Chapter 1

Recently, I got news that my cousin Laurie passed away. We haven’t seen each other for over fifty years, but back when we were youngsters, she played an important part in my life. We had a rocky relationship, but interesting, so I write this little story in her memory.

I remember it was my birthday, the day they arrived. It was the spring of 1946, and Mama had baked a chocolate cake with cream cheese icing for me and put a candle on it. I thought I was getting too old to be making birthday wishes and blowing out candles, but Mama insisted. I was her only child, so I was going to get all the mothering she had in her.

The cake was soon reduced to a few crumbs on the plate, and Papa gave me my birthday present; a new two-hundred-page, cloth-covered journal that I would quickly fill up with my stories, my poems, my opinions on anything and everything, and whatever other bits and pieces I thought were interesting. When I die (which could be any time now since I just turned eighty-seven), if any of my progeny take it upon themselves to read through the boxes of journals stored in my attic, I expect they’ll find some very interesting revelations, indeed, regarding our extended family.

Well, Papa being Papa, he felt obliged to point out that he’d paid two dollars for that journal at the TG&Y in town. In 1946, two dollars was significant money, and him being almost as tight with a penny as Ebenezer Scrooge, himself, he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to drive that point home. He would insist that I appreciated his sacrifice.

The town with the TG&Y was Enid, Oklahoma, about thirteen miles to southeast of the farm. There was actually a lot of money floating around in that area because you could hardly throw a rock or swing a dead cat without hitting an oil well. Unfortunately, none of them were on our property, so my family had to make its living the old-fashioned way – we worked hard for it.

I always suspected that I was a disappointment to Papa, but by the time I reached my teens, I guess he had finally given up on me growing into the star athlete and the archetypal, strapping farm boy he always wanted for a son, and decided to just go with what he had. What he had was a skinny, undersized kid, who had just turned fourteen years old at the time this story took place; a kid who had an insatiable thirst for learning new things, who spent as much time as he could with his nose in a book (at the public library in Enid, as often as I could manage it), who spent much of his spare time writing short stories and poems, who would sometimes get teary-eyed with emotion when he heard something sublime like Jascha Heifetz playing Albinoni’s Adagio on the radio.

I say I loved learning new things, but that didn’t translate into loving school. School was - well, let’s just say uncomfortable for me. I had a hard time getting along with other kids because, somehow, we just didn’t connect. I couldn’t connect. That resulted in fights a couple of times, but mostly, other kids just left me alone. I’ll say more about that later.

I might not have been what a hardscrabble farmer like Papa hoped for in a son and heir, but me being what he was inclined to described as “kinda girly” didn’t mean he went easy on me when it came time to do the work. Like all farm kids, I had my daily chores, and come planting and harvest, he liked to work my skinny little butt off. And I might have had a gentle, introverted nature, but I was no wimpy little mama’s boy. My hands were covered with hard callouses. And I might have been small for my age, certainly nothing close to Papa’s idea of “strapping”, but I was strong, what they used to call wiry, back then.

Personally, I didn’t believe I was the least bit “girly”. The truth was, I found girls in particular to be very puzzling, almost unfathomable creatures. I saw them as flighty, often irrational beings. Hell, I’m an old man now, and I never have figured them out. I suppose it’s possible, even probable that the difficulty lies in me, not them, but who knows? I gave up even trying to make any sense of it ages ago.

I guess I’m drifting, aren’t I? Forgive me if I take off on a tangent from time to time.

I mentioned the day they arrived. The they were Mama’s sister, her husband and their three kids; the Brandt side of the family. The two youngest were boys, Richard and Larry, eight and ten years old and both highly energized perpetual motion machines, and the oldest was their daughter, Laurie, who was five months older than I was. She and I were in the same grade, ninth.

They moved down from McCook, Nebraska because the trucking company that Uncle Elvin worked for went bust. He said the drivers didn’t even get any severance pay. One day they had work, the next day they didn’t. Well, Uncle Elvin and Aunt Maxine didn’t have any savings or anything like that, no way to pay the rent, so there wasn’t much choice but to store their household goods in someone’s shed and move in with relatives until they could get back on their feet.

Our house wasn’t all that big; a typical two-story frame farmhouse with just three small bedrooms, but family is family, so we just sucked it up and made do. It probably goes without saying that my bedroom with a double bed was given over to my aunt and uncle. Papa and I cleaned out a place in the attic next to a dormer window and moved an old army cot up there for me to sleep on. I kept my clothes and personal things in an old wooden leather-strapped trunk that came over from Sweden with Papa’s family. Laurie got the bedroom that Mama had been using as a sewing room, and the two boys slept on the fold-out sofa in the living room.

Well, I didn’t like giving up my own room and my own bed one little bit, but I knew that whining about it would likely get me a smack across the back of my head, so I just kept my mouth shut and felt sorry for myself. Papa had a big silver ring on his right hand, a family heirloom handed down to the eldest Larsen son through generations, and that damn thing would flat ring my bell if he caught me just right! I learned that from experience. More than once.

Well anyhow, that’s what happened on my fourteenth birthday.

By the way, my name is Eric Larsen, and my folks were Lois and Jakob Larsen. Papa’s family emigrated from Sweden when he was fifteen years old, and he spoke with a strong Swedish accent until the day he died. When he got angry, he did most of his swearing in his native language.

In some ways, the Brandt’s moving in with us actually worked out pretty well for Papa. We were just getting into spring planting, and the plowing was already well underway. Uncle Elvin was a hard-working man, and he’d be out helping Papa from sun-up until lunch time, then he’d clean up and head into Enid in his green ‘36 Chevy sedan to look for work. He wasn’t having much luck, though; the problem being that with the war over, the job market was flooded with ex-military, and any kind of a job that paid a decent enough wage that a man could feed and house a family was hard to come by for someone like my uncle because the returning soldiers would get first pick. It was only right.

It didn’t help matters that he had a bad leg from getting bucked off a horse when he was a young man working on a ranch in Colorado. The broken leg never did heal quite right, and driving trucks was one of the few jobs he could handle without suffering a lot of pain, because it kept him off his feet. Not that he let that slow him down all that much when he was out in the fields with Papa. He just worked through it. Uncle Elvin was a good man and a proud man, and he believed in paying his own way. Even though other people’s feelings are likely to sail right over my head, every single day that man had to live in our house, I felt like I could see shame in his eyes from him believing he was causing us a hardship.

Anyhow, within a few days after they moved in with us, things began to settle into a routine. Mama and Aunt Maxine cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed, all the things they’d always done, except now they did a lot more of it. Richard and Larry got enrolled in the grammar school over in Carrier, and Laurie was enrolled in the ninth grade at my junior high in Enid. We had to take the school bus all the way to Enid because the secondary school in Carrier burned down in ‘44, and it hadn’t been rebuilt yet.

In general, things went smoothly and we all got along pretty well together, considering how jammed up we were, practically living in each other’s laps. It was good that Richard and Larry had the whole farm to play on because it kept them from under foot. They were a wild pair, always up to some mischief. It wasn’t good that Laurie and I were often charged with keeping an eye on them to make sure they didn’t do something stupid. That particular chore was pretty much like herding cats - a futile effort.

The hardest part about the whole arrangement for me was that I’ve always been kind of a loner, as you might have guessed by now. Being an only child on a farm with the nearest neighbor dang near a mile down the road, I’d grown up making do with my own company, and for the most part, I was satisfied with that arrangement. I guess a lot of folks considered me odd in many ways, and how I came by my love for my bosom companions - reading, writing, and classical music - is a mystery. I can only ascribe it to recessive genes. Papa probably thought I was brain-damaged at birth, and there may have been some truth in that.