Fairlee E. Winfield

I hope to finish this new book in a month or two

BURMA SHAVE DAYS AND EVANGELIST NIGHTS

‒ 1 ‒

I don’t remember when we left Milwaukee. We should have stayed there. It was our home. But instead, we left in the middle of the night time. My brother, Buddy, was learning to walk, and I was three. Mommy never liked to talk about it.

I do remember the 1930 Oldsmobile. We started out in that one. Daddy always said he liked General Motors best. But in a pinch, he’d take a Ford or whatever was available. The Oldsmobile Princess was two years old and all black, his favorite color. That car, or its replacement, would be our home for the next seven years.

In the daytime I’d use the wide strip of shiny chrome that wrapped around the radiator as a fun house mirror to make Buddy laugh. And at night, the two big round headlights looked like the many-sided eyes of a blue-bottle fly shining their dim lights along the narrow black highway ahead. The big spare tire with its clean white sidewall was attached behind the left front fender. Buddy invented a game of climbing up on the bumper, struggling over the broad fender, then crawling on top of the spare tire, and finally plunging feet-first down onto the running board. He was always getting into trouble.

The upholstery inside the Princess was made of stiff gray mohair. When I put my legs over the edge of the long bench seat in back, so I could lean closer to Mommy up in front, the tough goat hair prickled the backs of my legs. I remember it seemed like needles, tiny needles that were so invisible I could never find them. But, my crayons were always safe inside the backseat ashtray.

Years later I was asked to make a drawing of the house I grew up in. I think the exercise was one of those touchy-feely things designed by psychobabblers to increase self-esteem, but it caused me great embarrassment. Oh, never doubt, I did the exercise, but I didn’t draw the Oldsmobile, the Ford, the Packard, the Rumble Seat Coupé, the Buick Series 40, the Lincoln Zephyr, or even the old 1929 Durant. Instead I created a two story mansion a la Frank Lloyd Wright complete with servants’ quarters. I was always looking for a house. A real house to grow up in, with four walls and a yard with a swing, not a car with a back seat.

People talk about their miserable childhoods during the depression. They boast and whine of the poverty, the hunger, the joblessness. John Steinbeck even won a Nobel Prize in 1962 describing it all. But the Okies and the Arkies had one thing going for them. They could look like, and behave like, what they were, poor unfortunate displaced people. Prime targets for brutal police and any local authority. They didn’t, or couldn’t, hide their wretched condition. We had to appear prosperous because we were running from the police and an irate man with a shotgun.

Since Daddy was from England, he said we must look like aristocrats—well-to-do, well-dressed, well-groomed, well-spoken, and altogether impeccably respectable. We learned to do this with the help of Phillips 66 roadside restrooms or under the big yellow signs of the Shell gas stations. Even then it would have been impossible without the Army behind us. Our very own army, the Salvation Army. Daddy had been blessed with his artillery of words, while Buddy and I became part of the Army’s Hallelujah Kids shock troops.

Our shoes were usually the only give away that could disprove our otherwise successful appearance. We had to wear them until the leather was impossibly scuffed and cracked. Still, it’s surprising how few people notice shoes during a depression, especially if you kept a good layer of waxy Australian Kiwi boot polish on them, had pretty blonde curls, and wore a big bow-ribbon in your hair. Daddy says, Kiwi’s the best polish. Made in Australia, he says.

Unfortunately, Mommy, well, she had given herself to a lover who existed only in her imagination. She was addicted to chocolates and romantic novels, her reasoning formed by pretty fiction against all visible facts. And Daddy, he had been born with an excess of human talent, good looks, and perception. Those traits always tempt Satan.