HAPPILY never AFTER
(Remembrance from my childhood)
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Hers was a primal scream, cutting me with an icy blade of accusation.
"Why don't you do something to help me?"
Lily-May cried out, struggling with two bulky-shouldered men from the State Hospital who'd come to fetch her while her uncle Wallace pretended everything was okay.
Wallace Roberts ignored his sister's panicked cries, setting about the business of hefting furniture out of his daddy's house, stacking it in a long haul trailer attached to his Packard automobile.
Jesse Roberts, the family patriarch, died the day before, tossing Lily-May's world upside down. Her father and her protector--the one person counted on, suddenly snatched away into a dark forever.
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I'd grown up in the house next door, seeing Lily-May every day smiling in her homespun dress and apron; the same dress as yesterday and the day before. I accepted things as a 'given' back then in a time when life was simple.
Menfolk set off to work early and returned in the evening. Womenfolk busied with domestic chores as children were sent outside to 'play.' The world spun endlessly carefree--eternal seasons of the heart on a ball of dirt hanging in the middle of nothing.
Lily-May wasn't young. I don't know her age at the time. There was just something odd about her. I didn't know how to put my finger on it. Just was. One day she watched me for an hour, standing with those peculiar eyes, fixated on my movements as I practiced tossing a throwing knife into a block of wood. She was never without a long yellow ribbon her mother had given to her on a disremembered birthday. The ribbon was her treasure, it seemed.
"You're right skilled, ain't ya?"
"Huh?"
"You don't miss."
"Oh, uh--I try not to miss."
An uneasiness settled in on me and I grew self-conscious. I stopped and turned to see if she was still standing behind the hedges separating the two properties, ours and hers. Of course she was.
"Ya wanna know a secret?"
"Um, I guess so."
"I was kicked in the head by a mule when I was just a baby."
"What did you say?"
"Daddy says that's why I'm slow."
I didn't know how to continue the conversation. I made an excuse and ran off into my house and left her standing there under the shadow of the overstretched sycamores in a world no longer there.
My grandmother spoke to me about Lily-May.
"That's just what families say to explain things."
"What things?"
"Some people are superstitious and cruel when a child isn't quite right in the head. Religious folks say it's God's punishment for sins. So, the parents will make something up to explain it away."
"Oh."
I understood on some level though not completely. I grew awfully sad for her.
I was much younger the day her Mom died. The old woman went to fetch her mail from the mailbox just outside the front door when she suddenly stopped and put her hand to her head and shouted, "Damn blackbird!" She fell where she stood.
Often I had walked next door with my great-grandmother, Groogie, as I called her. I was the "Little Pal" and Groogie's 'shadow' whereever she went. We knocked on the Robert's screen door and the Mom would shout, "Come in."
In the 1950's, nobody had air-conditioning. The best you could do to avoid heat was live as we did, in houses surrounded by a copse of overspreading trees. The rustle and chatter of wind in Sycamore leaves sung ever to our ears in songs without words.
I can't remember Mrs. Robert's first name. What I do recall is the Folger's coffee can she clutched in her lap. She spat into it from time to time. This action left a slime trail of viscous brown spit trailing from her whiskered chin. I couldn't help but stare.
"Why don't ye snap a picture--it'll last longer, Young'un?"
I'd hide behind my Groogie's apron red-faced and feeling guilty.
The other daughter showed up twice each day, a source of whispered fascination among neighbors. Lucille Roberts wore men's pants and a man's hat and she drove a taxi-cab. My mouth dropped open each time I saw her. The slight brown moustache above her lip was the sight I never tired seeing.
The Mom would catch me out, too.
"Why don't ye snap a picture--it'll last longer, Young'un?"
Groogie pulled me aside one day and chastened me not to be so rude as to stare at Lucille's mustache.
"Why not?"
"You'll embarrass her."
"Is that possible?"
Lucille could probably have whooped any man in the city in a fair fight--I reckoned the very idea of embarrassment was nigh on impossible.
Before his wife died so suddenly, Jesse Roberts worked as a Truant Officer (badge and all) in a black uniform like a policeman, for the Carol Peak Elementary School. He was efficiently hostile and tireless in pursuit of little 'hooligans' captured like a dog-catcher and hauled in to the Principal's office for a good paddling. The day his wife dropped at their front door, he miraculously softened into the warmest man I'd ever known.
Jesse Roberts retired as Truant Officer, planted an amazing rose garden all around his home's exterior, and laid the foundation of a large patio facing East with a full view of the new South Freeway in Ft.Worth. There he invited neighbors for sweet ice tea with lemon. We'd gather for hours rocking, sipping and chattering like ravens. This must have been 1957. The reason I know is because I had memorized every car printed in LIFE magazine that year. I entertained the adults by identifying all the new cars that zoomed by on the freeway. The most popular, of course, was the 57' Chevy with those futuristic fins at the rear.
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I sprung from my bed that fateful Saturday morning only minutes before 6 a.m. I'd begged my grandmother to awaken me for a reason. Saturday mornings, the Channel 5 NBC TV station broadcast began with special music which thrilled my ears, leaving me feeling a frisson of excitement. I had no idea what it was or what made that special feeling surge through me like electricity. (As an adult I heard it again, the announcer saying it was Petrouchka by Igor Stravinsky, but only the very last 6 notes.)
As the final note held, I heard Lily-May's screams outside the window and I dashed quickly through our hallway and out the screen door and jumped over the front porch onto the driveway adjacent to the Robert's house.
"Daddy's dead! Daddy's dead! Daddy's dead!" She screamed repeatedly while in the background inside the house her brother Wallace cursed at her to "Shut up, Dammit!"
The neighborhood soon aroused, folks stood in their night clothes, pajamas, long-johns and skivvies calling out to each other, "What's goin' on over there?"
The wail of the ambulence caught up with the cries of Lily-May in an almost feral horror of hair-raising dissonance.
By Three O'Clock that afternoon the next wave of distress rose like wildfire with the arrival of the attendants from State Hospital.
Wallace Roberts had seized hold of his sister's sleeve, jerking, tugging, and heaving with all his might. as the bulky-shouldered attendants arrived lifting Lily-May off the ground, legs fluttering without traction above the perfect green lawn so beloved by her dead father.
Hers was a primal scream, cutting me with an icy blade of accusation.
"Why don't you do something to help me?"
I was beside myself with frustration and anxiety! What could a boy eleven years old do to stop this from happening?
I bolted toward the back of my house and found my grandfather just as he exited the back door, clad in khaki pants and shirtless.
I frantically explained what the commotions were and urged him forward to stop those awful men from kidnapping Lily-May.
It was too late!
I caught my final glimpse of her pathetic face and haunting eyes. She cried out for salvation--swallowed whole in horrifying betrayal and extradition to God knows where.
I begged my grandfather for help.
He calmed me, shaking his head and repeating, "It's none of our business. It's none of our business."
And the world fell silent.
I collapsed in a heap next to Lily-May's yellow ribbon lying on the grass, wrested from her hands in that final struggle of upheaval.
Why had they taken her away from the only home she'd ever known?
Why did she think I could possibly help her? Why did nobody care about this except me?
The day crept into evening and the sound of the Packard car doors slammed out a final haul, as Wallace looked around one last time. He turned and waved at me. I just stood with red eyes, ignoring him and feeling an awful hatred rising like lava in the pit of my soul.
That was the last time anybody lived in the old house on the corner of Baltimore Street. Inside of a month, the roses died and scattered leaves hid the shaggy brown grass of the Robert's front lawn.
Something happened to me that afternoon. A fragile promise had broken, a bond of some kind that I had betrayed came again and again to haunt me, taunt me and embed inside my spirit.
I should have paid attention to Lily-May, befriended her, and offered a measure of warmth or comraderie to the humanity inside of her. I hadn't done that. I was so shy--so painfully shy--I couldn't befriend anybody.
I was her last and only chance and I had failed her and myself as well.
I still think about her and the yellow ribbon left behind on the grass. Did she end up crying herself to sleep without it?
How long did she live and where did she rest her head at night? Did any part of her life make sense? Is there anything fair in this wide world?
I think perhaps not, but I will never betray a friend again. No sir--I'll never betray a friend again.
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Terry Walstrom