Carry Me Home Read online

  “I’m so sorry.” It’s hard to hear what else Ma is saying, ’cause she’s got her face mashed up against Dad’s shoulder.

  Dad pulls Ma back and he holds on to the sides of her face. “Eileen, I know you loved him. That’s never been a secret between us. I never expected it to be. I just need to know that you learned to love me somewhere along the line too.”

  Ma starts shaking her head. “Oh, Hank, I spent so many of our early years together mourning Willie, building him up in my head until no one could compare. I was just as blind with my young, starry eyes as Jimmy is with Molly. All these years. All these years no one could hold a candle to the boy in my memory. But, Hank, I’m not a girl anymore, and with having you gone so much now . . . Oh, I’ve been such a fool.”

  Dad tells Ma she ain’t no fool, and Ma tells Dad how much she loves him, then they start to kissing.

  I get up from the floor. I’m real glad they’re kissing, but I don’t wanna watch, in case he starts grabbing at her titties or something.

  The next morning, Ma turns on the radio as she scrambles eggs, and Dad, he whistles in the bathroom as he shaves. Everything feels right again. At least as right as it can feel with Jimmy still gone.

  Chapter 17

  Things get right again with Eddie and me too, after a long, long time. One Sunday, when the leaves are all orange and yellow, there is a knock at the back door and I open it up. Eddie’s standing there. He don’t ask me to come out and play (which is a good thing since I’m still growed up); instead, he asks me if I wanna work with him.

  Eddie’s got papers with him that come from the War Production Board that his dad brought home from the Knox Factory. Eddie points to the picture on the bottom of the page. “See this here picture of the sailors on their raft? It says here, Life belts saved these sailors who had struggled seventeen hours in storm-tossed seas. You see, Earwig, life jackets, they used to be made out of this stuff called kapok fiber filler. That kapok stuff, it came all the way from a plantation in the East Indies. A plantation is a big farm.”

  “Where’s the East Indies, Eddie?”

  “I don’t know, Earwig, but that ain’t the point. The point is, the Japs, they captured the East Indies and now we can’t get any more of that kapok stuff to make life jackets with. If the soldiers ain’t got any life jackets, they could drown. This guy, I can’t remember his name, he figured out that we could use milkweed floss instead of that other stuff. You know the round fat part that we used to pick off milkweed plants and use for hand grenades back before you got too old to play? You know that white stringy stuff like hair inside those milkweed pods? That’s the stuff they’re gonna stick inside life jackets now. Anyway, we can pick them pods and make money for turning them in at the factory.” Eddie ain’t as fat as he used to be, and he ain’t as dumb either.

  “I know you got two jobs and a girl and sorrows, Earwig, but if you got time and want to pick milkweed pods with me, then you could do that.”

  So that’s what me and Eddie do. We wake up early every morning before I gotta be in the store and Eddie’s gotta be at school, and me and Eddie and Lucky go picking milkweed pods. Mr. McCarty, he lets us take his old pocket watch along, and we take turns carrying it. Eddie one day, me the next. And when I carry it I gotta keep an eye for when the big hand gets on the twelve and the little hand gets on the eight, ’cause then we have to head back, so we ain’t gonna be late.

  We head down on Honey Road, ’cause there is lots of milkweed growing up along that road. Ma gives us bushel-sized onion sacks she got saved up from the store, ’cause that’s what we gotta put ’em in. We find milk pods that has got nice brown seeds inside, like the paper says those seeds gotta be, and we fill them sacks. Eddie says each bag’s gotta have about eight hundred pods in it. I tell Eddie I can’t count that goddamn high, and Eddie says we don’t have to actually count ’em.

  Them bags are bulky when they is full, so after Eddie ties ’em tight, I carry ’em back to Eddie’s house. We hang ’em over the fence in the backyard, ’cause if we toss ’em on the ground and leave ’em there, they’re gonna rot and mold and the mill ain’t gonna pay us one red cent for ’em. We wait ’til we got that fence filled with a whole shitload of sacks, then Eddie’s dad takes ’em in the back of his truck to the mill. We get twenty cents a bag for them milkweed pods and split the money right down the middle, fair and square.

  When we get done working in the mornings, Mrs. McCarty, she feeds us pancakes or Malt-O-Meal, and then I gotta get to work and Eddie’s gotta get to school. Before I leave, I always say, “See ya tomorrow, Eddie,” and Eddie, he always says, “See you tomorrow, Earwig.” It sure is nice hanging around with Eddie again and laughing about farts and stuff. I am too growed up to play now, but I ain’t too old to laugh about farts and stuff, ’cause even Dad still does that.

  Dad, he says if I keep working and putting my money away like I am, I’m gonna turn into another Rockerfeller. I tell Dad that I ain’t working hard so I can get Rockerfeller-rich. I’m working hard so I keep busy and don’t get all buggy and fall off my rocker.

  Chapter 18

  Like I said before, the busier you get, the faster them days pile up like bottle caps. I work hard and a whole season goes by, and then another, and they keep piling up ’til it’s the summer of 1944 and I’m saying, “How in the hell did that happen?”

  Funny how things go. One day, time is whooshing along so fast you can’t count them days, then, wham! that time slams into something so big and awful that it can’t even budge.

  I head for Eddie’s house on a Sunday morning. I go early, when the birds is just waking up and making a racket in the trees. Me and Eddie is going to look for arrowheads, and the day before, Eddie said, “Come early, Earwig.” I think Eddie wants to go early ’cause he don’t like running around a lot on summer days that get so hot by the time the sun gets right over your head that you got sweat running down your ass crack.

  If you go digging around in the dirt in the right place, and you find something that is a rock but is shaped kinda like a triangle, that would be one of them arrowheads. Indians used to make ’em out of rocks and tie ’em to the tops of their sticks so they could poke animals and each other. After me and Eddie find some arrowheads, he is gonna tie ’em on sticks and go play-hunting with Spot. I’m all growed up now so I ain’t gonna play with Eddie, but me and Lucky might go along anyway to help him scout animals and keep Spot in line, ’cause Spot sure does mind me better than Eddie.

  When I get to Eddie’s, his ma says Eddie can’t come out, ’cause he’s sick. “He’s got the flu, Earl,” Mrs. McCarty says. “Maybe in a day or two.”

  I go home and try to find something fun to do. I wait ’til the next day, and after work I go back to Eddie’s to see if he wants to go look for arrowheads now, ’cause there’s plenty of time left before dark, but Mrs. McCarty, she says he’s still sick. She says now he’s got the pukes and a fever.

  After a couple more days, Eddie’s feeling better, but I don’t get to see him anyway ’cause Ma’s making me work like a dog again, and I didn’t even do nothing bad. Next day after that, Eddie wakes up in the morning, only he can’t walk on accounta his legs are freezed up with the polio. I heared all about it from Mrs. Pritchard, who said poor little Eddie went to swing his legs out of his bed and they wouldn’t budge. Not even a smidgen. So Eddie, he got real scared and started hollering for his ma. Mrs. McCarty got all skittery then, and called Dr. McCormick, who come over right away and said, yep, Eddie’s got the polio.

  Ma, she gasps when Mrs. Pritchard tells her. She calls me to the counter and she asks me over and over again when I see’d Eddie last, and did I go inside his house, and am I feeling punky at all, and do my legs ache. I gotta say no about a hundred times.

  Eddie, he has to go to the hospital in Ripley, and Ma says he’s probably gonna have to be there a long time, ’cause that polio ain’t nothing to mess around with. I get real scared, thinking about how Eddie maybe is gonna die. />
  It just figures that whenever something bad happens, I ain’t been to church for a long time. Now Eddie’s got the polio and God is pissed and I can’t ask for nothing, so I use my head and ask Ma to pray for Eddie instead.

  Ma musta prayed good enough, ’cause Eddie don’t die, and that polio, it don’t creep up to his lungs so that he’s gotta go in one of them big metal things, but maybe she didn’t pray enough days, ’cause Eddie, he don’t get all the way better either. Mrs. Pritchard, she says that Eddie is hurting bad in his muscles and that he’s laying in that hospital bed wearing braces on his legs. Mrs. Pritchard knows this ’cause she talked to Pearl McCarty. “Of course, I didn’t go inside. I didn’t even go into the yard. Pearl was hanging laundry so I just talked to her over the fence. Poor dear, she’s worried sick and missing that little boy so much.”

  One thing I know for sure from listening to Edna Pritchard is that when Eddie comes home, he’s gonna either be in a wheelchair or he’s gonna be walking using them short sticks that are sorta like a extra pair of legs. I want to tell Eddie that if he has to walk with them sticks, I’ll walk real slow so he can keep up, or if he can’t even do that and has to be in one of them wheelchairs, I’ll push him where he needs to go. I want to tell him these things, but I can’t. Eddie’s in the hospital and nobody can go see him. Not even his ma and dad.

  With having Jimmy and Floyd and John to worry about, and now Eddie too, I get whacked by them bowling pins a lot. “What’s the matter, Earl?” Eva Leigh asks me after days go by and I’m still getting whacked. “You still upset about your little friend?” I nod. “Earl, I hear that Eddie is getting better and will be home soon. He’ll be in braces, but at least he’s alive and will be able to get around.”

  “I know that,” I tell Eva Leigh. “I’m just wishing I didn’t get mean at Eddie like I did when I growed up and didn’t want to play no more.”

  Eva Leigh, she pats my arm and says, “Earl, we all think like that when something happens to somebody we care about. We start adding up the times we weren’t the best to them and we feel bad about those times. If we think about it too long, we can even start thinking we caused that person to get sick or to die because we didn’t love them enough. That’s not true, though. Even the nicest person in the world has some parts of him that aren’t so nice now and then. You don’t need to blame yourself or feel bad, Earl. It wasn’t your fault Eddie came down with polio.”

  Eva Leigh, she tells me that maybe I’d feel better if I drawed a picture for Eddie. She says if I do, she’ll address it off to Eddie at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Ripley for me. So that’s what I do. Only I draw Eddie a few pictures (on accounta I think I wasn’t so nice to Eddie way more than once). I draw him a picture of Lucky Lindy’s airplane and three pictures of Captain Midnight. I ain’t real good at drawing, so I ask Eva Leigh to write on them pages what those pictures are. On Cap’s picture I draw a bubble coming outta his mouth like in the comic books, and I ask Eva Leigh to write in the bubble, Don’t be scared, Eddie. I’ll beat up that polio for you.

  I draw Eddie a picture of me and Lucky too, but I don’t ask Eva Leigh to write on that one, ’cause I drawed turds coming out of Lucky’s butt so Eddie can have hisself a laugh. I think Eddie will figure them things out for hisself even if Eva Leigh doesn’t put on the page, This is Earwig. This is Lucky. This is Lucky’s turds.

  Nobody goes to visit Eddie in Ripley, and nobody goes to visit Mrs. McCarty while Eddie’s in the hospital either. They are too scared of getting the polio from Eddie’s house. Mrs. Pritchard, she says that Pearl McCarty says that people even cross the street so they don’t have to walk too close to her house. I feel real bad when I hear this, ’cause Mrs. McCarty is a real nice lady. I ask Ma if I can go see her, but Ma says I can’t. She says what I can do, though, is bring Mrs. McCarty a box of groceries. Mrs. McCarty, she ain’t coming into the store now ’cause she don’t want to make the ladies get the nerves, so she calls Ma with a list of things she needs, and Ma and me, we shop for her and Ma writes the stuff in the charge book. Then I carry the box to the McCartys’, but I can’t go inside. I knock on her door so she knows the groceries come, then I leave her box on the steps and go back on the sidewalk like Ma says. I wait for Mrs. McCarty to open the door, then I yell to her and ask her how Eddie is doing. Every day, she says he’s about the same and, nope, he can’t come home yet. One day on my way to the McCartys’ with groceries, I see some violets growing up alongside a tree and I pick some and put ’em in her box. When she sees them flowers she puts her hand up against her cheek and starts bawling. I didn’t know she was gonna cry when I gived her those flowers. I feel bad ’cause I didn’t mean to make her cry, so I don’t pick her no more violets after that.

  On days Mrs. McCarty don’t need groceries, I still walk to their house, knock on the door, then run back to the sidewalk and wait for her to come out. When she gets out on the front steps I ask her how Eddie is and when he’s coming home, and she tells me. “You don’t need to come ask every day, Earl,” she says one day. “I could call you on the telephone and keep you updated.” But I tell her it ain’t no bother coming by every day.

  It takes weeks before Eddie comes home. When he does, Ma calls Dr. McCormick and asks if Eddie is still catchy, and Dr. McCormick says no, he’s not, so I can go see Eddie.

  Eddie’s laying in his bed, his legs strapped in them metal braces that run down the sides of his legs and curl around under his shoes. Eddie don’t look turkey-fat no more. He looks little and he’s white as a snowflake.

  Eddie don’t look at me when I walk into his room. He’s busy looking out the window. I go over to the window to see what he’s looking at. It must be something good, since he don’t stop looking out there even long enough to say “Hey, Earwig.” I look this way and that, but there ain’t nothing in that sky. Not even a cloud.

  “Hey, Eddie,” I say, about a hundred times, but he still don’t say “Hey, Earwig” back.

  Mrs. McCarty brings up two glasses of Ovaltine and two thick slices of homemade bread gobbed with peanut butter. She sees that Eddie ain’t talking to me, and she sets down the tray and curls her finger at me a couple times, so I know to follow her into the hallway.

  “Eddie’s just feeling embarrassed right now, Earl. He doesn’t want anybody to see him in his braces. He’s afraid people will make fun of him.”

  “I wouldn’t make fun of Eddie, Mrs. McCarty. I sure wouldn’t.”

  “I know that, Earl,” she says, “but that’s what Eddie’s afraid of.”

  I go back in and sit down by his bed, and after a time I say to him, “Eddie, you ain’t gotta be worrying about me seeing you in them braces. I don’t care if your legs are crippled up by the polio. Well, I mean, I do care, ’cause I’m real sorry they is, but what I mean is that I ain’t gonna poke fun at you or nothing. Hell, Eddie, you see me being a dumbhead every day and you still like me just fine anyway. Even if I see you being crippled up every day, I’ll still like you just fine too.”

  Eddie, he turns to me then and he says, “Yeah, guess so.” Big fat tears start dripping down his face. “I just don’t want to be a cripple, Earwig.”

  “I don’t want you to be a cripple either, Eddie, but it’s better than being dead, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Eddie says, and I pat him on the head the way Dad does to me sometimes.

  As we drink our Ovaltine and have our peanut butter bread, I make Eddie laugh by talking about boogers and farts.

  After a few days, Eddie can go outside. He’s not doing good on them sawed-off sticks, so his ma says he better go out in his wheelchair so he don’t tip over on the sidewalk and get hurt. At least until he gets stronger. His ma dresses him up like it’s winter, so by the time I get Eddie to the sidewalk, he’s sweating like Bottoms Conner.

  I get Eddie’s old bike rim—the one that come from his outgrowed bike—that is propped up against the wall inside the garage, and I bring it to Eddie. “Here, this can be your steering
wheel and that chair can be your car.”

  There is a girl with skinny legs walking down the sidewalk. She sees Eddie in his wheelchair, and she gets all skittery, like she’s scared of him. She starts walking faster and faster. It kinda pisses me off, the way she’s looking over her shoulder at us, like she’s afraid we is gonna come too close to her and give her the polio. Eddie sees this too, and he wants to go home, but I don’t want to. “Hang on, Eddie,” I say. I push real fast, rhmmm, rhmmm, down the sidewalk, until we is close up behind that girl, then I yell, “You better watch it there, missy. Eddie here’s got the polio and he’s gonna give it to you, sure as shit.” Eddie starts to laughing so hard he almost falls out of his chair.

  We chase that girl pert’ near four blocks before she ditches inside a house and slams the door. “Uh-oh, Earwig. She’s gonna tell her ma.” I think Eddie’s right, so I spin his chair around, lickety-split, and race him back to his yard. “If she comes over here with her ma, we’ll just say it weren’t us, Eddie,” and Eddie says it’s a deal. He’s still laughing.

  “What’s this, Edna?” Ma says as she picks up the book Mrs. Pritchard plopped down on the counter. Ma reads the cover out loud. “And They Shall Walk, by Sister Kenny.”

  “It’s a book my sister sent me after I wrote her, telling her how many of our precious little angels here in Willowridge are coming down with polio. I took a look at it, and I think it’s something Pearl needs to read. I don’t have time to run it over there today, so I thought maybe your Earl could.”

  Ma pages through that book as Edna Pritchard yammers. “It’s an autobiography of this Australian woman who is now working at the University Hospital in Minneapolis. This woman is a miracle worker for children crippled from polio, Eileen. An absolute miracle worker!”