Childhood Country: And Other Short Stories from an Itinerant Early Life

By Richard Vaughn

A lonely boy's landscape encompasses the U. S. Middle West
and California during the Great Depression 1930s through the
World War II home front and late 1940s. Broken shards of
youthful memory: rooming with strangers, moving from place
to place with sudden frequency and continual uncertainty
because of poverty and a mother's marital failures. Seen
through a boy's eyes from six to sixteen, here are children and
adults in the throes of financial hardship and tumultuous
wartime: an empty house with deathly echoes, relatives swept
into the cataclysm of war, a cousin gripped by suicidal grief, a
family betrayed, and unexpected humor, friendship, hope and
first love. He escapes into movies, comic books, adventurous
imagination with fantasy excursions, and fascination with
guns. Through it all is his mother, raised on dreams of a
luxurious life but thwarted by doomed relationships as she
searches for love and security when both are rationed or
transient. He lives an adolescence not knowing who he is or
where he belongs as events propel him toward the looming
horizon of manhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 4, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595871933

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Copyright © 2007 by Richard L. Vaughn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-42854-0 (pbk)

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Printed in the United States of America

For all the grandchildren—

Matthew, Nathaniel, Marli

and Francesca—who are

nearer in essence to these

stories of long-ago youth.

"A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and

thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Contents

Preface

THE WIND’S WILL

ANOTHER HOUSE

THE GOOD SPORT

PERLA BEAR CHRISTMAS

MY COUNTRY AUNT

FORT PURITY

BLUE BLAZES

EARLY JULY

SUMMER COUSINS

TEN-CENT PHILOSOPHERS

THE UNWANTED GIRL

STARS BLUE AND GOLD

THE CHICKEN FACTORY

TRIPLE FEATURE

RICOCHET COWBOY

BRIDES OF WAR

TRIBAL WEAPONS

MEXICAN CLEANING LADY

CHILDHOOD COUNTRY

THE SALVAGE BICYCLE

BATTLESHIP ARIZONA

THE ANCHORITE

GUN COLLECTING

BIRTHDAY BOY

SKY DEMONS

THE UNION MAN

SHARK CANYON

THE BOY FROM BARCELONA

MEN AT NIGHT

FIELDS ON FIRE

HAMSTERIA

DEATH MARCH

THE JEWELER’S RIFLE

SELECTED NATURALLY

BULLET GAMES

QUICKSILVER

About the Author

Preface

Everybody has stories that comprise the mosaic of their life. Most of them are useful as a reminder of how each of us has arrived at who and where we are. They’re also of value to family and friends. ‘Greatest Generation’ adults who endured the Depression and fought World War II have documented the 1930s and 1940s. However, the children of those years lived a chaotic life and became the adolescents of the Cold War—a unique cohort unto themselves.

What may be the best reason for reading these short stories is that they creatively revisit the singular, disoriented and turbulent early years of a boy trying to grasp a world shaking itself to pieces. Traveling with a mother raised to desire the best that life had to offer but whose first three marriages failed, he lived in rented rooms and with relatives while she pursued work and emotional security. Little was certain, everything unsettled, two or three new schools each year. Strangers and instant relatives were fellow nomads during an endless transient existence.

These stories appeared in literary and small press magazines as the ‘Robby’ tales. He is a stand-in imbued with authorial virtues and vices, departing from reality only for narrative goals. Real people and events inspired every story but have been altered. When readers ask if an incident occurred, I’ve replied, Yes, it didn’t, and no, it did. Fictional or factual? Fictual—narratives woven on a patchwork quilt of re-imagined experiences.

While they’re sequenced by age, a few of the stories happen at the same time in different locales with characters that appear in one story but not in another. I offer no apologies. Each story came when it did under its own impetus. Since I acquired many relatives and siblings by marriage, it seemed convenient to cast them where they had a part to play. Also, some towns have been disguised to stage-manage the world. Soft lies nourish the storyteller’s artiface. Life’s truth exists in the subliminal dark between these stories. It’s my hope that some readers may uncover verities of their own in them.

Mission Viejo, California—December 2006

THE WIND’S WILL

I never remember belonging anywhere. From my first memories as a child in the late 1930s. Early recollection: riding in the back seat of a car with gray mouse-fur upholstery. A strange woman drives. She is from the kindergarten and is taking me to my apartment. She says the car is a Buca; I’ve misheard Buick. I’m not sure why she’s taking me home. It’s the second kindergarten I’ve gone to. We move a lot and it’s only February. The two-story brick building with leafless elms in front looks as forlorn as the factory-like school that has rejected me.

It’s no surprise that nobody answers the knock on our apartment door. My mother is at work. The woman shifts, frets, lights a cigarette, clutches her brocade purse, fumbles in her wool overcoat pockets for tissues to dab her nose, applies lipstick looking in a tiny mirror, then grips my hand to drag me to the manager’s door. Mrs. Griswold opens it and is told that I should go to the school three blocks away. This makes no sense to me. I got off the bus at the kindergarten as Mother stayed aboard riding to her job downtown. Mrs. Griswold doesn’t want me either and tries to resist as I’m pushed toward her.

The school woman flaps her arms like a goose, thumps away down the linoleum hallway and slams the glass-paneled front door. Mrs. Griswold yanks me inside by my collar, stares with hard eyes, and removes my corduroy jacket and leather helmet with goggles. She asks if I’ve had lunch. I haven’t. A bowl of potato soup is clunked before me. She doesn’t know about my milk allergy. When I don’t eat she forces two spoonfuls down. I gag and throw up, splattering the blue gingham tablecloth.

She puts me in the hallway to wait for my mother. I don’t know why she doesn’t let me into our apartment, but she shuts her door. I sit all afternoon and only go onto the back porch by the trash barrels to warm myself in the waning rays of the sun. It’s cozy and nice as I stretch on the boards to stare into the yard. Patches of snow mound the red earth. A breeze tickles maple leaves causing some to slither across sheet ice the sun has slicked with melt.

Swallows hug bare branches between darting flights after wind gusts buffet them as though trying to hurl each from the sky. I don’t understand how they can fly with the beating they take. If they head into the wind they go nowhere. When they come about it takes all the flight of their wings to avoid being driven into brick walls. It’s the first time I’ve watched such things, and I’m captivated by their ceaseless struggle.

Mother is late. She got off the bus at the kindergarten to find I wasn’t there. Her pinkish-white face is flushed from anger and the brittle North Dakota winds. When she takes off her felt hat, auburn curls unleash like coiled springs. It’s her greatest irritation each morning as she tries to tame them. In our bed later she explains that I’ll have to change schools again. I must seem sad because she adds that this is the last time. I nod, but know it’s not true. She’s said that many times before.

After she drifts off wearily I think it will be a long time before I sleep. The bed is beside a storm window. Through the frosted glass I see the skeletal spines of maples and poplars shivering in the wind like frozen snakes. That’s the origin of my fascination with the way restless air unsettles things and kicks life around. I’m not aware at the time, but being shunted from place to place will do more to shape my outlook than any classroom or teacher. I grasp that I am subject to forces beyond my control. It’s both frightening and soothing, and I doze like a wolf on the prairie with its back to the howling wind.

The rest of that school year I remain in the closest kindergarten. Mother walks me there each morning then busses to her job, returning later to walk me home. Much as she wants to settle down, work and fate drive us from Jamestown to Hankinson. She’s now remarried. My stepfather is a large man with gray hair. He’s a railway mail clerk for the Great Northern stationed at towns along the tracks. We move. I attend first grade in three schools because we change apartments for reasons unexplained. They have to do with the trouble when he drinks, but that can’t be right—most folks I know shout and rage without moving as often as we do.

During second grade Mother moves us again—not into an apartment—but rooms in a house. Mr. and Mrs. Woricki are middle-aged. He owns a butcher shop. They have two vacant rooms since their kids are gone. It’s a bungalow with a screened porch. I see willows and birches from my window. They undulate, sensuous and hypnotic. At night, before sleep, I imagine they listen to the wind—my new friend—as it whispers while caressing their green fingers.

Mrs. Woricki is a teacher. She drives me to her school so Mother doesn’t have to take me. I don’t care where I go. The trip in Mrs. Woricki’s Model A takes one hour on rutted roads. The school, a weathered plank building, looms bleakly on a muddied knoll amidst winter wheat fields. I thump up nine board steps to the door. Inside are two dozen old desks with lift tops. A cast iron stove glows red-hot in the corner. The room smells of pine, dank jackets, galoshes, and black-soil prairie kids who trudged from nearby farms.

Mrs. Woricki has to manage six grades in the single classroom. I’m considered special as I arrive with her. At first this is satisfying because the girls in their wool skirts and sweaters make eyes at me. But the boys are resentful and outside during recess I’m knocked about and pelted with snowballs. Also, since first grade was messy for me, I’m behind the second grade in writing and arithmetic and have to spend time on remedial lessons with three giggling girls in pigtails.

I feel dumb. On chill days I fantasize about the wind growling about the building like a buffalo herd. The air is robust and fierce, the schoolroom with its groaning flanks and creaking rafters, a pathetic protector. I sense when the gale is most awesome that the quaking structure will disintegrate, scattering boards and kids into the sky like straw. Or be ripped from the moist earth like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz and tossed into eternity. There are moments of despair when I long for either event. I go to this school a year, chalking words and numbers on a slate board. Mrs. Woricki drives to and from the school in silence while I yearn for a better life.

We remain with the Worickis through the following summer until Mother places me in the local school three blocks from another apartment. I begin third grade in a two-story brick prison with others my age. The teacher, Mrs. Yarbrough, is a gentle woman with silver hair and a gruff voice like a man’s that the boys imitate on the playground. The school yard is circled by oaks so enormous they block out houses and factories. It’s as if a meadow has been cleared so the school could drop from the sky. The wind beats against the outer edges of the forest barricade until gusts break through. When they do rush past the trees they create a vortex of whipping branches and leaves, flinging dust into my eyes. Girl’s dresses twirl and reveal underpants as boys squeal and laugh.

During one afternoon recess I get involved in a game of chicken at the sliding board, a structure with steps at one end and a steel chute at the other. Boys are showing off, running from the lower end to the ladder in a frenzy. Rather than sitting, we begin sliding down standing. It starts to drizzle. The recess bell rings as I’m sliding down, my Keds wet on the steel. A burst of wind hits me in the chest and I fall backward. My head smacks the railing and stuns me. I shrug off pain and get in line to go inside. There’s a wetness on my neck like warm rain. I wait last in line with my throbbing skull.

After we take our seats in the classroom the girl seated behind shrieks. Students laugh at her. When I turn the girl sitting in front screams. Mrs. Yarbrough hurries to me, muttering. She eases my head onto the desk and dabs a tissue at my neck. Rivulets trickle down both cheeks and spatter dark spots onto the lined spelling papers. I’m dizzy as she and a nurse hurry me to the office. There are phone calls. Mother arrives. We are driven to a doctor’s office. I lay on my side while stitches are sewn in my scalp. Later, going down the steep stairway, Mother sinks onto a step, white-faced. I rush for the doctor. He revives her and his nurse drives us home.

I have a white bandage on the back of my head. It creates a lot of interest when I return to school but that doesn’t last and I resume my place as just another child. After we move again in the spring, I go to a new school, but not long. Mother packs my lunch in a brown sack. Home lunches aren’t allowed in the cafeteria or school building, so I am sent to the front steps to eat by myself. When it starts to rain I press near the front door. That night I tell Mother I want to eat in the cafeteria instead of outside. She becomes furious. The next day she takes me to the school, marches past the office ladies and bangs into the principal’s office, unleashes a tirade of anger at him, demands a transfer slip for another school, and relocates me.

We move to Fargo the spring after Pearl Harbor and through fifth grade I attend four or five different schools. Moving becomes such a routine that living someplace for more than a few months is boring. When Mother says one day in spring 1944 that we’re leaving for California, it seems a bit more fascinating because that’s where movies are made. We’re heading to Badersville but probably won’t stay long. We are nomads and journey where we will and where we must.

Except for the alkali soil of California’s central valley, Badersville is like most other towns. We stay five years but naturally move about so that I’m in two grammar schools for sixth grade, three junior highs, and complete only two years of high school before we go to L A. My memory is of dry storms silting dust across the roadways like khaki liquid to drift against fence posts. Also, hawks and buzzards, ride thermals until specks in the drear sky before casting off to another rising column. By now I know it’s possible to use the wind to get somewhere else.

I drop out of high school after my third year and join the army. It takes me all over the world.

My mother keeps searching for life and love through many jobs and marriages. We don’t see each other for many years although we stay in touch. We both have to keep moving. After marrying and having children I invent excuses—job advancement, more space, better schools—to move frequently. We live in fifteen places before the children go their separate ways. As empty nesters my wife and I live in continual restlessness. I help my mother in later years as she moves about until it’s necessary to board her in a convalescent home. She succumbs muttering about all the places she has not seen and would like to visit—a perpetual gypsy unto her final breath.

It is her desire to be cremated and scattered at sea, so on a humid day we go out on a sailboat off San Diego to commit her ashes. I surmise in my time of grief that death is the last abode, whether we wander or reside in one place. Drifting out to sea, the land receding into a green-purple rumple of foothills, I recall not only all the places that my mother, my wife, and I have lived—but also, the illusion of permanence. The boat rides swells as we sail farther, the sea a slate-gray mottle as the offshore breeze roughens the surface to an elephant skin texture.

The funeral director, a somber but not unfriendly old man, talks about the sea and places he has lived—not so many as we have. When we reach the spot selected, I ask to help scatter the ashes. As we tilt the box toward sea water slapping against the hull and the granular remains of Mother’s existence spill out, a surge of wind flares past the stern and swirls ashes into a cloud. Instead of a trail spread on the surface we leave a splotched abstract as if we’d flung the contents with shovels. Tiny wisps of gray ash dance over the water like ghosts. The old man is upset and thinks our solemn ritual has been ruined, but I smile. In her devious way, my mother’s remains have become as wind-swept as her life.

My wife and I toss carnations, trying to fling them into the ashes mingling with seawater immensity. Seagulls glide above, riding the wind and, in joyous vitality, dive toward the funeral boughs. I watch them court the air, wings bursting for height before soaring toward shore and once again turning to the horizon. I think about my own flight, still unfinished. I desire wind and want to be sown over the earth. My earthly dust mites uncoiling behind an airplane to drift through the stratosphere on climatic wings. Yes, by God, I will circle the planet forever.

ANOTHER HOUSE

April thaw melted the hard-packed snow. Gray-frosted mounds like dumplings dotted the muddy fields with milky runoff sluicing beneath. Lemuel stirred himself from the farmhouse that had entombed him since a stroke the year before. He loaded his silver-haired wife, Ida, and two grandsons into his three-year old ’36 Hudson and drove the twenty miles to Arbordale. The bright day crackled with a breeze across the stubbled Minnesota wheat fields. Despite the mud-rutted roadway, he made good time and felt buoyant for the first time in months.

Why middle of the week? Ida said as the boys romped in the back seat.

To see the house, Lemuel said, maintaining an even strain.

Was that the phone call last night?

That, and about the farm.

The Hudson pitched into a wagon rut. Lemuel jerked the steering wheel to avoid swerving into the ditch. Ida stared out the side window in silence. He sensed what was on her mind, what had perturbed her for weeks.

I don’t want to leave the farm, she said without looking at him.

He didn’t either. Can’t work the place any longer. Not even with hired help.

Just the same, Lem.…

In town I can work in Arvid’s store, he said. His brother’s mercantile served the whole county. That’ll help make ends meet.

Ida took a small handkerchief from her purse and daubed both eyes. She wasn’t crying, she never did, but her mannerism when she coped. Her auburn hair had turned silver-white so many years before that his girl bride existed only in memory and sepia photos. But her agate blue eyes and cream-smooth skin sug

gested the beauty that still captivated him.

Sure hate to move on, she said. Old place’s been good to us and the boys.

Lemuel glanced back at his grandsons, aged eight and four. They squirmed and giggled on the leather cushion. A burden when Olivia first left them last year to work in St. Paul after her divorce, the boys now blessed his and Ida’s life.

We’ll make a new home, he said. Arbordale eased into view beyond the crest of a slope, roofs angling through oaks, birches, elms and willows, the sparkling blue-green lake beyond. It’s only another house.

Why, Ida asked, does it have to be this particular house?

It’s a right proper size, and the price is just too good to pass up.

It’ll feel queer even going in, she said, gazing down the elm-lined street, let alone living there.

He turned into the lane with two-story frame houses as stalwart as sentinels in a glade of maples, poplars and oaks. Apple and pear trees blossomed along side and back yards. He pulled the black Hudson into the gravel drive.

Is this it, Grandpa? Robby, the oldest boy, asked.

His younger brother, Dennis, kneeled on the back seat. Are we there?

This is it, all right, Lemuel said. Come on, everyone. The boys leaped out of the car, ran into the shaded front yard, and raced around the hollyhocks toward the back. Finished in slate-gray shingles with trimmed white window sashes and porch posts, the house bore an uninviting, somber look. Ida remained in the car. He got out, opened her door, and touched her arm. Won’t hurt to look, now will it?

I don’t like the idea of what happened … what he did in there.

They never got along, he said, anxious to put her at ease any way he might. It went bad for them from the very first, like it does for some folks.

It’s such a poor color, she carried on, but put her handkerchief away in the red beaded purse. The living room shades look a fright.

He laughed with relief. Me and Arvid’ll give the place a fresh coat of paint, any color your heart desires. And you can do the entire insides over to a fair thee well.

He helped her out. She stood in the gravel beside him. The boys, having sped through the back yard past the one-car garage, raced into the weeds beneath the oaks of the next-door vacant lot, startling moths and dragonflies into fluttering excitement.

Lemuel said, That lot goes with the house, too, Ida. You can cultivate a garden, just like at the farm. Could be right nice when finished.

Yes, yes. She hesitated to climb the board front steps.

Come on, now. He took her arm and urged her up. Only a house.

During her fifty-three years, Ida had lived in only two houses. Both had filled her need for comfort and order. Her father’s red-planked farmhouse with seven tiny, but cozy rooms off the long hallway; and Lem’s, bequeathed by his father—each filled an abiding emotional territory in her bosom. She’d forever felt that she belonged where she cooked, cleaned and breathed. No amount of travail could knock her down if she felt at home in the rooms