Laurie Graham - The Future Homemakers of America

Betty said, ‘Audrey, would you please allow Peggy to concentrate on driving? Charity begins at home, remember?’

Audrey ignored her. ‘My idea is,’ she said, ‘we could take them things. You know, we have so much and they just have nothing. They have a can of fruit there and they don’t even have an opener. And did anybody notice an icebox?’

I said, ‘I believe they’re living in it, Aud.’

She said, ‘Well, I think a food parcel is called for. Little things that I’m sure would be appreciated. And not just food. I mean, did you see the state of her pot holder? Whaddya say, girls?’

But Lois was in a world of her own, humming a little tune. And Betty wasn’t in the mood for talking.

Ed was on the doorstep when we pulled up. Didn’t matter Sherry and Deana had been just fine, getting milkshakes with Gayle and playing hospitals and helping Crystal and Sandie to eat all of Lois’s cookies. Ed Gillis had just got a mean old mood on him, I could tell. That little dint, side of his jaw, was popping in and out.

‘Time you call this?’ he said, and Betty hurried right on in, clutching her pictures of the Duke of Cornwall. She didn’t even say ‘Goodbye’.

‘Okay, girls. Here’s what I got so far.’ Audrey was getting ready to air-drop supplies for Kath and John.

‘Cheez Whizz, Sugar Pops, Campbell’s Soup, two cans of franks, can opener, Oreos, nylons, Chesterfield’s …’

I said, ‘I don’t think they use smokes. All that time we were pacing the floor there, I never seen any sign of cigarettes.’

‘Well maybe they’d like the chance to start,’ she said. ‘Jeez, Peg, I’m just trying to help. Then I got cornflakes and Pepsodent, and I thought we could throw in a fifth of Dewar’s.’

Gayle said, ‘How about cupcakes? Can they get Hostess cupcakes?’

She was real keen for us to take her out there, introduce her to Kath and John, ’cause all she’d heard from us since we got back was about them sleeping in their kitchen and having a open-air privy. Course, Gayle was from Carolina, almost into Tennessee, so she could just have been feeling homesick.

Betty was grounded. The way she told it, it was her own wish to spend more time making their quarters into a real home. She showed me some damnfool thing she’d done with a folding table, General Issue, and a mile of pink cretonne, sent her by her cousin.

‘See,’ she said, ‘I just made it up like a skirt, cover those ugly old legs, then I thumbtacked it down, with this real pretty wrapping paper to cover the top. Now if I can get my hands on a nice piece of bevelled glass, I’ll have the darlingest dressing table on the base.’

I said, ‘You okay, Betty? Ed’s not giving you a hard time?’

‘I’m just fine,’ she said. ‘Now, you give my best regards to Kath and John, and I’d like you to take them a little something from me.’ She handed me that bar of Ivory soap like it was a piece of the True Cross.

We drove out one morning, after I dropped Crystal. Betty said she’d have loved to mind Sandie, only Deana and Sherry had caught some terrible skin condition, highly contagious, got it in the school yard, rubbing up close to urchins probably never seen a bath tub in their lives, so they were home, painted with violet-coloured lotion, grizzling and tormenting each other. So Sandie came with us, sitting in the back with her mom and Gayle, begging for more when Lois rolled down the window, pretending she could hear the Thing out there, coming to get us.

John Pharaoh was home alone. ‘Not here,’ he said, pacing up and down. ‘She’s working at the singling, but do you drive over Brakey way, you’ll see her. She’s at the Mayday Shed. Hello, tuppence. You want to see what I got?’

Sandie ran off with him and Lois followed her. Gayle helped Audrey carry the food parcels inside, and I just leaned against the trunk of the car and watched some little bird that was hovering and singing about a mile over my head.

‘Skylark,’ Audrey said, when she came outta the house.

Gayle said, ‘Ain’t this place something! I mean, my folks don’t have much, but they got a TV at least. They got a car. These guys gotta be real poor.’

Aud said, ‘And they sleep in their kitchen, I hope you noticed.’

Gayle said ‘Oh, folk do that in Boomer. When we were all home there was eleven of us. Girls head to tail in the kitchen bed ’cause girls gotta be up first. Where’d he say she was today?’

She was at Mayday. It was one of the beet farms. That’s what she did. Little jobs here and there, whatever was going, according to the season.

I wouldn’t have minded some kind of work myself, ’stead of sitting indoors reading my stars in the same old magazines over and over, but when you marry the military you become a Dependent Wife, and DWs weren’t allowed to work. Your job was to stand by your bunk, wait for him to come home from Beer Call and tell you another thousand different ways he’d put his hide on the line up in the big blue yonder. How things have changed.

I found out later, from Kath, that singling beets wasn’t no exciting career. You just stood in a shed with a bunch of women, all Jexes or Gotobeds, splitting up the clusters of sugar-beet seeds, chopping them up and getting paid nickels and dimes.

‘That’s not hard,’ she said, ‘that’s just boring. Then August, I go tater riddling. That’s hard and boring.’

I asked her one time, ‘How come you’re out working and John stays home?’

‘He works when he can,’ she said. ‘But he’s not a strong man. He’s got bad nerves. He’s under Dr Brameld, but he can’t do nothing for them though by the seem of it. He catches eels, though, and sells them. When the eels are running, he does well at them. And that’s an early start, up at four, emptying the traps. Then he has to get them down to Brandon, in time for the pick-up. He makes traps. Cuts the willow. Strips it. They come from all over to buy his traps. A man come all the way from Welney looking for John to make him a willow grig.’

It seemed like John Pharaoh was a regular little eager beaver. I kinda wished I’d never asked.

Anyways, that was where he’d disappeared to with Lois and Sandie that morning, showing them around his eel-trap empire, making little Sandie squeal with his tray of lugworms. We found them while we were showing Gayle the privy, giving her the full guided tour, like it was the Alamo. Sandie peeping out from behind Lois, daring herself to go and take a close-up look at the worms, and John holding up a basket, shape of a pickle, but six foot high.

You ever sin one big as this?’ he said, giving Lois a knowing smile, and she roared.

‘See,’ she said, when we were driving home, via Brakey, looking for something that might be a beet shed, ‘see, they catch different kinds, depending on the time of year. And sometimes they use nets and traps, and sometimes they use … like a spear, and just catch them one at a time, and sometimes, on a good night, they might catch twenty pounds of them, just in one of those baskets, and the big traps are called grigs but the little ones are called hoileys, and … what else … ?’

‘Tune in same time next week,’ Audrey said, ‘for the Wonderful World of Eel Fishing presented by Lois Moon.’

‘I understand this right?’ Vern said. ‘You drove out there, guzzling gas, took half the commissary and a bottle of good liquor too, and she wasn’t even home?’

I said, ‘Yeah. Must have put fifteen mile on the clock. Jeez, you’re starting to sound like Ed Gillis. He’s got radar-tracking on Betty.’

‘Know what’s good for you, you’ll stay outta Ed and Betty’s business,’ he said. ‘Know what’s good for you, you’ll quit running round, fraternising with a bunch of breeds. Hell, Peg, why can’t you stay home and make a pie once in a while?’