Idlewild
My grandfather died, before I was born. Papa got the fishing cabin and Uncle Rob got the farm. “I got the best of the deal,” my father said, though he had to go out of state to work, all the way to the oil rigs on the Gulf of Mexico.
My mother said we could get by if he stayed. “You’re just restless. You don’t even want to try.”
“Annie, why be someone’s hired hand for peanuts when I can make good money down there?”
Summers, he came home and we lived in the cabin: one big room with a little bedroom off the back. My parents had the bedroom and I slept on the sofa in the big room. There was no electricity, just lamplight. I liked the smell of lamp oil, and watching the soft shadows as I fell asleep. The cabin didn’t have heat so after my father went back to Texas, when school started, we moved to the trailer on Uncle Rob’s farm. We didn’t have any other family except my mother’s father who lived alone on his farm. He hadn’t talked to my mother since she got married. Sometimes we saw him in Guy’s Hardware. He had a tangled beard and old-fashioned clothes, like the Mennonites, but he wasn’t one. My mother heard he wasn’t welcome in any church in the valley anymore, because he tried to run things.
Mama was the prettiest, youngest mother in my class. People meeting us were surprised: she was strawberry blond, and I dark - like my father. That summer I was thirteen, only three years younger than she’d been when she had me. I’d gotten my monthly for the first time in the spring.
“Sarah, you’re a woman now. You can have babies. Don’t let the boys touch
you, if you want to grow up to be a bride with a church wedding,” she said, almost like she was mad at me. I had let a boy hold my hand on the school bus, but after what she said, I tried to sit alone.
My mother worked at the Inn, waitressing and housekeeping. All summer Papa and I drove her there by seven, for breakfast. We pulled up in front; they leaned together over my head and kissed. She’d climb out of the truck and pause beside his window for one more kiss. Then, “Be good you two,” she’d say.
“Be good yourself, Annie,” he replied.
She waved and disappeared around the back of the old white Inn.
We drove back to the cabin to fish for breakfast. My father liked to cook outdoors and he said, “I like fish anyway you can catch them, anyway you can cook them, anytime you can eat them.” He taught me how to make a roll cast. Watching the loop of line unfurl, he said I was a natural, and promised I would be a natural at hunting, too. But during hunting season he was never around to teach me.
After breakfast, we might take the canoe and go exploring down Ray’s Branch. We saw an eagle once. Or he worked on projects – he put a new roof on the cabin that summer. I helped, or took my book and sat by the river to read. Thursdays, the Book Mobile came to the village and I could get new books; biographies were my favorite. The Book Mobile lady would pick out something for my mother, too. She knew Mama liked romance stories.
Afternoons, we drove to the lake: man-made but snug in the bowl between the hills as though it had always been there. Hiking trails crisscrossed through the hemlock woods. The north side of the lake was wild with steep cliffs; the south side a soft slope with campground, boat launch, and swimming beach. You could rent paddleboats but my father said they were for city people. The park rangers stocked the lake with bass. Some local fishermen came; my father called lake fishing too tame to bother with.
We’d walk through the picnic grove to the swimming beach. The biggest picnic shelter, the pavilion, could be reserved for family reunions. Families came with coolers and grills and guitars and playpens. They hung crepe paper streamers and covered the tables with paper cloths and jello salads and giant bags of chips. The air was full of the noise of volleyball and badminton and sweet smoke from grilling meat. One family played a relay race: tying each other up in toilet paper, spraying Reddi-whip into open mouths. Sometimes the pavilion stood empty, and the sign said “Available.” My family – us, a grandfather we didn’t speak to, Uncle Rob and Aunt Lida – couldn’t fill even the smallest shelter.
The swimming beach was grassy and shaded by oak trees, with a narrow strip of sand right by the water, trucked in each spring. We waded in the lake, startling clouds of little minnows, and swam out to the floating dock so Papa could dive. I liked to lie on my belly on the cool wet float, looking into the green water for shadows of big bass swimming down deep. That summer when I stretched out on the float it was uncomfortable – my breasts were new and small, but finally big enough to get in the way. I looked back at the shore where boys splashed girls and little children dug in the sand. Mothers from the campground pulled over wagons full of towels and thermoses and sat chatting in the shade. Sometimes there would be another local family; I could tell by the father’s tan – neck and forearms deep brown, shoulders and chest white. “A farmer’s tan,” my father said. He was walnut brown all over.
For dinner we went to the Frosty Bear Drive In. I had onion rings and a cheeseburger, a strawberry milkshake so thick and cold sipping it made my head ache. He usually had a shrimp basket; he missed the shrimp down on the Gulf, “big as baby sunfish.” Teenagers hung out at The Frosty Bear. From the truck’s cab, like a bird blind, we watched the girls and boys sitting on the hoods of cars, laughing, eating ice cream.
“See that pretty girl over there?” he’d say, nodding toward a girl in short shorts, surrounded by a group of boys. “That’ll be you in a couple years, Sarah. You’ll have them eating out of your hand. You’ll be the Bedford County Fall Foliage Queen.”
I liked to imagine being a Fall Foliage Princess, riding on the back of a convertible in the parade, holding a big bouquet of asters, waving at the crowd. The parade ends at the Courthouse, where my parents got married. The fathers wait there, all dressed up. Each Princess and her father climb up the steps together, each father kisses his Princess and then walks down the steps to wait and see who gets picked Queen. I liked to picture my parents down in the crowd, their proud faces turned up to me, waiting for the news....
Published in Midway Journal: 2010
