Exodus from Podunk

I remember my Mama packing us up from my dad’s place in Fort Wayne, for a trip to a place called Clifty Falls over in Jefferson County, Indiana. We were ultimately headed for Augusta, Georgia to stay with my grandmother, but mom opted for a detour. Clifty Falls was a place to hike, enjoy the scenery and to be in nature. Mama felt that being outside would be good for us, since we didn’t look like we felt well when she picked us up.

My mother had a late 60’s model Green Ford van. It had two cushy seats up front and a HUGE bump in between them, (I didn't know that was an engine housing called a "Dog House" until recently). One of mom’s friends had made a “Caddy” out of wood for things like drinks, cigarettes, maps, etc., and mounted it on the dog house for her. It was well oiled and stained to match the wood accents on the dashboard.

Mom got the van at a great price and had plans to fix it up, but since she hadn’t done that yet, the back of it was hulled out into nothing but a metal shell with four walls and no windows. Ordinarily she would have it loaded up with band equipment for the next gig, but this was all about us, so it had rugs, bean bag chairs and a big cooler in it. Rolled up sleeping bags donned one corner and it looked like she had planned this thing out in great detail.

It seemed like we were in that van for days, even though I know it was only about a 3- or 4-hour trip. I rode up front with my mother, having promised to navigate, and my younger brother and sister were trying to rest in sleeping bags in the back, even though they kept moaning that they didn’t feel well.

Mama had set a course with her map and had planned to the very moment when our “halfway” point would be. As the trip wore on though, my stomach waged war with my body for over an hour before I finally broke down and asked if we could go to the bathroom. Mom, determined to keep her schedule, asked if we could hold on just a little longer. Our mid-way stop was only about 20-minutes or so up the road.

Let me just say, we didn’t have GPS back then. Mom had trips planned to places she had been and wanted to take us, because that way, she knew where the best and safest places were to take bathroom breaks and walk around for a minute.

I hadn’t seen my mother in weeks and I didn’t want our first outing in that time to be a disappointment to her so I said I would hold it. I took a deep breath and pinched. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t get any moisture to swallow and there wasn’t anything in the cooler yet, because we hadn’t gotten to the store where she would have liked to buy anything.

Less than five minutes had gone by when my brother stood straight up.

I had heard a little rustling prior to that and turned to see what was going on back there. His white-blonde hair was tussled and standing up from static electricity and his eyes were as big as silver dollars.

“Mom”, I said.

“It’s just a little farther.” she put in, crushing out her cigarette in the ash tray.

“Mom.” I said again. “Louis looks sick.”

Mom’s eyes crested the rear-view mirror so she could see him. His skin was pale and he was shaking.

“Are you ok?” She asked. “Hold on just a little farther.” She told him. “We’re almost at a good place to stop.”

My brother attempted to nod, but as he did, I think the motion of the van was too much for him because he fell to his knees. My mom looked at me worried.

“Can you scoot back there and make sure he’s alright?” she asked.

Nodding, I crawled over her giant thermos perched in the wooden caddy and got down on my knees next to my little brother. I softly rubbed his back with my hands to soothe him and told him everything was going to be ok. He was probably four-years-old at the time and the baby of the bunch. It literally broke my heart to see him looking so frail. He looked up at me with giant tear-filled blue eyes… and threw up all over me.

My sister heard the commotion and jumped up to help. She was only five herself and was sick too. I was working really hard not to be sick, and was grateful someone was back there with me who wasn’t covered in vomit. My brother was still throwing up when my sister realized what was going on and she joined the foray. Before I knew what hit me we were all doing it.

My mother at that moment, hit the gas. There was no WAY she was pulling over until she got somewhere that we could get out for a while at this point. She rolled her window down and stuck her head out.

We finally arrived at our destination, a small mom & pop style grocery store just next to a camper park, and my mom couldn’t get out of the van fast enough. She threw the side doors open to let us out and let me tell you, we were a MESS! After she caught her breath from the horrid smell, Mama thought it over for a second, and then told us to stay put while she went into the grocery store.

She came back with paper towels, soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, and then pulled around to the side of the building where the grocer said she could use the hose. We got out of the van and all three of us, weak-kneed and stinking, sat down in the dirt to rest while mom, (with a bandanna tied over her nose), pulled everything out of the van.

She had to go inside and ask the grocer for a spray nozzle and then bought a bottle of Lysol to clean everything with and some garbage bags to put all of the blankets and stuff in. I watched all of this in misery, feeling responsible for the mess. If I had held onto my own cookies the mess wouldn't have been as bad and mom wouldn't have had to work so hard.

I was still lost in my own personal misery when mom finished, turned around and looked at us, then sighed, pulling the bandanna off.

"It's ok." she told us. "Everybody gets sick. I've got the van cleaned out and there are plenty of clean blankets back there. You guys will be ok. We just have to get you cleaned up."

I flushed red. Cleaning up a 4 or 5 year-old kid outside with a hose was fine and dandy but, but I was ten and had no intention of baring anything behind a grocery store.

Mom cleaned the other two up, got them into some clean pajamas and put them to sleep with some children's aspirins to help with the fever.

Once my siblings were taken care of, mom started looking for my bag and didn't see it anywhere. I helped look for it for a few minutes, when I realized I had forgotten it and didn't have anything clean to put on. I just wanted to die. All I wanted to do was spend some time with my mom and everything was ruined, most of it my fault. I stood there for a moment, feeling hot and tired, stinking like throw up, and my chin started quivering.

"No." Mom cautioned me in a hushed tone. "You'll wake them up and they need their rest."

I wanted to crawl into a hole and literally never come out, but I shook it off for them.

Mom took me inside, where the store owner let me use their restroom to clean up. Mom had travel shampoo and washed my hair in the sink. She helped me get cleaned up, and then went to the van to get her own bag.

She had a skirt suit that was pretty tight on her and with the help of a couple of safety pins from her singing clothes, she managed to make it look like a good fit. My shoes were beyond help even more than my brother's, so she gave me a pair of her red, slip-on shoes to wear. I may have been sick, but now that the fever and the unending wave of vomit was gone, I felt pretty hot in that polka dot outfit.

Mama bought us a box of saltine crackers and a couple six-packs of 7-UP, and got back into the van. After a few minutes she made the decision to take us to Clifty Falls in the morning. I guess her original plan was to visit Clifty Falls, stay the night and then head to Georgia the next morning, but since we were all too sick to enjoy it, she drove to the Horne's Lodge just down the road and we stayed the night.

The room was small, just one bed and a chair, but the desk clerk saw fit to let mom have the room she could afford and not list two of us. Mom packed us kids into the bed and then sat in the chair, where he slept the night through.

I woke up in the dark some hours later with no idea where I was. I almost called out for my dad, when I realized I was wearing my mother's gown and the memory of the earlier events washed over me.

I slipped out of bed and tip-toed to the bathroom. Once I finished, I slipped back out into the room and saw my mom asleep in that chair. The light from the street lamp outside highlighted her hair in the dark and I felt so bad for her. The things a mom had to do for their kids could be so awful, and she still had been so nice to us about it all. If that had happened in my dad's Oldsmobile, there would have been screaming, cussing, forehead veins bulging and lots of things thrown out of the car. I was both mortified and grateful this happened on mom's watch.

In the morning while we were all getting ready and I was safety-pinning on mom's skirt suit, she counted her money, arranged her things and started getting ready for the trip. She called my dad collect and asked him if he would send the bag with my clothes in it, to which he agreed. She told him how sick we were and that we had red bumps all over us this morning. Then she asked him if he had noticed if we had gotten into something or not. Dad apologized to mom, (according to a conversation I had with mom later), and said some of the kids we had been playing with had come down with the measles and we probably had them too.

I heard the word "bumps" and lost my mind. I ran to the bathroom mirror and almost fainted when I saw how swollen my face was. Tiny welts and bumps covered patches on my cheeks and chest and I just sat down and cried. That trip couldn't have gotten any worse.

Then mom called my grandma, (maw-maw), to ask her what she should do.

Not long after that, mama took us back to the store from the day before, bought some calamine lotion, then drove to a Western Union. She came out of there with a little more pep in her step. Now that I'm grown, I know Maw-Maw sent her some cash to come home on but at the time, I didn't know what a Western Union was and was so sick, I didn't care.

Mom pulled a different set of maps from the glove box and started working on our new course. We weren't going to make it to Clifty Falls. She was heading home. She asked us to just lay down and rest, and with the meds she had in us, sleeping wasn't hard to do.

I still remember the first time we pulled up at my grandmother's after leaving Horne's all those miles ago. Our great-uncle, Luke was leaning against a lacey white brick fence in my grandma's front yard. His slim, sinewy silouhette reminded me a little bit of a cowboy, even though he was wearing an olive-green khaki uniform and a trucker's hat. Sun-darkened skin tightened into crow's feet as his sharp eyes addressed each of us wordlessly while we climbed out of the van. We were still something of a motley mess, groggy from travel and dehydrated from fever.

His steely grey eyes kind of roved over my mother for a moment as she got out and said hello to him.

He dropped what was left of his hand-rolled cigarette in the dirt and shook his head as he crushed it out with his heavy boot.

"Did you think we were running a dog-pound here?" He snickered at mom, thinking himself terribly clever.

Without missing a beat, mom said:

"I wouldn't dream of letting them stay at your place, but thanks anyway." And it was like that between those two for the rest of their lives.

My mom was still a liberated, self-possessed, educated lady when we arrived, but it didn't take long living there with my Uncle Luke for that to disappear. They were always at each other, either verbally or playing pranks but always, they loved each other.

We never did make it to Clifty Falls, but we didn't miss it, either. My dad decided to deliver my things in person and we had the time of our lives as a family, then he was gone again.

It was a bittersweet parting when he did go. Mama was misty-eyed once he was gone, and he was already the same before he left. It's sad to watch your parents walk away from each other when there's still love between them, but what can you do when you're a kid? As an adult, I see that tenderness they shared as something that was directly tied to us kids. When they were with us, they could do anything, but if it was just the two of them, they couldn't, and therein lie my mother's dilemma.

Their decision to part ways brought my siblings and me south to scratch out an existence on a poor-man's farm, always hungry, always labor-weary, wearing things overly worn and always dancing with want and sorrow like some marionette waiting for the next reel to start... but I'd be hog-tied and monkey stomped if I was going to let my life continue in the cycle. The day I watched mama wave a tearful goodbye to my dad's Oldsmobile as he drove away from the dirt farm, I started planning my exodus.