End of the Innocent

I changed the names of some characters in this abridged version of End of the Innocent.   --CE

Charlotte’s Web is one of my favorite stories, and even now, when I think of it, I’m right back in my fourth grade classroom listening to Mrs. Hill read to us from a dog-eared library copy of the book. Mrs. Hill was a pixie of a woman just slightly taller than the students in her class, with perfectly permed white hair, black and silver cat-eye glasses with rhinestones on the corners and the soft hands of one who knows tenderness. She taught me multiplication tables, and I took standardized tests in her classroom including the one that measured IQ. She had kind eyes and treated us kids kindly, and I loved her.

Story time came every afternoon. We returned sweaty and tired from recess after lunch. Lunch was usually something fried, steak patties with gravy or fish patties with homemade tartar sauce. The cafeteria ladies served potatoes - fried, mashed or boiled - and homemade yeast rolls with real butter. We’d take our full bellies to the playground after lunch. I sprinting back inside the building to the ball closet near the restrooms for first pick of the kick balls. Running in the hallway was not allowed. I got caught running once and Mrs. Winifred Manry paddled me for it - my only school paddling.

After recess we filed back to class, and put our heads down on the big kids desks, topped with smooth green Formica. As the fan hummed in the corner, Mrs. Hill would read a few pages of the book animating her voice for the different parts. I’d daydream and in my mind create scenes of farm life where the animals talked to each other.

During these years, my mother Mary, father Jasper, three sisters and I – lived in a wood frame house the school district built. White with blue shutters, the school colors, the house sat at the bottom of a hill on a tar-and-chip topped road that ended abruptly just beyond our house at a steep drop of about 20 feet into a creek below. One day I was playing in front of the house when I noticed Susie, our teenage neighbor from across the street, backing out of her driveway in her forest green ‘55 Chevy. As she braked and turned the wheel to point the car forward toward town, something happened - she got her foot hung, or the gearshift stuck. I never found out why Susie’s car didn’t stop as it reached the cliff. It continued its backward motion off the edge and disappeared into the creek. Miraculously, Susie jumped out at the last second. She stared hopelessly over the edge of the cliff at her car below and then cried until the wrecker arrived and pulled it, remarkably unscathed, out of the creek. The incident caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, and everyone ran down to look at the strange sight of a car being pulled from the creek.

Throughout my grammar school years, I lived in a world of imaginary friends and magical places and playtime with Barbie and Ken and Disney’s Wonderful World of Color tv shows. My neighbor Ray and I were the same age, and he was a companion for bicycle rides, stick baseball games, army and cowboy battle reenactments even playing Ken when I asked him to. I spent most of those lazy school days and weekends riding my bicycle. Underneath the towering pines trees on the west the side of our house, I built a bicycle town of one large circular lane crisscrossed with shortcut paths and pretend houses and stores. I raked away the pine needle carpet and rode around and around the circle packing the dirt to a consistency much smoother than asphalt roads. I spent hours there singing and riding, soaking up the monotony of it, wanting nothing more than another day of the same. 

I often ventured beyond my little bicycle town to the back roads on the south side of Corrigan and the mile or so to and from the elementary school. I’d often test my bicycle skills by riding over rocks, sticks and drop-offs in the road to see if I could keep from falling. Because I knew the workings of my bicycle so well, I often rode without hands.

Our driveway was at the front of our house, and the garage was converted into a bedroom and bath for my parents. The den separated my parent’s room from two bedrooms on the east side of the house; one for my older sister, Sisi, and me, and another for my two younger sisters, Beverly and Janice. Both bedrooms had large wood frame windows that faced east, the woods side, and were dressed with sheer curtains and Venetian blinds.  Sisi’s and my room also had one window that faced the front of the house, south. Since our house was not air conditioned, we kept these windows and the blinds open on warm nights. 

At the back of the house was a large yard at the far edge of which was an old barn that had no other use than to store old paper – newspapers, magazines and books from the school, a recycling practice begun during the war years. Vines and weeds consumed an old WWII jeep parked nearby. The barn sat just outside a dense thicket, a wooded patch of land with tall pine timber, undergrowth saplings, berry bushes and briar patches. The thicket covered an acre or two, and we didn’t play there because you could get tangled up in the briars or worse get lost in it. We doubted a clever cat could get from one side to the other without great difficulty.

Amid this country town setting, we four girls experienced a childhood full of school activities and adventurous outside playtime. Sisi was a teenager, and she was beautiful. She wore her red hair in the style of the day, short and teased under the crown and sides, sprayed with Aqua Net and then combed down just enough to make it smooth. She wore oversized sweaters, straight skirts, bobby socks and penny loafers and on special occasions Chanel #5 that was intoxicating to a little girl, and I expect to her boyfriend as well.

We had one bathroom for all four girls in our part of the house. A small window high on the wall between the tub and the commode was a source of air and light in the small room. One night I was in the bathroom, and I heard a thud against the wall just under the window. Sisi heard it, too, and we both went to tell Mary. We didn’t think about again until the next day. I was playing around outside and came upon my younger sister’s tricycle. Oddly, it was under the bathroom window, its seat had been wrenched sideways, almost broken off.

With last night’s thud and today’s discovery of the tricycle in an odd spot where we heard the sound, we began to piece together evidence of an evening visitor-a peeper. We all became more aware of strange sounds after sundown.  I especially became wary at night, and like a hound dog was highly tuned to the slightest snap of a stick or rustle of leaves outside our house. Many quiet evenings passed until one evening the peeper theory was proven correct. Sisi had just walked out of the bathroom and stood before the dresser mirror, and I was sitting on the bed getting ready to turn in. Five-year-old sister Beverly walked into the bedroom and said, “Who’s that?”  as she pointed to the window. Sisi and I turned and saw at the same time a hand reaching in the window to pull back the curtain. We screamed in unison. Sisi ran for the other side of the house yelling for Jasper as Beverly and I stumbled out of the room behind her. 

Jasper, already in bed dressed in his usual sleeping attire - boxer shorts and undershirt - did not hesitate or stop to pull on his pants. He grabbed his shotgun and ran out of the front of the house chasing the peeper. Mary and the sisters waited in the den all chilled and shaking from the scare. Soon Jasper returned with a faculty neighbor, Mr. Couch, Ray’s dad, whose help he had elicited in the chase. He followed Jasper into the house carrying a pistol. He asked my sister if she might know the name of the peeper.

Remembering creepy rumors about her friend May’s brother, she said, “It might be Bruce Landry.”

Mr. Couch said, “Well, I tell you one thing, whoever it is will be all scratched up tomorrow because he high-tailed it through those briars.”

The next day at school Bruce Landry showed up scratched to pieces. He was called to the office and Jasper and Mr. Couch interrogated him. After that, he was not seen around school for a while. Sisi heard about it sitting in Mrs. Black’s math class next to May. May told Sisi she was not surprised it was her brother and to look for little holes in the screen just above the hook-and-eye latch where he would punch a hole with a pencil to unlock the screen. Then she added, “What if you had to live with him?” 

I was to keep up my bicycle town for a few more years, but I became a little less innocent after the peeper incident. I developed a fear of strangers. I heard tales of a tramp who stole kids off the street, carrying them in a large tow slack slung over his shoulder. He wore a droopy hat and a long gray beard covered most of his face so no one ever got a good bead on his facial features. I thought I saw him one day walking down the farm-to-market road not far from the school.

On Monday nights at 6:30, the fire siren in town called the volunteer firemen practice, and I knew it was time for me to get home to supper and watch Twilight Zone.  I was drawn to the macabre “theater of the absurd” with its weird characters and storylines, which only fueled my childhood fear of lurking danger. 

In the back of my mind, I knew danger could pop out at any time.  To discourage any more peeping, my parents added a large spotlight to the woods side of the house. The light provided some security. However, one night as I stared through the window trying to fall asleep, a cat jumped onto the window screen and hung by the claws of all four feet, legs splayed, meowing. It scared me so bad I thought I would faint.  Although the peeper disappeared from my life, danger became a constant possibility. I learned to look for it around every corner. I still do today.

(C) Copyright 2016  Carolyn Elmore