still have him for my own brother. I listen. I hope. I can understand big things when I try hard. I try hard.

He says Paddy is alive, but he may or he may not be able to see when the bandages are removed. We will have to wait to know. My family is not good at waiting to know, so I shudder.

We are at home. It doesn’t smell funny here. It’s clean because Mama likes it that way, but you can smell that people live here. Paddy has patches over his eyes. I read to him. Maybe, I just make up a story to go with the pictures. I don’t know because I’m little.

I am so sorry that I let my brother get hurt. I didn’t do my job. Please God, let Paddy see and be just like he was before the rock hit him in his face. Please! I meant to do my job. I’m sorry. Will I get fired from being a Sunbeam?

12

It’s time to take the patches off! I hold my breath. Paddy is not holding his breath. He is too full of living for that even with patches. There is a big long scar under the bandages. It starts between his eyebrows and moves down and across the bone in his nose down to the holes he needs to breathe. I heard the big people say that it took one hundred stitches to close up the hole that the rock made.

But he can see! And now Paddy is my own dimply laughing brother with a sewn up hole in the middle of his face.

13

Today we’re loading some of our stuff into Mama’s Mustang. It is a 1964 and a half. I’m not sure what that means, but daddy is so proud of it and so happy that mama drives it. The story is that when my mama was in the hospital having her baby- this was before she gave him to me to be my brother- my daddy called her on the phone and said look out of the window of your room, and Mama did, and she saw a beautiful little silver sports car that Daddy had purchased special for her. I think when you make a boy, a daddy buys you a car.

We are packing her car because Mama is angry with Daddy. She is out of groceries and he is gone hunting on his parents land to get us some meat. Mama knows that we don’t have to live this way in this modern world. We’re going home to Texarkana. I am puzzled. I thought home was the place where my daddy lives, but mama says it is the place where her daddy lives.

It’s hard to be four- or am I five?

14

It’s good that Daddy bought Mama the car, so we could go get some groceries the modern way, from her mama and daddy.

There’s another reason that it’s good. When Mama had me, she was living in Ankara, Turkey, in the middle east with my daddy. My father worked on a military base because he was a soldier and he operated a ham radio.

Mama had never been away from home before and she had never had a baby before. She and Daddy lived in a tiny apartment away from the base where she had to wash my dirty diapers by hand, wring them out, then hang them on string strung all over the place. If she hung my diapers, or anything outside in the air, the thick coal smog would shade them so that it was as if she had never washed them at all! Then, she had to wash them all over again. And I was colicky and I cried much of the time. Mama says she felt the weight of the world on her shoulders. I guess that hurt because she cried a lot, too.

When the world comes out of the sky to sit on your own shoulders, it brings the brilliance of the sunshiny days and the deep darkness of the night too close to you. Poor Mama.

It’s a wonderful thing that the new car helped her to not be sad like she was when she had me. And Paddy came fast, too. Mama didn’t have to hurt so long and she didn’t have to lie on her back for two days with a splitting headache. I’m glad it was easier for her to have her boy baby.

15

We live on Jefferson Street in Texarkana now, because we are getting groceries the way you’re supposed to these days, and Mama works at JC Penny so we can have Christmas to go with our groceries.

Granny is my Mama’s mama. She’s short and mostly round, with bountiful, wavy, shiny chestnut hair- like Mama’s hair. Granny fusses with Mama, and I think it’s brave because Mamma’s strong and she’s not happy when anyone bickers with her. Granny favors the kitchen and the church, and is mostly in one place or the other. Pawpaw is her husband and Mama’s daddy. I think the ladies I call aunt and their kids belong to them, too.

Pawpaw sits on the side of his bed wearing his uniform light cotton jumpsuit. Sometimes he calls to me softly and I enter and approach him. He grins and hugs me and calls me his own Bonnie rabbit. I think he’s always worried and a little sad. I think the modern way may be too hard on him.

When Christmas finally comes, I wake up and slip into Granny’s Living room. Santa (or someone) has surely been here because on Granny’s sturdy, pretty, gold and green couch is perched a doll. The prettiest Barbie doll I have ever seen is dressed in a red velvet Christmas coat with a white fur collar. The buttons on the coat are tiny gold balls. She has blond hair like my tall grandmother, and it’s thick with pretty curls. She has large unassuming blue eyes and dense lashes- and her own shoes! My grandmother has deep blue eyes, too, and this dolly is shaped like my blond grandmother and my mama are shaped when they wear pants. I am delighted, and now my first Barbie, the one Santa delivered to our little white and green house with her dressed in only a short yellow nightie, will have a friend with a coat she can borrow.

16

My daddy has come to Jefferson Street to visit. He and my mama are in the bathroom around the corner from the kitchen and off the hall to the right. Daddy is sitting on the countertop and Mama is standing across from him, leaning on the shower wall. Daddy is using both hands to grip the speckled Formica counter and he”s crying. Mama has her arms loosely crossed and appears amused- casual. There’s something wrong with the picture and I don’t know what it is. I’m worried and my head hurts. I wander away to somewhere else. Hopefully, somewhere less complicated…

Copyright 2015. L.L. Shelton

(God-willing, there is more to come.)

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