Outrunning Crazy

By Deborah Kimmett

Tammy Babcock’s life is like a bad country and western song. The men have left. The dog has died. And people keep getting born again. No matter where you go you can't outrun crazy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deborah Kimmett
• Release date: Jun 24, 2010

Deborah Kimmett

Deborah Kimmett is a gifted and hilarious writer. She was a 25-year veteran of the famous Second City having written, performed and directed many shows for this Toronto Theatre. In l994, while playwright-in- residence at Tarragon Theatre, she was nominated for the Governor General Award for best drama, for her play Miracle Mother.As well as being an established playwright with five plays to her name, she wrote for TV’s Go Girl on W Network and performed her comedy and solo shows for CBC Radio’s the Debaters, Winnipeg Comedy Festival, Sunday Showcase. And Laugh Out LoudShe wrote for More Magazine, Canadian Living, being nominated for National Humour Award two years running. Her book Reality Is Over Rated is available and she has a new- e-novel Almost True. As well as a movie about female prison guards called Guarded.Influences/Inspirations:novels by Carol Shields, and Margaret Lawrence, small towns, hosptials, farming, my parents, Ireland. The Catholic Church (for better and wo

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Fiction

OUTRUNNING CRAZY

by

DEBORAH KIMMETT

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

DEBORAH KIMMETT on Smashwords

OUTRUNNING CRAZY

Copyright © 2004 by Deborah Kimmett

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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There are a few people I’d like to thank.

I’d like to thank so many people who kept me writing this. Eloise Gowan, Gwen Lareul, Mary Ellen Csamer, Ruth Vandenberg, Lawrence Jeffries, Bruce Pirrie, and my special sister Karen. But most of all Sally Bowen who sustained me with vegetables from her garden, while she worked diligently editing this. Dedicate to the five J’s.

This story is not true but it should have been.

********

THE BIG PICTURE

The summer of 1968 is where my mind plops down and lights up a smoke. I am ten years old. It’s hotter than Hades and we are all standing in the woodshed, attached to the summer kitchen, my siblings and my mother, still as soldiers, barely able to catch our breath. It smells like mouse shit and dried wood.

Don’t make a sound, she threatened us, or I’ll crucify you. My mother never followed through on these threats, but how many times I imagined myself being nailed on the back wall of the classroom, able to see everyone else’s test paper.

We had just gotten back from swimming; Alberta took us daily when we were haying. She hated wasting any part of her workday, but we were always sweltering by noon. She’d load us all in the back of the truck and drive like a bat out of hell through the backfield. Maybe if she’d slowed down a bit, she wouldn’t have worn out so many transmissions. I can still see us, holding our towels tight around our necks, bouncing this way and that. It was better than the Tilt-A-Whirl.

We cooled off in the river that ran at the back of the property. We called it the Cottage though the only building back there was an outhouse wallpapered with pages from the Sears Catalogue. We’d often eat our noon meal down by the grove of pine trees. Our family always had our big meal at lunch. It was no fancy picnic – nothing from a wicker basket like you see French people doing in a movie. There wasn’t a checkered tablecloth or wine, not even a picnic table. Alberta would boil up a ham in a pot of potatoes. Some days we’d be so anxious to get wet she’d let us eat straight from the saucepan. She caught me more than once drinking the ham water from the pot. Put that down, you pig. Nobody wants your germs all over them. That was me from the get-go, taking more than she was offering. I’d stuff myself until I almost bust a gut and then jump in the water. The rule about waiting an hour had not been invented yet. Even if it had, by mid- summer the river was so low the water only went up to our knees. If we’d got a cramp, we could’ve just stood up.

The river ran directly downstream from the canning factory in Spike Mills. The bulk of what they canned was green peas. By mid-August the river had artificial green foam floating on top. Every September we’d go back to school, our eyes oozing with pus. When we’d complain about the infection, my father King would tell us to stop our bitching. It’ll grow hair on your chest, which is not at all reassuring to a ten-year old girl.

On that scorcher of a day, we’d just gotten back to the house and were standing in the front yard picking the sand out from between our toes. Alberta had conniptions if we tracked it through the house, and there was nothing worse than getting it in the sheets. The sun had zapped our bathing suits dry and it was like we had never gotten wet.

One minute there we were – five children wiping our feet on the grass.

The next we were running this way and that trying to get out of sight. 5 kids. Three boys. Brothers that I never had a conversation with. NeilPatrickBill. One name. My mother yelled it out in one breath. A group. A subset. There were two girls. Me. Marley, the youngest. There we all were, plus my mother, standing in a woodshed, trying to outsmart one travelling salesman.

On summer afternoons, they could be seen walking up and down our side road. You could spot them a mile away, with their casual saunter like they had nowhere in particular to be. With jackets flung over their shoulders, carrying a big black suitcase, they sold anything you could imagine from gadgets to appliances to face cream – anything a housewife might need.

Alberta would never be accused of being a housewife. She spent more time in the barn than anywhere else, but she had a hate-on for those salesmen. To her they were blowhards who were trained to fleece innocent people out of money they didn’t have. By people, I mean King. She was mad at him for years over getting talked into buying the Instant Color TV Converter. It was only $4.95, but a big waste of money. The salesman convinced my dad that the contraption would magically turn our black and white TV into a colour one. When it arrived in the mail, it was nothing more than a piece of plastic that you placed on top of the screen. It had three colours: blue at the top for sky, green on the bottom for grass, and in the middle orange for everything else. That would have been fine if you were watching outdoor shows like ‘Lassie’ or ‘Bonanza.’ But for indoor TV shows like ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ it meant all the characters had blue faces. I hated that show to begin with – it was totally unbelievable that people would act that nice – but when Beaver’s face had a sky blue tinge, it really made me mad.

Not all of the salesmen sold useless and ridiculous items. The Raleigh man for one had good products: ointments for colds (we jammed the stuff up our noses even when we didn’t have a runny nose because we liked the smell of it), and brown salves for burns and sores, which could be used for people or cattle. However, that Raleigh guy had the knack of showing up just as a meal was about to be served. He was a Hunt; all the Hunts were like that. Nana said when she was first married the Hunt spinsters would come by unannounced on Sunday afternoons. There were four of the old bats and they’d land in, claiming they just happened to be out for a drive after church. It happened with enough frequency that Nana knew it had to be intentional. She finally gave up trying to give them hints. You can’t fight city hall, she’d say as soon as they drove up the driveway. She’d go out to the back, kill a chicken, gut it, pluck it and put it in the oven. The old bats were never well mannered enough to bring a pie or lift a finger to help with the dishes. The Raleigh man was from the same clan so he knew no better. It took nothing for him to wrangle an invitation for a noon meal. We’d see him and pull up another chair and put another plate on the table, but then he didn’t know enough to move on down the road afterwards. He’d hunker down and suck marrow from the pork chop bones long after we’d all gone back to the fields. It’s a wonder he didn’t stay on ‘til supper.

‘The best defense is a good offense’ is what Alberta always said so she trained us to be on the lookout for these salesmen. If we saw a man in a suit walking down the road whistling, we were to yell the code word ‘S.O.B.’. Cuss words were allowed if we spelled them. If any of us heard those three letters, we were to run to the woodshed immediately. I wonder who we thought we were fooling. If we could see them coming that meant they could see us too. One minute there were kids swinging from the tire on the tree, and the next minute the yard was empty.

We were a loud people at the best of times, and so the ones brazen enough to come up and knock on the door would’ve been able to hear us too. The woodshed was attached to the house, right off the summer kitchen. The more we tried to be quiet, the more the giggle fits came. It’s a law of nature. If someone tells you to shut up, you can’t stop yourself from laughing. Of course, I was the shit disturber who got everyone else going by clowning around making faces. I was very funny; that is, before I became difficult.

On the particular day I’m recalling, this salesman banged on the door for so long Alberta couldn’t ignore him. He knocked and knocked until his fist must have been numb. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she stormed out of our hiding place and asked him, Jesus Mary and Joseph, what the H.E… double hockey sticks do you want?

When we stuck our heads out to see what this one looked like, we caught Alberta in the midst of latching the screen door. As if an eyehook was going to keep us safe, especially if he’d turned out to be some psychopath.

People say that all the time, ‘what if that guy was a psychopath?’ The truth is psychopaths are very smart. They’re not a dime a dozen.

You have to be focused to be a serial killer and this guy was a simple slack-jawed man with an ugly church hat. When he took it off he introduced himself as Mr. Martin and looked straight ahead into Alberta’s chest. He wasn’t being fresh; he was short in stature. She was a bruiser of a woman, so when he peered through the screen, he was eyeball to eyeball with her boobs. The size of her chest was substantial. This might have gotten an ordinary man excited. An ordinary man might have forgotten what he came for, but Alberta’s demeanor never encouraged fantasy in anyone. Ordinary men are still afraid of her.

Martin began his pitch on the other side of the screen door. I’m a photographer. A few days ago, I flew over your property in my airplane and snapped some pictures of your land.

"What are you doing going around taking pictures of my land?" Alberta asked.

Not your land in particular, ma’am. Everybody’s land. I took pictures of all the farms in the neighbourhood.

Why in the name of God would you do that? This behavior did not make any sense to her or us.

It’s beautiful to see the way things look from above, so far above everything. He continued, It gives you a whole new appreciation of what a blessing land can be.

A blessing? My land? Calling land a blessing revealed he didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a farmer. That and there was something sissy about the way he pulled the photographs from the manila envelope and handed them to her. There it was, our farm. Picture perfect, parceled off in rows, neat as a pin.

Yes. See, what I will do is I will take this picture and place it over a lampshade.

A lampshade? She couldn’t understand where he was going with this.

Yes. He pulled a small desk lamp out from his suitcase and placed our picture around it, attaching it with two clips so it would stick.

Well, isn’t that different? Alberta used that word ‘different’ to describe just about anything she had never thought of.

Of course if you bought this it would be permanently placed on the shade.

I see. How would you do that?

Well it’s a …let’s just say it’s advanced technology. Now if you’d let me come in, I could plug it in, and you’d see how wonderful this looks when it’s lit up.

Mom, please, please, please? We all chimed in, as if nagging ever worked. But she surprised us, and unlatched the hook, grabbed the lamp, shut the screen door and re-hooked it before Martin even realized that he was still stuck out on the verandah.

This contraption better not blow any fuses, or I won’t be happy, she warned him.

Full electrical grounding – it will stand a storm even out here in the middle of nowhere, he said, not knowing that calling a person’s location nowhere is never a good sales move.

She bent over and plugged it in all the same. When the lampshade lit up, he was right. It did look beautiful. It was odd to see our lives from that far up above things. All picture perfect.

Well, that is different. Alberta said.

Yes, ma’am. It’s very reasonable for a beautiful piece of art.

Art? That word slapped her back to reality because she changed her tune right on the spot. This is art? Why didn’t you say something? Do I look like I have time for art? I’m a farmer.

She opened the screen door, handed it back to him, then hooked the lock again and exited to the woodshed, without so much as a good-bye or kiss my ass. A few seconds passed with us kids standing there staring at him like the hillbillies we were. When he heard Alberta start up the chainsaw in the back, Martin turned promptly on his heels and waddled down the driveway with his little penguin city boy walk, us kids in tow, yapping at him. But it was my cousin Elaine who had the nerve to ask him:

Can we have the picture, can we Mr.? Can we? Can we? Can we? He turned around quickly and raised his hand. It looked like he was going to hit her and then he dropped his shoulders in defeat. When he saw her pus-filled eyes, maybe he felt sorry for us, or maybe he saw Alberta with a chain saw and safety goggles exiting the shed, he thought he’d walked into some back woods cult. Whatever it was, he offered up the picture to Elaine and said, All right, all right, keep the dang thing. It’s no use to me. Then he placed his hat back on his head and he and the lamp disappeared down the road.

I’ve had that picture taped to the lamp in my bedroom for years.

I took it with me when I moved to the apartment above the China Doll Restaurant with Elaine. I took it with me when she and stopped being friends. And I brought it here to this place that looks back across the river. They say a picture never lies but this one did. When I stare at it I realize it didn’t capture anything that was going on between the two of us.

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CHAPTER 2

HOME

We grew up in Hawley – seven miles east of Spike’s Junction, five miles north of nowhere on a land share where four generations from my mother’s side had eked out a living. The red barns were in constant need of painting; a tractor stood in the middle of the cow pasture, stalled, left for years until a tree grew up around it. The cows used the rusted out seat as a salt lick. I can still see those stubborn immoveable beasts standing in the meadow in the field next to our farmhouse.

My family lived in the stucco house which people called the Old House. It had been Nana Mary and JD’s before they built their new ranch. Their new abode had a wheelchair ramp because Nana was convinced she’d end up having a stroke.

Our place was run-down, nothing special to look at. The best room in the place was the summer kitchen right off the wood shed. It’s where most of my good memories came from. An un-insulated extension off the regular part of the house, it was an architectural after- thought. It acted as a cold storage place for our baking in the winter. When company would come, she’d tell us to go out and get the brown jam cookies, the ones made of molasses with jam in the middle that popped up through the hole we made with a thimble. She hid them from us trying to save them for when visitors came. Being off limits made them all the more precious. Fights would break out over whom was going to go out and get them. We wanted to see how many we could shove into our mouths before coming back into the regular part of the house.

Easter weekend was when we moved everything from the larder in the regular kitchen to the cupboards in the summer one. The coffee pots and baking had to be brought out there for the next five months since it was where we would do everything as a family – all our eating and socializing went on there until the first frost. During the summer months, we only used the rest of the house for sleeping.

I loved waking up on cold mornings in the spring when the frost had left but still chilly so you had to pull the quilts up around your chin. The only thing that could pry me from bed was the smell of the woodstove burning. Alberta would have put the coffee pot on to perk and gone out to do the milking. There was nothing better than the smell of coffee perking on a wood stove. Tasting it was the real disappointment. It was dark and bitter so we had to load it up with Carnation milk and sugar. One sugar cube per teaspoon of coffee was the perfect ratio. We took forever to drink a cup of coffee; slopping it everywhere didn’t matter because there was something called an oilcloth. A brightly coloured piece of vinyl pulled across the old wooden table and secured by thumbtacks so it could be wiped up quick, and wouldn’t move when we played Euchre.

Fourhanded euchre was the game for summer. Nana sat in her lucky chair, the one with a hundred coats of paint on it, which she covered over every year in another absurd colour to make her feel she’d got some new furniture. We created all sorts of rituals to try and psyche out our opponents. Nana sat in the same direction as the bathtub. I’d wear lucky underwear, anything to improve my luck, so I’d be able to crack my knuckles hard on the table as I yelled out Euchre, trumped you! Read ‘em and weep.

When you live on a farm the war with the black flies was constant. Alberta spent most of the summer packing a bug pump of bug spray. She’d aim and fire it like an Uzi whether we were eating or not. The thing had so many pesticides it likely permanently changed our genetic coding forever. Maybe that’s why I turned out the way I did.

My mother Alberta was not someone you’d ever accuse of being affectionate. When she kissed us she made her lips flat, so there was no saliva. She was only nice if she thought you were retarded or dying. When I had the German measles my temperature spiked to 104O so I came close to the latter.

Out there in that summer kitchen she bathed me in cool water trying to get my fever to break, lying beside me all night, so I wouldn’t go into convulsions. I had the heartbreak of psoriasis so I got everything ten times worse than anybody else. Chicken pox, the measles – German and Red – all were a big ordeal for a sensitive person like me. My skin was a giant transmitter of pain. People liked to tell you that only nervous people get psoriasis. I must’ve been born nervous because I got it when I was nine months old.

I remember I was lying on King’s couch as Alberta brailed along my pockmarked skin with her hands that smelled like cow shit and Jergen’s lotion, the smell I knew as mother.

I can still see her standing there in her see-through white cotton nightgown with pink flowered underpants peeking through as she sang to me off-key. I ain’t going to bed no more. I’m going to sleep on the hardwood floor. I’m a beeno. It is a tune she made up to make me happy, but when she sang it to me I thought I was dying.

Memory blurs time. I’m not sure if it was the same night, she was standing under the yellow hue of the bug light near the sink, shaving her legs. We’re not a hairy people. I only have one thin line of hair on my shins and peach fuzz under my pits so I’ll never be one of those people who need to wax. Alberta only needed to shave a couple times a year.

By that time in the summer the cistern was almost empty so she would’ve been re-using water. I see her balancing one of her legs when King came in from locking up his workshop for the day. As he stood there sipping his coffee cup he watched her. They spoke in a soft way that reassures you when you’re young. The content doesn’t matter, just the sound of your parents’ voices made you feel loved. She must’ve nicked herself because I remember hearing her yelling. Dang it, King, I’m bleeding. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He always carried two, a clean one for his nose and a greasy one for the engines he tried to fix. With the unused one, he started dabbing the spot where she was bleeding. My God, lover, I’ve seen vets come back from Korea looking better than this. He then kissed her. I squinted to look as she swung her legs around and stood up and pulled him to her. Like the lamp salesman, King was short, so to kiss her he had to take off his shoes and stand on top of her feet.

For many years I told myself she hated him, but I now know better. Her lips became full and red when he kissed her but she didn’t like being that vulnerable. Sometimes after he hugged her she looked like Bambi when his mother had been shot.

They’d grown up near each other, her on one side of the river and him on the other. They must have run into each other before but King liked to say the day he saw her first she was standing up at the front of a classroom bossing little children. At seventeen she was already a teacher, having graduated from Normal School. If anybody could’ve gone to a school to be normal it would’ve been Alberta for she was as practical a person as you could possibly meet. There was no dreaming in her blood.

I was too troubled at that age to have commanded respect that early on. But when you’re tall, people think you know what you’re doing. Over six feet, one inch, she was so tall, if her height didn’t intimidate the kids, her hollering would. The mouth on her could bring in cows from three fields back.

King had come to drop off his younger brother who was starting Grade One. Bent over helping him tie up his shoes was when he first laid eyes on my mother. Your mother’s size thirteen feet came into view. I knew right then and there those pontoons would carry me to shore. King and his malarkey. He claimed he looked up, way up, and when he saw that pitch-black hair hanging down her back to her waist he knew she was a woman he could look up to. Being just under five six he was Sonny to her Cher.

King told us he didn’t move. He just stood there grinning ear to ear and that from the first time she saw him, she wanted to slap it off his face.

King didn’t have a serious bone in his body. He spent most of his life lying on that couch, cracking jokes. No matter how mad she got at him, no matter how much shit he got into every time she walked by, he’d slap her ass and every time she’d say, No, King, not in front of the kids. And every time she yelled Not in front of the kids, a few months later there’d be another baby.

He didn’t give her an engagement ring for two more years after they met. For one thing he had to save for it. And two, Babcock men are like that. They’d go around with a person for a while before they’d commit themselves. King went to a consignment sale the jewelry store was having and even convinced Suitcase Ray to let him have the ring before it had been paid off. I think he still owes money on it. He gave her the engagement ring on a Thursday night, and legend has it that when he got up the next morning, Grandma Babcock had poached him a couple of eggs.

You won’t be eating any more meat on Friday, she said, as she put the plate in front of him. She’s a Cochrane. Cochranes are Catholic, to the core. Everybody knew he’d convert; there was no way around it. At St Paul’s, they got married on a windy day in October, the kind of day where people have to hold on to their hats.

The priest stood at the front of the church and said, Do you take King to be your lawfully wedded husband?

Alberta adjusted her veil. I do.

Then he turned to King and asked him, Do you take Alberta to be your lawfully wedded wife?

And he puffed up his chest and said, I do.

I now pronounce you king and queen of nowhere, said the priest and King stood on his tiptoes to kiss her.

I was