family’s name is Ruffin. I was a Ruffin until I married Grandpa.”
“Oh.” I thought. “Ruffin Valley. That is funny.” I looked west.
“Sometime I’ll show the old farm to you. You can’t see it from here. It’s where I was a girl.”
I’d never put any thought into the idea that there was a place in this world where my grandmother had once been a girl.
“Is the house you grew up in still there?” I asked.
“You know, they bulldozed it. I guess so they could plant more corn. It was in a sad state, anyway. Would have made my mother weep to see how sad it was.”
“When you were a girl, had cars been invented?” I asked. I thought it was a thoughtful question. It showed my understanding of history.
“I’m not that old,” she said quickly. “There were cars,” she said. “I’m not that old.”
I felt bad. It was rare to see Grandma ruffled. She thought I had called her old. But wasn’t she?
The real reason I’d asked to go over to Craig’s house was that I was bored, and Craig lived in a brand-new ranch house on a big farm, and there was a pinball machine in the basement, not to mention other toys, including militaristic ones I wasn’t allowed to have. But when I got to Craig’s house, I felt bad about this play date and I watched Grandma drive away out the long driveway and then I watched her turn onto the blacktop and move farther and farther away while Craig, who I now remembered was too young and frenzied to engage in satisfying play, was talking nonstop and most of it was meaningless. Grandma’s car faded into the haze.
“Hey, do you want to swim in the cows’ watering tank?” Craig asked.
That night, Craig’s mother, Linda, drove me and Craig into Sedalia, where we met Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, and Dad to see the State Fair Parade and a horse show. We got back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house at eleven p.m. The next day was a whole day at the fair with Mom and Dad. As Dad said as we walked through the admission gate: “Let’s hope it’s not just a fair fair.” It wasn’t. Baby pigs sprinted around a little racetrack to reach a plate of Oreo cookies. Giant catfish and largemouth bass hung suspended in huge aquariums, just teasing us by their presence. A free pencil here. A free key fob there. Chickens in cages. Puffy chickens, fancy chickens. Big new tractors with tires as tall as Dad. We met Grandma for lunch at Wendy’s. I got a glow-in-the-dark ball with my Kids’ Meal, but I was scared of it because I’d heard that glow-in-the-dark things caused cancer. Grandma didn’t eat much because she said her stomach had been upset in recent weeks. Back at the fair: a snow cone. A dollar to spend at the arcade. At the end of the day, my ankles were filthy with the dust of the midway. All of us went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s again for the night.
Then, Friday, we picked up Elizabeth and Susan from basketball camp and went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Elizabeth’s seventeenth birthday dinner. Ham, rolls, scalloped potatoes, cauliflower with cheese sauce, green beans, iced tea, peach-whip salad, cake, and ice cream.
It was different with my family there. We sat out on the front lawn while it grew dark, and Susan and Elizabeth slumped in their chairs. I pulled on Susan’s tan arm, but she wouldn’t run with me. So I did some sprinting with the dogs. I rolled on the lawn. Far away, there was a line of clouds catching the last red of the sunset on their crowns.
I had spent the first part of the week trying to think of things to do, but anything worth doing involved having at least one sister around. That’s the way it was at Grandma and Grandpa’s. There was no substitute for a sister. On Tuesday, Grandma had bought me a set of string-connected walkie-talkies from the five-and-dime, and she even tried them out with me. But what were you supposed to say to Grandma over a string-connected walkie-talkie?
“Grandma,” I had whispered conspiratorially from the top of the stairs, “I think it’s time to take the cookies out of the oven.”
This was doubly stupid because (a) it was stupid, and (b) the cookies had been baked hours ago. Plus, the walkie-talkies hadn’t worked.
And now that my sisters were here, they were stubbornly lethargic. They didn’t want to do anything. Yes, so I ran with the dogs by myself. I rolled by myself. I did somersaults by myself. I went and stood in the middle of the gravel road and looked one way, then the other, and then I looked back at my family assembled there in a line of lawn chairs. It was getting dark, and I couldn’t tell if anyone was looking at me.
But in the morning I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to feel the hot sun on the back of my neck and watch Grandpa driving the tractor across the field and listen to Grandma practice the organ in the cool, empty church and have her wash my hair in the kitchen sink.
You could see farther there. The sun was always out.
Stay
At the end of the summer, one night after supper, Dad and I drove to a state park named Bennett Spring. We checked into a little cabin and then walked to the edge of the big blue spring itself. The air smelled like cold rain, and suspended in the water were the dark-backed trout that had drawn us here. We’d never caught a trout, and not for lack of trying.
The air by the spring was cool, but as we walked away, the smothering heat of the day returned. Dad wiped his brow with a blue handkerchief.
“When I was your age,” he said, “there was a drought so bad the grasshoppers ate the bark off the fence posts.”
In the morning we were up early. Outside, the river was already lined with men holding long fly rods and wearing waders and fishing vests. What did they carry in all those pockets? Dad and I walked downstream with our beat-up spinning rods, our rubber farm boots clunking as we went, our lures rattling in Dad’s big metal tackle box. Some of the fishermen watched us as we passed.
Along certain stretches of water, the fishermen were standing within arm’s reach of each other. Beyond them, in the water, I could see the fish, all facing upstream, nearly motionless despite the current. In the middle of the night, hundreds of trout had been released into the stream: two trout for every tag that was bought yesterday. That meant there were two trout out there waiting for me.
Finally we found a place to stand. We waited, then the opening horn sounded, and the fishing began. Immediately, everywhere, fish were being caught. The dumb fish bit first. They’d never seen a lure in their lives. They’d lived in concrete tanks until today.
But the fish were not dumb enough. Or we were dumber than they were, because though over the next few hours we saw fisherman after fisherman leave with stringers of fish, we didn’t have a solitary nibble. It was maddening because we could see the trout so clearly, we could put lures right in front of their noses, but they either ignored the lure or darted away. At home, on our pond, the bluegills would fight over our lures!
The stream grew less and less crowded, both with fish and men. We persisted, moving from spot to spot, casting, reeling in, casting, reeling in.
It started to rain.
I gave up on fishing and amused myself by teasing the small sculpins in the shallows with my lure. I dropped my jig near them and watched them dart out and try to bite the lure that was nearly the same size as they were.
After a while, I saw Dad talking to an older man. I went over.
