My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory
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Название: My Father’s Keeper

Автор: Julie Gregory

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007285549

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СКАЧАТЬ that’s how we ended up leaving Phoenix, and back in Ohio, moving through a series of apartments and mobile homes in a never ending quest to be settled. I went to four different kindergartens alone; just making a new friend before being yanked out again. We finally spent six months in a rented trailer, long enough for Dad to till a garden and mound rows of dirt to plant cantaloupes. On Saturdays, he’d load great baskets of ripe melons into the back of the car and drive us over to the new base where he worked, parking at the edge of the gates to wait for the military men coming and going on shift. I sat on the tailgate of the family station wagon, swinging my legs, happy as a clam to be with my father. Dad was a master melon grower and the men of the base always pulled over to share a joke or a story with my dad and walk away with an armful of juicy cantaloupes. I watched them as the sun set and laughed with them, even though I didn’t know what they talked about. But it was just the warmth of the people who sought out my father that I liked so much; men who smiled and laughed and didn’t carry the weight and anger of my mother. And Dad was never like this when they were together. I experienced my parents separately—and it was my father who stole my heart.

      And who knew that it would be in the hollow of Burns Road where we’d finally settle or that I’d come of age on the same track of isolation in which my life began? But we were driven to the ends of the earth by the 22 different jobs Dad had over the years and his increasing need for shelter, each loss a slit in the fabric of my father’s well-being and an obvious indication that the world was conspiring against him. After all, the proof was all around us. Grandma Madge was crazy. Former bosses were crazy. The people who got him fired were crazy. The only one who was not mad, my father insisted and I wholeheartedly agreed, was him.

       Chapter Three

      I was ten and my little brother Daniel Joseph the third was only three that first year we moved down into the hollow. With no other children for miles and parents who didn’t know the meaning of a play date, my brother and I were one another’s best friends from the start. I loved him something fierce and called him by the variety of nicknames Dad had christened him with as a baby; peanut and then more specifically, goober. And little Danny, in his every effort to say Julie, called me “Dewey” or just “Sissy” for short.

      We weave our little fingers together;

       Here’s the church.Here’s the steeple.Open the door and here’s all the people.

      When we open our palms, we wiggle our fingertips to show all the “people”. Me and Danny sit on the floor of the trailer and hold our own church, led by the fading remnants of Sunday school and a smathering of tokens hard won there from memorizing verse; Bible-shaped erasers and white pencils with psalms embossed in gold; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

      Because I was seven years older than my brother, it was my job to recall the memories of life before Burns Road since that was all he could remember. My little brother props his elbows on his knees, chin in hand and listens intently to stories of paved roads for bicycles, neighbourhood kids we could play with and the first old car Dad bought when Danny was just a baby, a 1920 Model A Ford we named Mr Hoover, that Dad would take us out in on Sundays. The car only went 20 miles an hour but the thrill of climbing up into the hard ribbed backseat and the ancient interior smell of oil, gasoline and leather had Danny convinced he could remember those afternoons crystal clear. Dad had an orange triangle for slow-moving buggies he rigged on the back and we’d pull out onto the road at a crawl. I held Danny on my lap and we’d peer through the open window, anxiously awaiting an oncoming car.

      “Dad, Dad, do the ooga-ooga horn,” I’d yell when I spotted one, and Dad would lock his arm straight and press hard the centre button of the steering column.

       Ooooga-ooooooooga.

      The other car would honk back and I’d hold baby Danny by the wrist and flap his hand to the driver as they smiled and drove past. Those Sunday afternoons we all had our hands out the windows as we crawled along the inside lane, waving to the cars that slowed down to admire us as we rolled on. I felt so special in the back of Mr Hoover, with my little brother on my lap, an ingrained sense of pride and ownership of them both.

      Mom rarely went because the smell of the interior made her carsick and she had to keep her head on a swivel, she said, to watch out for cars that came up on us too fast. When she was there, by the time we were halfway through the drive, Dad was sulking at the wheel and we’d stopped waving out the window altogether.

      Danny had just turned three when Mom made Dad sell Mr Hoover for the move to the country. It seemed as if our descent down the dirt road stripped us of the very thing that made us colourful out in the world. Without the car, we faded from view, Dad behind the wheel of a wide-body station wagon and two bored and bickering kids in the back.

      Danny was too small to remember the cool car so he didn’t know what he was missing. But Dad lived so vicariously through my little brother’s Matchbox car collection, expounding big plans for the day he would build us our own classic car, that Danny became as obsessed with the idea of us getting one as I was nostalgic over the loss of the one we’d had.

      The outside of our used trailer was dingy white and had interior features Mom referred to as “top of the line.” Doorknobs and bathroom fixtures were cast in gold plastic, some with a marble swirl and little crankout handles jutted from windows far too narrow to let the light of day in, let alone the tang out.

      Our mother’s rampant decorating saw us pasting up orange velvet wallpaper and painting accents with gold leaf on everything from the drain stopper to the little plastic clips that held the mirror to the bathroom wall. When the sink faucet she’d spraypainted silver began to fleck, we’d dab at it from a luminescent jar of my brother’s model car paint. Bark art from the Circleville Pumpkin Show displayed a riveting image of Tecumseh’s Last Stand, which was shellacked onto a slab of stained and charred wood and fitted with a toothy mount on the back, suitable for display. Needless to say, the trailer, and all that was in it, was rightfully Mom’s domain. Tan press board was eventually sided up over the aluminium of the exterior and the shutters were drenched in chocolate brown paint.

      My mother, wanting to give our trailer some European flair, ordered a plastic cuckoo clock from the back of The Swiss Colony catalogue and hung it next to the hutch that held my father’s blue felt coin collecting books, to which the best years of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters were pressed after being panned from a large clear plastic pretzel barrel that sat wedged in between the couch and the wall. The cuckoo clock chimed on the hour and two plastic birds, one blue, the other yellow, popped out a miniature barn door and circled on a track. The clock’s long chains cascaded down the wall and moulded plastic pine cones dangled at the ends of them, inches above the carpet.

      Just like Arizona, time was spent with either Mom or Dad, but rarely both. Even at Christmas, when my father parked in the living room to watch us open presents, Mom scurried through the trailer tending to forgotten tasks. It was as if a hotplate existed just underfoot and began to heat up whenever they landed in the same room together.

      Only one photo exists of my father on Burns Road in his boyish state, taken just after we’d moved in. It is a picture of me, Danny, Dad and his two best buddies from the base where he worked. Rolly Polanka and Tommy Templeton were happy, good-natured men, just like my father. Always happy to see us and a joy to be around, they cracked jokes with Dad about gas and crap and never tired once of the same ones. Danny and I laughed just because they did. Excited in their company, we snuck up on the couch and jumped on their heads, rough housing with them for attention.

      Life with my father is resurrected СКАЧАТЬ