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Last home Conrad lived in with his parents.
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Dad was not much
of a hand to write but we got short letters every week or so. He had found a job at the DuBois sawmill on
the waterfront in Vancouver where he had worked ten years before. George DuBois had remembered him and what a
good worker he was before. In due time
Dad saved enough money to rent a house and get the basic furniture so the
problem became how for him to get my mother and us four kids to Vancouver.
It may have taken
weeks for Dad to save the money for train tickets, but fortunately, there was a
friend, a Mr. Ganaway, living near Arcola who decided that he wanted to see the
Pacific Northwest. He had a pickup truck
on which he had built a homemade canopy.
A deal was made that Dad would pay for the gas and, after an auction
sale at our little farm, they would load in our possessions. Mother and baby Sandra would ride in the cab
with Ganaway and us boys would ride on top of the things in back.
Even though it was
my ambition to leave the hills and, initially, I had been elated at the
prospect, in September when departure was a matter of a month away I began to
have some second thoughts. The school
year was well under way and I did not like the idea of interrupting my final
year there to start in the middle of the term at a new and much larger
school. I had been told that Vancouver
High School where we would go had around three hundred students in each class.
As the month wore
on, I became ever more reluctant. I was
still competing with Mary Neil for valedictorian of graduating tenth
grade. I was also aware that I was
getting an exceptionally fine education from J. B. Mitchell. More and more I was torn between my original
sesire to get out of the Ozark hills and wanting to finish the school year at
Bona.
One day when we
were to spend our last night in that little grey farmhouse, I was a long time
getting home from school. I remained
after the others had gone, cleaning erasers and taking a long look around that
familiar room where I had spent so many hours.
I wanted very much to finish the year.
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| Grandma and Grandpa Stanley's house 1936, Bona |
As I finally
walked slowly homeward, I paused in Bona.
I looked for a long time at my grandparents’ house and store, at Tom
Humbert’s store across the road, the road down the hill west past the frog
pond, and I gazed across the rolling hills and woodlands to the east from the
porch of Grandpa’s store. All this was
home and down inside I did not want to leave.
I was torn, too, between a dread of the strange new world out there and
eager anticipation of a better life to come.
I stared again at
Grandpa’s house then trudged on up the road toward home, an idea forming. I nearly chewed the inside of my lower lip
raw thinking about it. I am sure Mother
made note of the fact that I was unusually silent and thoughtful during
supper. I was ordinarily the ebullient
one and should have been dancing with glee.
After supper,
while Richard was drying the dishes I had washed, I took a look around the
familiar kitchen in the soft yellow light of the kerosene lamp (no more of
those, I thought silently—we will have electricity in Vancouver), then I went
quietly through the living room and out onto the small front porch. I sat on the step in the darkness. There was a moon overhead and the pale white
moonlight dappled the grass in the yard where it came through the red leaves of
the maple trees. There was no breeze but
there was a hint of fall frosts in the air.
I sat there for a
long time thinking. Finally the screened
door behind me opened and closed and my mother sat down beside me, draping a
sweater around my shoulders.
“You’ll catch your
death—it is getting chilly out. What are
you doing out here by yourself?”
“Oh—I was just
thinkin’.”
“Think-ing,” she
said automatically. “What were you
thinking about?”
I shook my head
and looked down at my bare feet in the moonlight, “Nuthin’ much.”
She was very
perceptive. She put her arm around my
shoulders and said softly, “You don’t really want to go, do you?”
For all of my
fourteen years, I suddenly felt very young.
I felt tears sting my eyes as I let the things I had been thinking come
tumbling out.
It’s not that I
don’t want to go, Mama! I do want to go—and
in the worst way. But not just now. If I don’t finish the school year here, old
Mary Neil will be valedictorian for sure.
I can do it if I could stay! No
old girl can do better than me!”
I turned to her
pleadingly. “How would it be if I stayed
here for the rest of the year with Grandpa and Grandma? I could help them some and they have that little
room on the back of the house that no one is using. I could sleep there. Then, after we graduate, I could come on to
Vancouver on the train—I’ll save up all I can toward the ticket!”
There was a
secretive smile on my mother’s young face in the moonlight. “I guessed that was what was bothering you
several days ago. You just have not been
yourself. As a matter of fact, I have already
talked it over with your grandparents.
They are willing for you to stay if you want to do that.”
My spirits soared
to the stars as she went on, “It would be the worst for you to change schools
just now. Richard is hardly settle in at
Dadeville High and Rex is young enough that it won’t matter all that much. They will just miss a week or two of school.
“I know how bad you want to be valedictorian
and Mr. Mitchell thinks you can do it, too.
Yes, I have already talked to him.
He has faith in you, Conrad, just as your father and I do. You will have to be very good for your
grandparents and not give them any trouble.
You must help them and work hard at school.”
I promised and,
after she went back into the house, went capering around the yard in the
moonlight in a wild sort of dance, swinging from tree limbs and hanging by my
knees. The old irrepressible Conrad was back—I
did not have to leave the Ozark hills just yet and I would be living full time
with Grandpa and Grandma!
