Spring '41

In Clancy in 1930 when a baby was born, the Pork Growers Association gave the family a pork roast the same weight as the baby. In my case, nine pounds. I didn't hear about it until I was eight or so, wearing patent leather slippers to Sunday School and sneaking extra cake when no one was looking.

"A pork roast!" I said when my mother told me. She still had, in fact, the certificate of presentation pasted into my baby book. "And you ate it?" That pinkish white flesh shoved into the oven and then sliced thin and set on the table? I wouldn't even eat pork chops after that. I dream of it sometimes, a mix-up in the kitchen, shrieks of disbelief when the mother looks in the baby's crib.

"You're such a finicky child," my mother said, and not for the first time. "It was a wonderful roast and a generous gesture on the part of the pork growers."

"Stop!" I begged, but she went right on with the Depression lecture.

"You have no idea what a pork roast cost the year you were born. We were so sick of eating chicken we could hardly look at one."

I hardly could either. Beneath my perch in the chinaberry tree in our backyard was the chopping block where chickens lost their heads on Saturday evenings. Afterward, they flopped around on the grass, although my father said they were dead.

"How can that be?" I insisted on knowing.

"Reflexive action. The same thing," he said, "as frog legs jumping when they're dropped in hot grease."

As time passed I discovered additional food horrors: liver and tongue. And calves brains! I was living mostly on candy and mustard greens by the time my Aunt Lou from Dallas came to stay with us (because, as my mother explained, she'd had an unfortunate experience with matrimony).

"Is that a disease?" I asked, half-afraid.

"Matrimony?"

Matrimony is marriage, I suddenly remembered. "Is Aunt Lou married?"

My mother said, tight-lipped, "It didn't come off. The groom didn't show up."

Thrilled, I said, "He left her waiting at the altar?" I had seen that once in a picture show.

"Not quite at the altar." Mother sat to rest on the bed we had moved into my room for Aunt Lou to sleep in. "I'm only telling you, Maizie, because I don't want you asking questions that might make things worse."

"Maybe the groom was run over. And hauled to the hospital! With a case of amnesia!"

"He went to Canada with another woman."

I pictured the two of them running across the map, suitcases bumping against their legs, and the woman's hair flying back. I think it was red.

"Is he going to marry that woman?"

"I have no idea. I have enough to do trying to figure out how you and Lou sharing a room is going to work out."

"I could go to Dallas and live with her there."

"In a pig's eye," said my mother. Lou was Mother's younger sister, prone to sick headaches and up-and-down moods. They didn't get along, but I was crazy about her. She acted like a kid and talked to me like I was twenty-seven. "I guess she'll cry a lot."

My mother sighed. "She might do anything. I've told her, though, she can't smoke in the house."

"Can she still drink beer?"

"If she behaves herself." Lou had once gotten drunk at our house after a picnic. I saw her from where I was hiding in the hall. She lay down on the breakfast table and kicked her feet in the air until her shoes flew off. The man she was with (she brought him from Dallas) picked up the shoes (after two or three tries) and crammed her feet back in them. Then he gave a yell like a rodeo rider, and my father rushed in and...