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Geese to a Poor Market by Lonnie Whitaker
Chapter One Home Again
The
boy, barely four feet tall with a sprinkling of freckles across his nose, watched as the orange semi trailer rig turned onto his street a
block away. “It’s Daddy!”
The truck’s windshield reflected the afternoon sun like a mirror. The truck completed the turn
and the reflection dulled as a cloud passed overhead. The boy turned his gaze toward his
mother standing a few feet away next to their car parked in the driveway. “Mommy, who’s that
lady in the truck with Daddy?”
“That’s no lady. Get in the car, Wesley; we should
have been on the road by now. From inside the
car Wesley waived as the truck passed without slowing, but the woman on the passenger side looked straight ahead.
Sanders’ eyes strained through the rain-streaked windshield at the headlights of oncoming traffic.
She was heading south from Iowa, and the hilly roads of the southern Missouri Ozarks made passing difficult.
Fifty more miles and they would be at her parents’ farm and, she hoped, in time for supper.
Her seven-year-old boy in the back seat was hungry.
The radio faded out and blared static and she turned it off. She was tired of it anyway.
It seemed every station she was able to pick up droned on about spring training and the chances for the 1955 St. Louis Cardinals to
win the National League pennant. “Wesley, don’t eat any more root beer barrels—you’ll get sick.
Grandma will have something good to eat when we get there. It won’t be long.” “OK, Mama,” he said, as he put two more in his mouth and continued
reading his comic book. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were in Alaska on a dogsled. “Mama, do you know what an Es-ki-mo says when he wants his dogs to go?” She looked in the rearview mirror to make eye contact.
“Mush!” “How did you know that?” He
sounded disappointed. “I’ve seen
Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on television, too.”
“OK, do you know what they say when they want them to stop?” “No, Wesley, what?” “You’re supposed to guess, Mama.” “All right. Raspberries?” “No! Oatmeal!”
The boy began a spontaneous staccato giggle that reminded Rita of another cartoon character—Woody Woodpecker. “That’s pretty funny, Wesley.”
He kept giggling, obviously proud of his joke, and for a moment, Rita forgot her troubles. But in the next instance, she saw her reflection in the rearview mirror
and was struck by how old she looked. She hoped it was just from lack of sleep.
When she was a girl, people often said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.
This memory spawned some hope. After all, she was only twenty-seven, her hair was still
black, and the men still looked at her. She smiled at the mirror.
And, I have pretty teeth. She tried the radio again.
Hank Williams’ nasal voice came through crooning Your Cheating Heart, and she thought of her
estranged husband, Ray. Yeah, he had a cheating heart, too.
He had met up with that truck stop waitress and cheated all the way across Texas. Six months before, Rita had found a letter in Ray’s shirt pocket from
Betty somebody and confronted him. A series of ugly fights had followed—fights that she was
ashamed to admit, Wesley had seen. Now here she was, pulling a trailer with their belongings
behind a 1950 Ford to her parents’ farm in the Ozark hills. A few miles back, she had exited Route 66 and headed south on Highway 63,
a winding blacktop road that went all the way to Arkansas. Along the roadside she passed
shacks and farms with woodpiles stacked high and smoke coming from the chimneys. It was still
chilly in March, but even in summer, many folks in the Ozarks cooked on wood-burning stoves.
The smell of the smoke took her back in time. The dense hardwood forests were beginning to show early signs of spring.
Dogwoods would be blooming in a few weeks. It was still winter in Iowa.
Winter, that was how she thought about Iowa—never the summers—just barren winter fields with corn stobs poking through the snow.
She should have used the restroom at the truck stop in Rolla.
She had made Wesley go, but the door to the women’s room wouldn’t shut completely, and the room smelled awful.
Somebody had thrown up, and she was afraid she would throw up, too, if she stayed inside.
Now, the truck stop coffee had made its way through her system, and she felt a sense of urgency.
She would have to pull off to the side of the road. From experience Rita knew one advantage of a four-door sedan was that, in
a pee stop, both doors on the passenger side could be opened, and a woman could hunker down between them out of the view of passing
traffic. She told Wesley to walk down the road a short ways, to turn his head, and to watch
for cars. With her jeans and panties below her knees, she squatted and began to
feel, along with a cold breeze, the sense of relief that comes with urination too long postponed.
A car was coming . . . no, it was slowing. She heard the crunch of tires on the gravel
shoulder and peeked over the door. A man was getting out of a green Buick, three car lengths
away. Wesley stood between the Buick and Rita’s car. She grimaced, and with effort, stopped the flow and jerked her pants and
underwear up at the Frede time, letting her blouse hang on the outside.
“Is everything all right here?” the man asked, standing beside his car. “Everything is fine,” Rita called back, as she stood up behind the door.
“Wesley, come over here with Mama.” Wesley, showing no sense of alarm, sauntered toward
her. “I saw the boy standing by the road and both doors open and thought there
might be some trouble.” The man’s eyes shifted to the ground below the car door where the ground
was wet, and Rita thought she saw the hint of a smile on his lips. “I just dumped out some
coffee,” she said. In a conversational tone, the man asked, “Where are you headed?” “To my parents’ farm in Henderson County.” She paused before adding, “My
husband is a truck driver, and he’s following behind me. I got ahead, and I’m waiting for him
to catch up.” “Henderson County? That’s
where I’m headed.” He moved forward a few steps from
his car and stopped. “My name is Sam Rockford. I
run a little tavern called Club 60 in Birch View.” “Wait a second,” Rita said, “I remember you.
You run that honky-tonk the other side of Birch View that we went to last summer. You
offered me a job.” Sam’s face registered a faint recollection.
“Yeah,” he said, pausing in thought, “you were there with your girlfriend and her sister.”
Then, with a laugh, he said, “Well, the job is still open. Guess, I’ll be going, now.
Drop in and see me.” “I might just do that.”
Sam turned toward his car.
When he got to the door, he looked over his shoulder at Rita and said, “Don’t drink too much coffee.” Under her breath, Rita said, “You son of a bitch.” An hour later the bridge that spanned the Jack’s Fork River at Cedar
Bluff came into view. The location got its name from a gnarled ancient cedar that grew out of
the forty-foot bluff that shadowed a popular swimming hole.
“Look, Mama. There are people swimming in that river.”
Swimming in March?
Rita peered through the bridge structure at the spring-fed river.
“Oh my. They’re not swimming—they’re being baptized.
It must be forty degrees outside.”
The wide gravel bar below looked like a parking lot with a dozen or so pickups and cars aligned in rows.
Men wearing overalls and long-sleeved shirts stood as a group facing the river, while women at the water’s edge wrapped blankets
around three or four drenched and shivering grade-school-aged children.
A preacher man, standing waist-deep in the water, covered a young girl’s mouth with her hand and leaned her backwards until she was
submerged. The girl arose from the water, flailing her arms to gain a footing and fought her
way back to shore and the waiting arms of a woman holding a blanket.
“I’ll bet they’re cold,” Wesley said.
“I expect they are,” Rita said. “I was baptized in that Frede creek in
February.”
Her mind, again, went back in time. She had just turned twelve years old, still a child,
really, when she was submerged in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost one Sunday afternoon.
Rita thought, What happened to that girl?
“Mama . . . Mama, are you listening?”
“Yes, Wesley. What?”
“Why were they doing that back at the river?”
“Son, when you go south of the Jack’s Fork River, you go into a different world.” Wesley scrunched
up his face as if he wanted to ask a question, but didn’t know what question to ask, and just said, “Oh.” Twenty minutes later they came to a “T” intersection with U.S. Highway 60
and turned eastward through a string of filling stations and small businesses at the edge of Pine Grove. “Mama, what’s that man got?” Wesley asked, pointing out the window toward
a motel with a sign that read “Krazy Kabins.” Rita looked through the passenger side window.
In the parking lot, standing at the rear of a newer model Oldsmobile convertible, a man was either removing or loading something in
the trunk. He glanced to the left and right as if to make sure no one was looking.
With an eye open, always, to the beauty in every man, Rita slowed even more to watch. She
noticed that although he was a big man, tall and broad, something about him seemed almost dainty.
Maybe it was because he was so well dressed.
Again, the impeccably dressed man looked furtively up and down the highway and then removed his classy sport coat and threw it over the
cargo in the trunk of his car.
Rita slowed nearly to a crawl, but kept moving, watching the man in her side mirror, then switching to her rearview mirror.
The man had removed the cargo from the trunk and was now carrying it, trying to keep it covered with the sport coat. Poking out
from under the jacket was what looked like an animal’s head, but with too many horns.
Wesley was now on his knees staring out the back window. “Mama, it looks like a woman with
horns.”
What a good-looking man,
Rita thought.
Rita turned south off Highway 60 at the Tremont General Store and onto the gravel road that led to the O’Dellfarm.
A mile later, when the Ford bumped over the tracks at Railroad Hill, Wesley awoke from a nap.
“Are we there yet? I’m hungry.”
“It’s less than a half-mile; we’ll be there in a
minute.” At the top of the hill, Rita said, “There it is.”
Wesley put his hands on the back of
the front seat and leaned forward. “I can see it, too.”
The two-story house had a square-hipped roof with two front dormers and a mansard covered with faded green asphalt shingles.
The shiplap exterior was unpainted and weathered gray. The closest neighboring houses
were barely visible in either direction.
In her mind’s eye, Rita could see the rough-hewn floorboards on the second floor where she and Wesley would be staying.
It was an unfinished attic that was frigid in the winter and stifling hot in the summer, but it would be home . . . again.
Rita turned in at the gravel driveway, stopped the car, and shut down the engine. Three dogs
trotted toward the car barking.
“Wait a minute, Wesley.” He was opening the door and about to get out.
“Let the dogs settle down. Grandma and Grandpa will be out in a second.”
Rita’s father, Will, came through the door first, waving his arms at the dogs in a reversed breaststroke, which they ignored. But they
stopped their barking and scattered when Will bellowed, “You dogs get out of here.” “You can get out
now, Wesley,” Rita said.
Wesley opened the door and ran to his grandpa. Will bent over and hugged the boy, and Wesley
wrapped both arms tightly around Will’s waist.
“Hi Grandpa! We drove in the middle of the night and saw a man with something in his trunk and
saw another man on the road and—”
“Hold on son, you’ll have plenty of time to tell me about your trip. Let me say hello to your
mama.”
“OK, Grandpa.”
Will removed his engineer-style cap, revealing his mostly bald head, and put the cap on Wesley.
It went down over Wesley’s ears, but it produced a big smile on the boy’s face, and a grin on Will’s.
Rita closed the car door and raised both arms straight up in a full body stretch. Her back
ached, her feelings were on edge, and she was at a point of exhaustion, where she knew she could teeter either toward laughter or tears.
But seeing her dad’s cap on Wesley made her smile.
Rita and her dad met each other walking and embraced, neither speaking for a moment. Will
kissed the top of her head and said, “Welcome home. Let’s go see Mom.”
They separated and turned toward the house. Beulah, stout and
formidable, wearing a blue gingham dress and apron, appeared at the doorway. “You all come on
in, now; I’ve got supper on the stove.” She opened the screen door. “Wesley, come and give
your grandma a hug.”
After supper Will took Wesley to the barnyard to show him Charley the pig and the old mare, Dolly.
Rita and Beulah began the after-dinner clean up.
The smell of the fried chicken they had for dinner lingered in the air. The kitchen was sultry
in defiance of the slight breeze that drifted through the open window. The room got even
warmer after Beulah added dried corncobs and oak planer mill scraps to the cook stove firebox to heat dishwater.
After an extended period of silence that suggested neither knew what to say, Beulah asked Rita, “Well, have you heard from Ray?”
“Not for several weeks. The last time he was in town, he stayed with a friend.
He said he was going to come and see Wesley, but he never showed up.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe he just didn’t want to see you.”
“You think it’s my fault?”
“No, I’m just surprised he didn’t see Wesley, that’s all.”
Rita sighed. “He could have . . . why do you always take his side?”
“I’m not taking sides. I’m just worried about Wesley.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.”
Beulah lifted the metal dishpan to the stove and looked back at Rita. “How are you going to
support yourself? Where are you going to get a job around here?”
“I’ve got some money from the house. We sold it to another trucker.
I’ll be fine for a few months. I thought I could help you and daddy around here and
then find something. When we were here last summer, that guy who runs the tavern in Birch View
said he’d give me a job if I lived around here.”
Beulah’s face became dour. “I hoped you wouldn’t go to bars anymore when you moved down here .
. . and maybe be more like you used to be when you taught Sunday school.”
“Mama, that was a long time ago—before the war—things have changed.” "Well,
they haven’t changed that much around here.”
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