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By Root 823 0

should have been home passed. Our joking and bickering ended and real fear crept in. At midnight the dogs began to bark to warn of a car’s approach. We quickly hid in our parents’ closet until we could be sure that it was really our parents and brother. By this time, we were convinced that the dreaded stranger would arrive before our family. We knew our parents would not knock. Tom Barnett’s knock on the door sent us into a small panic. But the news the neighbor brought was even worse. Our parents and Ray had been in an accident and had been taken to the hospital. Thus began the winter of 1967: Aunt Sadie was in the hospital suffering from a stroke from which she would soon die; my father and mother and brother snatched away without warning in the middle of the night; and my brother John enlisted in the armed forces as a private during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

My mother came home from the hospital within two weeks of the accident. Her major injury was a broken collarbone. After her return home, the household returned to some semblance of normalcy. My father’s injuries, however, were more extensive and severe, including a collapsed lung and a shattered right arm. He had to be taken to the hospital in Tulsa, over an hour by car from where we lived. From my one visit with my father in the hospital, I remember him covered in bandages and strapped to countless sustaining and monitoring devices. Even as a child I knew the reason for the visit: that it might be the last time I saw my father alive. The prognosis for his survival was very poor. We were grateful that my father proved the doctors wrong—he lived—but never spoke of the danger of his condition. After what in a child’s mind seemed an interminable stay in the hospital, he came home for a recovery that lasted throughout the winter. He was in and out of bed, and my mother, my sister, and I were constantly tending his shattered arm. We bathed and massaged it, hoping to revive it from its now paralyzed state, though I never believed that the therapy was adequate for or scientifically related to his full recovery. Still, he did recover partial use of the arm.

In the meantime, the farmwork, which during winter consisted mostly of feeding the cattle and pigs, continued. During the winter of 1967 the work fell on Ray and my mother. This was a precursor for the following winter. That year, with my father ill again and Ray away at school, the chore of feeding over a hundred head of cattle fell on my mother, JoAnn, and me. My mother was the muscle of the operation weighing 130 pounds. At ages fifteen and eleven, neither JoAnn nor I weighed more than 90 pounds. The winter of 1967 was cold and dismal. Often my body quivered—the response of a frightened adolescent who had not yet learned to express such an intense fear of loss.

Everything in my life and in the world seemed completely upended and uncontrollable. I was eleven years old and for the first time ever I was more frightened by the world than I was intrigued by it. Quietly, I had always soaked up life’s experiences. I loved schoolwork; even test taking. In the evening when my chores were completed and before I did my homework, I watched the national news with intense interest. I even enjoyed some, but admittedly not all, of the rigors of farmwork. Now, however, I wanted to retreat.

My life with my family had been more than just the farmwork. My sisters and brothers were my best friends. I rode the bicycle I shared with JoAnn. I played basketball on a dirt court with Ray. On Saturdays when my parents went to town for the family groceries and left us at home, I listened to the 45s that John played for us while Ray and Carlene danced. In the springtime Jo Ann and I picked blackberries along the roadsides. In the fall we fished the mud holes together for crawdads—one of JoAnn’s favorite activities. Even on the farm there were always sounds and sights that were pleasant, bright, and exciting—the greens of the spring peas, the croaking of the tree frogs, the glimmer of the fireflies that we called lightning bugs.

Yet