Free Heart Earth by Ivan Doig Page B

kitchen, stock-still, scrubbing brush still in her hand where she had been slaving away at the rust stains on the ancient sink drainboard, my mother stood staring at the radio as though trying to see the words just said.
    "Mama? When Daddy gets home, are we going to wash the car in the creek?"
    "I ... I don't think so, dear. President Roosevelt's funeral isn't going to be here."
    Everything rattles on in the kitchen now, full days later; the dressmaking, the chitchat, their medical opinions on my father who, sore side or not, goes winging out of the house every day to put in twelve hours in a lambing shed
(he really shouldn't be working but then you know Charlie),
rosters of who's home on leave from the war and apt to be met up with at the prom (the White Sulphur Springs high school spring formal amounts to a community dance, as any dance in that lonely Big Belt-edged country tends to), denunciations of this wintry spring, you name it and the smart cookies in the kitchen will do you a two-woman chorus of it. This peppy visit from Winona amounts to a special bulletin itself. Cute yet industrious, Winona looks like a half-pint version of Rosie the Riveter except that, slang and gravelly in-this-for-the-duration voice and all, she is a schoolteacher. Winona I suppose I am a bit shy of, her firecracker energy, her sassy eyes. Kiddo, she calls me. But really,
kiddo
is a hundred times better than the excruciating
Pinky
which some of White Sulphur's downtown denizens call me because of my red mop of hair, and in the right tone of voice I think it also makes an improvement over
Ivan.

    Now Winona is off on hats. She's seen a zippy spring number in the Monkey Ward catalogue she is sure she could make for my mother. Living out of suitcases as we have been for the past half year my mother's wardrobe can stand any first aid it can get, so the women talk headgear until the next mousetrap springs. This time Winona, insisting she wouldn't want to get out of practice, takes a turn at disposing of the deceased mouse. Quick as she scoots back in from the garbage barrel, the conversation again becomes fabric and color and whether to veil or not, yet how much more than hat chat is going on.
Wally, you asked me my opinion of you and Winona.
    "Going together" was the description for Wally and Winona, fine fudge of a phrase. Did it mean merely fooling around with one another while the good time lasted or drawing toward each other into inevitable destiny of matrimony? Evitable or in, that is the question for Wally out there on the
Ault
with an ocean of time to think. He has put in about a thousand days in the navy by now, and Winona even more in the teacherage at Ringling, and across such a space of young life maybe a sag sets in. Her V-mail to him stays bright and kidding, but as she points out, there is only so much of yourself you can provide in 25 words or so.
Nonie has a good education...
    Tricky duty for Berneta's pen here. Close chum to Winona, but also Wally's older and married sister being asked for advice.
    My mother ends up doing them a tick-tack-toe for going beyond going together.
...is a good cook, a fair housekeeper, and a real seamstress as well as a good sport. She has her faults, so do we all. But I think she is the kind that if she loves a guy she'll stick with him through Hell & high water. So if you think you two can make a go of life together I'm certainly for you. But it is up to you to know what you feel in your heart.
    Now she pauses over the factor that has winked between Wally and Winona since their first moment and is neither X nor O.
There is a few years difference in your age...
    Quite the picture of a strapping young beau, the prewar Wally amounted to. Abundant black teenage hair in the long-may-it-wave 1940s style; that ever likable face, ready for anything; muscular frame you could pick out clear across town when the town happened to be Ringling.
    Decades later when he had become royally bellied, amid one of our trout