I Will Not Leave You Comfortless: A Memoir

the first part

A Storm

On the last Wednesday of April, 1983, my grandmother went to a funeral. She drove from the farm to Windsor through the early afternoon sunlight, past pastures where the grass was shin high and rising, past full creeks, past newly plowed fields. In town, the last tulips bloomed in front yards and side yards, the sidewalks were swept, and the streets were shaded by leaves that as of a week ago hadn’t even been born. This was spring in Missouri.

She had heard on the radio about the thunderstorms, but there was no sign of them yet. The day was quiet. She walked from the parking lot to the church through a breeze with no hint of threat to it. She was not a nervous woman, nor unfamiliar with the storms of her part of the country. She had lived in western Missouri her whole life, and she didn’t consider changing the course of her day just because storms were near.

That said, when the funeral was over and she had played the last sustained chord on the organ, she headed straight home. Within the course of an hour, the sky had changed. The sun had slipped behind a veil of high clouds so that the day was still bright, but there were no shadows anymore. She drove west, and once she left the trees and houses of town she could see the storm clouds in front of her. They were close.

Really, it was a race. She was on a collision course with the storms, and it was simply a matter of who would reach the farm first. The clouds that were approaching were not pleasant clouds. They were black and moving fast, like the flagships of night.

She left the blacktop and headed up the gravel road. Back toward town, there was still blue sky visible. Just a little badge of it in her rearview mirror.

She had a couple of miles to go on the white, straight-shot road. Dust billowed behind her. The rumble of the tires cruising over the gravel masked any sound of thunder.

She was almost home.

At last she pulled into the driveway of the farmhouse, gathered her purse and sheet music, and got out of the car. The clouds were nearly overhead. The air was moist and stuffy, like a greenhouse. She went inside. She set her purse on the kitchen counter as a rapidly expanding whooshing sound came from all directions at once, and the house’s joints began to creak inside the walls. She looked out the kitchen window and saw the wind sweeping the yard in one sustained and still-gathering blast.

Then rain hit the panes.

She watched the storm. She moved through the strange, dusky light of the farmhouse, looking out the bedroom window, then the front door, then the side door. She thought about Grandpa, who had taken some calves to the sale barn and was now out in the storm. She thought about dinner. She thought about the funeral she’d just been to. It was one of nearly thirty she played for that year, and she hadn’t known the man well. She thought about the garden and hoped the rain wasn’t too much for it. But before long, the rain was letting up.

At 3:15, she sat down and wrote a letter to my family, as she did nearly every week.

It’s really dark, she started, looks like about 6:30 and it’s the middle of the afternoon—We’ve had a big rain this afternoon.

She heard an engine and looked through the dining room window to see Grandpa’s headlights.

Daddy took the rest of the calves to the sale this afternoon and he is just now getting home.

Sixty miles east, at that moment, I was on my way home from school. Mom had picked up Susan and me in dinky old Russellville, and now we were driving through the countryside toward our farm, followed by a car containing two of Mom’s piano students and one of their mothers.

The storm that had swept over Grandma now glowered on our horizon, and I didn’t care for it. I was a ten-year-old who knew too much about storms. They showed us informational films each year at school, films from twenty years ago, when the kids wore clothes that seemed more appropriate for church, films that strived to impart to us an awareness of the fact that tornadoes would, given the chance, kill us. The storm that faced us fit the profile of a tornado spawner if I’d ever seen one: greenish, from the southwest, April, midafternoon.

The films were clear: basements are your only hope.

We didn’t have a basement.

Mon. was such a beautiful day, Grandma continued. Washed 2 loads of clothes, the back bedroom curtains and cleaned that room. About 3 o’clock we set out 3 doz. cauliflower plants, 2 doz. broccoli—2 more rows of potatoes and 2 rows of green beans. Don’t think ever in my life it made me feel so bad, actually thought I was coming down with something.

Tue.—couldn’t do the curtains, was too windy—then last night was Sewing Club—this morn., washed the dining r. & front bedroom curtains and hung them out. . . I got all the curtains pressed before I left at 1 o’clock for the funeral, so have had plenty to do today, but did feel more normal this morn.

When we got home, I wrapped myself in a blanket, put on my fake plastic batting helmet, and went into the house’s only interior room: the sewing closet under the stairs. I could hear the piano lessons well because the piano was right next to the sewing closet door. I stood in the tiny closet and looked at the wall of shelves filled with spools, bobbins, and jars of buttons. I could hear the thunder. Muffled, thuddy thunder. And I could hear my quickened heartbeat. There was no place to sit. This was not good at all, this basementless tornado-bait farmhouse.

After several minutes, I heard the back door of the house open and close. It meant Elizabeth, my oldest sister, had made it home. I emerged to greet her, only to find not Elizabeth but the mother who had brought the piano students. She’d been waiting in her car.

I think that’s more than just a regular storm, she said to my mother. Do you have a basement?

I returned to the closet. Chewed my fingernails. Worried about Elizabeth.

Daddy planted 4 rows of sweet corn this morn. It should be well packed in the ground after this rain.

We are really proud of Elizabeth winning the trip to Wash. D.C., that’s just great. Now Darrell would you write another article for the paper for me about this and about the Distinguished Am. High School Student Award she has received—we will save all the track records for another time.

Daddy got good price for his calves, the best price was some at $74.75 (steers), had 5 bulls at $70.75, heifers at $63.30—he thought that was good for heifers. They are better prices than he got last year—

Must stop and get supper—

Love from both

Mother and Daddy

P.S. Daddy saved 4 calves to butcher—

Elizabeth, on the other hand, didn’t worry about storms.

She left school and drove through Russellville—the curbless, peeling-paint town of seven hundred. Soon she entered the countryside. Black cattle lay in the corner of a pasture. A crow wheeled over the wind-wracked trees. For Elizabeth, the drive home was always satisfying, and the pickup—especially at speeds over sixty—had a nice floaty ride. One time, the truck had raced Tom Claypool’s car. And won.

She watched the storm as she cruised along the long, open ridge of Route U. She was thankful there had been a track meet yesterday, otherwise this wouldn’t be a resting day, and she would be out on some gravel road right now, miles from school, running.

I can beat this storm, she thought and pushed the accelerator. The truck went faster.

She loved a race, and she loved to win.

She turned onto Mount Hope Road—our gravel road—just a mile and a half from the farm and faced the oncoming storm. She was going to make it. She would beat the storm home.

But the clouds were coming straight at her now, so close they filled the entire western sky, and when she crested the top of the first hill, she was met with a blast of wind so strong that it stopped the truck and sprayed gravel against the windshield.

She had time to think, So this is what a tornado is like. And she had enough calm in her—enough of the athlete’s instinctiveness—to consider the safest place for her to be at this moment.

She opened the truck door, stepped into the storm, and dashed for the ditch. She crouched there with her hands over her head, her back to the storm, as the wind gusted and faded and then gusted again. Raindrops stung her back. But she soon realized the worst had passed.

After the storm’s blast waned, I emerged from the closet. I walked from room to room, looking out every window at the heavy rain. Piano music continued in the living room. I went to the glassed-in back porch and saw Elizabeth running up the sidewalk. I hadn’t heard the truck approach because the rain was so loud. I opened the door for her, and she ducked inside.

Phew! she said, water dripping off her face. She looked at me. What are you wearing?

Our sister, Susan, appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen. He was scared of the storm, she said, so he put on that blanket and plastic hat and hid under the stairs.

I was so happy Elizabeth was home, I didn’t even bother to defend myself.

I wish I’d been under the stairs, Elizabeth said. The weirdest thing happened.

She told us her story, and we listened, rapt, and we asked her to repeat it. The best part was when she got into the ditch, waited, then just stood up and drove home. Elizabeth! Elizabeth could survive anything.

You mean there was actual gravel in the air? I asked.

"Yeah, not just sand but, like, big pebbles. Bam-bam-bam-bam! Hitting the windshield."

Did you leave the truck running? Susan asked.

Yeah! she said, and laughed. Luckily I put it in park!

We laughed: Elizabeth had been in some sort of mini-tornado and had left the truck engine running. But probably it would have been funny even if she’d turned it off. Mainly we were giddy that Elizabeth was safe. We were all safe. The storm had knocked down a few small branches and sent a bucket reeling across the lawn, but that was all.

After the piano students left and the rain stopped, we went outside and looked at the truck. Much of the paint on the hood had been scoured away, and the windshield had dozens of pits and dings. But it wasn’t broken.

I looked up to Elizabeth as if she were a giant. She was seven years older than I was. Her letter jacket was so heavy with medals from track and basketball, it must have weighed five pounds. She had scars on her ankles from being spiked by other runners, scars on her knees from falling on cinder tracks. She had the same dishwater-blond hair I did, and a fast-trigger jump shot so rare among girl basketball players that opponents sometimes did a double take.

I could think of nothing better to be than a Jeremy version of Elizabeth: athlete, scholar, bale-chucking, manure-shoveling farm kid, pickup racer, lifeguard, horse rider. Hers were the shoes I aimed to fill.

On the day of that storm, the one both Grandma and Elizabeth raced home, my father was working in his office in the basement of the state capitol in Jefferson City. There were no windows, and the office was so deeply buried that even the loudest thunder couldn’t be heard. He was at his desk when suddenly—blink!—the lights went out.

Food, Animals

The way it worked is that we would stop at Alvina’s house about once a week, either on the way home from Jefferson City or having come from school in Russellville. If you volunteered or were conscripted into service, you opened the car door and stepped onto the white pebbles of Alvina’s driveway. Unless it was winter, you left the car door open. If Alvina was near, you said hello or waved. She was nice.

You entered the shed and went through the dim first room, then stepped down one step that was never quite where you expected it to be. There on the left was the deep cooler, and you reached down and pulled out a gallon of fresh milk, which was cold and heavy. The huge glass jar was wet because the cooler was filled with water and you lifted the jar carefully and there was no easy way to hold it. No handles. If we were picking up two gallons, someone came with you. One of your parents. Or a sister. One person could carry only one jar. That was the equation.

You now stood, holding eight pounds of milk, in one of the dark places of the world. This, though, simplified your exit. All you had to do was aim for the light coming through the doorway that led outside. And once you got the milk back into the light of day, you saw it—the milk itself—for the first time. White. You climbed back into the car and put the jar on the floor, and held it upright by squeezing it between your shins and keeping one hand on the lid. The lid itself was the size of a saucer. As the driver pulled carefully back onto the blacktop, accelerating slowly, you realized the milk was moving in the jar. You were reminded that it was liquid.

From Alvina’s, you drove south to Mount Hope Road, then rolled along the gravel road—down four hills, up four hills, but not in that order—and then turned into the long driveway. The driveway traced the perimeter of a grassy hill. At a bend in the driveway you looked at the gravelly shoulder where turtles could be found surprisingly frequently—say, once a year. Tortoises. This was also the corner where long ago your sisters saw a rattlesnake and walked around it by cutting through the field. So the story went.

The car climbed the little hill—slowly—and then you saw the house, the barns. On your right was a valley of pastures and fields. There were lines of trees along the fencerows. One of the ponds was down there.

When the car got closer to the farmhouse, the terrier and the small black cat would issue forth from the front porch, and that—that moment—was one of the best parts of the day. Here was your universe, your sun and your moons. You carried the milk inside—and if anything it seemed colder now than when you’d first lifted it into your arms—you hefted it onto the counter, you unscrewed the tremendous lid, and you skimmed the cream from the top. With the cream, we would make butter or occasionally whipped cream or sometimes ice cream. As for the milk, we drank it and used it for baking and sometimes gave a splash of it to the cats. We mixed it with a dollop of yogurt and put it in a jar and put the jar in an insulated box and put the box down by the refrigerator’s warm exhaust and in the morning the milk would be yogurt. During the summer, we put the milk on our cereal, and during the school year when we weren’t allowed cold cereal, we drizzled a little milk on our oatmeal. Just a little. It helped cool the oatmeal. Oatmeal, meet milk. Milk, meet oatmeal. That’s the kind of thing we would say.

The milk was not pasteurized. It was not homogenized. It tasted like something. Something singular. Alvina’s cow wasn’t a Holstein or Jersey, or any other breed of cow that you would encounter at the state fair. There was nothing written in any textbook about this kind of cow. It was a milk cow of indeterminate origin. It was a small cow. Brown.

Those huge glass jars. We never broke a single one.

We. Us. Ours. We were five in number. We were a father, a mother, a sister, another sister, and a brother. Our father wore navy pinstriped suits and drove into Jefferson City each day, where he worked with legislators and the chief clerk and the speaker of the house and his own staff of researchers. The soles of men’s shoes clicked on the polished floors of the long corridors. The parking garage was a spiral. The capitol building sat on a bluff overlooking the muddy Missouri River.

Our father drove home at night and changed out of his suit and into khaki work pants and a blue shirt and then he did chores. He fed the cows and horses and cats. Closed the chicken coop. Other times he cut brush with the tractor, chainsawed, stacked hay bales in the hayloft, mended fences, helped a cow deliver her calf in the middle of the night. There was a row of boots on the back porch: rain boots, work boots, steel-toe boots, snow boots.

Our father who came from a farm not so far away, who had gone to the state university and married our mother there, then continued on to a university on the East Coast that was so famous that simply stating the fact of his enrollment there was essentially a form of bragging, and therefore the name was rarely spoken. Our father who was a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. The room in the house that we called the study—but which was also a bedroom—had three walls of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, the titles inscrutable. Greek and Latin. Plato and Augustine. He would sit in a chair after dark. Just a regular chair, not a soft one. And he would read and touch his mustache absentmindedly.

Our father had a mustache. Always had.

Food. Animals. You lay in bed and thought. Now that it was summer, your bed was pushed up against the window, and your head was by the window, and the window was open and you could hear the bullfrogs at the west pond talking and the bullfrogs at the east pond talking and from everywhere else you heard crickets. You could hear a car on the gravel road a long way away, moving, making a whooshing noise on the gravel, growing louder, cresting a hill, then fading. Who was that, out driving in the night? Maybe it was Elizabeth, who was out with her boyfriend, Wayne Elwood. Maybe not. Light bloomed up through the open stairwell and shone against one wall of your room. Dad was still awake, but it was quiet down there, down in the living room. You listened and you waited and then you heard him turn a page.

You rolled over and you looked at the dark, open doorway to your sisters’ room. Then you heard something. A faint jingling. A rhythmic jingling. Outside. You rolled onto your stomach and looked out the window, but it was dark, very dark out there. But the noise, you knew what it was. It was the terrier, Teddy. His vaccination tag—the little aluminum vaccination tag—jingling against his collar as he trotted across the yard. Maybe he was about to bark at something. Maybe he sensed raccoons in the vicinity.

The jingling stopped.

Teddy? you called out the window.

No jingling. You knew he was standing motionless in the dark, his ears pricked up because he had heard you. He was listening.

Teddy, you said, go to bed.

In the other room, Susan laughed. You smiled because you had made her laugh. She was lying in her own bed, going to sleep, just like you.

You put your chin down onto the pillow, still looking out the window. You sank into the pillow up to your nose, and you could smell the pillow and the pillow blocked your nose and made breathing pleasantly difficult.

The terrier was on the move again and then the sound faded away.

From the other room, after awhile, Susan said, Where’d he go? She had heard him, too. She was lying by her window, too.

You said, Around the house, I think. You wondered. You said, Maybe he’s thirsty.

You thought about that, and about the pan of water behind the cellar house where he drank. The cats drank there, too. You thought about the doghouse on the front porch, which was painted the same color as the real house. Sometimes the terrier slept in there and sometimes he didn’t. It was anybody’s guess. Then you thought about how if you pointed to something extremely directly—in other words, touched it—and said the terrier’s name with a certain urgency, he would eat whatever you were pointing at. Or attempt to eat it. He was four years old and you’d owned him since your sixth birthday and he was a cairn terrier approximately the color of old straw. His eyes hid behind a veil of hair but he didn’t seem to have any trouble seeing and sometimes for fun you would pull back his bangs and reveal his eyes and they were black.

If you were working in the garden, the terrier would join you because any kind of garden work involved edible things for him. True, if you were there, it might mean you would trick him into trying to eat a piece of wood