1937, Burwell, Nebraska

By Grant Flint

Before this day is over, Aunt Effie will go crazy. Even in the beginning, I can feel something is wrong. She has her usual unpainted mouth, sunburned neck, too-large dress made from printed flour sacks.

She is even thinner than last visit, the skin tight over her cheekbones, under her dark, tired eyes. It is the Great Depression, 1937, Nebraska. We are poor, but Aunt Effie’s family is poorer.

“Mama,” little Susy, my youngest cousin, says in her baby-shrill voice, “Mama - is Grandma going to give us food to take home?”

Aunt Effie looks up, startled, and then her mouth goes stiff and pale. She shuts her eyes and bends her head. After a moment, she pushes up from the table, trembling as she leaves the room.

Later, down at the barn, my Uncle Seth, who is 15, five years older than me, says, “You wanna see Willa?” He laughs sharply.

I don’t understand. Cousin Willa is nine months older than me.

“You know – see under her dress.”

I feel my face burn red. For a moment, I can’t think at all; then I turn and walk away.

“Wait a minute,” Uncle Seth says. “We’ll take her clothes off. Up in the hay mow. You don’t have to do nothin’ but look.”

I walk away with my dog toward the walnut trees. Uncle Seth and my cousins go into the barn.

“Maybe Cousin Willa doesn’t want me to see her naked,” I tell my dog, Waggles.

We go way back into the grove of walnut trees, where the old farm machinery is silently rusting.

My father is dead. He couldn’t afford to go to the hospital in time to stop the leukemia. The bank discounted his salary warrants because of the Depression.

After that, my mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse. We lived in back. In the summer, we drove through the rural areas, trying to find a school that paid more than a dollar a day. Half the farms were deserted, barn doors flopping in the wind, tumbleweeds rolling fitfully across the drought-dry fields, sky red from dust storms.

“The Depression,” Mama said.

Now we live with Grandma here on the farm. Life is hard for Grandma. Twice-widowed, she carries two full 10-gallon pails to slop the hogs. Some secret pain knifes her. She takes raw Lysol in capsules, same as she gives the animals for their ailments.

The worst thing for Grandma is the banker, Mr. Fenner. The mortgage. Fear of foreclosure. Every March 1, after months of anxiety, agony, she gives herself a home permanent, puts on lipstick, which she never wears otherwise, puts on her best dress; then in town gets out of the car like a stranger, walks like an old woman, bent, dragging, to the bank.

Comes back an hour or more later. Reduced. As though she has been ruined by Mr. Fenner. He has done some awful, sinful, terrible thing to her, crushed her spirit.

But we have the farm again for another year.

Daddy’s tombstone will be paid off in four more years. But Grandma’s first husband, my mother’s daddy, had no tombstone.

“We’ll make one,” my mother said. She bought the wood, nailed a form together, laid the form on a gunny sack, mixed white cement powder with water in a washtub.

“It won’t work,” Grandma said. Stood there tired, stout, sunburned, with a pained face.

Three times, it failed. Cement wouldn’t harden all the way through.

Fourth time - “It’s holding!” my mother said. “No cracks yet!”

“The inscription,” Grandma said, breathing hard.

Mama carved the dates in. “1881 - 1928.”

My dog, Waggles, here now as always, is watching me, waiting for me to throw a walnut for her to chase.

I throw one toward the barn, she leaps after it on the dead run, I come up to the barn and go in. I have a right to be here. They’re probably not taking Cousin Willa’s dress off, anyway.

I crawl silently up the ladder and into the loft. The older boys are talking to Willa. Cousin Ben and little Susy are swinging on a gunny sack filled with straw. When Cousin Willa sees me, she giggles and hides her face.

“Come on over,” Uncle Seth says. “Everything’s ready.”

I don’t move.

“Come on, or we’ll come get you!”

After a few seconds of whisperings, they come get me, drag me over to see Willa.

They try to force my hands away from my face, and when they can’t, they begin to remove my overalls.

I struggle but then it is too late, and I feel the breeze in the loft touch my bareness.

When Willa giggles, I open my eyes angrily, and then I can only look, everything in my mind and body looking –

“What you kids doin’ up there?”

The voice below hits us like a slap.

“You go to the cellar and get some jars of them tomatoes,” Grandma calls up, “and peaches, about a dozen jars. And bring a sack of them potatoes. Get some melons, too - three or four big ones.”

“Okay, Mom,” Uncle Seth says hoarsely.

At supper, Uncle Lloyd sits at the table as though only his mind is trapped here, the rest of him far away.

Aunt Effie isn’t saying a word, just looking at the food on the table, her face pinched and desperate. She doesn’t look anybody in the eye.

It feels like the fearful time just before a storm, when the air is silent and heavy, hurts the ears.

When supper is at last over, and we are all carrying loads of food up to the car, I notice little Susy pulling at her mother’s dress, trying to get her attention. But Aunt Effie is only watching the food go into the car - watching with a strange, tight-lipped stare.

Then, when the loading is finished, and everyone is standing silently near the old car, little Susy says very clearly, “Mama, the boys took Sister’s dress off, and they looked at her!”

Everything freezes. Suddenly, Aunt Effie grabs at her hair and starts screaming. She screams with her mouth open wide and her chin high. She reaches blindly for the car door, opens it, claws at the large sack of potatoes in the backseat, spilling the potatoes out onto the ground.

“Take it! Take it! Take it!” she screams, grabbing at the jars of fruit. “Take it! Take it!”

Then, she collapses against the car, sobbing and muttering senseless words. She shakes her head from side to side. “We can live,” she moans, “we can live.” Over and over, she says this, like a dead prayer.

I shiver, watching my Aunt Effie. It is awful, seeing her like that. All bare and unprotected and unable to hide. I don’t want to see her like that, but I can’t turn away, can’t stop watching her.

Grandma and mother go to Aunt Effie. “There, it’s all right, it’s all right now.” But when their arms touch Aunt Effie’s back, she jerks upright and screams and yanks her hair, and strikes out blindly at them.

She jumps away and begins to run under the walnut trees, her arms out wide, her feet slipping on the green walnuts. She runs toward the culvert with the dogs barking and snapping joyously at her heels. When she reaches the culvert, she hides. The dogs stay, wagging their tails, peering in at her.

I watch numbly as Uncle Lloyd goes after Aunt Effie. After several minutes, Uncle Lloyd brings her back.

“Get in the car,” he says to my cousins. After they are in, Aunt Effie and Uncle Lloyd get in front and drive away without saying good-bye. They drive over the culvert, trailing dust behind. When the dust is settled, they are out of sight.

Grandma sighs. She and Mother pick up the spoiled food and walk slowly back to the house.

I stand by the gate, waiting. After a while, I see it. I know it is them. The car is small now, like a shiny toy car, and it is moving slowly up the twisting road, rising slowly to the rim of the sandhills where the last rays of the sun are fading. I watch until the tiny car reaches the top. Then it is gone.

The night, wind rises in the trees, and leaves stir on the ground. I think, someday I will go over that eastern hill like Aunt Effie, go on and on, and maybe someday, the Depression will end. Then everything will be all right.

The wind whispers cold through the branches of the trees like sighing. Green walnuts fall to the ground.

The Great Depression and Grant Flint were born in the same year, 1929. He is finishing the ninth novel of his life.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, August 6th, 2007 | Email This Post

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