Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [3]
The lifetime members of the Spit ’N’ Argue Club settled into wooden chairs around the potbellied stove in my grandfather’s general store. For the next few hours they’d chew tobacco, sip coffee from enamel mugs, and complain about the price of corn.
With their smell of tobacco and dried sweat, these were men I’d known all of my nine years, hardworking farmers from Carroll County, Missouri. Skipping into the store, my brown hair in braids, I headed for the long wooden counter and reached into a glass jar full of candy. Gummy beans were my favorites, so I grabbed a handful. Grandfather Hillis, known to me as Pa, stood with an apron tied around his girth in front of floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves. As I posted the first candy between my lips, he gave me a conspiratorial wink.
“Hey, HH,” one of the men called out. “You oughta use some liver tonic on that kid. She’s way too skinny.” Skinny was a word I’d heard my whole life, along with bony and tall. Like my father, I towered over my friends.
“I beg your pardon!” Pa replied. “My granddaughter’s not skinny—she’s streamlined.”
My father, Willis, whose first name was really Charles, looked up from his butcher’s counter and gave me a shy smile, as did my uncle Bruce, who was in a corner stacking sacks of feed. The two brothers helped run the family business, Blakeley’s General Store, on Main Street, Bosworth, the only one of its kind for hundreds of “Missour-a” miles. The place that had first served the wagon trains of the pioneers sold just about everything a person might need, from sausages to nails. Homesteaders came by horse and cart to trade corn and beans for luxury goods such as coffee or shoes. For some reason, my father always insisted I wear stiff new high-tops laced tight to keep my ankles “thin as a racehorse’s.” It worked.
In the basement, down treacherous stairs that were eventually to kill her, my grandmother Ma did the laundry and sold feed in between loading the furnace with coal. As the Depression deepened, she and Pa had no choice but to extend credit to their customers. Each night after dinner, my barrel-shaped Pa would tally up the day’s IOUs, clicking through them with a long, curved fingernail he kept especially for the task. Click-click it went, as I stared in fascination. After an hour or so, he’d fall asleep in his chair. Painting my mouth with Mother’s reddest lipstick, I’d plant a big kiss in the middle of his bald spot, knowing that the Spit ’N’ Argue Club would give him hell for it the following day.
Blakeley’s General Store was the sanctuary to which I’d run three blocks almost every day after school with our bulldog, Brownie. It shielded me from my little sister, Patricia (who wanted to do everything I did), and chores such as collecting eggs, churning butter, picking fruit, or plucking chickens freshly beheaded by my ma. Within the store’s aromatic walls I could pick up free candy and an easy compliment. “Someday you’re gonna break boys’ hearts,” Pa would tell me, allowing me to hug and kiss him in a way I never could my folks.
Having had my fill of gummy beans, I wandered out onto the wide front porch that fall afternoon in 1936 and drew my cardigan around me. A farmer rode up the gravel street, jumped off his horse, and tied its reins to the rail. Reaching out, I stroked the animal’s nose and pulled an apple from my pocket. Taking a bite, I offered it the rest on the flat of my palm.
“Hey, Barbara,” the man said, tipping his hat. “Could be a cyclone coming. Best git home.”
I gazed in dismay at the leaden sky and hoped he was wrong. I hated going to the storm cellar dug out of the dirt under our house. My mother would lift the trapdoor, push us down the wooden steps, and follow with an oil lamp. We’d huddle together in the clammy space stacked with preserved goods—wax-sealed jars of pickles and fruit, most of which I’d helped peel, pulp, and prepare. There were also bottles of sweet cider and some kind of Irish whiskey. Once a year my grandfather would disappear down the steps, shut the trapdoor behind him, and get loaded. We’d hear