on a wringer washer to do our laundry. Each piece of clothing had to be fed between the rollers individually to squeeze out the excess water. I loved to feel the rollers pull a sock or a pair of underpants from my hands and watch it squish and suck the water out of it so it resembled a flattened cartoon character.
An indoor wash line was strung across the back of the basement so we could dry our clothes downstairs during winter. In the corner, a small, dark, spider-webby room dubbed the “root cellar” contained shelves full of peanut butter and jars of olives. Nobody liked them, but they were free, army-surplus food. The same room housed my mother’s homemade goods: jars of blackberry and grape and elderberry jelly, as well as canned apple butter, tomatoes, beets, pickles, and other assorted vegetables.
Wooden barrels held my father’s various homemade wines—elderberry, blackberry, strawberry, and grape from the grapes we picked at my father’s aunt Almeda’s and which we delighted in crushing with our hands. The church would kick a member out for smoking cigarettes, but drinking alcohol was fine as long as it was in moderation. Apparently Jesus drank wine but didn’t smoke.
With three bedrooms upstairs, two down, and one bathroom, we played musical beds. In Huntingburg, I’d slept with Abby and Mary and Liz. In Jasper, it was mix and match. Sometimes I shared a room with Wanda and Mary, but two years after we moved in, Wanda had graduated from high school and moved out. Then it was Liz and Sarah, while Mary and Abby were together.
The two floors of the house were filled with stuff, lots of stuff, both because twelve people lived there, and also because my mother compulsively collected and kept items from Goodwill, yard sales, and relatives. Broken furniture, bags full of huge granny underwear, musty-smelling books—if it was free or practically free, my Depression-era mother took it. I often thought how deprived my mother must have felt as a child that she couldn’t let go of anything.
Once, my father saw a laundry basket filled with jeans to be patched and shouted, “Mama, what’s this? What if Jesus Christ appeared right now, would this be any way for a Christian to live? Junk stacked to high heaven? Let me tell you, Satan and his demons have got their feet in this door, and we have got to get our house in order!”
My mother argued in her defense, “It’s my stuff, and you have a bunch of junk cars outside. Why don’t you do something about them?”
My father said, “Mama, you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. You’re talking out of your rear end again. I think you got a demon in you, I really do.” Said with complete seriousness. I looked at my mother anew and wondered if the demon would manifest itself somehow. I couldn’t imagine how a demon might affect my even-tempered, kind mother. Later, my mother muttered, “He’s got the demon.”
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What remained consistent was my mother’s free-floating parenting style versus my father’s attempt to keep everything under control. He was the head of the household, and on his shoulders had been placed a particular burden—to keep his kids in church, to make certain we did the right thing, and to ensure that we all made it into the Kingdom.
To my father’s dismay, our house was a teeming, frothing cauldron of meanness. We stomped, slammed doors, kicked, screamed, punched, wrestled, chased, and threatened one another on a daily basis. We locked each other out of the house, chased each other up trees, called each other ugly, stupid, dumb shit, asshole, and pig. We teased and tortured, threw hairbrushes and baseballs at one another. We pulled chairs out from under each other, laughing hysterically when someone fell onto the floor. We made off with the peanut-butter sandwich that a sibling (John) had painstakingly prepared for himself. We were territorial over our own things, but ignored our siblings’ boundaries. We fought over the one telephone (a party line shared with our neighbors down the road) and, especially, the one bathroom.
“Get out, you’ve been in there over five minutes.”
“Are you reading comic books or did you fall in?”
Then, when the bathroom hog exited, there was a mad rush for the hotspot.
“I was here first.”
“No, I was.”
“You lost your place in line when you got the phone.”
“Sarah saved my place.”
“No fair saving someone else’s place.”
“That’s not true, the rule is you can save someone else’s place if they’re only gone for five minutes.”
We never said excuse me, please, or I’m sorry. We threatened to beat each other to a pulp, to whup the other, to choke, disfigure, or maim the other. Yet, despite how vigorously and aggressively we teased and taunted one another, we knew that we were in this together. Only we could ever truly understand what it was to be a member of this specific clan bound by blood and history. So we settled in to wait on Portersville Road for Jesus to return and rapture us to Petra. Soon. It would happen soon, but only if we continued to support God’s work. My mother and my father were consistent about one thing: the world was coming to an end, and only through the church could they make it to salvation.
CHAPTER 5
One summer evening in 1969, after running around with our cousins all Sunday at our grandparents’ farm, my sister Abby’s face suddenly became bright red. Her heart beat erratically, and she developed a strange twitch on one side of her body. Sixteen months older than me, Abby was nine years old.
At Grandma Himsel’s insistence, my parents took her to a doctor, which was against church doctrine. Because of Abby’s twitches, she was first diagnosed with chorea. Then they said it was rheumatic fever, which could, in rare cases, lead to chorea. Finally, my mother explained that Abby had a hole in her heart that made her tired. No medical treatment was available, or so we were told, so she swallowed fistfuls of vitamins every day. The church and my mother remained convinced that anything natural was from God and was thus better than any medicine, which was man-made.
Abby weakened quickly and missed a whole year of school. On bad days, she could barely walk to the bathroom. Once my best friend, the one I played jacks with on the floor, the one who was invariably on my team for hide-and-seek, her illness created a distance that I was too young to understand, too young to surmount. She was on a different side now. And I could only look at her from across an emotional chasm.
Abby’s face lost all color, and her stomach swelled up, filled with fluid her heart couldn’t pump out. It became harder and harder to look at her. This wasn’t my fearless older sister who jumped out of the swing when it was at its highest and, when she fell to the ground, picked herself up and laughed.
The minister came over many times to anoint Abby. He smudged olive oil on her forehead and, holding her head between his hands, asked God to heal her. Every other week my parents requested a new prayer cloth from church headquarters. My mother held it against Abby’s forehead, much like the ministers anointed her with oil, and silently offered a prayer.
Abby and I had taken bubble baths together, patting the bubbles onto each other’s faces to form moustaches and beards, which, I privately feared, made us look like that pagan Santa Claus. We’d caught lightning bugs on summer evenings and stuck them on the end of sticks, brandishing them about like flashlights. We’d held hands, leaned back, and turned around and around and around in the living room, delighting in getting dizzier and dizzier until we fell down. Abby and I had slept in the same bed listening
