RUNAWAYS

IN THE FALL of ’27, Robert again decided to ramble. This time he included Manuel Barque and me in his plans. We were going to “run off’ to escape the oppressions put upon us by school officials and the “big folks.” “Big folks” included anyone over twenty-one.

At the farm we had three “big folks”-Bill, Gertrude and Grandmother. They were kind to us to the extreme, but we didn’t think of it that way. We hadn’t ever been exposed to the real world.

Bob had just been expelled for shooting a paper clip with alarming accuracy at the private parts of our favorite teacher, Miss Robbins. She was a vivacious, red-headed Virginia miss, and I was in love with her. She taught our class to sing ‘Welcome, sweet springtime, we greet thee with song.” She put a song in my heart until I learned that she was having an affair with the principal. I didn’t exactly know what an affair was but it broke my heart anyway. It was another good reason for me to run away.

Avoiding the highway, we walked the railroad tracks for some twenty-five miles. Night found us on the outskirts of Bridgeville, where we holed up in corn shocks that stood like Indian teepees. Cold settled down in deathly silence, broken only by field mice scurrying for corn kernels and the whoop of horned owls searching for the field mice. Dogs bayed in the distance. The mournful sound of a train whistle echoed and re-echoed across the windswept fields.

A new sound was now heard: Manuel Barque’s sobbing. Soon my wailing was added, then the intrepid Robert’s. The crying trio wended its way across the frozen field to an isolated farmhouse, dark and foreboding. Bob knocked on the back door. Soon, a kerosene lamp shone through the window panes that overlooked the back porch.

“Land sakes alive, Hiram!” A woman’s voice called out to someone in the interior of the home. "It's three younguns."

The farmer and his wife brought us into the kitchen and surveyed us with disbelief.

"We run off” Bob’s pronouncement brought a clucking sound from the woman and a more practical one from the man. “Martha, fix them some hot cocoa while I call the sheriff.” .

We were so cold, hungry and homesick, even the word “sheriff’ didn’t bring a twinge from any of us.

Manuel’s father picked us up at the sheriffs station about four in the morning. We drove the twenty-five miles in total silence.

When we arrived at the farmhouse, Uncle Bill greeted us with tears streaming down his gaunt cheeks.

“I swore on your father’s grave that youse would never go hungry, never be without a roof over your head and that youse would get an education. He stopped to blow his nose loudly. “I’ve dug wells, painted houses, plowed fields, worked wheat fields—anything to keep all of youse under one roof. And how do you repay me? You run away!”

He started crying all over again,

Aunt Gertrude quietly ordered us to our rooms. Much relieved, we crept up the stairs to bed.

Later, Grandmother came into the darkened bedroom, carrying a tiny peach tree twig. She stood looking down at us, tears webbing from her eyes. “I suppose I have to punish you,” she said. She tentatively flicked the twig at us a few times, then fled the room, sobbing uncontrollably.

Now, over a half-century later, that ‘flogging” looms in our minds as the worst we’ve ever taken. “This hurts me more than it does you” was never more clearly defined than in our sainted Grandmother’s valiant attempt to “punish” us.

***

Although our religious training was never highly organized, we were dealt subtle doses in such a manner that, to this day, God is a very real entity to me. He is not a long-bearded fellow who sits in Heaven and pronounces judgments on us like a local magistrate dealing out traffic fines. God is an eternal stream of truth that in its purity remains ever constant.

We all know that driving a car at eighty miles an hour in a fifteen-mile-­an-hour zone can only result in disaster. Ignoring truths that have existed from the beginning of time has the same dismal result. God is love. If we all really acted on that premise, crime and war wouldn’t exist.

Mankind pays lip service to the basic creed but, in reality, avoids its application like the plague.

Grandmother had given some land to the small Negro community so they might build a church. When the building was finished, it was picture-per­fect, nestled in a clearing in the woods and facing the road that Barney Jenkins often trod. It also faced out on our family’s grape vineyard.

The first harvest of the Concords was an excitement to us all. Bob, Sonny, Louise, Pat and I drifted along the long rows searching for any grapes that looked even remotely ripe. We made ourselves sick by gorging pounds of them into our stomachs.

One Monday morning, we became bedeviled with a “fun” idea.

Lilly Mae, a slender, graying and gracious lady of about fifty, was cleaning her church after the Sunday meeting. Now wouldn’t it be fun, we decided, to throw dirt clods into the area she’d already cleaned? Then we’d dart into the cool hiding places among the green vines. We did just that, feeling vaguely alarmed when the front door of the church slowly closed.

The feeling intensified the next day. Lilly Mae, dressed in her Sunday best, headed straight down the dirt road toward our farmhouse. She looked terribly dignified in her finery, adding a touch of elegance to her carriage with a parasol shading her soft brown face from the sun.

She was going to “tell”! What is more paralyzing to young minds than that dreaded word—“tell”?

Straight to Grandmother Gunderson she went. Soon that soft, Norwegian ­tinted voice drifted to our ears. “Children…”—how we dreaded that sound—“…Come into the parlor. I want to talk to you all.” The voice was soft, but the steel rod in it glinted through.

A more contrite group of waifs never existed. We slunk into the parlor, heads bowed and eyes studiously examining the floor. Grandmother, all ninety pounds of her, eyed us sternly. “Lilly Maehas something she wants to say to you. I think you’d better listen.” We looked at each other dumbly. Lilly Mae surveyed us sadly. No anger, no hostility, just a deep sadness.

“Children,” she said in her gentle Southern accent, “when you threw dirt into the church, you weren’t harming me. You were desecrating God’s house. I know it’s just a little country church, not a big cathedral or temple, but God is there just the same. He is everywhere and He is Love. So when you do things that are mean and small in His eyes, you hurt Him, not me. All I ask of you is to think about it.

“Do you really want to be mean and small?”

Personally, I’d rather have taken a beating. I could have crawled into a rat hole. When I sneaked a look at my fellow conspirators, I knew that they felt the same.

Grandmother spoke up. “Lilly Mae has invited us up to her house for lemonade and cookies. Get yourselves cleaned up.” She turned to Lilly Mae. “We’ll be there in half an hour.”

After Lilly Mae left, the scrub brush whined. Soon, spanking clean, we were ready for our visit, which proved to be an eye-opener. From its exterior appearance, the house of Lilly Mae was a shack: the porch sagged, the wood was unpainted, and it had an air of abject poverty. The interior, however, was spotless and nicely furnished. And Lilly Mae was a charming hostess. The lemonade was cool and fresh, the cookies delicious. The lesson was driven home without fanfare or bombast.

I can attest to the fact that Grandmother and Lilly Mae made it nigh unto impossible for me to be swayed by color, creed or outward appearances. To this day, Bob and I are more impressed by what a person actually does than by what he says, what he actually lives by and up to, than what he professes. Aesop was right: “Fine feathers do not make fine birds.”