Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family

11. City

CHAPTER 11 z City IN those nonchalant summers of my childhood, when I scampered off the farm to visit relatives in Hot Springs or Cabot or North Little Rock, I discovered another layer of being beyond my father’s fields. I was beginning to internalize the contrasts of other landscapes and cultures to our Delta farm, beginning to understand who I was. The lakes, the mountains, the Arlington Hotel of Hot Springs, the rises and swales of Grandfather Merritt’s rocky farm—those momentarily seduced me, but, although I had no words for it then, the dirt of the land I grew up on had seeped into my bones. Little Rock, the largest city in Arkansas then and now, lies just across the Arkansas River from North Little Rock, where my cousins Mollie and Albert lived in a circumspect red-brick house at  North Main. Childless, they welcomed me into their house for a week each summer, usually at the end of my stay with my grandparents Merritt, who lived less than an hour’s drive away. The two cities provided a sharp contrast to the farm and rural southeast Arkansas. In the relatively urban world of Mollie and Albert, the land lay in precise city blocks, more than one movie house existed, and there were no mosquitoes.That world, however, lacked the luxurious dirt of my backyard. It lacked even the dirt sufficient for mud pies, a fact I lament in a letter home during one of my visits. I’m not yet nine at the writing of this letter, dated June , , D-Day: the Allied invasion of Normandy against the Germans in World War II. I remained unaware of this, and I don’t recall any mention of that historic event in my cousins’ house. z  June ,  Dear daddy and mother, How are things at home? Please don’t throw away my mud pies. I want them to play with when I come home. We are going to the zoo this afternoon. Yesterday evening we went to the airport to watch the planes come in. Albert has decided we are going to have a weinie roast. I found a four leaf clover yesterday. . . . We fed the birds this morning but it was only the sparrows that got it. Tomorrow we are going to the house where McAurther was born. I hope you didn’t sell my bicycle and tent daddy. There isn’t any dust up here to make mud pies. Lots of love, Jo Even though the deep dust of the farm found no purchase in my cousins’ city, every day of my visits there held some fillip of delight. Albert, older than Mollie by over a decade and semi-retired from his furniture business, took me occasionally to the movies. (In a letter written on one of my visits, I tell Daddy that I’ve seen Lou Costello, one of Dad’s favorites, in Who Done It?) Mollie, Albert, and I went to Lakewood to see the Old Mill, which, as most Arkansans know, made a cameo appearance in the movie Gone with theWind. We went to Burns Park, the largest park I had ever seen, its woods going on and on, green and cool and mysterious . I had read about Robin Hood, and I imagined him in a forest like this. We crossed the river into Little Rock, down Main to Little Rock’s air-conditioned stores, the ones with mannequins wearing winter coats in mid-July. At Pfeiffer’s, the icy temperature made me long for one of those coats. I rode the elevators aimlessly while Mollie bought a girdle and a pair of stockings. Part of the joy of visiting Mollie and Albert lay in showing off, using my best penmanship and sentence structure, in letters home to my parents . Dad, chronically worried about my drooping math skills, would surely have been pleased by my account, written on a visit when I was eight, of buying a comic book in Little Rock. “Today,” I write, “I got a funny-book. I forgot my purse and told Mollie. She payed for it. I didn’t  z City ask her to but she did. I payed her back with two nickels because it was a dime.” In my cousins’ house, I fell into the rhythm of their days. The day would begin with a breakfast of bacon, eggs fried over-easy, sausage, and...