Tallgrass Read Free Page B

Buddy had joined up. Her face had become gaunt, and she seemed tired all the time. There was gray in her blond hair, too. But Dad still told her she was the prettiest thing since strawberry ice cream, and he believed it. I suppose I knew that there was something special about my parents, although I never thought much about it. They never criticized each other like the Smiths, never argued the way Betty Joyce’s parents did. They respected each other—and me, too—and I was still hoping they wouldn’t say I’d let them down by coming to the station to watch the Japanese. There wasn’t anything as hard to take as my folks’ disappointment; now that my brother and sister were gone, I had to bear all their disappointment.
    “Oh, go on. Don’t talk so, Loyal,” Mom said.
    “Red here thinks I should say something to that reporter over there, tell him we don’t all hate the Japanese. What do you think?”
    “I think you ought not to stir up trouble. Who knows what the Jolly Stitchers would say to that?” Then she told us to come along because Granny was waiting and might wander off.
    “And how is the old lady?” Mr. Lee asked, scratching at his head. He had only a fringe of hair, and his freckled bald head was always peeling, even in the winter.
    “Granny forgets. And she frets about that. But then she forgets she forgets.” Dad sighed. “There’s things I’d like to forget right about now, so I guess she isn’t in such a bad way.”
    My grandmother had forgotten most of what had happened in the past forty years. I loved Granny, who was sweet and smelled like cinnamon and lavender powder, and sometimes wandered into my room and slept with me. That was because when my sister went off to Denver, Mom moved me out of the big bedroom we’d shared and into Granny’s room, giving Granny the front bedroom. It was sunny, and Granny could sit by the window, piecing quilt tops. “I’m making this one for Mattie,” she’d told me last week. Mattie was her sister, who’d lived in Mingo and died there in the early part of the century. Sometimes Granny forgot she had moved into the front bedroom, and then she’d go into her old room, curling up like a kitten in the bed beside me and keeping me warm. From time to time, she would snap out of her dreamy world and recall something that had happened a long time ago—or as little as a month or two ago. “I didn’t make Buddy a quilt to take off to war, because soldier boys now have good warm blankets. Remember, Buddy wrote that in his letter,” she’d said one night at dinner.
    Dad said good-bye to Mr. Lee, and as we walked away, Dad asked Mom if she’d bought the yellow material she’d had her eye on.
    “I can put that quarter to better use,” she told him.
    Dad said he didn’t guess we’d lose the farm for two bits. Besides, with the war, crops were going sky-high, and we’d be rolling in money. “Might be we could sell a little something to the Tallgrass Camp. They’re going to need eggs.”
    “Lord, Loyal, I’d hate to make money off the Japanese. I don’t know what’s people to think if we did that.”
    “Somebody has to provide them with eggs, and if we do it, those folks’ll eat choice. It wouldn’t surprise me if the government’s giving them the powdered stuff,” Dad told her. “Squirt and me will wait in the wagon with Granny whilst you buy your cloth.”
    “Perhaps I will, then. Granny favors yellow.” Mom didn’t really believe the Depression was over, and it pained her to spend money on herself, so she had to be convinced that it was going for someone else.
    “You might pick up a nickel’s worth of licorice, too,” Dad said. He and I were crazy about licorice, although nobody else in the family liked it.
    Mom went off to the dry goods—she walked slower now than she used to—while Dad and I headed toward the wagon. We had a truck, but we drove the wagon when we could to save on gasoline and tires. We were so close to town that we