Sleeping in the hayloft - Part 5
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
This is the final installment of this story.Our thanksgiving supper in our red brick house in the Enchanted Acres subdivisionin the middle of a sea of straw and mud where the developer swears in the spring there'll be bluegrass as far as they eye can see is a far cry from my grandparents' farm. There's no aunts and uncles or cousins. And there's certainly nothing enchanted in our tiny dining room with the flocked green wallpaper. Just the four of us staring at each other across the sea of food my mom has been duty-bound by tradition to prepare. Me. My sister who is infinitely better at being popular than I and who has no need to spin big lies to get kids to pay attention to her. My mother who's ladeling gravy over the pork roast while I'm wondering why we can't just have turkey like everyone else. And my dad who tells us every single day how much he despises, how much he loathes, how much he utterly hates, his job that we moved here from O-K-l-a-h-o-m-A for, and this goddamn little company town, until he makes certain we all lose any shred of hope we might have ever had or could even wish for in the whole future of our lives.
After dinner, I go do the balance beam walk on the concrete curb and pretend I am high in the mountains somewhere, out there way beyond the flat soybean fields that border our subdivision. I am an adverturess, a secret princess on a perilous journey to go meet my king. I'm already thinking up a new story for Roberta, Missy, and Bobbie. In fact, I'm telling it to myself right now. And Laurie. I see her busy fingers in my mind, trying to tell me something important, spelling it out letter by letter because I haven't learned many of the words yet. She's going to really like this one.
Sunday morning at the Crystal Avenue Baptist church I can hardly see Mrs. Kohl's white hands flashing the sign language because what she's saying is all washed up in hot, hateful tears streaming down my face, and my mom is putting her arms around me and squeezing me close to her in the hard cold pew, holding me tight while the tremors run up and down my body like knives. Mrs. Kohl forms the words as quick as lightning while Pastor Rich tells us in between sobs and chokes why Laurie wasn't in my Sunday School class this morning. And why she never will be again.
When my friend and her family were celebrating Thanksgiving last week, her grandpa, who had come all the way from Buffalo, New York to visit, returned from the only grocery store he'd been able to find open on the holiday with a pint of cream for her mom. He pulled their Buick into the garage, all in a hurry to get that whipping cream to Laurie's mom for the dessert, and he forgot to turn the ignition key off. Can you believe that? He forgot to turn the car off? The whole family went to sleep that night in their beds, and since they were all deaf as stones, they never did hear that automobile running its engine, spewing out it noxious fumes of death. And my mom says you can't smell that kind of gas.
Laurie, her brothers, her sister, her Mom, and her Dad, her grandpa from Buffalo who'd been so proud to save the pumpkin pies—they all went to sleep and never woke up, is what they said in church. I guess that's supposed to be the nicer and more delicate way of saying what happened to my friend.
When I go to bed now, after my mom kisses me goodnight, I lay awake for a while, afraid to close my eyes.
But when I do, sometimes I dream of Laurie and me together in the hayloft of the candy-apple-red barn on my grandparents' farm. We have our arms wound around each other beneath the crazy quilt my grandma made. Out hair is flecked with straw, and we whisper and giggle and tell stories, our breath little clouds in the air, until we finally fall sound asleep, completely exhausted, breathing in the aroma of sweet feed and hay, inhaling the fresh winter air slowly into our lungs, then exhaling out. And it's funny. Because in my dream, Laurie can talk. And I know her voice as sure as the world even though I've never really heard it once. As if she's always been talking to me, all along, and it's no big deal.
We wake up to a world covered in snow like the icing on my Aunt Betty's special white coconut layer cake. My grandpa saddles up one of the Belgian draft horses for us and off we go galloping into the morning light in our bare feet and flannel nightgowns, with Laurie riding behind me. Grandpa waves to us from the doorway then starts to play us an Irish jig on his fiddle, keeping time with the toe of his boot, and before you know it, the melody is turning into something about hush-a-bye and don't you cry I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart.
Good night, Laurie.
