each other. So Sandie came with us, sitting in the back with her mom and Gayle, begging for more when Lois rolled down the window, pretending she could hear the Thing out there, coming to get us.
John Pharaoh was home alone. ‘Not here,’ he said, pacing up and down. ‘She’s working at the singling, but do you drive over Brakey way, you’ll see her. She’s at the Mayday Shed. Hello, tuppence. You want to see what I got?’
Sandie ran off with him and Lois followed her. Gayle helped Audrey carry the food parcels inside, and I just leaned against the trunk of the car and watched some little bird that was hovering and singing about a mile over my head.
‘Skylark,’ Audrey said, when she came outta the house.
Gayle said, ‘Ain’t this place something! I mean, my folks don’t have much, but they got a TV at least. They got a car. These guys gotta be real poor.’
Aud said, ‘And they sleep in their kitchen, I hope you noticed.’
Gayle said ‘Oh, folk do that in Boomer. When we were all home there was eleven of us. Girls head to tail in the kitchen bed ’cause girls gotta be up first. Where’d he say she was today?’
She was at Mayday. It was one of the beet farms. That’s what she did. Little jobs here and there, whatever was going, according to the season.
I wouldn’t have minded some kind of work myself, ’stead of sitting indoors reading my stars in the same old magazines over and over, but when you marry the military you become a Dependent Wife, and DWs weren’t allowed to work. Your job was to stand by your bunk, wait for him to come home from Beer Call and tell you another thousand different ways he’d put his hide on the line up in the big blue yonder. How things have changed.
I found out later, from Kath, that singling beets wasn’t no exciting career. You just stood in a shed with a bunch of women, all Jexes or Gotobeds, splitting up the clusters of sugar-beet seeds, chopping them up and getting paid nickels and dimes.
‘That’s not hard,’ she said, ‘that’s just boring. Then August, I go tater riddling. That’s hard and boring.’
I asked her one time, ‘How come you’re out working and John stays home?’
‘He works when he can,’ she said. ‘But he’s not a strong man. He’s got bad nerves. He’s under Dr Brameld, but he can’t do nothing for them though by the seem of it. He catches eels, though, and sells them. When the eels are running, he does well at them. And that’s an early start, up at four, emptying the traps. Then he has to get them down to Brandon, in time for the pick-up. He makes traps. Cuts the willow. Strips it. They come from all over to buy his traps. A man come all the way from Welney looking for John to make him a willow grig.’
It seemed like John Pharaoh was a regular little eager beaver. I kinda wished I’d never asked.
Anyways, that was where he’d disappeared to with Lois and Sandie that morning, showing them around his eel-trap empire, making little Sandie squeal with his tray of lugworms. We found them while we were showing Gayle the privy, giving her the full guided tour, like it was the Alamo. Sandie peeping out from behind Lois, daring herself to go and take a close-up look at the worms, and John holding up a basket, shape of a pickle, but six foot high.
You ever sin one big as this?’ he said, giving Lois a knowing smile, and she roared.
‘See,’ she said, when we were driving home, via Brakey, looking for something that might be a beet shed, ‘see, they catch different kinds, depending on the time of year. And sometimes they use nets and traps, and sometimes they use … like a spear, and just catch them one at a time, and sometimes, on a good night, they might catch twenty pounds of them, just in one of those baskets, and the big traps are called grigs but the little ones are called hoileys, and … what else … ?’
‘Tune in same time next week,’ Audrey said, ‘for the Wonderful World of Eel Fishing presented by Lois Moon.’
‘I understand this right?’ Vern said. ‘You drove out there, guzzling gas, took half the commissary and a bottle of good liquor too, and she wasn’t even home?’
I said, ‘Yeah. Must have put fifteen mile on the clock. Jeez, you’re starting to sound like Ed Gillis. He’s got radar-tracking on Betty.’
‘Know what’s good for you, you’ll stay outta Ed and Betty’s business,’ he said. ‘Know what’s good for you, you’ll quit running round, fraternising with a bunch of breeds. Hell, Peg, why can’t you stay home and make a pie once in a while?’
‘Hell is a bad word,’ Crystal said. ‘Also, jeez. Miss Boyle says.’
‘Vern,’ I told him, ‘I can make pie and go visiting.’
I’ll say this about Vern. Sometimes pie was all it took.
‘Honey,’ he said to Crystal, ‘you tell Miss Boyle welcome to the free world, thanks to folks like your daddy, and you can say any goddamn words you please.’
‘You don’t tell Miss Boyle no such thing,’ I said to her when I was tucking her in, ‘and you know what? Mommy’s gonna get you a princess dressing table, all pink and pretty.’
I was thinking I’d get Miss Homemaker of America to give me a hand. Betty always seemed to have a hundred ideas how to turn a prefab cabin into what she called ‘a gracious and lovely home’. I figured, if I kept Vern sweet, smartened up the quarters, made the occasional pie, I’d be able get off base once in a while without getting the third degree. Get away from the whine of the jets and the rattling of the windows. Now I’d got the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road, and handling that funny money of theirs, I was starting to enjoy going out there.
Crystal said, ‘Mommy? Do I have to have a princess dressing table? Can I get roller skates instead?’
I fell and busted my collar bone, coming outta the PX where the kids had been skidding around, polishing the ice. They strapped me up, till the bone knit, which good as put me in the slammer for a while. Couldn’t drive, couldn’t hardly pull up my own shorts. Couldn’t stop Betty Gillis running in and out performing acts of neighbourly kindness. Vern ate all the soup she brung in. That man was a walking Disposall. I just lived on codeine and Pepsi and prayed next time he got orders it’d be for Ramey, Puerto Rico.
‘You rest up now,’ Betty said. ‘I’ll take care of things. You’re in the best place. You seen what kinda weather we got today?’
They called it a Fen Blow. Looked like a sandstorm to me. A sandstorm on the far side of the moon.
‘Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse,’ Lois said. ‘Here, open nice and wide and I’ll steady the gun in your mouth. Hell, no. Let me go first. You can make your own arrangements. I got Herb at home and you’ll never guess what he’s doing.’
Herb loved chopping wood.
Thirty-six hours they didn’t fly a single sortie, because of the Blow, and Vern was like a bear with a boil on his backside, driving out to the facility every five minutes, looking for a patch of clear sky.
I said, ‘Why can’t you quit prowling around and do something? Play checkers with Crystal or write your mom. Do you know Lance Rudman writes his folks every week?’
‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Well that figures. Pushing a pencil’s about what Rudman’s cut out for.’
Vern didn’t have much time for Lance. Okey Jackson was the one Vern rated, even though he looked so