Early Warning

Lois sat in her chair with her elbow on the table and a smile on her face. In the summer, she’d won the pie contest at the county fair for the second year in a row. Dave Crest found some old variety of apples called Spitzenbergs, and she made a pie layering thin slices of those with blueberries. But when she was trying out her recipe (ten pies altogether), she ate just a sliver of each. Joe knew Lois didn’t love him anymore, and probably his love of her had flowered and faded, too, something not deeply rooted or lasting, like his old love of Minnie, but they all got along; on a farm, practicality ruled.

Love was for the children — Lois was especially good at that. She was responsible and affectionate, and she had a remarkable way of teaching them things. When she had to tell them something, she squatted down, took hold of a little hand, and looked the child in the eye. Then she explained, and they nodded, and they really did understand. How many times when he was a kid had Joe himself sworn up and down that he understood, just to get Walter or Rosanna to go away and leave him alone? How many times had he seen Frank nod agreement, flash his brilliant smile, and then go right back to making trouble once Walter was out of hearing? Joe let the kids crawl all over him, and he carried them on his shoulders, and he bounced Jesse on his knee. He mimicked animal sounds and bird sounds for them. When he told Lois how Lillian had once read books to Claire while Joe made the animal noises in the background, Lois loved that anecdote, so they tried it, and their kids loved it, too. He wasn’t a good disciplinarian, but Minnie’s expressed opinion was that strict fathers were too scary for small children. If there was spanking to be done, well, Aunt Minnie could do it, and Joe could stand in the background, frowning and shaking his head, and then Mommy Lois could hand out a cookie afterward and sit with the child, petting Poppy. Minnie had lots of opinions about kids and their families, as well she should, given the parade of kids through her office every school year.

Between them, Joe, John, and Gary ate almost everything on the table, and then John pretended to need Gary to pull him out of his chair. Joe said, “Say, John, what did you feed that steer? Meat’s delicious!”

“Clover all up and down that slope.”

Nat and Poppy were sitting on the back porch when they came out, and full of burrs. Joe would have some brushing to do that evening, and probably there were ticks on the dogs, too, if they’d been in the burrs. In front of him, John said something that floated away in the wind. Joe smiled. Yes, he was. He was a happy man.

1958

WHEN HIS DAD and his mom were going back and forth all winter about whether to move out of D.C. and if so where to go, Tim was against it. He had a group of friends, and he was the boss of those six guys, who ran with him on the playground and roamed with him in the neighborhood. Three streets in any direction, there were stores, parks, playgrounds, anything you wanted. But it was also true that, if he was going to get rid of Dean and all his crap, then they needed a bigger house. Somehow, no one was in favor of Tim’s preferred plan, putting Dean and his stuff in the cellar, or his alternate plan, taking over the cellar himself. You got out of the cellar by going up a few steps and pushing open a metal door, and there you were in the side yard. That was a possibility until he and Brad Widger laid some boards around the floor of the cellar and then ran a line of DuPont Cement along the boards to a cherry bomb inside a tin can (he had poked a hole in the side of the can for the fuse to stick out of). When the bomb exploded, the bang was pretty loud. Debbie, who was reading on the couch, said that she was lifted into the air, and Mom almost fainted, because she knew that Tim and Brad were in the cellar, and she thought the furnace had exploded. The tin can had gone up the stairs, bounced against the door, and unraveled along its seams. Mr. Widger whipped Brad with his belt, and Dad had made Tim clean the walls of the cellar with a scrub brush.

All of a sudden they found the perfect place — open house on Sunday, purchase agreement on Monday, then moving in two weeks later, March 1. It was expensive — forty thousand dollars (though Mom and Dad didn’t know that he leafed through the papers on Dad’s desk one day and discovered that). He also knew, from listening to them whispering in the kitchen, that Colonel Grandfather Manning Sir had left just about that amount in his will. The new house was on five acres, all on one floor, and had six doors to the outside, any of which Tim could get out of anytime, day or night, that he cared to.

He remained grumpy. There were only twenty kids in his new sixth-grade class, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the junior high was small, too — forty kids in that class. He felt stuck in the middle of nowhere. Until he met the Sloans.