Free Don't Call Me Mother by Linda Joy Myers Page B

practice sessions grow longer, the piano gets boring. The neighborhood kids play outside, the sound of their laughter drifting in. I want to play games and run in the grass with them, but Gram makes me practice almost all day long. At night after they have gone inside, sometimes I stand in the yard inhaling the sweet smell of the grass, watching the grand sky overhead with all its millions of stars, listening to the chirping of crickets. The huge moon rises overhead, painting the world silver. Alone in this landscape, I forget about the pressure in the house, and about Gram’s strict rules. I’m part of the night, and the land that surrounds us in dust and light.

 
    The Plains Is
Our Mother
    It’s June and school is out. Gram tells me that we are going to see her mama. With tears in her eyes, she says that her mother and brothers and sisters live in Iowa, and she misses them. She loads the car with cigarette cartons and suitcases, and puts the down comforter on the floor of the back seat, to protect me if we have an accident.
    The Great Plains is an amber dream, the blue sky a canopy over the flat land that stretches to the far horizon. The wheat fields are ever-undulating seas. It is harvest time for the wheat. Combines lumber up and down the fields spewing golden dust into the air as they cut the long wheat stalks, capturing wheat heads that will be stored in monolithic grain elevators rising from the emptiness of the plains. Every afternoon small clouds grow into huge thunderheads, and the air smells of sulfur. Rain drums the roof of the Rambler, and the windshield wipers bang frantically back and forth. Burma-Shave signs mark our way north.
    The car weaves through Kansas towns like Sedan and Arkansas City. We stop at small cafés, where Gram speaks with her English accent, acting like a world traveler. We order milkshakes or hot fudge sundaes and perch at picnic tables.
    Gram likes to stop at historical monuments on the roadside, where I learn about the Osage Indians and the tall plains grasses, about outlaws and the Civil War. In Coffeyville, where the Dalton gang was captured, we stay at a fancy hotel with high ceilings and crystal chandeliers. I can imagine an hombre swaggering in, ordering a beer at the bar, then shooting out the brass-framed mirrors. Gram tells me that the Missouri River starts out in Montana, where Lewis and Clark found its source. She tells me about Sacajawea and about the pioneer women in wagon trains that came across here, when the plains hadn’t been settled yet.
    “My mama, Blanche, was born a pioneer woman, in 1873.” I wonder about Gram’s mama—what she looks like, if I resemble her. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine horses running, dust swirling around their flanks. On the way to Iowa, I play with my dolls and imaginary companions, a fairy mother and daughter. The mother never lets the girl out of sight, and I play for hours with the lucky daughter who gets to have her mother with her all the time.
    On the third day of our trip, Gram’s eyes light up and she points eastward. “We’re almost there! Fifty miles to the Mississippi River, the greatest river in the United States. Our family has been living near that river since before your great-great-grandmother was born. That’s where my mama and her mama were born and where I was born.”
    A mist settles over her eyes. I don’t understand her story, but I want to know all about these women and the place that made them.

 
    The Mississippi
Valley Cradle
    On the Eisely Hill that overlooks the bottomlands of the Mississippi, a road curves across a wide plain of cornfields and rumbles past roadside fruit and vegetable stands. Gram starts to tell me about the family I am going to meet. “You’ll see—it’s a big family—all the kids that Mama had when I was older.” We turn into a driveway with the sign “Martin’s Mink Farm.” When Gram toots the horn, people rush down the porch stairs, smiling and waving.
    “That