Ozark Girl

Ozark Series, Vol. 1

Terry C. Piper

Charlene Ridley didn’t have a lot going for her. Growing up in the Ozark hills of southwestern Missouri during the 1950s, she owned one pair of shoes that had to last the school year, whether her feet grew or not, and she wore dresses her mother made from feed sacks that she bought from the local feed store. Tall and thin when the fashion was short and curvy, Charlene knew she was no beauty, and if she had forgotten, she had her alcoholic father to remind her, as he did at every opportunity. She loved school because it was the one thing she knew she was good at – until sixth grade, that is, when the bullying began. This is a story of poverty and strength, of paternal abuse and maternal love; it is a story about the pain and cruelty of early adolescence, and, ultimately, it is a story of hope.

ISBN 1-59431-373-X Mainstream Ficiton / Series / Trade Paperback

Cover Art/ Maggie Dix



Prologue

The first picture Charlene remembered seeing of herself was one that Momma took when Charlene was five, Dale was four and Frank, two. They are dressed in plaid coats of identical fabric, suggesting that Momma must have made them. Charlene's is too short and Frank's too tight, suggesting that she made them the winter previous to the one when the picture was taken. They look at the camera, pretend-smiling, mostly-frowning, except for Frank, who is just scowling. Charlene is holding onto the trunk of a small leafless oak tree, its limbs as scrawny and young as her own. Her long fingers wrap easily around the trunk of the tree, one of the three her father had recently planted as the landscaping for their new house. Her eyes are pale and she keeps her mouth closed, hiding her teeth, or absence of teeth, from the camera.

When Daddy looked at the photograph, he shook his head and sighed. "Well, Charley," he said. "You sure don't look like your Momma. I just hope you turn out to be smart."



Chapter 1

No one slept much in the Ridley household that Labor Day night in 1952. For one thing, the temperature was 104 and the family didn't own a fan. But that wasn't what kept Charlene awake. She kept getting up during the night to touch her new dress and to make sure that thieves hadn't broken in and stolen all the new things Momma had bought her. Like the tablet with the red Indian chief on the front. She'd never owned any paper before. Momma would sometimes give her a sheet from the tablet she used to write letters to Grandma Stone in California, but Charlene had never had more than one piece of paper at a time in her whole life.

She touched the tablet and the thick, heavy pencil lying next to it, and then picked up the Crayola box. She'd never had more than 8, and those had to be shared with her brothers, and now she had twice as many, and all to herself. She had heard Momma telling Daddy how everything cost so much and Daddy telling her not to worry because if the weather held, he'd be working until Christmas. Momma muttered something about a guy named Jim Beam getting a bigger share than the kids, but Charlene wasn't sure who that was.

The sun was barely up when she pushed the screen door open, squeezed through, and walked across the back yard to the outhouse, wiggling her toes in the high wet grass, watching, always watching, for snakes. She pushed open the splintery door and sat first on the smaller hole--Daddy had made one of the holes to fit the children's young bottoms--then changed her mind and moved to the larger one. I'm almost grown up now, she thought, in no time, I'll be marching in the band and-- her imagination failed her there. Momma had taken them to the Christmas parade last year and Charlene was enchanted by the long-legged teenaged girls, their smiles painted bright red, wearing short green and white skirts and throwing batons into the air. She had no idea at all what actually happened in school or what she might be doing there, but she was sure that this was the place that would turn her into one of those glamorous creatures.

Reaching into the heart shaped pocket Momma had sewn onto her red and white baby dolls, she pulled out a stub of a pencil that she'd found in her father's overalls when she was helping Momma get the clothes ready for washing. Every day, she crossed a day off the calendar that Daddy had hung on the rear wall between the two holes, being careful not to slip and fall in. She'd do that in a minute. First, she bent over and picked up the old Montgomery Ward catalogue. They used real toilet paper--Momma said they weren't that poor yet. The catalogue was for entertainment, and for Charlene, it was a picture book of the world outside Boogey Flats, Missouri. She studied every page very carefully as she looked for one with a lot of white space on it. Finding it in the men's pajama section, she carefully printed her name, C-H-A-R-L-I-N-E, the wobbly "E" creeping onto the sleeve of a smiling man's buttoned pajamas. Her daddy had taught her to spell it like that, but Momma insisted that it was spelled with two 'e's, and so she turned to a page with piles of white diapers on it and printed her mother's version, C-H-A-R-L-E-N-E. She had no way of figuring out who was right, and so she decided that she'd spell it whichever way her teacher thought was right.

When she got back to the house, her mother was up and stirring oatmeal into boiling water. "You're up early. Go wash before Daddy comes in and the boys wake up." Daddy was out milking Rosie and Bess, the two cows that kept them in milk, rich cream and butter. Charlene went to the painted wash stand in the corner of the kitchen where her mother had already poured water into the wide chipped bowl that was their sink. She'd had a bath last night in the galvanized steel laundry tub, and so she only dabbed with the wash rag this morning, ignoring the Ivory soap in its metal holder, her mind on the dress she'd be putting on in a little while. When Momma took her to school for visitors' day last May, she saw so many girls and all of them dressed in beautiful, bright-colored dresses. She had been wearing the only dress she owned, a brown and white checked gingham with a white yoke, already too short and showing her knees, grimy despite Momma's best efforts with the wash rag, and she knew that some of the girls were staring at her, so she hid behind Momma and pretended to be invisible.

Momma had spent the summer sewing, and now she had six new dresses, one for each day of the week and one for Sunday School or anything special that might come up. Like a birthday party, Momma said. Charlene had never been to a birthday party, except for the Kool-aid and cupcake parties she and her brothers held for each other, but it sounded pretty serious if you got to wear a special dress. She knew how special the dresses were because she had heard Momma and Daddy arguing about them. Daddy said that he didn't see the sense in wasting money on more than two or three dresses because, after all, she could only wear one at a time. He also said something about a sow's ear and a silk purse, but Charlene couldn't figure out why he was talking about pigs unless it was because Momma got some of the cloth from sacks that the pigs' feed came in.

She dried her face and hands on the worn, striped towel and turned to her mother. "Can I put my dress on now?"

"No! If you do that, you're sure to spill oatmeal or milk on it. Just leave your pajamas on while you have your breakfast and you can put on your good clothes while I take Daddy to work. Then I'll come back and drive you to school. Don't expect that every day, though. It costs money to put gas in the car. Besides, it's only a mile and the walk will do you good." Charlene nodded. She didn't know what a mile was, but she did know where the school was and reckoned that she wouldn't have any trouble walking that far.

"Do you want your bread toasted?" Momma asked.

Charlene usually preferred it soft and untoasted, but she remembered that it had been several days since Momma had baked. "Yes please," she said, remembering to try out the manners her mother was trying to instill in her. She took some peanut butter onto her plate and poured in a little honey and began to mix it up.

"Don't you want some strawberry jam?" Momma's strawberry jam was widely praised.

"No, I like this," Charlene replied.

"That old man's taught you bad habits," her mother grumbled.

The old man was her grandfather, Old Frank, her father's father, who lived in a little shack of his own on the same property, about a hundred yards from their house. He ate breakfast and lunch on his own but joined them for supper most days. Whatever meal he was eating, he always had bread spread with peanut butter and honey, or pancake syrup if they were out of honey. Momma didn't really care whether he had peanut butter and honey or cow dung on his bread, as Charlene had heard her tell Daddy. What burned her ass was that he shunned her perfectly good homemade bread, like he was too good to eat homemade, Momma snorted. He had to walk into town to buy it, which he did, even though he was almost 80, had asthma and relied heavily on an old hickory cane. He asked Momma to pick it up for him once when she went to the store for groceries, but he hadn't made that mistake again.

After breakfast, Charlene went to put on her new dress and her new saddle oxfords and socks. The dress was lilac polished cotton with a border of embroidered green-leafed purple flowers circling the waist and another hiding the stitches that held up the hem of the skirt. It had short puffy sleeves and an inserted square yoke of white pique, also trimmed with the embroidered flowers. Daddy's cousin Earlene had sent the cloth and the trimming from Kansas City where she worked in the shipping department of Montgomery Ward. She even sent white anklets with a purple flower on them. The problem was that they were too small. Even at age six, Charlene had big feet, but she cried so hard that Momma cut out the toes so that she could wear them anyway.

"For God's sake, don't take your shoes off, girl!" she warned Charlene, who added that to her list of things to worry about along with how to find out where the toilet was and what to do if a bully attacked her. Momma had told stories of how she had wet her pants on her first day of school because she didn't know where the toilet was or how to ask to go, and she had heard her Daddy talking about bullies at the school. She didn't know what a bully was, exactly, but she was pretty sure that she'd know one if she met one.

With her brothers occupied at the kitchen table, where Frank was pouring thick cream into his oatmeal in a futile attempt to thin it and Dale was spooning large globs of glossy strawberry jam onto his toast, Charlene put on the white cotton slip that her mother had made her and then pulled the newly ironed dress over her head. She couldn't do up the buttons in back by herself, so she went back into the kitchen to wait for her mother.

"Want me to do your buttons?" Dale asked, being uncharacteristically helpful.

"Okay," said Charlene, turning around. He fumbled a bit but eventually finished.

"You could have brushed your hair," her mother said by way of greeting when she returned a few minutes later. "Come on over here," she said, sitting down on a kitchen chair, hairbrush in hand. Charlene walked clumsily in her new shoes, her feet unaccustomed to shoes over the summer, and stood before her mother as she began to tug the brush through Charlene's matted brown hair. "Your hair's even thicker than mine," she observed just as Charlene yelped. "Hold still now. Okay, turn around--what the hell? Can't I leave you alone for fifteen minutes without you getting all dirty? How did you manage to get the back of your dress covered in strawberry jam?" Charlene was as surprised as her mother until she saw the look of fright on Dale's face. "It was Dale, Momma, not me."

"I was just helpin," Dale said.

"Well, she can't go to school lookin' like that," Momma said, unbuttoning the dress.

"Go pick out another one and throw that one in the laundry basket. Maybe the green plaid, she suggested. There's a little purple in it and so your socks will be okay. No time for changin' them, too. Hurry now!"