“They take everything,” my mother said. “And all that material is just going to get soiled. Or perforated.”
So, once during those years, she and Mrs. Schmidt, who was the wife of Holt’s one doctor after Marcellus Packer died of a stroke in the tavern, drove in my mother’s car to shop in the big stores in Denver, and they managed to find a pair of stockings apiece and a few dresses. But the trip to Denver turned out to be a one-time affair, a single charge. When Doc Schmidt found out where his gas coupons had gone he was not exactly ecstatic. If nothing else he stopped leaving his coupons out in the open on his dresser top. So what I remember of the hurried-up victory celebration on the football field in 1945—the band played marches, I remember; the mayor spoke and there were preachers on the wood platform—all that is mixed up with the memory of my mother’s anticipation of stocked shelves again, dresses and hats. “Thank God,” she said, when we heard about the armistice on the radio. And I don’t guess the only thing she had in mind was the end of killing. But then I don’t suppose she was the only one who felt that way, either. Maybe she was a little more honest, that’s all. Because to do her justice, it was what she had to live on.
In different ways my dad suffered over the war, too. There was that bad business with Edith and the tractor because of the war—I mean Lyman would never have managed to jump up and run off if there hadn’t been a war—but there was also the fact that my dad had spent enough nights drinking and fighting to have a pretty good idea of what men could do to one another for no reason; and now with the war they had a reason, and they were actually being trained and encouraged to do more than just hit one another in the face. So, while I can’t say much of that touched me hard, I believe it made my dad sick. He hated it. And sometime back I think I said he wasn’t a man who laughed a lot—well, now he didn’t seem to laugh at all. On the other hand, to do him justice too, he must have made some money during those years. The cattle market stayed steady with the increased need for meat, and he went on castrating calves and experimenting with seed bulls and hauling fat cattle to the sale barn. I suppose he learned to live with the connection between his raising beef and all that blood being spilled in Europe.
THAT LEAVES ME. And like it or not I can see you’re going to have to hear some more about Sanders Roscoe. It’s the price you pay for asking questions about Edith Goodnough.