A Matter of Survival

Chapter One

He walked down the dusty path toward home. Memories greeted him with the sight of every hill. Reminded of both the sweet times and the ones that were filled with pain, he tried to stay on the good times. It didn’t work.

Chris, his parents and three brothers etched out a living on a piece of hand-me-down land in Iowa. They held on to dreams that gave them a reason to keep trying to make life work, until they could try no more. Their paths would split; each would take a different route to survival.

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We did our best to make a living from a few scrawny chickens, a small heard of milk cows, six pigs, and several acres of corn. But, somehow, our best was just never good enough. Pa had inherited the farm from his grandfather after the war was over. He didn’t want it. It showed, so it was up to me, my brothers, and Momma to make it work.

Momma was a strong woman. Never saw her being beaten, but I heard it. I heard it a lot. She never complained though. She took it like it was her due. She held her head high; she never caved. She passed on that strength to us in ways we were too young to understand at the time. Taking different paths, we each found our way out.

Daddy had a real mean streak in him. At 6’7” weighing in at about 325, he always came into the house with his fists balled and ready. He ruled with an iron hand; he wouldn’t tolerate being questioned.
He was handsome, intelligent, and polite to others. You couldn’t ask for better proof of the saying, “all that glitters is not gold”.

Nothing Momma did, nothing we did, could wipe away the hatred he felt for himself. The life he’d worked for before the war ended with one shot. He’d had big dreams until then. He was going to be a singer. He had a real schmoozy voice, kind of like Frank Sinatra, but the war took that away from him when he took a bullet to the throat. It grazed his larynx, and killed his dreams. Every time he got drunk, we’d hear that old story again, and again.

Our lives mirrored the lives of many other farmers in the area. We had a cistern to save rainwater for daily use. We had to draw enough water to fill a huge washtub for Momma to wash our clothes by hand every day. Our wardrobe was limited to two pair of working coveralls and shirts. It wasn’t very fashionable, but it fit into our little community just fine. We were poor, but clean, same as most folks around these parts. Momma had two dresses. One dress was for every day chores around the house; one dress was for church.

Momma held her head high whenever she wore that dress on Sunday. To hear her tell it, she held her head high with pride. She sewed that dress together herself. I figured the main reason she held her head high was mostly so she wouldn’t have to see the smirk on the women’s faces as they compared their dresses to hers. They weren’t dressed any better. They just thought they were. Momma tried to spruce up the tired old dress by stitching flower patterns onto the parts that were thinning. The end product was something akin to a dying garden. Seemed appropriate, considering.

The youngest brother, Carl, was special. He was petite like Momma. Had her face and soft voice. Carl’s job was to haul enough corn to the back yard to keep the water boiling while Momma dropped clothes into the washtub. She’d stir them with a big stick to help loosen the dirt, pull them out still steaming and dunk them into another tub where she would scrub them clean on an old washboard. She’d then rinse them out in cold water before hanging them on the line. Carl, being kind of small, stayed close to Momma and helped around the house.

Carl had a gift for gentle distraction. He was a peacekeeper, an angel in disguise. Carl was Daddy’s favorite. When Pa was in one of his moods, it was Carl that would plant himself in a path that never had a good end to it. The scars were there, we just couldn’t see them. Now, brother William was another story.

Will was damaged while still in the womb; he was a gentle giant with the mind of a six year old. He could follow instructions real good as long as you didn’t change them. Too many changes confused him. He wasn’t too good at talking about things that bothered him; he found other ways to let his feelings be known.

When the crops failed, or the cows dried up, Momma took in washing for city folks. My brothers and I would be up at four o’clock in the morning to do our chores on the farm. By nine in the morning we would have milked the cows, shucked corn to feed the pigs, shelled corn to feed the chickens, and chased off vermin and crows from our cornfield. On the way back from school we would clean yards, and do odd chores for neighbors. We worked hard, scrimped, and saved as much as we could to get us through the winter. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was damned hard. Even so, we always had time for trouble.

There were four of us boys. For the most part, we were “good” boys. We minded our manners, and we did our chores, we tried to keep our grades up in school as best we could. We were ‘good’ boys, Richard, William, Carl and me, but still managed to get into a peck of trouble every so often. Nothing very harmful mind you, but it sometimes created a bit of chaos. Those were some of the better memories.