Flavors (6 page)

A sagging, bedspread-draped couch flanked one corner while an equally drooping armchair hugged the next wall. Lingering in the cluttered chamber was the smoky fragrance of a big iron wood stove, now on summer furlough in the barn, along with the feather-ticked mattresses and iron bedsteads, stacked high atop dismantled iron beds, in a sometimes futile effort to deter critters from ransacking and feasting on them. Only the adult males kept their beds during the hot months.

It was exciting, the turn of season. It brought
change.
The first night of floor camping thrilled beyond measure. Following an evening outside with Grandpa's chilling ghost stories, we would bed down. When lights died, squeals and giggles erupted like frenzied popping corn.

“Shut up and go to sleep,” commanded Grandma.

Then, as one, in the inky blackness of country night, everybody – save Little Joe – disappeared. At least, I thought they vanished, which was their design. Ghoulish whispers floated to me across the endless expanse of darkness as my fingers groped in every direction for human warmth. Goose-fleshed and near panic, I dared not scream. Grandma would
kill
me. My fingers closed in on a shirt sleeve and I snuggled toward it.

“You skeerd, Sadie?” whispered Little Joe.

“No.” I curled toward him, adrenalin-high on pure adventure
.

Arrr – arr-arr-Arrr.
Last night's memories poofed, I squinted through dimness to where my grandparents' bed loomed like an off-course
Titanic
, crashed catty-cornered into the room. From my pallet, I watched Grandma's ample arm snake from beneath the covers and pull a long string that stretched from the ceiling's electric light cord, then tethered to her iron bed's head-poster.

Click.
Overhead light seared my eye sockets and from another corner, a four-foot cabinet radio – also connected to the string conduit – blared Farmer Gray's friendly, “First call to breakfast!” while he slurped coffee over the airwaves. I had a grasshopper's eye view of Grandpa's and Grandma's feet hitting the floor on opposite sides of their big bed.

“Get up!” Grandpa called out to everybody.

Grandpa, as you've no doubt already suspected, is secondary in the Melton hierarchy. Grandma is undeniably the family matriarch. A small wiry man with full, wavy salt-and-pepper hair perpetually covered by a battered old Fedora hat during daylight hours, Grandpa had a hawkish appearance that spoke of earlier male beauty. Farming had eroded all but a glimpse of it. He always slanted the Fedora hat brim down low over his left forehead because in his youth, whooping cough had cost him that eye.

Grandpa's profile is not as vivid as Grandma's in my later life because he was always disappearing out the door to go tend crops. Same with the stair-step order of adolescent-teen males who did not already hold cotton mill jobs: Cletus, Tommy Lee and Alton Dean.

“What day is it?” I asked Nellie Jane, who lay near me. She sat up and stretched, taking her own good time to answer me.
Mornings were not her best time. Rarely did she condescend to give me an immediate reply.

“What difference does it make what day it is, Lazy-bones? You still gotta get up,” she grumped. I can still, more than a half-century later, hear her voice. It was not mean, even in name-calling irritation. It was more a weary monotone. Only when fear or injustice upset or riled her did her voice rise to high-pitch or strident. And this departure endured for only brief moments, usually dissolving into deep, silent weeping, mostly done in private.

From the radio, Farmer Gray crooned cheerfully, “A good Thursday to you. It's gonna be a warm day. Lots of sunshine.”

“Today's Thursday,” I said.

Nellie Jane rolled her eyes and drawled, “Oh, you are so-o
smart.
”

I didn't pay her any attention. “I'm so glad school's out and I don't have to wear shoes and I'll be in the seventh grade next year. Mr. Cogdill will be my teacher,” I announced in dreamy anticipation.

Nellie Jane sniffed and cut her eyes down at me. “Ol' man Cog-leg?”

Since, in middle school, we attended the same district school, she was familiar with who he was.

“Stop calling him that. He can't help it if he limps.”

“You can't wait ‘cause you're gonna be his
pet
,” Nellie Jane intoned, as though it were a curse. She watched me close, pushing some obscure button deep inside me, one that stirred up something wild, that flailed about desperately denying Heaven-only-knew-what.

“Not so!” I sputtered, not sure
why
her taunt bothered me so.

“Teacher's pet,” she sing-songed in her hushed way, knowing Grandma wouldn't hear her. Grandma
never
heard her.

“Stop saying that.”

“S'the truth.” She climbed to her feet, blasé about the whole thing.

“It's not so the truth!” I blared, nettled to the bone.

“Hush your mouthing, Sadie,” called Grandma from the kitchen.

Nellie Jane sauntered away, calm and composed. I watched her go into the back bedroom and slam the door behind her. I knew she would change from her nightshirt to a dress before going to the kitchen to help Grandma with breakfast. She'd done her sponge bath the night before, a ritual I'd not yet grasped without being forced to. At home, we had indoor plumbing and a bathtub, a more simple process than the sponge bath.

Besides, at home, Mama always ran the water and made me hop in and checked to make sure I soaped up all over, then rinsed. At home, it was an adventure. Here, in Melton-land, a bath got lost somewhere between supper, ghost stories and pallets.

Why does she say those nasty things about Mr. Cogdill?
Was it to make me mad? Nellie Jane did just love to make me mad. I decided then and there that she just
pretended
she didn't like Mr. Cogdill because when he was nice to her at school, she was always nice back to him. She knew I really, really liked him. He always spoke to me at school and called me by my whole name, Sadie Ann. That made me feel real good that he remembered my name all the time.

I couldn't
wait
till school started again and I could show him how smart I was and share some of my poems with him. I'd taken to writing them that past year. Mama and Daddy liked them and I suspected he would, too.

“Nellie Jane!” Grandma called. “Git in here.” I could hear her knocking pots and pans around in the kitchen and smelled
bacon frying. I stuck my foot up in the air and wiggled my toes. One was sore and black and blue from hitting a rock yesterday.

Soon, Grandpa and the boys would leave for the fields to work. During spring and summer months, Grandpa planted and harvested vegetables. I suddenly yearned to go off to the fields and hoe beans like the boys. I wanted to help, but Grandma said I was a curse to the cause, that I dug up more bean plants than weeds.

I was too ashamed to tell her I couldn't tell the difference.

Farmer Gray's voice grabbed my attention. “Yessiree, there'll be lots and lots of sunshine today. Ma, get out your sunbonnet.”

Hot diggity! I can have fun right here.
Today, I would play in the woods, all by myself, where a shady breeze always stirred, where one clearing became my beautiful castle. A big tree stump was my throne while several smaller ones seated all my subjects.

“Get up!” Grandpa repeated the order to all reclining stragglers while buckling his overall straps over his threadbare, faded work shirt.

All about me, like leaves in a soft wind, kids began stirring, stretching, yawning and trying to sit. Most of them were Grandma's and Grandpa's kids. Some folks round about there, as well as our school teachers, thought it kind of peculiar, me having aunts and uncles my own age and younger. All except Mr. Cogdill, who liked all the Meltons and never failed to show them kindness and fairness in the classroom that combined three grades and incorporated a diverse spectrum of Meltons.

“Wake up, Clarence Henry.” Cousin Doodle-Bug shook my cotton-topped uncle awake. Doodle, Clarence Henry and I were all close in age. I stared at Doodle-Bug across the room sitting on his pallet, scratching his head and then his belly through a hole in his big T-shirt, one he borrowed from Conrad to sleep
in. His mama, my Aunt Zelda, had visited yesterday and left Doodle at Grandma's for a couple of days.

“Your real name's Lamaar,” I said to him, for no reason. He turned and looked at me real mean.
Why did I say that?
Quite honestly, I had not planned it. It just popped out. A kind of reckless flap of the tongue. Doodle's black hair was like a brush pile and his face, scowling, looked like one of those wild injuns I'd seen in a Johnny Mack Brown film at the Saturday afternoon cowboy movie matinee. The only difference was that Doodle's face wasn't painted.

“Don't you
ever
call me Lamaar again. D'ya hear me?”

I turned my head away. Boy! He was
grouchy.

“Y'hear me, Lazy-bones?” The sneer was in his croaky voice.
Huh
! He couldn't even make up his own name-tags; he stole Nellie Jane's. I ignored him.

Though only two months older than me, Doodle was bigger and lately had started doing mean things to me when nobody was looking, like pushing me and daring me to push him back. I didn't want to push him back and when I didn't, he made stupid faces at me and called me “Scaredy-cat.”

Everybody called him Doodle-Bug because when he was a baby, he crawled backward, like the bug we poked sticks at and tried to call from his hole in the ground by chanting, “Doodle-Bug, Doodle-Bug, your house is burning up.” Sometimes, the tiny insect would crawl backward up the sick, sending us into rapture.

I flipped over to the other side of my pallet, keeping my face turned so Doodle wouldn't catch me looking at him. He would make something out of it. I just
knew
he would.

All at once, I didn't want to get up. I thought of Mama and Daddy working in the cotton mill and wished they could come and see me every day at Grandma's. But they said that
time didn't permit them to do that. Only on weekends did I see them.

I remember today that vivid, visceral sense of placeless-ness that snaked through me as I lay on that musty pallet, parts of me touching naked linoleum through ratty holes. I knew, even then, that the Melton farm did not own me. I belonged to my simple cotton-mill village home. There, I connected the
I am
to the
I am here.

Oh, how I yearned for the weekend.

How fast those weekends flew – such fun times of Saturday night drive-in movies and Hershey bars and popcorn and lots of laughter. One night at our house, Little Joe, Mama and I piled up on her bed. Daddy had me and Mama laughing till we cried by sliding into one of her full-tailed skirts, rolling up his pants legs underneath and putting on her high-heels. Those spindly legs dancing a jig under that flappy skirt was the funniest sight we'd ever seen. And when Little Joe couldn't stop laughing, we all ended up in hysterics until we had to wipe away tears.

“Soon,” Daddy kept saying, hugging me. “We're bound to find somebody to babysit ya'll at home.” Hope would leap like flames through me each and every time.

“But Ma takes good care of you,” he usually added while Mama nodded assent. Our parents unreservedly entrusted us into Grandma's care. I suppose that was wise, considering Grandma's track record with her sizeable brood was quite good until that summer.

The thing was, she literally set us loose on the farm to scatter in any and all directions we chose. Outside of a poisonous spider or snakebite or falling out of a tree and breaking one's neck, little on the Melton farm posed a real threat. I mean, it would have been difficult to drown in a creek bed of water three inches deep. In later years, I ponder and grasp, to a degree, my
parents' sense of security concerning our well-being. We were, after all, well fed, passably clean, had a roof over our heads and a degree of safety.

Mama and Daddy always agreed on things. Only once did I see my parents angry with each other and then it was short and quiet, ending in a few hours. They didn't rant or toss recriminations at each other. Rather, they behaved with dignity, eventually sitting down and talking things out. Yet another of life's strawberry-vanilla lessons: the import of compromise and negotiation.

My parents' Sunday evening departure after dropping us off at the farm, always stirred within me a moment of yearning for my very own hearth and bed. My own turf. But within a twinkling, the flurry of playfulness rustling all about the rustic old farmhouse captivated me anew. Even Grandma's and Grandpa's grunts and reprimands failed to dampen my revived sense of merriment.

Home.
The essence of it hit me anew and I could smell its unique fragrance, a blend of wood smoke, furniture polish that smelled like chewing gum and lingering aroma of fried potatoes smothered in onions, gingerbread baking or southern fried, country-style steak. And underlying it all was the incomparable bouquet of contentment and affection.

Of
unconditional love.

I sighed and nestled my face against the wrinkled old quilt. It smelled of ordinary staleness.
I wish I could stay here on the floor and go back to sleep.
Everybody was up except me. They'd all taken their covers and put them away. Only my pallet littered the floor, precious space needed for traffic. I had a feeling this was not going to be such a good day.

“Lazy-bones,” muttered Nellie Jane as she walked past me to the kitchen to make biscuits. More than anything I wanted to make biscuits, too. Grandma said I made too much of a mess.
Since Nellie Jane helped cook and clean, she didn't have much time to play with me. I did so want to sweep and dust, too. Grandma usually sent me outside while they did chores, saying I didn't sweep good enough or I left the bedspread wrinkled when I made her bed.