Foot Ways

This is a work of fiction.  Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. 

Polly Junior (Mary Flora Glory Marchant)

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It was Mr. Rufe who named me Polly Junior.  Which was one reason I didn’t like him.  One.  He appeared at odd times, mostly spring, as far back as I can remember.  My father referred to him as that perfect case of human driftwood.  Whenever he’d say, It’s about time for that perfect case of human driftwood to show up, my mother, Polly Senior, as she was called by Mr. Rufe, would give a little sniff and hike her humpbacked whale cold shoulder high, high, high. 

I wondered how Daddy knew Mr. Rufe was coming, but, somehow, I got the message that I dare not ask him.

I was born knowing what a cold shoulder was, but Daddy was the one who made it personal.  I loved Daddy’s way with words, and humpbacked whale cold shoulder has always seemed to me a classic example.  He didn’t talk a great deal, but, when he did, he made it count.

I loved Momma, too, of course, but she never did have Daddy’s way with words.  For one thing, she talked too much.  I knew she was always after my good when she piled them on, but there were so many of them that I guess they seemed cheap somehow.  Daddy never complained, but I could tell he felt the same way about it.  He’d just hunker down over his coffee or iced tea and eat.  The more Momma talked, the faster he ate.

I have always tried to be fair, from what both Daddy and Momma taught me, but mainly because my Aunt Florence, who lived across the road from us, never was.  Fair, I mean, by my lights at least.  So, I have to admit that I may have been prejudiced against Mr. Rufe because Momma always put him up in my playhouse.  Daddy objected, but Momma would say, Samuel Wesley, Mr. Rufe will be given hospitality in The Playroom, or he will be given hospitality in our spare bedroom.  You decide.

Daddy almost always agreed with whatever followed Momma’s addressing him as Samuel Wesley instead of his regular Sam.

I am proud to say, though, that Daddy did not give in totally gracefully.  I heard him mutter every time, as plain as the nose on my face, That man does not pee gold and silver irregardless of what the women in this community may think!  Oh, I thought that was the finest sentiment and longed to share it, but I knew better than to use the pee word.  I had been taught to say I had to piddle as early back as I could remember.  And even that was filled with danger.  Because there came the time Aunt Florence described one of the neighbor women as nothing but a piddler.  Why that woman piddles the day away.  Which makes it little wonder her husband hasn’t got a pot to you-know-what in.  Why didn’t she say piddle in if she didn’t want to use the regular word, pot to piss in?  I tried to put it to her, but she just went screaming off to find Momma with her hands up in the air as she went.  I found out the difference between piddle and piddle, not to mention p—-, which I was not allowed to say ever again, the hard way.

I also wanted to ask what a spare room was for, if not for the likes of Mr. Rufe, but, somehow, I got the message that I dare not ask Momma or Daddy.  Early on, I gained a reputation for being "Sam and Miss Polly’s right smart girl-child.  I thought it was to distinguish me from my sister Abigail, who was seven years older and never around because she lived way off in Lumberton with my four-times-widowed grandmother who had gone blind and refused to be put in a home."  That was, for the longest kind of time, entirely confusing to me.  The way they used the word home in connection with Grandma Woodie.

When I began to get my hands around that word, I started thinking of my playhouse as a kind of home away from home.  When I was not in tall cotton, so to speak, with one or both of my parents or wanted to get away before Aunt Florence arrived to deliver her latest lecture or just wanted to be alone to think out something, I went to the playhouse.  Aunt Florence was always saying I shouldn’t be allowed to be so solitary.  Why, with Dear Abigail way off at her Grandmother Woodie’s, Aunt Florence would say (Good riddance! I wanted to shout.), our little Mary might just as well be an only child.  Do you ever make her play with other children, Polly?  Does she ever have the opportunity to learn to share, which she will need to make her way in this cruel world?

Well, Florence, Momma would say, "I am not sure that sharing will be our Mary’s ticket through the thickets of the world.  Besides, Mary makes her own opportunities.  Which just may be more important, you know."

I should explain.  My real name is Mary, plus a lot worse.  Mary Flora Glory Wesley Marchant.  Momma named me that because her own name, Polly, is a diminutive of Mary; because I was supposed to be her Final Glory and keep her in Flowers or Flora; and because my father is Samuel Wesley Marchant.  I don’t know exactly how it all got put together, but some old man who was a doctor and a friend of hers told her that she should have been named Mary.  For its formality and because it fitted her.  I never asked her too close about it because I found out early on about the Virgin Mary and Mary the Mother of Jesus, James, and Mark, who was all right, and Mary Magdalene, who was and wasn’t all right.  It was not a matter I could easily talk on with my mother.  With Daddy, yes, though I don’t recall ever quite getting around to it.

To tell the truth, I think Daddy built me the playhouse because he would of liked to have one to get away to but couldn’t because he was an adult.  He was a quiet man, as I have indicated.  He could manage Momma all right, but not Momma and Aunt Florence together.

So, I benefited.  He built on this big room next to the garage, which was not the kind of thing we have as garages now but a big shed with two stalls for cars.  Only when I was real little, we didn’t have but one car, so the other opening was apt to be occupied by a tractor or the pick-up truck, whichever one was not in use at the moment.

He weather-proofed it, too, which nobody but nobody had ever heard tell of for a child’s playhouse, and a lot of the neighbors came by and hung around watching while it was being built.  Daddy put in a row of sweet little windows up at the top on the side that didn’t join the garage.  Later on, when the REA, the Rural Electrification Authority people, brought us electricity out into the country, he put a hanging bulb in the playhouse.  Before that, I wasn’t allowed to be in there after dark because I would have to have a candle or an oil lamp or lantern or something, and it would be too dangerous.  I had shelves just about the whole way round and could display most of my toys.  My best toys stayed in trunks.  I had a small table where I could serve a real meal and a day bed to take a nap on.  Momma made me a matching bedspread and curtains.  There was a small oil heater for winter.  Which didn’t make much sense to me because it ought to be as dangerous as a lamp, oughtn’t it?  But I never put that question to either of my parents, and Aunt Florence, for once, didn’t get to the prickly heart of the matter. 

I loved that playhouse.  It had a little picket fence and a gate with a dainty little bell.  I rigged the bell myself, so as to tell if anybody was approaching.  What was the good of having a playhouse if it wasn’t your castle the way Daddy was always saying My home is a castle when Aunt Florence would lecture him about making more of himself.  I thought it was funny that Aunt Florence never noticed he said my instead of a man’s and a instead of my.  Not "A man’s home is his castle. but My home is a castle."  I thought a lot about what that meant.  Daddy was careful with words, and I knew he had something important in mind when he put the castle words together that certain way.

If I was in my playhouse, nobody could get at me without me knowing they were coming.  Except, of course, when the honey got switched with the vinegar.  I mean, Mr. Rufe would show up, and I’d be Little Nell out in the snow without so much as a by your leave.  Many’s the time I thought about removing the bell while he was there so he could be sneaked up on.

What it was, too, I think now, is that Mr. Rufe tried too hard with me.  He seemed to know that he didn’t make my heart pittety-pat the way he did all the other women and daughters in the neighborhood.  Even my full tomboy best friend Pook Adams would put on a dress for that man, and we fell out every spring for the duration of Mr. Rufe’s descent upon the community.  I was only what Daddy called a quasi-tomboy because I did not aim to miss out on anything that was out there.  If I had not kept Pook up on what was going on in the regular girls’ world, she would of been up a creek without a paddle for certain.  Finally, we agreed, without taking an oath or anything, just to cool it