I was born two years after their marriage. Around the age of four, my own memories begin. We rented a two-story white frame on the corner of Holt and Buttermilk. Our landlady was Mrs. Sanders, an elderly woman who lived next door. Across the street, in a long cinderblock building with a permastone front, was a print shop that published The Mill Record, the county’s only weekly paper.
The press started up early; each weekday, I awoke to a constant clicking. Perhaps that’s why images of my childhood are triggered by sounds. Besides the press, there was the wind in the hollowed-out gourds Mother hung on the porch. Martins were supposed to nest there, but they didn’t because Grandma was always banging in and out. Next came the sound of Chum, the neighborhood bulldog, panting and grunting as he followed the mailman. Then, a tremendous wheeze when Chum flopped down, usually in front of our house. Finally, there was the sound of bubbles. Let me tell you about them.
Every morning Mother would make a batch of bubbles. She filled a pan with warm water, squeezed in a bit of glycerin followed by a glob of Ivory Snow. The bottom of the pan was dented; it rocked gently on the linoleum floor. Mother always set it down with a sigh. I always held my breath. You see, the placing of the pan was invested with secret meaning. If the water spilled out, it meant the bubbles would be lazy, heavy, too oily to rise. If the waves sloshed just to the rim, it would be a good batch.
Imagine a hot summer morning. Imagine the motions of a small mountain town. The pan has been set on the floor, and the water has sloshed safely. In the kitchen is the drip from the faucet and the hum of the second-hand Frigidaire. I’m sitting on the floor with my legs splayed in a V, waiting. Mother is moving about in the next room, then I hear her shut the door to the bath. More sounds of water running. The mixture waits in a spiraled glob in the bottom of the pan. At last, the sound of her body in the tub. I stick my finger in the pan and begin to swirl slowly, but when the bubbles come, it’s just too much. I make bubble lips and bubble moustaches, mountains of bubbles pile up on the kitchen floor. I watch iridescent bubbles roll on the air until I can stand it no longer and jump up, clapping my hands to make them pop. I should remember the smell, but I don’t, only light, pinprick popping. On some days, so many and fast it sounded like rain. Sounds only— of my mother singing, of my bubble kisses, of her hips as the wet skin shifted against the enamel of the claw-foot tub.
Grandma Lizzie and Mother were close, but there was a bond outside of blood that made them closer. Both were widows. I never knew my grandfather because he died in my mother’s junior year. His death was undramatic. Grandpa Hugh simply closed his side street market at noon, walked home for lunch, and died while sitting on the front porch in a wicker chair.
My father’s death was a different matter. His death was dramatic, gruesome, and written about not only in The Mill Record but in The Clovis Dispatch and The Burlington Gazette. LOCAL MAN CRUSHED BETWEEN TRUCK AND TRAIN. C&O TO INVESTIGATE FATAL COLLISION ON 16TH AND HUMMEL. HARSHBARGER MILLS NATIVE NEVER REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS.
My father was a truck driver, who’d just returned from a run to Clovington. He’d begun to cross the railroad track, even though he probably knew a train was coming, but it must have still seemed safe because an eyewitness said the warning arms were slow in coming down: When the cab was smack in the middle of the track, the engine stalled. The driver tried to start it. The truck went a few feet and stalled again. The guy looked up, saw the train, but started fiddling with the engine again. He tried one more time before he jumped out, tripped on the tracks and fell. I saw the whole thing, but I wish I hadn’t.
My dad lived a few hours afterwards, but the doctors told my mother there was no hope because his liver was crushed. Looking back, I don’t know which was the hotter topic: the way my dad died or the structured settlements we received – one from Tri-State Trucking and the other from C&O Railroad. Samy with one m. I should remember him more than I do. I don’t remember the eulogy at his funeral, just the expressions of his sons, Rush and Jarrell, born five minutes apart yet so different in temperament. At my father’s funeral for the first time, I saw my brothers as twins. They wore the same expression—confused.
©Joan Heck Spilman. All rights reserved.
