Long Road to California Read online

  Chapter 13

  Vera Remembering

  Vera Mae hears noises outside the room. Faint voices, and for a moment she can’t recall where she is in the slightest. The bedcovers are strewn about, as if her young cousin has yanked them away. But that was so long ago, they aren’t camped by the side of the road. Is it that awful old shack they crowded into, steps from the cotton farm? The little trailer they rented after Jed took off for the city? Her apartment in Oakland, the house in Modesto? All she knows is the darkness.

  There is the familiar sound of a loaded tray rattling, and Vera places herself at Fairhaven, her life and possessions back to one little room. Her mind settles and her body relaxes back toward sleep.

  All the talk with her visitors has stirred up memories. Telling them about the days after Pearl Harbor and her wedding day, no wonder she’s a bit muddled. To explain the story of her marriage to Walt, you had to understand those prior years. The Depression, the drought, leaving Kansas and the dust bowl. To know Walt, you had to stretch back to the hardships he endured too. His journey across, running parallel to hers, all the same burdens and more. He had no older brothers, no Uncle Stan – he grew up fast, had to labor like a grown man from the time he turned 12.

  She tries to recall what he looked like the first time they met. But all she remembers are the photographs from that stop, the first long layover on their trip. Walt, her brothers, other sons of farmers who had left Kansas and were heading west, small images, faint, black and white.

  Instead, her drowsiness overcomes her and she is there with them herself, on the road. As they got farther west, routines emerged, even out there where you hardly knew what to expect with each new day. Almost floating above, Vera Mae sees herself helping load up the cars, racing with her brothers to get the tarps up and the mattresses tied down. Then they are driving and she feels the bumps, the rhythmic bouncing that lulled them into a sleepy, hungry stupor near every afternoon. The hot air blowing, the dirt.

  Before they reached the California border, they came upon a whole load of people camped by a long stretch of river. Vera thinks she can hear the rush of the river. Shouts from the children as they rushed in to douse themselves in the clear fresh water, sighs from the ladies as they lay themselves down after, resting before doing the washing, rounding up their kids, figuring out how to stretch their meager food into a filling dinner.

  Strangers suddenly friendly. No need for shyness when they were all banging the dirt out of their clothes together. Laughing, delighting in the sensation of being purely clean, knowing they had left the dust storms back behind them. The boys, finding work, helping steer the river away from the best flats for camping. They had all met Reno and Smitty there, on the banks of that wide river. Boys and girls took a fancy to each other all up and down those clean river banks.

  Vera sees their faces: the rawness in them. Sunburned and lined, brows furrowed to permanent frowns. Thin, those people were, but muscled. Not a one especially pretty or handsome, but each fierce and gritty and resolute. All of them absolutely determined to make their way to a better place and to earn their keep fair and square. That steadfast resolve made the fellows like Reno look well enough, though the years that followed were a trial as far as finding steady work.

  She drifts a bit, nestling deeper into her covers and picturing Walt as she knew him just before the war. He would put on a smile when he came to see her. And she would try to rouse herself too. She felt the loss of Reno keenly then, hourly it seemed, but she knew Walt had a double dose – both of his parents dying one after the other. Every day, she put one foot after the other, numb. But driven to earn her keep, to turn away from the long hard seasons when the only jobs were picking, and then few of those to be had. And Walt worked hard too; hard work surely a way to set aside his losses. He wouldn’t realize it when his sorrow showed on his face. Sitting together, their conversations dwindled to silence, was more comforting than she could have guessed. Like old married people already maybe. Maybe that was why it was so easy to say yes when he asked.

  Vera shifts. The hallway has gone quiet again, though she thinks she hears the sounds of birds outside. Like the old house. She pictures Walt there, up on a ladder or out in the yard, happily fixing thing. Young people now couldn’t understand the sheer joy you could get just from having a place of your own. Walt’s folks never had owned their own place – he’d been born poor, grew up poor, got sent off to war just when things were getting better back at the end of the hard times.

  It made him appreciate a good solid job in partnership with his younger brother. A wife and kids, a house that would be paid off well before his retirement. Food on the table, a good simple meal, with coffee, and milk for the coffee, and a fresh cake or pie for dessert.

  Well, she’s the same way herself, of course. Say what you will about Fairhaven, there were three meals a day and indoor plumbing; Vera had lived with worse.

  And slow but sure, she and Walt both had lifted out of poverty and risen away from all that sorrow. Having children will do that. His surviving the war with only superficial wounds. Both of them earning enough money to open a savings account, put down a payment on a house. Growing food in her garden to eat, and having money enough to shop at the market, even splurge now and then. Fine new clothes, sturdy new cars, college funds for the children.

  Awake with the light of day slipping into the room, Vera knows without a doubt that they built a good life. In the end, she could only wish he had lived a few years longer. Seventy-three, he was, when his heart gave out. He had been ailing for several months at that point and more than once asked her not to let him linger if it came to that. So the final heart attack was as much a release for him, for them both.

  She had just turned 70. She can recall how she had felt herself to be so old then. Where now, a woman mobile, active, just 70 – why, what she wouldn’t give to trade places! She can almost feel her muscles strain as she remembers how she had pitched in to clean out the house, laughing off the children and grandchildren who insisted she sit and rest while they worked. Nonsense, she had always worked, she wasn’t about to stop, and the truth was that staying busy took her mind off the loss.

  Missing Walt after all those years of marriage was a different kind of sadness. She had seen it coming and they had spent good time together, quiet talks just like in the early days. She had all the youngsters to check in on her, to see her through. Not like Reno, which was shocking. Most people hadn’t known the depth of their feelings and near everybody assured her she was still young, she’d find someone else. She had nursed a lot of her pain in secret. Widowhood at 70 was public and respectable.

  Still, there were other feelings she needed to keep to herself. What she felt on and off throughout those years, though, was guilt. Guilt that she should have waited, she should have investigated when the news came about Reno, not just taken a stranger’s word for it. She should have found a way to go out there, then she could have learned the truth a decade before she finally did. Should have kept all his letters proudly, not secreted them away until they were lost in one of the family moves. But on top of this was guilt that she had managed a good life anyway.

  But she was entitled to that much, wasn’t she? After all she’d been through? As a younger woman, Vera Mae tended to see people, herself included, as either good or bad, as choosing either right or wrong. How she had wondered about her own character, her own choices. Many a year had passed before she realized that people are not just one way or the other. The very same person can be both, can be some of each. Circumstances change. Choices made don’t lock a person in one way or the other.

  Vera hears the cheerful voice of the fellow who delivers breakfasts, and she slowly, carefully, rises from her bed to greet the day.