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CHAPTER 1
Barefoot Girl Running with the Boys
Lately I've had some of the strangest feelings that I can't explain at all. I want to know more than I know now. I want to learn about the strange things beyond. I'm impatient, and it seems strange to live in a world where one knows no more than the life that you are living now.
— Winifred Bryan, age twelve
Wednesday, October 10, 2013. This is the first day of our planned sessions to record Win's life stories. When I arrive at Win and Dave's apartment at TigerPlace — the retirement residence where they recently moved following some problematic health issues for Win that taxed Dave's ability to care for her — Win sits at the end of the table surrounded by sheets of handwritten pages and a yellow legal pad next to her elbow. She has obviously been writing down dates and things she wanted to be sure to tell me today. Her handwriting is labored and shaky at times, but her notes help her to stay on track, she tells me with a big smile.
Win waves goodbye to Dave as she reaches up her arms to hug me. Dave tells me hello and goodbye, announcing that he is off to the farm, leaving us "to it" as he goes out the door, grateful to be able to be outdoors where he is happiest. Win does not stand in greeting, so I bend down, careful not to squeeze her thin bones too tightly or dislodge the oxygen tubing on her nose. I gently kiss her on the cheek. That's how you spread germs, you know, she mutters as she kisses me right back. You're not even supposed to shake hands anymore. Spreads germs. Bunch of nonsense.
She is being silly; her smile is bright, and she chuckles as I put my jacket over a chair and set up the recorder between us on the table. You want water? she asks. Coffee? Get whatever you need; it's on the counter. I pull out the recorder and a bottle of water I have brought with me, cracking open a new journal I have bought just for this purpose. Even though I am recording her story, I realize there will be dates and specifics that I might need to jot down in order to keep her story straight in my mind. People tell their stories differently. Some are methodically chronological in their telling; others jump around from story to story. I have no idea how Win will want to tell her tale, but I am definitely excited to begin. Evidently, so is she.
I had worried about Win's stamina for these long recording sessions. I realized the "ka-thump" of her oxygen tank behind her would provide the background to all of our conversations. It never missed a beat. I was confident this would go well; after all, Win and I were great friends and enjoyed each other's company. We had met like this for years. It helped that I knew most, if not all, of the people she would be talking about — people I had also come to know well over the past thirty years. My assumption that Win's stories would revolve around her career as a university professor was somehow both true and not true. While her joy in her academic work was the centerpiece of her life, she definitely planned to put this story into the context of the times and the expectations that she had to struggle against.
Win Horner lived her life as both the subject of her story and the witness to that story. She knew she was capable, smart, even "special," as her mother insisted. She thought of herself as a writer, perhaps even an academic, before she probably could articulate this desire. Her independent childhood and early years as "one of the boys" in her family had not prepared her for the surprises she encountered on the journey that lay before her as a young woman eager to get started. Although she was not yet aware of the world's opinion of her gender, luckily her mother had instilled in her a love for the written word, and the boys had taught her how to swim, dive, challenge, and compete. These skills would serve her well in the years to come. The one thing she knew to do as she set out was to write it all down. Her pen was in lockstep with her feet.
Once Win is certain that Dave has left in his truck, she prepares to begin her story. The day is warm for October, and we leave the door open to the screen so we can hear the birds in the trees outside the porch. She asks me if I am ready. I am, and she begins to talk.
I find it odd now to think about my childhood as one of privilege, yet in many ways it was. Born in 1922 in St. Louis, the only girl of four children, to a blue-collar family could have been pretty rough. Yet, because my father worked with the St. Louis Transportation Department, he always had a steady income, and my mother was a seamstress. We came from well-educated, although not rich, stock, and somehow our parents ran with a more wealthy crowd in the city. My father had many friends, most of whom had more money than we did. My father's connections resulted in four men investing their collective savings into a plot of rough land two hours south of St. Louis on the Meramec River for the sole purpose of providing a summer escape from the urban heat for their wives and children. The men were young and eager to find a way to enjoy the river.
I remember going down to what we dubbed Water Oaks on weekends, while the fathers built a series of primitive cabins all along the river's edge. The families became very tight-knit. The mothers loved spending time together along the water's edge, smoking and drinking their gin and vodka, gossiping and being lazy. They allowed all the children free rein in the woods and in the rather languid water. As soon as the cabins could keep the rain off our heads, the fathers went back to the city during the week and the mothers and all us children remained at the cabins. There was no plumbing or electricity, but that made the summers all that more exciting. I think there were about six boys — and me, the only girl! I need to make it clear that we were not rich. But we were privileged to have the kind of life we did. I was privileged in having the mother and father that I did. And I was privileged to have my brothers. When we lived in St. Louis, our fathers worked hard at their jobs, and our mothers took care of the children and the household duties. Now, I find it rather amazing that my father, Dave's father, and a few other men managed to buy that rough acreage south of Columbia and St. Louis on the Meramec River, during the Depression. You have to understand these families had known each other in St. Louis for generations. Their grandfathers had known each other in school; the grandmothers were all friends. And they were all highly educated families. They all put their money together and bought five hundred, or was it three hundred acres, right on the river, with each family getting about sixty acres. It was scruffy land that was pretty much useless for farming or anything else, so they got it on the cheap. But for them to be able to buy this land in the midst of the Depression was quite a big deal.
Part of the reason the fathers could buy this land was because they were able to keep their jobs during the Depression. All the men in our families were engineers of one kind or another. Once the land was purchased, the men went down there together and built three cabins, rough buildings without the need for insulation or any extras. I would say the cabins were simple. The living areas were up a flight of outside stairs and the kitchen was on the first floor. Each cabin had a big covered porch, and each one had a kitchen, a pantry, and a large living and dining area. Each had a couple of bedrooms and there were extra cots everywhere for guests and for new family members. My brothers all slept on the porch, even though it often rained on them, or, rather, the wind would drive the rain onto the porch, and they would have to sleep on the sofa and the floors. I slept in a small alcove next to my parents' bed. My mother hung this long burlap curtain between their bed and my small cot. I remember being quite curious about the various shadows that would play out on that curtain and the noises I would hear from my parents' bed whenever my father came down to Water Oaks on the weekends. I found all that rather amusing. Other nights it was completely silent, although I could easily hear my mother's gentle breathing when she was sound asleep, or I knew when she was reading late into the night because she kept her lamp lit. I always tried to fall asleep before she blew out her lantern, because then it was so very dark out there.
Years later, I found out that one of the reasons that motivated Dave's father to urge all the fathers to buy this land away from the city was that Dave's grandmother had a Down syndrome child, a girl, who of course eventually became a young woman. For years they used to take her to Maine for the summers when her father was still alive. But when he died, they wanted a summer place closer to St. Louis where they could take her, so that's one of the reasons they bought the place. Actually, we rarely saw her. I think the grandmother would take this child, woman, down to the water's edge during the morning hours and let her play in the sand and shallow water, but by the time all of us kids slapped into the water, she was back at the cabin "resting."
So, we were doubly privileged to be able to leave the city all summer, every summer, and head for Water Oaks. The day after school let out, my mother would pack the touring car for the entire summer. Once we got to Water Oaks, we did not go off the place for three months. As children, we roamed the land, on our own, all summer. We climbed trees, jumped over rotten logs, followed trails out through the dense undergrowth, chased rabbits, and flew into the river at all our favorite diving spots. We would collapse on the pebbly "beach" when we simply ran out of steam. Of course, while living this way every summer, we never gave it a thought.
Our mothers came with us, leaving their homes in the city and their husbands to fend for themselves. They did not watch over us much. Rather, they would sit in the end of a boat, smoking and talking, for hours on end. They barely looked up even at the sound of screaming or crying, knowing the older kids had the sense to get them involved if absolutely necessary. Otherwise, they chatted quietly amongst themselves, about what I do not know. Sometimes I would hear one of them mention their husband's name, or a new product one of them had tried, or they might share the names of reliable maids in the city.
It never occurred to me that I was more like the mothers than the brothers or the fathers. By that I mean that in our summer lives gender did not matter for me at all. When I was young I never even thought of myself as different from the boys. Before we left for Water Oaks the barber would come to the house, and Mother would instruct him to give us all short summer bob cuts, identical. And she brought to the cabin bags of shirts, shorts, socks, and shoes in various sizes and shapes. We would wake up in the mornings, one after the other, and grab something semi-clean that might or might not fit very well and head for breakfast. Our mother never really noted what each of us had chosen to wear; she did not care. Her back would greet us as we entered the large kitchen/dining room area, the sizzle of bacon inviting us to sit while all the smells in the kitchen made us salivate like puppies.
We didn't talk much until we had eaten our scrambled eggs and bacon, drunk our milk and juice, and swiped our dripping mouths with the backs of our hands, wiping our fingers on our shorts for good measure as we headed for the door as a unit. Our mother yelled behind us as the screen door slapped shut, "Stay together; stay within shouting distance; come if I call you; wear shoes in the woods." Her voice faded as we skipped across the gravel driveway, met the other kids, and roamed the nearby woods first, still a bit slow and sleepy, knowing it was too early to hit the water when the dew was still on the grass. We slipped into the undergrowth, watching for snakes, following the sounds of the elusive pileated woodpecker, the one Dave's dad had told us was quite rare. We recognized the bird's distinctive hammer and call and struck out, single file, to see if we could spot the one we'd adopted as our "Pecker." It never failed to amuse us to say "Pecker." We all knew we ought not use this word while in earshot of our mothers. But the boys swaggered just slightly as they repeated the word under their breath: "Here, Pecker, here, Pecker. Where are you, Pecker?" Frankly, I found their humor slightly dumb. I'd seen all their "peckers" at one time or another, and I just didn't get that they were such a big deal.
I think I did feel a wee bit of envy when I realized that among all the children traipsing through the woods every summer, I did not sport a "pecker" when I needed to pee. I was totally dismayed that taking time to piss in the woods meant exposing all my privates, front and back, and lowering my backside toward the tickling grasses in order to squat and urinate, while the boys merely turned toward a tree and wrote their names boldly in a hot yellow stream on the bark. Or, I felt left out when they all stood in a line and arched their "peckers" toward a selected mark to see who could piss the furthest. I could not participate in these boys-only capers. More often than not, I would leave them to their contests and strike out ahead of them up the ridge, hoping to make a discovery that might top their pecker prowess.
Some days, my foray ahead of the boys was highly successful. I remember finding a dead turkey once. We circled around that bird for a long time, gently prodding it with our toed shoes, perhaps afraid it really wasn't dead. We tried to figure out how the bird had died. We found no blood, no evidence of a gunshot wound or an arrow, but it was fresh, untouched somehow by the buzzards or underbrush animals, ants, and maggots that could locate carrion seemingly the moment a heart stopped beating. We didn't dare try to pick up the turkey and somehow hoist it back to the cabins, having agreed this was not a gift our mothers would appreciate. So, we proceeded to pluck all the best feathers, still shiny and smooth. These we would take home with us at lunchtime.
In the backyard between the cabins, we would add our feathers to our summer altar. We didn't call it that, of course, but, in a way, it really was a ritualized accumulation of each summer's escapades and discoveries, our findings, which could tell the tale of any given Water Oaks summer — feathers, bones, exotic flowers wilted beyond recognition, rocks, fossils, wasp nests, bird nests, and snake skins, tributes to our fearlessness. Our mothers paid scant attention to our growing archive of natural history, but it was our pride and joy. Early on in our Water Oaks summers, we had constructed a kind of haphazard museum-display kind of structure out of abandoned planks of wood and shoved it under the broad eaves of our outdoor storage shed, which mostly kept it out of the wind and rain and viable at least for the length of one full summer. We were always discouraged when we returned the following year and found it in disarray, pondering together who or what had ravaged our collection while we were gone. Had wolves come to reclaim bones — or Indians? Had birds flown low to recapture their loved ones' feathers? Had the snake skins slithered off the shelves and returned to the earth? Of course, we never discovered the answers to these questions. Soon enough we were clearing out the remnants of last summer's treasures and preparing for the new ones to come. Off into the woods we would tramp, eager to locate even better specimens than the year before.
I always felt a great sense of satisfaction as the collection grew. Whenever I was alone, which wasn't actually very often, I would make up stories in my head about each of the artifacts and elaborately connect them in a narrative of my own making. My internal narrative would grow as the shelves accumulated more items. I doubt the boys shared this storied pastime, but I never asked them, nor did I share my own stories with them, fearing they might find a way to make fun of my growing imagination. Somehow, I recognized my ability to narrate the summer through our varied objects as a singular talent, one I owned but the boys did not, something I owned that no one else knew about. I loved the stories I made up on the spot and elaborated on them at night as I tried to fall asleep with the purr of night noises as the background music to my tales — crickets, cicadas, frogs, birds, and sometimes coyotes traveling close by, or a panther's call, which our mother said gave her the creeps because it sounded so much like a woman screaming. I never wrote down my imagined tales, but I wish I had. They were full of intrigue and fabulous characters, tied together by a special narrative voice I polished to a shine. I imagined this narrative voice as being very sophisticated and stylish, something akin to both Jane Austen and the Grimm Brothers combined. But then, my memories may be tricking me on this. While I know I did write elaborate stories in my head all summer long, how good they actually were can never be revealed. Perhaps it's better that way. I can remember them as splendid tales woven by my own (superior) brain, the early precursors to a life of writing and a love of language. Either way, my brain was very active during these hot, humid summer days; it would spin tales that really never ended but rather slipped into my unconscious. They are still in there, somewhere; there's just too much other stuff in there as well, relegating them to a misty area I can almost access but never actually retrieve, something like a dream. I also remember that when it was raining, I would often sit at the end of the big kitchen table and play with cards. I would line up the king, queen, jack, and ace, and for hours, I would make up stories about the queen, the king, and the jack. For hours! I don't know what these stories were, either, but I was very busy making them up in my head.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Liberation of Winifred Bryan Horner"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Elaine J. Lawless.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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