“Well, that thar is just crazy talk. Ain’t no child a mine gonna’ talk that way. No sirree. Ifin I hear that a comin’ frum you onest more I will take you over my knee and beat that thar idear right outta’ you.”
“But, momma, I just wanna’ go to school to like those other kids.”
“Eeenough! And I mean it, Suzie Lee! This here discussing is done.”
That’s how it started. However, that is not how it ended. I was finally able to talk my daddy into finding a way around my mother. My daddy. He was a gentle man with the ability to love and find the love in others like no one ever before him or since. I am still not sure how he came to marry to my mother. She was a hard woman. ‘Strong’, that’s what the neighbors called her. ‘Stern’, that’s what my cousins thought. I just thought she was mean and ignorant when I was younger. Now I look back and think she was probably just plain scared. Only one time did I see my mother’s hard exterior ever soften. It was right after the accident that took my daddy’s life many years later. She wept and leaned on her sister that afternoon after we got the news. I was already an adult then and had left the family. I, in fact, was the only one to ever leave the family. But that is a whole different story.
Daddy didn’t come home one day from a lumber delivery. Some days he drove the lumber he harvested off our land to the local mill and some days he contracted out and delivered for another local. This was one of those times. A farmer from two counties over had heard about daddy and his truck and hired him to deliver a load of wood. He didn’t need it delivered to our local mill, though. He needed it to go on some barge up river to another mill. Daddy agreed, mostly because he was good man, but I suspect he knew the pay would be good and his season hadn’t yielded as much as was needed to get the farm through the winter. It was going to be a two day job. One day to load the lumber and drive to the dock and then another day to off load and drive home again. He should have been home by mid afternoon. He wasn’t.
I knew at midnight, when I got a call at the state university, that it was going to be bad news. No one ever called me. I was the heathen spinster sister that was too good to talk to my family because I had a college degree. In truth, I didn’t seek them out either. But I did know when my nieces and nephews were born. When someone from back home got married or ran off to get married quick. I had one great cousin who kept me in the loop. Not one of my siblings ever asked me about my life. I don’t think they were even aware I had graduated with my masters degree in American Literature cum laude. One time, when my youngest brother had called to thank me for a baby gift I had sent his first son, I did try to tell him what I was doing.
“So, you get paid money to read stories to grown adults? And then ask them questions about what they just heard? That’s the funniest thing I ever heard, sis.”
This time, when I answered the phone it was my sister. She is just two years my junior. She did everything the way mother wanted. Dropped out of school in the seventh grade to help take care of the our younger siblings and was married six years later at 17 to the neighbor’s boy. Her first child, like so many, was born after only six months of marriage. It was common knowledge that the first child could come as early as six months and all other babies took nine.
“Suz,” she started real slow, “you need to come home.”