Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family

8. Daddy

CHAPTER 8 z Daddy yY HOME PLACE I remember my father when I was six pushing open the gate on the farm road, stirring the dust of August. The locusts sizzling in the grass, a hum of dragonflies hanging sleepy above us. zZ On a Saturday in late September , I’m playing hopscotch in the backyard of the house. It’s absurdly hot, and I’m dressed in my favorite pink shorts and white sandals. Adjacent to the yard lies one of my father’s rice fields, ready for harvest, the field I see every day from my room. Bob, the hired hand who, my father says, “hasn’t got the brains God gave a goose,” has bumbled a grain wagon into the field. Gone home to supper, he’s forgotten to close the gate. My dog of the moment, Laddie, a black-and-white “rat” terrier who wouldn’t know a rat from a rhinoceros, moseys toward the field. He looks back, inviting me. At the age of five, I’m not hard to persuade, although z  I hesitate. This field of rice, yawning in the heat, climbs higher than my head and goes on, it seems, all the way into town, maybe even across the river to Little Rock. Dad has issued me a strict warning about this: When a field of rice has grown to its mature height—as tall as my six-foot father’s breast pocket—I must not, under any circumstances, enter there. I hear his voice in my head: “You get in that field of rice when it’s grown, it’ll swallow you up. You’ll be gone in no time. We’ll never find you.” Whistling “You Are My Sunshine,” I follow Laddie into the field. My mother’s house dwindles behind me. I enter a Black Forest of rice, its odor a mix of drying hay and just-baked pie crust. The crickets have begun the singing that I’ll come to associate with graves. I push on, following Laddie’s exuberant lead. A red-winged blackbird balances on a rice stalk, bending it almost to the ground. The blackbird makes one or two of its piercing calls and flies away. Then, silence.The rice closes its ranks over and around me. I’ve lost sight of Laddie in the dusk. Above, ahead, beside, behind me lurk nothing but rice stalks, each one a clone of the other, impersonal and banal. A rustle, a message in code, speeds like brushfire through the grain. Through the patchy ceiling of rice, the last of daylight descends as if through water; a sliver of a moon appears. I am drowning. I want my mother. I want my room. Something nudges my foot. My heart rattles up past my collarbone. “Jo! Jo Hamel!” Someone calls from a great distance, using both my given names, a guarantee of trouble. “Jo! Answer me. You answer me right now, young lady, you hear?” Daddy. I don’t want to be left in the coming dark, abandoned to this lock-step army of rice; I want even less to face my father. I say nothing. Laddie, having circled back to me, says nothing. Dad calls again, harsher, closer. “Answer me, young lady!”Then I see, just above the rice stalks, a straw fedora skimming along, no visible body or face beneath it. My father looms like Colossus in front of me. In Vacation Bible School, I’ve seen a picture of the sea parted by Moses; Dad’s face grows darker than that water. “You. Turn. Around. Right. Now,” he says. “And you head for home.” I hear the relief in his voice, but I feel the willow switch on my bare legs, little stinging swipes every step of the three or four decades it takes to get to my mother’s house. “Didn’t I tell you? And you went in that field anyway? Don’t you ever, ever do that again,”  z Daddy he says, punctuating every other word with the switch. “You hear?” The air has cooled; the rice has grown aloof, bereft now of crickets and blackbirds and light. Tail down, Laddie tucks in beside me, headed home. z It’s late March, . We’ve just left Mother’s new grave. From the front living room of my mother’s house, if the draperies were open—and, as usual, they’re not...