A Ticket to the Circus Read Free Page B

by a kind family who needed twenty-two cats and fed them cream every day. I’ve always been an optimist.

    Gaynell, me, and Pickles the cat on the porch of our house in the country.
    I think life in those days was good for Mother for the most part, and for me, too. My father still worked in Little Rock, which meant he had to get up early in the morning for the hour-and-a-half commute. I guess we were poor—well, no guessing about it. Although we had cold water from a pump at the kitchen sink, we didn’t have hot running water in the house or an indoor toilet. (We did use toilet paper in theouthouse, however. My daddy used to tell me that when he was a boy on the farm, they used corncobs, red ones and white ones. You used a red one first, then you used a white one to see if you needed to use another red one.) But a lot of people didn’t have running water or indoor bathrooms, like my grandparents in the Dardanelle cotton fields. My grandma cooked on a wood burning stove like her mother and grandmother had, and like us, they used coal for heat in a black potbellied stove in the living room. Our bedrooms were icy in winter, and the only way anybody could sleep was to be nestled in a feather bed, weighed down under a big stack of quilts my grandma had made, so heavy it was a chore to turn over.
    My grandparents raised or grew everything they ate, made their own soap from rendered fat and wood ashes, and sewed some of their clothes from flour sacks, which were lovely soft cotton prints, designed by the flour companies in fifty- or hundred-pound bags for just that purpose. I still have baby clothes my grandmother made for me from flour sacks, and my own granddaughter wore them.
    The infamous year I was three, we went to Grandma’s house for Sunday dinner, as we often did, and I went out in the yard to watch her chase a chicken down and wring its neck. Then she sat with it between her knees, plucked off the feathers, cleaned it, and threw the insides into a bucket she gave to the hogs. Finally, she chopped off the feet and tossed them to me, saying, “Here, baby, you can play and make tracks in the dirt with these.” I looked at those yellow disembodied feet lying there—I was still in shock from seeing the pigs chowing down on the entrails—and got sick and threw up. I didn’t eat any chicken that day, and never touched meat of any kind again until I was around fourteen and started to date. All the kids made fun of me for ordering a hamburger without the meat. (In grade school, they liked the fact I didn’t eat meat; somebody was always vying to sit next to me in the lunchroom to ask for mine, so I was popular.) After I learned to eat hamburger, all was lost. That led to hot dogs, then chicken, then bacon and everything else.
    By the time I was in first grade, riding the big yellow bus every day, my parents decided they wanted to move to town so I could walk to school and have an easier life, so my father took out a loan and built a house two blocks from school with an indoor bathroom. Besides thewonder of the flush toilet and being able to take a hot bath without having to heat the water on the stove, we had a floor furnace. I used to stand on the furnace and let the hot air blow my skirts up, like Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate, while my bottom burned, toasty and warm. The whole house was warm, not just the spot right in front of the coal stove. And I became one of the town children. That made a big difference in my social life. I could ride my bike to visit my friends and play with the other kids on the block, running from yard to yard flying kites or playing tag or chasing lightning bugs, all the moms watching after us from their kitchen windows, until it got dark and they called us in to supper.
    There was one dark cloud in this idyllic time. My father was working on a job building a paper mill near Atkins, and he was standing underneath a huge iron slab, directing it into place, when the chains broke and the