I Call Evil Daddy

“The Last Time I Tasted

Snow-Cream”

DOES HE HAVE HIS LOADED SHOTGUN with him?

I wanted to ask Mother,

remembering the last time I had seen Daddy. But, of course, I didn’t.

One look at Mother’s pale face told me we had no choice except do what Daddy wanted.

Although Mother had recovered from her illness, it had taken it’s toll on her. She hadn’t regained her strength as fast as she should have, plus losing so much weight she appeared to be literally skin and bones.

“Well, I gotta say y’all look like hell, Alice,” Daddy remarked while we were loading the truck.

“I haven’t been feeling very good lately,” she answered.

“Dat ain’ no reason t’ let yo’self go like dis. ’Course y’all ain’t never been much to look at, an’ now ya look like a goddam scarecrow,” he said. Mother didn’t answer.

Why don’t ya tell him y’all almost died and it was all his fault? Why don’t ya tell him that? My anger spat silently at Mother. I could tell him!

I thought bravely! Then why don’t I? I questioned myself and then answered honestly. It’s because Daddy can’t hear invisible people.

I pushed my anger deep inside and concentrated on keeping the cold and hunger from taking over. Yet everything reminded me of it.

My hands felt like ice and from my stomach I could hear rumblings even above the noise of this old truck.

As we traveled, I gazed through the slats of the truck. I could see the small farmhouses and even the chimneys, belching steady streams of smoke. My imagination was alive and active. I wonder who lives in those houses? I’ll bet their mother is cooking them a warm supper. Cords of neatly stacked firewood told me they were warm. One of the small sheds out back was probably a smokehouse full of ham, bacon, and sausage. Another shed would be the chicken house with lots of chickens and eggs. These things told me they had plenty to eat. Even though my imagination knew no bounds, I could not for the life of me imagine what it would be like to live that way.

We had been on the road for a long time, stopping only a couple of times out of sheer necessity. Despite the cold, I chose to stay in the back with Snowball. The cab was loaded down with all our belongings that wouldn’t fit in the back.

“Please, Mother,” I begged, “I’ll snuggle with Snowball and I’ve got these quilts. I’ll stay warm. Please let me ride back here.”

“Carolyn, y’all are going to freeze back there,” Mother protested.

“I think y’all ought to come up here and sit on Jimmy’s lap.”

“Dang it, why does she always have to sit on my lap,” whined Jimmy.

“I ain’t gonna sit on y’all boney ole lap, I’d rather freeze first,” I yelled back.

“Fur goddam sake, Alice, let de gal sit where she wants t’; she be alright,” Daddy said as he started the engine.

“But, Willie, it’s so cold, she’ll freeze,” Mother argued.

It sounded like Daddy was being nice to me by letting me sit where I wanted. But I knew better. He’d be happy if I did freeze to death. I doubted that he’d even know that I wasn’t there anymore.

Just about the time I thought we were never going to find a place to stay, we came across an old, abandoned house. Daddy turned off the main road onto an old, unused one. Actually, it was more like an overgrown path than a road, but it had clearly been traveled on at one time. That usually indicated that somebody had lived in a house down that way once.

Daddy had a sense about things like that. Sure enough, we found the house about a half mile off the main road. It was in a secluded area on the edge of some fairly dense woods.

“This is pretty bad; it doesn’t look like anyone’s lived in it for a very long time,” Mother said, getting her first look at the three room shotgun-style house. [A shotgun house is one where all the rooms line up in a row one behind the other. Some say it’s called that because you can shoot a shotgun through the front door and it’ll come out the back without hitting anything.]

“Ain’t all dat bad,” Daddy replied. “Y’all kin have it fixed up in no time a’tall.” Daddy was right about that. Mother could make more

out of nothing than anybody I’d ever seen. After a thorough going over, she decided only one of the rooms was livable. Or, at least, it would be after we pulled boards off those two bad rooms and covered the broken window panes on the good room.

thing, it had a truly magnificent, stone fireplace. Built with all natural large stones, it was a work of art in its truest form. After we unclogged the flue, the fireplace worked almost as good as it looked.

Since we’d done this plenty of times before, setting up was simple. I set up the coal oil lamps. Daddy and Jimmy set up the bed.

Daddy didn’t say a word when he saw how the bed had been wired together with baling wire after he’d destroyed it. In fact, he acted as if nothing at all had happened.

Jimmy and I went in search of firewood and found a fairly goodsized log which we thought would burn all night. As soon as Mother put it in the fireplace and got it going, we all fell into an exhausted sleep.

It didn’t surprise us the next morning to learn the old pump in the back yard was dry. However, we discovered a small clear-running creek in the woods not too far from the house. We took the largest buckets and pails we owned and carried water for cooking and drinking. We didn’t worry too much about bathing. Its importance came somewhere behind finding something to eat and staying warm. About two weeks later it began to snow, not a lot but almost daily, and enough to keep several inches on the ground at all times. In one respect that was good because we no longer had to carry water from the creek. Instead, we would just fi ll the bucket with snow and let it melt.

Thanks to Jimmy and me, we had a good supply of wood, but we had little food. Daddy had only enough money for a little fl our, some lard, and a few beans, but only enough to last a few days.

Jimmy, Snowball and I caught a few rabbits in a trap we made.

Everyday we went deeper and deeper in the woods to find a fishing hole. We never did find one.

Although Daddy went out every day searching for work he couldn’t find anything. “I’ma gonna have t’ go t’ Greenville t’ see if ’n I kin fi n a load o’ produce or somethin’,” Daddy announced.

“Willie, we only got enough fl our and lard to last three more days and the beans are already gone,” Mother said.

“Don’ worry ’bout it. I’s be back in three days,” he promised.

Mother looked doubtful, Jimmy looked scared, and me? I believed him. In spite of everything he’d done, somehow I still had faith in him. One minute I’d be hating him like crazy, and the next, I’d still be trying to get him to notice me. No matter what he did, I found a way to not only forgive, but also to forget, denying to myself it ever happened, so I could love him again. I didn’t like myself for being like that, yet I didn’t know how to change it.