Everybody has that best friend when they’re little. When you sift back through Father Time’s hour glass and go looking for memories of when you were young, you inevitably remember your partner in crime.
It’s that one face that pops up the most. Yeah, you know who it is. The person you were intimately familiar with. It was that person who shared hardships with you. It was that person who teased you mercilessly in good fun, but whom you always forgave. It was the person you fought with, wrestled with, argued with, and laughed with. For me, it was Willie, my little brother.
In My Life: The Beginning, Willie, was one of the twins that my mother held. That moment, it was my first introduction to him. I was standing in a doorway watching my mother feed him with a bottle.
I honestly don’t remember any memories of the twins in diapers. He melted and merged into my life and was just suddenly there playing with his toy cars on our warped hardwood floor near the piece of flooring with the triangular hole.
I think I became self-aware the first time my parents let me go outside to play in the snow alone. I was fascinated with the drifting snow, and the foot prints of the birds. I was mesmerized by the feathery pattern in the snow the bird’s made with their wings as they took off. It was simple and beautiful and fantastic. It was my childhood.
I could never stay out in the snow very long when I was little. Nose red and cheeks rosy, I would run my stiff-legged run through the snow from beneath the giant Box Elder that grew outside my parents bedroom window to our front porch. Climbing up the cinder block steps, one at a time, using my hands, I achieved the top step and returned inside to play with Willie, and sometimes, his twin sister, Shelly.
I think I’ll take a moment to explain something about the twins. Willie was a dirty-blonde with extremely curly, bright blue eyes and a lopsided way of smiling that always seemed shy and innocent but arrogant at the same time. Shelly was a tattletale–daddy’s little girl. She had long brown hair, green eyes, and sparse sprinkling of freckles across her nose. I was astounded by them both, but Willie mainly. He was everything I wasn’t. He was handsome, incredibly brave, and fierce–even in the beginning.
Our house was horse-shoe shaped inside. You entered through the front door which was located almost in the center on the front of the house. The living room stretched away to your right where the sunlight streamed through in golden beams of morning light. Dad usually sat at the bar, drinking coffee and picking his guitar. The living room also swept to the left, ending at my parents bedroom door. If you looked straight, you would see two parallel halls that went to the back of the house. The hall on the right had the kitchen open to it and ended in a concrete-floored room as big as the living room. It was where we did the wash. The hall to the left ended at the bathroom door and had bedrooms coming off of it to the left. The closets came off the hall to the right.
Willie would pull his tricycle down by the bathroom and ride it like the boogey-man was chasing him through the house. He would curve around the end of the wall separating the two hallways and hook back into the kitchen, throwing himself sideways from the tricycle at the top of the turn. He would roll across the floor like stunt man–or a stunt toddler. I was too afraid to do that. It looked like it hurt, but he’d get up, flash mom that lopsided smile of his and run over to her so she would hug him and kiss him. And then, he’d do it again.
It was my early childhood, playing near the glowing boxes of sun light on the hardwood floor, chasing glowing motes of dust drifting through the slanted beams, watching my little brother play with toy cars, and listening to my dad pluck his guitar. Occasionally, I’d get in trouble and having a little brother and little sister to blame it on was kind of nice.
Willie and I were nearly inseparable growing up. When it was planting season in the Spring, we’d ride behind the tractor while dad plowed the deep furrows in the two acre garden he grew. We’d ride the disk plows he used to chop up the freshly turned soil. We even rode the rakes he used to remove the grasses from the shredded soil. And then, Willie and I would chase the tractor as dad plowed the final furrow that the seeds would go in.
I actually enjoyed this part even though it was dirty. My dad and the older boys would walk down the rows dropping seeds while Justine, Donnette, the twins and I followed after covering the seeds with dirt, using our feet. The cool soil felt nice on my the bottom of my foot. Cardinals and Robins, and birds that I can not name, flew down to eat the worms my dads plowing had revealed. We’d see rabbits near the fence row in the evenings and deer running across the fields in the morning. Planting season, by far, was my favorite season.
During the summer, Dad would put us to work picking tobacco worms off the tomatoes, potato bugs off the potatoes, and weeds from the garden. The worms that we’d pick off were dropped into a bucket and dumped in the chicken house. Oh, how the chickens went wild. Willie even had a speckled hen that would follow him around during the day, which made it easier for him. He’d pick off a worm and throw it on the ground and the chicken would run over and gobble it down. I was a little jealous of that. I didn’t have a chicken following me around. I really wanted one to follow me around, but no amount of bribery could convince any of the stupid chickens to follow me. By all accounts, and as near as I can reckon, that was officially the first chick my brother ever attracted.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
As summer progressed, we would capture grasshoppers and—no, wait, I’m not done with this. I wanted my own chicken. Dale, my older brother, he used to have a Mallard duck that followed him around. Shelly had a kitten that followed her around. My older sisters had boys following them around. My older brothers had the sheriff following them around. Nobody was following me. I really wanted someone to follow me. I even told mom this. She just laughed and said turn around, and there was Willie standing behind me as he always was. She said Willie followed me everywhere I went. It didn’t feel the same as having a chicken, but I took it.
Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah. I was talking about catching grasshoppers. Willie and I, later in the summer, would spend our time catching grasshoppers or digging up worms to use as bait. Dad always stocked the red clay pond with new fish. He mainly stocked it with Perch and Catfish, which I find delicious.
After two years of fishing in that pond, Willie and I figured out that the tiny frogs around it made much better bait than the grasshoppers and worms. So, with pant legs rolled up to our knee, we set to work catching frogs. It did not go well at first, but we eventually got the hang of it. The biggest fish in the pond was an old catfish I had nicknamed, Nathan. We had seen it once and dad even caught it a couple of times but always let it go for some reason we could never fathom.
We enjoyed fishing, and we enjoyed eating the fish dad cooked.
Oh, I should mention something peculiar about my family. Dad did almost all the cooking in the family. Mom didn’t cook. Well, she did, but it was less of a spoon stirring role and more of kitchen manager thing. She told the older kids what to add, when to stir, and when to remove it, and she did this from her seat on the bench beside the table.
Mom, always sat at the kitchen table with a Harlequin Romance novel in one hand, an ice cold Pepsi sweating in a glass nearby, and a Bel-air cigarette burning in the ash tray. Sometimes, it was a word search or a crossword she was perusing instead of a trashy novel.
As I said a moment ago, we enjoyed catching the fish right up until the time our dad taught us how to scale them, cut their heads off, and gut them. A lot of the romance went out of the sport after that, but stubbornly, we would still catch them. We turned it into a game of who could convince dad to clean them for us first. One out of every three times, we were able to get dad to clean the fish. He didn’t really seem to mind. I think he even knew about the game.
As the summer came to an end, the harvest was undertaken. My dad grew five separate gardens. He had an herb garden behind the house in which he grew strawberries, tomatoes, and onions. It was complete with a hot bed around which mint grew.
Cherry trees grew at the end of this garden and beyond that was the dill and asparagus patch. Between the house and the barn, a distance of about a foot ball field, grew the garden we simple called The Garden. Across the path from it was another garden referred to as the Chip Pile. The garden was planted where my father’s post mill used to stand. The soil was dark and rich, and the plants grew extremely well there. The next garden was the two acre garden we called the Milo Field. It was the only garden my dad planted Milo in, thus, the name. The final garden required a truck to reach. So, it was understandably called the Truck Patch.
My dad conducted his harvest like it was an orchestra. The young kids, under the supervision of Justine, would harvest The Garden, while mom and Donnette harvested the herb garden. Dad sometimes planted sweet peas and cucumbers in addition to the other crops mentioned before. The strawberries, though, they were harvested earlier in the summer.
Dad, and my older brothers who hadn’t joined the military, would harvest the Chip Pile. The Chip Pile was where dad grew corn, pumpkins, peppers, potatoes, carrots, and peanuts. Oh, how I love peanuts.
Unfortunately, while my siblings got to go off and harvest the Truck Patch and the Milo Field, the twins and I would be stuck with digging up the peanuts and potatoes.
Dad had a wide-toothed fork with thick flat tines that were spaced wide apart the potato fork. We had to stomp it into the ground like it was a shovel beside the mounded potato or peanut plants. From there, one of us would simply pry back on the handle, while the other sibling pulled on the plant which would come free rather easily with potatoes or peanuts dangling from the roots.
We usually let Shelly pick off the peanuts and potatoes and put them in the bucket, while we dug through the hole we’d just made looking for any potatoes or peanuts that hadn’t come out with the plant. We filled up five gallon buckets with our harvested bounty and left them setting in the garden.
After my brothers were through with their harvesting of the other gardens, they would drive through the Chip Pile with the flat bed, loading the five gallon buckets on the truck as they went. The cleaned vegetables were stored in the concrete floored room on the back of the house. It was the room we called the back porch, even though, it wasn’t a porch. Over the course of the next two weeks, mom, dad, and my sisters would can everything and place the freshly canned produce in the pantry. We had a massive pantry on the back porch, filled with hundreds of mason jars at all times.
We harvested the orchards next, divesting the fruit trees of their sweet treats. Willie would climb the tree and drop the apples down to me, which I would catch and put in a bucket that sat in a wagon. When the bucket was full, Shelly would roll it up to the house where they would give her another bucket for us to fill. We picked the apples, the peaches, the plums and the pears. The house smelled glorious at this time of year.
As autumn wore on, it came time to pick up the Walnuts. If you have never picked Walnuts, you have wasted your life. The appeal for us was we could be mean, we could make money, and the adults left us alone. The easiest way to collect Walnuts is to climb the tree and start bouncing on the limbs with everything you got. The Walnuts rain down green hail, staining anything and anyone they hit.
The twins and I would take turns climbing the trees. We’d start shaking the limbs, while the other two would fill the feed sacks with Walnuts. The fun part was waiting until the right moment to shake the tree. If you did it at the right time, your brother and sister would get conked on the head with Walnuts.
Inevitably though, some of the Walnuts would refuse to fall. It was at these times that we would find out who the better rock thrower was. Our goal was to hit the limb and jar the Walnut’s loose. It usually took several tries, a bad word, and a bribe to buy the other two siblings silence to get the stubborn Walnuts to drop. In later years, we figured out that using a weighted rope was way more efficient.
After the Walnuts were picked and taken to the mill, dad would have us take buckets into the woods where we would collect Hickory nuts. Dad enjoyed having hickory nuts in some of the baked goods that he ate. Well, before he lost his teeth, that was what he enjoyed.
The hunting seasons and butchering seasons were the next thing to arrive. I didn’t enjoy this time of year. Willie seemed to.
Our dad would butcher three hogs in the fall. I never got used to that coppery smell of blood everywhere I went, or the image of the metal tub filled with the animals innards. Thankfully, they never made us help them with this.
Deer season was always rewarded with at least a deer a piece for each of my brothers and my dad and mom and sisters. My mom and sisters didn’t hunt, but dad would get a deer tag for each them anyway, which he would fill himself. By the end of the season, we usually had about six to seven deer in the freezer. It’s funny, I never remember dad every butchering one of his cows. He never talked about God, but he was incredibly skinny. Perhaps, he was secretly Hindu. I don’t know. In addition to the other butchering that took place, we would also have to butcher plenty of chickens.
If it is in your power, and the situation calls for you to choose between butchering a chicken and smashing your thumb with a hammer, take the hammer. I hated butchering chickens. It is incredibly smelly work.
Willie really enjoyed killing them, but he didn’t like plucking them afterwards–no one did. Killing a chicken isn’t hard to do, and if it wasn’t because I was taking a life, I probably would have enjoyed it.
Dad would hand us each a narrow board about three feet long, lock us in the chicken house, and tell us to kill a dozen chickens. To kill them, we’d had to chase them down and whack them in the head real hard with the board. They’d flop around for a moment and then lay still.
Dad was much more direct. He simply grabbed the chicken by the head and give it a quick twist with a whipping motion. The result was nearly the same except that the head came off in his hand. The chicken always flopped around after you killed it. Maybe it’s soul had trouble escaping, I don’t know. What I do know is that it was a hideous thing to make a little kid do.
Behind the house, mom would have hot buckets of water ready for us. We had to dip the chickens in the water to soften the skin to make plucking the feathers off easier. The smell of wet chicken is worse than wet dog any day of the week.
Despite the chicken killing, life was fine back then. Willie and I didn’t have a care in the world. We grew, and as we grew, we took on more of the older kids responsibilities. Some of them had dropped out of school and moved out. They’d move back in when things got tough, but they always moved out again.
Mom, I might of mentioned in an earlier writing, sold Tupperware to support our family. It’s one of the reasons she got to sit around while everyone else worked. Dad, since closing the post mill, made his money plowing fields for other farms, bush hogging, and installing fence. He also worked on their equipment. My dad was a welder, mechanic, a builder, a farmer, and resourceful. He often said it isn’t what you have that matters, but your ability to find what you need. He traded labor for services or material goods, he traded cars and farm equipment for livestock, and he sold or traded livestock for whatever he needed. We never wanted for anything. We always at three meals a day. We were always given baths every other day. Each morning, dad would squeeze our cheeks with one hand and rub Castor oil in our hair with the other, then comb our hair. Each evening, mom would greet us as we entered the door and have us give her a hug and tell her about our day. With eleven children to her credit, she had received a lot of macaroni art over the years.
There were a few turbulent times. The night our neighbor found Dale passed out drunk in a ditch three miles outside of town, fleeing a wreck that he’d been a passenger in was one of them. I remember that night well. Dad would pour coffee in him. Dale would cough and spit it out and dad would slap him across the face.
Dale made the mistake of calling mom a bitch in his drunken stupor. Before that night, all I had ever seen as far as a fight went, was wrestling between my brothers. I never saw anyone get hit with a closed fist before. Dale never called mom a bitch again. I don’t know if dad’s punching him temporarily broke through the fog of inebriation, but that punch was the only thing Dale remembered about that night. The guy that had been driving when the car wrecked was Donnette’s boyfriend at the time. Dale had been underage and drunk in the car. To keep everyone out of trouble, he had told Dale to run. Dale had run and made it halfway home before collapsing in the ditch in the freezing winter weather. No one denied that Dale was lucky the neighbor had spotted him. He easily could have died that night.
One guess who my dad went looking for that night after putting my brother to bed. I never heard any details about it, but I heard the guy avoided our family like the plague after that night.
Willie, for all his charm, was a troubled and peculiar kid. I don’t know why it manifested, but one day Willie had an imaginary friend. He said his friend’s name was Zim Zim and that Zim Zim lived under our fridge. Willie played with Zim Zim all the time after that. Out at the barn, he would grab up handfuls of dirt and make a milking motion over an ice cream bucket, explaining to Zim Zim that this was how you milked a cow.
Later on, he added a new friend to his imaginary entourage, a sophisticated pal named Ziggy. Ziggy lived on the Island. The Island was the oasis of grass that grew in the eye of our circular drive.
Willie, Ziggy, and Zim Zim were inseparable. They were as thick as ticks in tall grass. We all saw the humor in Willie’s imaginary friends–everyone but dad. It made him angry to hear Willie talking to people that weren’t there. There were a few spankings doled out as a result of Willie’s imagination, but eventually, my little brother stopped talking to the empty air. I’m actually kind of disappointed in that. I don’t know if it was some underlying problem that Willie had or if it was just something he created to make life more entertaining. I don’t know if his imaginary friends were a manifestation of a psychological insecurity or if it was just a game that had gotten out of control. I’ll never know, and I think that my father over-reacted.
In another age, my brother would have been burned at the stake for witch craft. He had an uncanny knack of knowing things before they happened. As a kid, I thought he was psychic, but as an adult, I figure there was probably some easily explainable reason for it. The year our mother took sick, Willie exhibited a level of clairvoyance I have never been able to explain.
We came home from school to find that our mother had collapsed in the left hallway. My mom, she was a big girl, and the paramedics had a hard time getting her out to the ambulance. But when they did, they spirited her away with my father following them in his car.
After a very long night in which we were told nothing, it was discovered that mom had multiple brain tumors. They kept her in the hospital for several days. I think it was a weekend. The older kids were sitting around the table talking. I was admiring dads guitar wondering when my siblings were going to make breakfast. They were all talking about what the tumors meant and what the doctor’s were going to do when Willie woke and came into the living room crying. No–not crying, he was bawling.
Before anyone could move to comfort him, he blurted out that mom was dead. The phone rang ten minutes later, confirming what he had told us. It was dad calling to tell us that mom had died.
I was only nine years old, but I stood there looking at my little brother, trying to figure out how he knew. I didn’t believe it, of course. Mom couldn’t be dead. The next morning though, my brother Dale took me and the twins into town. We hardly ever got to go to town. He took us to a place where we cold shoot pool. He took us for ice cream. He took us to the dollar store and let us buy toys. It was really fun. I mean, how could mom be dead, if I was enjoying myself this much.
The night before the funeral, I finally got to see mom again. She was just laying in the box. The box was nice, but I finally realized that no one had lied. In my nine year old brain, I began to realize what this meant. I began to see past that moment to tomorrow and the next day. Mom was gone. My eyes were hot, and they burned, and I started to cry.
And, Willie laughed.
He pointed at me, he was only eight, and he laughed because I was crying in public. He laughed because he didn’t realize mom would never hold him again. He laughed not understanding that she would never again cradle him, kiss him, tickle his back when he felt bad, or have her hug him from behind and kiss his neck while he squealed with laughter.
Willie laughed. He fucking laughed.
I didn’t cry at the funeral the next day. I didn’t cry for a long time after that. There was a distance that had opened up between me and him. We fought more. There was more competition and less of me defending him when there was trouble. We still played, and we still had fun, but things had changed.
Over the course of the year, a lot of things changed. Everyone, cocooned in their own grief, spread out. We were short with each other. We held grudges that we refused to let go and through it all, dad sat in his chair, drank his coffee, and stared at his guitar. I never saw dad cry after mom’s death. When I asked him if he missed her. He shrugged and told me that mom had always been kind of lazy. I don’t know if he was coping and trying to protect himself by pretending she wasn’t anyone to be missed, or if my dad was just a dick. Either way, it was a horrible thing to tell your nine year old son.
The year mom died, Donnette had met a guy and was wanting to move out. Dad told her no. She was still in high school. Dad told her that he needed her around the house to help out with things since mom was gone. Donnette married the guy to get out of the house even though dad told her that if she did, she wasn’t ever allowed to come back. She married him anyway, and dad kept his word.
My amazing family in that little farm house, which had once stood at thirteen members, had been whittled down to five–dad, Justine, Willie, Shelly, and myself. Gardens were no longer planted. The weeds grew up around the barn and filled the old gardens. The yard was rarely mowed, and the house was rarely cleaned. Dishes often stayed piled up in the sink, and the table was rarely cleaned after meals.
Justine was five years older than me. She played softball at school. She had friends and a social life before mom died. It was ending for her. She had to come home from school each day and help clean the house, prepare the meals, and wash the clothes. She didn’t like this at all. It was late fall the year mom died. Justine hadn’t come home on the bus. She had stayed after school for softball practice ignoring dad’s edict. Dad had called the school and complained, telling the school she was no longer allowed to play softball. She came home in a fury, kicking out the aluminum panel on the bottom of the screen door.
Two days later, Donnette showed up at the house while dad was working out at our uncles house. Justine knew she wasn’t allowed to be there, but her and Justine sat in the driveway in Donnette’s husbands car and talked. They would shoo us away if we came around to listen. After their talk, Donnette left, telling us that she didn’t want to be there when dad got home. There had been bad blood between Donnette and dad since he’d forbidden her to come home again.
It was during school that a strange lady arrived one day. She was dressed formally and stunk of bureaucracy. She tried to explain to me that she was here to take me to my new home. I was conditioned by school to do what my teachers or people in authority told me to do. So, unsure of who she was or why I had to follow her, I obediently trailed along behind her.
It was raining outside. It had been raining all day. She lead me out to her car along with Willie and Shelly. Justine was already sitting in the front seat. We were put in the back. The school bell rang and kids flooded out headed to their buses. Kids we knew stared at us as we sat in the strangers car in the pouring rain. We watched them and drove away wondering what was going on. Justine seemed unfazed and even happy with the circumstances. I looked out the window of this woman’s car and watched everything familiar fade away. I’m not religious, but I’m pretty sure this is how Adam and Eve felt when God kicked them out of Eden.
The strange woman drove us through our small town with its population of 721 people and drove us to a strange house three miles west of town. We were met by older man missing an upper tooth on his right side. He wore red suspenders and had a pot belly and a trucker’s cap. A short robust woman wearing a long jean skirt with her hair done up into a bun stood beside him. They were the strangest looking people I had ever seen. The woman who had abducted us for the state, explained that the man was one of our distant cousins, and the woman was his wife, and then, she told us this was our new home. I didn’t understand that part. We already had a home.
We questioned her of course, but Justine explained that everything was going to be okay. The woman explained to us that living conditions at our old house weren’t proper and that an accusation had been made that required the state to remove us. They called this place with odd man and woman a foster home. I didn’t know what that was.
I looked at Justine suspiciously. She was smiling and shaking the hands of the strange couple, and my nine year old brain solved its first mystery. A sound drew my attention then, and I turned to the twins from which it came. Shelly was scared and shaking and clutching her twins arm. Willie, though, had finally decided to cry. Here, months after our mother’s death, he finally realized that nothing was ever going to be the same again. He finally got it.
I’m sorry to leave off at this point in the story, but I promise, there will be another installment in which I finish the story about Willie and myself. It has been a privilege to tell you my tale. Thank you for reading.
Thank you and good-bye.
Koyotee Laughing 