Long Road to California Read online

Long Road to California

  by

  Myanne Shelley

  PUBLISHED BY:

  TITLE

  Copyright © 2014 by Anne Shelley

  Chapter 1

  Vera Mae Dreaming

  Sleep was ever more elusive in Vera Mae’s 88th year, but her dreams came bold and frequent, sometimes difficult to distinguish from reality. Though who could really judge. Reality meant long hours of stillness and quiet, aches down to her very bones, the high pitched complaints from her compatriots at the care facility and sarcastic murmurs from their underpaid caregivers. The dreams that overtook her as she hovered between sleep and awake – and maybe even between this world and the next – seemed quite as real.

  Early morning, barely enough light to separate objects from shadows and nothing to show colors at all, Vera Mae found herself in bed, but in her childhood bed. The room narrow, her bed pushed up by that window that never shut all the way, the tight row of her siblings’ beds along side her. The bed was small but so was she – her arms little twigs extending from her raggedy nightgown, its lacy sleeves torn from too many washings.

  She was just a girl, twelve maybe, always skinny and all the more so back on the farm, during those hard years. It was the start of the dust storms. The strange stillness had woken her, the stillness before the winds howled. The family had barely cleaned up from the last one. They were still new, abnormal, and everybody thought then that each new storm would surely be the last.

  Her older brothers, sprawled across their double bed, seemed to have a dozen lanky limbs between them. Nellie was there – little Nellie alive! Sleeping peacefully on her trundle, her small perfect fist curled in front of that dainty bow shaped mouth. Vera Mae stood above her, gazing down, willing herself to stay in this moment.

  But when she lifted her eyes, the storm was rolling towards the window, faster than a steam train hurtling down a track. Faster than anything she had ever seen. The roiling dark mass extended to the sky; it reached the window and rattled it like death arriving. The window couldn’t stop the dust, and Vera Mae felt it coming, covering her skin and burrowing deep into her lungs. She woke – really woke – coughing,

  Chapter 2

  Nina’s Goodbye

  I’ve called Vera Mae Byrnes my grandma for so long that sometimes it slips my mind that the relationship is only by marriage, that she’s my husband Caleb’s grandmother. I truly love her like my own.

  Caleb and I leave on our journey tomorrow, and surely one of the down sides will be missing her while we’re gone. We’ve set her up on Skype, and showed our favorite of the Fairhaven attendants how to log her on, how to check her email. This young woman, Maya, is a joy for Grandma Vera and us both, and it worries me that she’ll find a better job, with higher pay and something close to the respect she deserves for her level of dedication.

  Vera was up and dressed when we arrived at the start of visiting hours, and she willingly accompanied us to the small parlor to sit comfortably and admire what we could of the outside garden. This used to be one of several spots Vera would go on her own; lately she’ll walk along with us, but she doesn’t seem to leave her room much otherwise.

  Walking is a chore for her. She’s quiet about it, but you can tell. She takes the tiniest of steps, leaning heavily on her thick pronged cane, eyes downward and lips pursed in concentration. I know she likes it once we get there, and that’s why I still push it. I fear most of her visitors – and she doesn’t get that many either – just accept her passivity and let her stay put.

  I’ve told her about our trip already. Of course she knows, she’s been a gentle and non-judgmental witness to the financial struggles Caleb and I have had over the past couple years as well as my frustration with my professional work. She knows the myriad reasons, at least as much as I’ve spelled them out to her, starting foremost with her precious memory box, her “collection,” as she calls it.

  Still, it comforts me to lay it out, now that the plans are final. “We’ll be gone for eight weeks altogether,” I tell her. I send a look over at Caleb, sitting awkwardly on the old fashioned chair across from us, and he nods. “Our flight to Dallas is in the morning. We’ll stay a few days with Dee, see Ginnie, and pull together all the things we need for the trip.”

  “Send my love,” Vera says, her voice a slightly hoarse whisper. Ginnie is her firstborn daughter, Caleb’s mom, and Dee is Caleb’s older sister.

  I pause to see if she wants to say anything more, and wonder if she’s having trouble talking. Or more concerning, forming the right words. I have to tamp down my urge to put in a call to the doctor or check with the staff. They’re going to have to sort this out themselves. That’s what they’re here for.

  “Then we’ll head out from Dallas and up to the Kansas line, see if we can find where the old farmstead was. We’ll pick up the interstate that’s replaced Route 66 at Amarillo,” I continue brightly. “I expect we’ll be stopping quite often of course, even if we can’t find the exact spots. I have all the images from your collection scanned and on my laptop,” I assure her.

  I stop again, waiting, watching her until I catch a glimmer of a nod, a sense of understanding in her crystal blue eyes. Caleb glances up, wondering why I’ve stopped talking. His eyes are clear and bright like that too. Vera’s shine from deep in their sockets, penetrating out from the broad thatch of wrinkles all around them.

  “We’ll be mostly camping. They have one of those rigs that fit on the back of a truck, you know, so it should be reasonably comfortable. Staying at places with a shower and finding wifi for the computer.” I don’t think she really gets how computers work, but I say that anyway. Just in case. “I’ll send you lots of emails, and let you know when we can Skype. Once we’re on the road, it’s hard to tell how long we’ll stay where. But we’ll follow your route near as we can. We’ll stay with a couple friends along the way, and splurge for a motel now and then. Some restaurant meals. Caleb will have his radio to keep up with his games.”

  Vera extends her hand toward me, or perhaps toward my camera bag. “You’ll take the photographs,” she whispers.

  “Oh, dozens,” I answer. “Hundreds. It doesn’t matter on the digital camera, I’ll keep shooting until I get just the right shot.”

  “You could get one now,” Caleb says, straightening up on the little chair, eyes on Vera.

  She nods, a sly smile easing across her face, sitting a tiny bit taller herself. I grab the Lumix, my basic camera, from my bag, and take a step back to frame her face and upper body, away from the light of the window. I see in her expression and posture the look of a woman who once turned heads. “Get in,” I tell Caleb.

  He’s not crazy about being photographed, but he’ll do it if Grandma Vera wants it. He leans down next to her so that their faces are level. Without being asked, he knows to turn towards the light from the window.

  As I frame and focus, I’m pleased as always to see the genetic bond between them despite the generations that separate them. It’s not even that many years – Vera Mae was only 22 when Ginnie was born, and Ginnie had Caleb at 21. Anyway, both are slender but sinewy and strong, with bright blue eyes and rosy skin that easily freckles. Caleb has worked to keep himself in shape for sports; he’s loved everything about baseball apparently since birth. And while Vera has slowed down a lot, even now you can see her grit and determination to do whatever she sets her mind to. As a younger woman, she was quite physically active, raising four kids and growing a huge garden of food, harvesting and canning it all herself, plus taking on every imaginable do it yourself project.

  In the pictures in her collection, she looks permanently in motion. Carrying her
younger brother or cousins, hauling wood or laundry or just picked food, bounding to the top of some landmark for a look around, helping her brothers push the old jalopy.

  How I wish she could come along with us. I grin to myself, imagining the looks we’d get dragging Grandma Vera up to the top of some boulder, trying to recreate a faded black and white snapshot taken with a brownie camera in the spring of 1937. Watching her sink back down on her chair, though, I can see it was a strain even to pose for these quick pictures. I’ll put us in the re-creations, I tell myself, or passersby.

  “Lucia?” Vera asks. “Still in school?”

  “She’s taking her regular classes, Grandma,” Caleb answers. “Studying hard, as usual.”

  Lucia is our 19 year old daughter. “She’s got a nice little place in Davis,” I add. “Three roommates to keep her company, and we’ll only be a cell phone call away.” I keep my voice completely nonchalant, as I’ve tried to with Lucia this whole time.

  Of course she’ll be fine, she’s been away at college for a year and a half already. She insisted on skipping tenth grade and going early. We’ve paid her portion of the rent up front. She has a job on the campus for spending money. Emergencies, she can call us. Or any time, as she already does. “I’m hoping she can come by and see you,” I tell Vera. “She’s planning to come down for a party next month, she’ll stay over with her friends.”

  Vera nods. Her brows are knitted. I think it bothers her that we aren’t taking Lucia with us, that our small family will be apart for so long. It’s less than a normal semester at college, I’d like to point out. Lucia too has her reservations – but her angle is that the house will be occupied, unavailable to her.

  Frankly, that’s a huge plus for us, for our finances: we’ve been renting out our spare room above the garage through Airbnb, and a regular who’d been visiting the Cal campus arranged to rent the whole house for him and his wife for two months. He’s a gem – he’ll even oversee the regular room rentals for us as part of the deal. It will net us more than I’d make, staying home and working.

  But all Lucia understood was that her childhood home would be off limits, and she was at first as indignant as if we had taken away her phone. We haven’t shared all of our financial woes with the girl, but enough to make her see that bringing in this money was more important than the small inconvenience.

  Enough with the worries, I tell myself again. It’s only temporary. By the time we get back we should have more money in the bank than we started with, the job market will hopefully have loosened up a bit for Caleb, and his knee healed. Caleb is a landscape architect, wonderfully talented, but unfortunately his trade is in the high end sorts of jobs that have been sparse these past years. He had bad timing with joining and investing in the launch of a rather exclusive new firm just at the start of the big recession. It failed spectacularly, and Caleb, I think, feels his reputation has been tainted from his brief association.

  I watch him chatting with Vera, wishing he could lose that tension in his posture, the way his shoulders look hunched and defensive even seated. For most of our years together, he’s been the loose one, the funny one, the partner I look to for comic relief. The past couple years have been roughest on him. He’s a bit anxious about the trip too, I suppose. In addition to the work and knee stuff. I know he’s excited about the adventure, but it pains him that he has to sit out all season from his softball team, and that he can’t follow every game of the Giants and A’s.

  But it’s eight weeks. For God’s sake, we’ll be on the road for less time than Grandma Vera’s family spent completing their journey west in the first place, our nominal reason for choosing this route and destination. Technically, we’re delivering a used pick up truck from Dee and her husband to a second cousin in the valley who’s buying it for use in the summer.

  Really, my goal is my art. I want to create a then and now series of images of that capture the essence of that massive migration from the dust bowl era. Using Vera’s collection as a start, we’ll retrace her steps, try to find the places, sketch in some details about the people, who they were and where they went and who they are now. Caleb and the rest of them think it’ll be a nice little thing for the family. I fantasize about skyrocketing sales and widespread recognition from publishing a gorgeous coffee table book.

  Even small sales. Even a tiny bit of recognition. For too long now, years that have stretched to decades, I have set aside my photography, my original love. I’ve poured any creative energy into my job, into developing and keeping clientele, into raising Lucia. I extended my small innate talent for images, shapes and colors to build better web portals and branding for small businesses that I hardly care about. The occasional discounted nonprofit job to salve the guilt from my former activist self.

  But so little time, so little energy left over for taking pictures, even as the digital technology has exploded. Even now when anyone with a smart phone snaps and posts pictures of their breakfasts online.

  This is going to change, this I’ve promised myself. For all the downer news, the tough choices Caleb and I have made, I can at least get something out of this, the second year of our personal financial crisis. We sold our second car, cut off cable, stopped taking vacations that didn’t include a foldout couch in somebody’s house, dumped our share of the season Giants tickets. But I kept my cameras and my ibook.

  Flipping it open now, I ask Vera if she’ll take a last quick look at the digital images, just see if the basic order is right, if anything else jumps out at her from the somewhat grainy shots and faded images of news clippings, pamphlets, handbills.

  “My eyes aren’t what they were,” she says sternly, but belies her words by firmly motioning me to hold the laptop right in front of her.

  The very first image makes her laugh: a swirling out of focus shot of some kids, her cousins, dashing after chickens. This is back in southwestern Kansas, on their farm.

  But she sobers as I click through the next set of photos. Her Uncle Stan took all these. He was, I understand, the driving force that got the whole family moving, the one with a tiny bit more means to support the group as they undertook on their journey. Vera’s own family was terribly poor to start with, trying to farm in that barren dry land. They’d barely been scraping by before the dust storms hit. And then her little sister had gotten sick and died, further devastating the family. Uncle Stan had pushed both families along toward California, and the promise of a better life. And he had – how I wish I had known him, could thank him now – proudly documented the trip with his trusted camera.

  Here they are all grouped by the two vehicles, the caravan, as Vera called it in her neat cursive note across the back of the photo. The men, Uncle Stan and Vera’s father, stand tall and determined, arms propped along the open backs of their impossibly loaded cars. Vera’s mother and aunt stand on either side of the men, the aunt with her youngest child on her hip. Vera and the other kids are arranged haphazardly in the car backs, looking as though the slightest bump in the road could tumble them out. It appears dangerous even to me, and I was raised in the era before rear seatbelts, when kids bounced around in the backs of station wagons and no one thought anything of it. Vera is 16 in this picture, but looks much younger. All children are scrawny. Her older brothers are tall but boyish, long awkward limbs hanging from too short sleeves. The cousins and her younger brother crowd together, hard to tell apart.

  The cars look ancient, like something a museum would reject for being too implausible to possibly even have run. But the next pair of pictures show each car starting off, dust billowing behind and frantic hands waving out the sides. There are a couple shots of the farm too, depressing wide vistas of bare land with nothing growing. The dilapidated farmhouses – dusty and weather beaten, nothing you’d miss, I imagine.

  I click through these faster; I don’t think Vera likes to dwell on them. Quickly past what she calls campsites, which to me look lik
e just dusty lots, no shade in site, but where they stopped a few days here and there. The roads were not freeways back then. Some were barely paved. The cars broke down, or the men got a couple days hard labor. In one shot, all the men and boys are hauling something – train trestles maybe? Vera can’t remember, but identifies it as the place where they helped build a side of the road camp. They look fried from the sun, overheated and sweating, muscles straining, yet they all grin at the camera.

  I watch her eyes for recognition, for reaction. She nods almost imperceptibly at a few images; others just make her look vacant or sad.

  “Wait, that one,” she says suddenly. “That belongs later. We didn’t meet those fellows until we were almost to California.” She’s staring at the picture, leaning forward.

  The image is of Vera’s brothers and two rather brawny young men who are all leaning on shovels or rakes next to a ditch. One has a hat rakishly drooping past one eyebrow. “Who are they, Vera?” I ask. “You didn’t have a note on that one.”

  “Reno. That’s Reno.” Her voice is hushed.

  “But you were way south of Reno, do you mean Las Vegas?”

  “No, dear, that’s his name. Reno’s in the hat. That’s his younger brother Smitty. That’s when we first met, it was just before we reached California. We needed to stop and fix the cars, get reconnoitered before we crossed the state line. They were there too, doing the same. Fine fellows.”

  “Do they turn up later? He doesn’t look familiar.”

  “No, not in these pictures, I’m afraid. But we all were together in ’38, a picking.”

  I wait for her to say more, but she’s done. I jot a quick note about the names – we’ll have to query further when we get to that point. The clippings and pamphlets aren’t worth trying to have her look at – the print is small even for me. Vera looks tired, I realize. She’s no longer focusing on the images as I scroll through them. Well, I’ll be following up, shot by shot, as we go along.

  I click to the end: the last image is a pdf of a jolly placemat with garish images of landmarks along Route 66, something clearly from later, probably the 1950s. Vera’s eyes crinkle almost shut as she laughs her joyous laugh. “Oh, that, they sent me that, one of the cousins, much later,” she says. “Oh my dears. It was nothing like that.”

  I start to close the laptop, but she reaches out a tentative arm to stop me. “Caleb, I wonder if you could find me a tissue?” she asks. The minute he’s out of earshot, she says, “Let me see that one again. Reno and the boys.”

  Puzzled, I click back. “Oh, Nina,” she whispers. “It hurts to see that, but I want to keep looking at it. That’s all that’s left, I’m afraid. I had my letters, but they’re all gone now. I can’t really say much about him, it’s not right, not appropriate to the family, you see. But he was my first love.”

  Caleb returns and Vera turns away from the screen, towards him with a warm smile. She takes the tissue and dabs her eyes. Glances at me and shakes her head, obviously doesn’t want to say more or to be asked more. At least not in front of Caleb. But how can I not follow up on this? Supposedly she married her first love, Caleb’s grandfather, the long departed Grandpa Walt, in a quick blooming romance just before he shipped off in the army in World War II.

  As we get ready to say goodbye, her words stay with me. It was nothing like that. But what was it really like, I wonder.