Betty likes to hear people talk about cash—who has it, had it, got it, lost it; how it might be acquired. She could have been a great deal maker; in another era, she would have ruled.
When her father died, a few years before I was born, Betty inherited, with my grandmother and her brothers, the four Baker Lumber yards—in Madison, Paris, Mexico, and Moberly. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, in my grandmother’s bare dining room, with its ringed but sturdy mahogany table, Mammy and her children circled to talk things out about the business, bent over paperwork. My father was never invited; he was not an official partner, but an employee, not in on significant decision making. Around the time I entered eighth grade, the Madison yard, which my father managed, started losing money. Mammy, always expecting financial cataclysm, looked agonized if it was mentioned; they all tried to hide what she would envision as the start of the family’s inevitable journey to the poorhouse.
Eavesdropping as was my habit, I heard them make the decision to close the yard, and though they saw that times were bad for all businesses in the area, they blamed my dad, at least a bit. Bill assessed my father’s performance with a jeweler’s eye for flaw, said Daddy wasted too much time laughing with customers. Levity on the job was to him tantamount to embezzlement. Years before, during a painful, days-long session of labor, Bill, lying on his back on the top of a scaffolding platform, painted the tin ceiling of our hardware store, a grueling feat that damaged his back for life. Up at all hours, he never stopped; he basked in misery.
My mother, listening with a stony expression, looked furious at everyone, those in the room and, I was certain, one who was not.
. . .
After the yard closed in Madison in 1973, my father labored at the Paris yard with Uncle Harry, where I was forced to work too that summer. We were still living in Madison—our new home in Paris was still being built. Big George and I left the house every morning at 6 a.m. for the twelve-mile drive to Paris. “Time to make the doughnuts,” my father said to me when he dragged me, reluctant and surly, out of bed for a Pop-Tart as he picked bits of Grape Nuts out of his teeth nervously. When we arrived at the lumberyard, he slammed the car door and headed in with his pocket full of pencils and a tape measure clipped to his belt. He never said much on our way to work those mornings; he seemed like a soldier heading into battle. He was different, disappointed.
In Madison, my father had whistled down Main Street in his dusty work boots, swatting the town’s working women, all lipsticked and beehived, on their big, cheeky butts with his clipboard full of paint orders. I can see him standing in streaks of sun, slightly wobbly from a few beers and completely sweat-soaked with a hand-lettered sandwich board, accosting passing motorists whom he berated to buy chicken at the annual Lions Club Memorial Day barbecue.
Across town, in her darkened bedroom, my mother, who had long before ceased her efforts to control his antics, attempted to sleep away her embarrassment as he transformed the greater part of the Lions membership into a brazen mob of drunken boys who danced to a portable radio with bosomy, rouged-up women way into the night, in the parking lot of Del Miles’s old gas station where they set up their grills.
“Oh lay me down, in your big brass bed,” my father would sing on these party nights. “Oh lay me down, in your big brass bed.” Hearing this favorite, I sensed scandal but didn’t get the words: “I’m going to Chicago to get my hambone boiled. Cause the women in St. Louie done let my hambone spoil.”
One day it dawned on me what this all meant.
“That is a dirty song, Daddy,” I said.
“Don’t go blabbing to your mother.”
The only secrets I didn’t tell were my own.
Betty avoided the Lions events. “Is it over yet?” she would ask me wearily when she rose from her bed to confront me.
. . .
At the lumberyard, I pitched in as best I could. A special patience, I discovered, is required to dust a pile of nails. I did learn to use the paint mixer successfully, spending more time than some considered necessary experimenting with color combinations. Most I managed seemed suitable for the Caribbean. Within moments, I found myself streaked with more color than a Masai tribesman. When my father saw how much paint I was going through, he looked stricken. “That cost hundreds of dollars,” he said, hoping my uncle was in his office, hunched over his papers.