March 21, 2008

• Down on the Bird Ranch

  This memoir segment follows this one.

  I don’t remember much about the train ride from Texas to California.  It was evening when we boarded, and the motion lulled Marie and me to sleep.We slept through most of the trip.  When we were awake, we went up to the Vista-Dome observation car and watched the scenery, even at night.

  Mama met the train in San Bernardino.  I told her I planned to get a job as soon as I could, and I needed a Social Security card, so we stopped at the SS office before we headed out of town to the ranch.  The first thing we did when we got home was to grab a colander from the kitchen and go out to pick green beans from the garden for dinner.  Then we sat on the shady patio while we snapped the beans, catching up.

  There was no sense of urgency about my getting a job and getting out of there.  Mama and Grady recommended waiting at least until my facial cuts and bruises had healed, so I settled into the routine of the ranch.  Primarily, they raised game birds.  The ranch was owned by an ophthalmic surgeon, who saved money on his taxes by losing money on the ranch.  Several domestic and exotic species of pheasants, quail, geese, and ducks were raised to be released on hunting preserves.  If we wanted pheasant for dinner, though, we didn’t have to shoot one.  We’d take a long stick with a metal hook on the end, go into a pen, and snare a bird by its neck.

  They also kept chickens, turkeys, rabbits, pigs, and cattle.  Domestic ducks and geese wandered free in the yard.  A flock of guinea fowl roosted in a big tree beside the house, filling the role of watchdog, making a racket day or night, whenever anything out of the ordinary disturbed them.  Turkeys were put out to forage in whichever pasture wasn’t being used for cattle, and had to be rounded up and herded under shelter when it rained, or they’d gaze up at the falling raindrops and drown.  I helped with feeding, and Mama and I caught, killed, plucked,
  dismembered and packed birds for our freezer, and for the doctor’s
  freezer.

  Grady did the milking.  Mama and I skimmed cream and churned butter, and every few days the doctor’s chauffeur would come to the ranch and pick up fresh milk, butter, eggs and meat.  The vegetable garden was only for our home use, and the fields of corn and grain were grown primarily for stock feed.  The balance between work to be done and time for doing it was comfortable.  Mama and Grady had been able to handle it alone, and with my help more jobs got done and there was more free time, too.

  Getting to know my stepfather Grady was a pleasant surprise.  Of all my mother’s husbands and lovers, he’s the one I liked best.  He was straightforward, articulate, and funny, and he treated me like an adult human being — a refreshing change.  He and Marie hit it off, too.   If Mama and I were up to our elbows in feathers and guts, Grady would take Marie with him to feed or milk or whatever.

  Marie’s favorite chore was feeding the rabbits.  It had been Mama’s job until we came.  Then it became mine.  I’d load a handcart with buckets of rabbit pellets, set Marie on top, and wheel the cart along the rows of hutches.  She’d grab handfuls of rabbit feed to munch along the way, a treat that her grandmother thought was unwholesome and inappropriate, so, after I carefully read the ingredients on the bags, we just kept it to ourselves.  The kid would chatter away at the bunnies,  reaching out for their furry bodies.  Their names were on the hutches, and she soon learned them all.  Several were especially tame and gentle, and we’d take time out to pet them.

  Just before we got there, the doctor had borrowed a polled hereford bull from a neighbor to breed his cows, so for a week or so he was the main attraction.  Buddy was enormous — his rump higher than my head.  He was also calm and gentle, having grown up as a kid’s 4-H project.  Mama came unglued one day when Grady led Buddy up to the house with Marie riding high up behind his head, holding onto the lead rope around the bull’s neck.  Marie loved it, Grady was amused, I thought it was great fun, and my mother had a hissy — as usual.  It must have been hell, being her, so fear ridden, and ridiculed by everyone around her.

  About a week after Marie and I got to California, on September 26, I left her on the ranch with Mama and Grady and went into Redlands to stay with my aunt Nora.  She’s the one on the left in this picture, with my aunt Alice and the other sister, Flora, left to right, with Dorris, my mother, peeking out between them.  Nora was older, a stepsister to the other three, with more class and urbane poise than all the rest combined. They all called her “Pat,” and so she was Aunty Pat to me.

  She was widowed young and never had children of her own, but she raised two daughters for my mother’s brother Earl, whose wife was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown when their four children were small.  By the time I stayed with Pat, my cousins were grown and married.  She lived alone in a small, light and airy apartment within walking distance of the business district, an ideal base for my job search.

  The date I went to stay with her, Sept. 26, 1960, is memorable because it was the day of the first ever televised presidential candidates’ debate.  Nixon and Kennedy responded to questions on the issues of the day.  I listened to the audio while doing my ironing at a built-in board off the kitchen, while Pat watched in the living room.  Pat, like most of those who watched the debate, was convinced that Kennedy won.  If I had been old enough to vote, I would have voted for Nixon, like most people who heard but didn’t see the debate.

  I don’t recall how long I stayed in town looking for a job.  I’d go out each morning, walk from one business to the next, ask if they needed help or were taking applications, then I’d join Pat for lunch before making my afternoon rounds.  Everyone in the family knew someone who might help me get a job, and I talked to all of them.  After I had answered every ad, checked out each lead, and visited every visible business, I went back to the ones that had seemed most likely.  I would talk to Marie on the phone a couple of times each day.  We missed each other, so eventually I went back to the ranch to watch the classified ads and wait for someone to call me to work.

  A double railroad track, the through line and a siding, ran along the ranch’s property line about 15 feet from the house.  My bedroom was on the side of the house closest to the track.  For the first few days there, passing trains would startle me awake, but Marie always slept through them.  After a while, so did I.

  Hobos from the trains that stopped on the siding would come to the house asking for water.  We always had surplus buttermilk from the butter we made for the doctor’s household and our own, and there was usually cold fried chicken or some other leftovers for the hobos, too.  Mama’s attitude toward these men was typical for her.  She didn’t mind giving them food, but she didn’t want them coming to her door, so if she saw them walking along the fence toward the gate, she’d quickly put together a sack of food, jar of buttermilk and jug of water, and send me out to meet them with it.
   
  That’s me at sixteen, on the left holding Marie’s hands, with my cousins, Flora’s daughters Sharron and Donna, and Donna’s daughter, Kathy.  Flora and her husband Hubert had five daughters, and their daughters had daughters.  Most of them lived in Southern California at the time, and often on a Sunday an aunt or uncle or two and several of my cousins would show up for dinner.  Nobody else in the family had the abundance of “free” food that we had, so our ranch was the natural gathering place.

  When it came time to butcher a big old hog, we made it a family affair.  Several uncles and the husbands or boyfriends of various girl cousins rolled up their sleeves and helped Grady hoist the dead porker up into the guineas’ tree beside the house, and everyone got into the butchering one way or another.  I circulated between the kitchen and the yard, fetching knives, hot water, rags, iced tea… whatever was called for.  Then I hauled loads of meat in dishpans into the screen house that held sinks and freezers, rinsed the grass and debris from the meat, and helped to cut , wrap and label it for freezing.  At the end of the day, I was too tired to eat… tired but happy.

  It was a time of peace and comfort for me, but it wasn’t entirely trouble-free.  Early in my stay there, Grady had shown me his hidden fermenter filled with potatoes and yeast.  I was sworn to secrecy, and convincingly faked surprise when Mama found it for herself sometime later.  She was livid.  She and Grady had an understanding:  he would not drink alcohol, period.  The potato mash was fed to the pigs, and Mama slammed doors and stomped around for a few days until the emotional storm blew over.

  Grady was cutting a broken limb off the big tree with a chainsaw when it bucked back and slashed his face.  Fortunately, his employer, the ophthalmic surgeon who had operated on Sammy Davis, Jr. after his car wreck, was at home at the time.  He met Grady at the hospital, operated immediately, and saved his eye.   During his hospitalization and his convalescence at home, Grady and Mama both frequently expressed the thought that it was, “a good thing,” that I was there to fill in and do the “man’s work” that Mama couldn’t handle, such as driving the cattle from one pasture to another or throwing hay bales.  Neither Mama nor I was any good at milking the cows, and with only three cows they didn’t have milking machines.  Uncle Hubert or his son-in-law Elmer came down twice a day and took care of that until Grady could do it.

  Next, Thanksgiving and the family reunion…

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