News from Grammie: 4/1/12

The Brat

“Take this loaf of bread in to your Mother and let her know we’ll be ready for dinner in about fifteen minutes.”

“Okay, Dad” I said, anxious as always to be considered capable of carrying out an assignment.

So why, like so many times, did I feel the urge to do something I knew was going to get me in trouble?

I loved to feed the chickens and had been in hot water several times that summer because I had shared food intended for the family with the appreciative flock of birds that roamed our farm yard. Just the week before I had decimated a fresh batch of doughnuts. Mom had given me a fresh doughnut to eat, reminding me to go sit on the back steps so the crumbs would not fall on the freshly washed kitchen floor. I loved those doughnuts and so did Dad. Mom made batches of several dozen doughnuts at a time, rolling out an expanse of dough to just the right thickness and cutting it with the special cutter that created the hole and the doughnut with one quick cutting and twisting motion. She would then place the dough in a cast iron skillet filled with hot, hot lard. The circle of dough would sink briefly and then pop to the surface and in a minute they were ready to be turned. Mom turned them quickly, exposing the brown bottoms and she usually stood, fork poised, waiting to lift them out. Row after row of doughnuts slowly appeared, cooling on layers of newspaper until the last doughnut was fried.

So there I sat on the back steps, eating my doughnut and watching the crumbs fall when first one and then another white chicken sauntered over, neck arching in sync with their steps. I threw a little chunk of doughnut out on the grass and they immediately responded, pecking at the crumbs and scratching for more. The activity was a signal to several more chickens that food was available and first two and then four more birds joined the first two. I couldn’t resist – I shared half my doughnut with the appreciative fowl. A bite for me, a chunk for them and the doughnut was gone. All eyes were on me as if to say “got any more?”

When I saw Mom leave the kitchen I sneaked inside and grabbed two more doughnuts. The ever increasing flock greeted my return, clucking and eyeing me closely. Soon the two doughnuts were gone and I went in and grabbed a handful. I stood on the back steps like a queen surrounded by her adoring subjects and dispensed my favors.

“Young lady, WHAT are you doing?” Dad’s voice shocked me out of my royal reverie.

“Nothin’ Dad, honest” I said, using my fallback position of innocence whenever confronted with my misdeeds.

“In the house with you” he said and called out for my mother. “Evelyn, how many doughnuts did you make?”

“Exactly six dozen, why?” came her voice from the other room.

“She’s been feeding the chickens again” he replied and I knew I was going to get a spanking.

“Over the chair” he said and I reluctantly leaned over the kitchen chair and took a few hard whacks to my bottom, this time it was only with his hand and not the leather belt but my tears came quickly nonetheless.

This was the most recent in a string of feeding incidents; I had even discovered that chickens would eat their own eggs if they were tossed on the ground. Each time I was disciplined, first by what my parents called “a good talking to” and when that failed the spankings while I leaned over the white wooden chair, grabbing the rung as I was instructed.

So why on this day I didn’t just walk across the yard with the loaf of bread and give it to my mother is still a mystery. Having recently hit the snack jackpot with me, the chickens had taken to following me in hopes of another treat. So I opened the loaf of bread and tossed a slice on the ground. They pounced on it, quickly tearing it to shreds. What could I do – I gave them another slice and another slice until there were only four slices left in the bag. Rather nonchalantly, I took the nearly empty bread sack in the house.

Mom had placed an urgent call in to my grandmother when Dad unexpectedly announced that the men, meaning he and my grandfather, would be there for the noon meal. Mom was caught short of bread and no meal was complete on the farm without a plate of bread and a crock of butter. When she saw the few slices of bread she assumed that was all my grandmother had.

The men filed in the kitchen, pausing at the sink to pump a little water and scrub their hands with a bar of Lava soap. Their chairs scraped on the worn linoleum as they pulled up to the table and began passing around the bowls of food.

“Could we get a little more bread” my Dad asked.

“That’s all there is George, I ran out and your mother must have been almost out too.”

“I sent Carolyn to the house with a full sack of bread” he said and their eyes met across the table, knowing without asking what had happened to the rest of the bread. The remainder of the meal was eaten in silence except for the sounds of forks clinking against plates and Kool Aid being poured into tall glasses. Although the silence was ominous I foolishly held out hope that they would just forget about the missing bread. As soon as the meal was over my dad said “out to the granary with you” and my heart sank. The worst punishment of all was being locked in the granary and, as I followed him across the yard, I began imploring, “Please Daddy, don’t shut the door, please Daddy, I’ll be good, I won’t do it again, please Daddy please don’t shut the door.”

Dad was not a man given to sympathy – he had been raised in a stern and often cruel way and his was the only way he knew to parent a disobedient child. Spare the rod and spoil the child was his mantra. But for some reason, on this day, he yielded to my entreaty and put me in the granary, but left the sliding door open a foot or so. There was plenty of light to look around the bin that still held many bushels of grain that had been specially cleaned to be used as seed wheat. I sat in the middle of the small area, sifting the kernels through my fingers and choking back the big sobs threatening to overcome me.

The granary door was positioned so that it was not visible from most of the farmyard leaving me nothing to look at out the door other than the nearby trees. After a few minutes of sifting grain and craning my neck as far out the door as I could, I began to worry that Dad would forget me there. I tested getting out of the door and jumping the short distance to the ground, scrambling back in as it occurred to me that I might get caught. It seemed that an hour had passed and I had gone through the fear and anger stage directly to being bored, my nemesis when it came to good behavior.

First one and then another chicken came around the corner of the granary, peering at me with their little ringed eyes, red combs perched atop their heads and their sturdy yellow legs lifting high in the tall grass. I grabbed a small handful of wheat and let it drizzle through the fingers of my outstretched arm. The reaction was immediate – the chickens scurried to the open door. I grabbed another handful of grain and threw it out the door. More chickens began to gather, fueling my behavior. I put my hands together and began to scoop up larger portions of grain and fling them out the door. This went on for several minutes – the birds and I joined in our own little ecstasies.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the granary it became obvious to my father that mischief was afoot when he saw a steady migration of white Plymouth Rock chickens crossing the yard and disappearing around the corner of the granary.

As though there was a script written with my father and me the aspiring actors, another one act play began.

“Young lady, WHAT are you doing?”

Discipline in my family, at that time, in that place was often swift, harsh and corporal. It differed only slightly from the way my parents themselves had been raised and it was what they knew. I endured more than my share of spankings: with a hand, with a leather belt, with a lefse stick and worst of all, with branches from the Caragana bushes that formed the southern border of our yard. Mom would instruct me to go cut a branch and to also peel the bark, leaving a long thin switch that was painful and left welts on my legs after a spanking. I never saw any of their forms of discipline as a form of cruelty so much as I saw it as an attempt to make me bend to their will – a battle that would rage until I left for college.

As I got older the most difficult punishment was when they would ground me from all social activities. As a teenager I was even more willful, unwilling to obey even the simplest rules. Since we lived in the country my first hurdle was getting permission to go somewhere – on a date, to a dance or maybe to just drive around the countryside with friends. Typically I had to get permission from Dad, the keeper of the list of transgressions that could be dredged up as reason to deny my request. If I sought permission from Mom her answer was always the same, “Ask your Father.”

If I passed the first hurdle with Dad the stipulations would begin – where I could go, who I was allowed to be with, and, worst of all, what time I had to be home. I was a full one or two years younger than the others in my small circle of friends and it seemed that they always were given later hours than I was given.

“I want you in by 11 o’clock.”

“Oh come on Dad, please, we are going to the drive-in in Rugby – the movie won’t even be over by then.”

“I want you in by 11 or you can’t go.”

“Okay.”

Like the chickens peering at me with anticipation, my friends would peer at me as I got in the car, wanting to know my curfew. They just wanted me to be able to go out, have fun, and not be a drag. So I would start the evening with a fib, “Oh, he really didn’t give me a time, just after the movie is over.”

For a time I would have fun. Instead of actually going to the drive-in theater we might go to a different town than Rugby, we might drink a few beers, we might find a wedding dance we could crash or sometimes, if it was a solo date, we just parked somewhere in the country, listening to KOMA on the radio.

Then the dash clock would start nearing eleven and I would weakly say something about going home.

“Whaddya mean – it’s still early – don’t be a party pooper!” or “Sweetie, stay a little longer, come on.” Those jeers or pleas never failed to sway me and I would ignore the little voice that said “He’s really going to be pissed”. I was a past master at ignoring that little voice.

Later, sometimes much later, I would have my friends or my boyfriend drop me off on the highway near our farm driveway and I would walk the few hundred feet to the house, hoping to sneak in without being caught. I would walk slowly up the drive, avoiding the gravel that would crunch under my shoes, certain that Dad was lying awake and could hear my footsteps. Then, up the back steps, opening the screen door an inch at a time, slipping out of my shoes, tiptoeing across the kitchen and down the hallway, praying that my sister had left the bedroom door unlatched. Once I was safely in bed and there was no obvious sign I had been heard I would fall asleep, knowing that the true test of my freedom would come at breakfast.

“Snooky, what time did you get in last night?” My Dad’s voice didn’t give me a hint whether I had been heard or not. Falling back on old habits I said “It was probably a few minutes after eleven, the movie got out just in time but it took a little longer than we thought it would to get out of the exit at the drive-in.”

Without another word he stood up, took a pen from his shirt pocket and went to the wall calendar, the one that always hung on a nail beside the window. He circled that day’s date and then he slowly counted out what he felt was an appropriate number of days and circled another date.

“I heard you come in, it was almost one o’clock. You are grounded.” At times like this even I knew the futility of claiming innocence and I stayed silent, sometimes wondering why I was so stupid, sometimes wondering if the extra time with my friends had been worth it and always wondering how I would endure the days the circles on the calendar represented.