Chapter Three
1964 (part one)
From the fertile groves of Indian River east of Blue Cypress Lake to the decades-old, hillside trees lining U.S. 50 west of Orlando to the sweet, heavy Valencias in rows along the Myakka River, the sticky heat of early January rolled in taunting.
The killing frosts of Christmas week had rendered the trees brittle and dark and the desperate cutting swept through them creating mutant shapes, skeletons twisted and separate where they had once touched alive and green. The bloated fruit of the trees turned brown from orange and the groves dripped in the sunshine, dead or dying.
The sickening smell filled the air and the snowbirds from Ohio, Michigan and New York rolled up the windows of their cars, closed the outside vents and switched on the air conditioning.
The smudge pots still sat black, spaced among the rows where the high school kids on Christmas break had stayed up with the growers for two nights running, recruited to keep the fires burning hot and ignite a miracle comeback against the icy air. The orange trees yet to be sawed into jagged stacks reacted to the heat by chucking piles of curled leaves onto the sand, their limbs a maze of crooked silhouettes bleached by the sun.
In south Sarasota, in the tidy middle-class area of Southgate, the year-end freeze had bludgeoned the ornamental shrubs framing the symmetry of the groomed, ranch-style homes. The colorful stone and brick planters under the eaves greeting front-door visitors bore a tangle of dead pansies, geraniums and periwinkles. In the well-tended backyards among the hardy oleanders and hibiscus, a few of the larger fruit trees survived.
On Bougainvillea Street, in back of Wallace Bailey's house, the tangerine tree was dead, but life hung on in the heart of one grapefruit and one navel orange tree. Dahlia had Wallace cut back the fruit trees after the second freezing night and the Florida sun had warmed their trunks and stopped the decay from spreading too far inward from the branch tips.
The backyard on Bougainvillea Street was never a showcase, but it had its share of highlights. Azalea beds here. An imitation cactus garden there. A goldfish pond in the middle, though there were never any goldfish. Surrounding the pond, the yard also offered a year-around bumper crop of sandspurs sprouting from the sandy soil. Sodding the property front and back would have made it nicer, I guess, but neither Wallace nor Dahlia believed in throwing money around on non-essentials. Besides, the streetside lawn looked pretty good and nobody much saw the backyard.
Other rules remained in effect regardless of the schedule:
--Take
your shoes off before you come in from outside. Leave your shoes in the
neat row by the carport side entrance.
--Do
not use the front door.
--Wash your hands when you come in, before you touch anything.
--Bow your head and say grace before touching anything on your plate.
--Scrape your plate clean over the garbage can when you finish eating.
--Make your bed.
--Hang up your clothes, put them in the laundry hamper or fold them in
a drawer. --Clean up after yourself in the bathroom.
--Don't use the display towels hanging on the rack.
--Don't ask friends to come inside without asking Dahlia first.
The last commandment was always the easiest to abide. After one taste of my stepmother's welcome, my friends rarely signed up for a return engagement. Come to think of it, I don't remember too many eager adults coming back for a second helping of her uniquely Southern hospitality. The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure she liked it just like that.
I remember one time at our last address during the sixth grade, the first time I invited Jim Mackie inside, Dahlia's Southerness caught his attention. After taking off his shoes and washing his hands at the kitchen sink, Jim was rewarded with a chocolate cookie and a cup of Kool-Aid. After being warned about getting crumbs on the terrazzo floor, we retreated to the relaxed atmosphere of the great outdoors.
"Hey, Josh. What's wrong with your mom's voice?" Jim asked.
"She's
my stepmom. You think it sounds funny?"
"It
kinda sounds like Abbot Benwall the other day when he was catching and
forgot to wear his cup and Eddie Dunn threw the fastball that hit him
in the nuts. Like that, except quieter."
"Yeah," I said, "her voice sounds pretty good today. She's from Louisiana
anyway. Everybody from there calls it Looziana. But I don't think too
many of them sound like Dahlia."
"I never heard anybody else sound like that."
"You should hear it when she gets mad."
"No thanks," Jim said.
Nobody but me, I guess. I know I spent quite a bit of time back there, pulling weeds, mowing the sandspurs and scrubbing the empty goldfish pond. The trouble was, the pond held water after a rain and soon became discolored and algae-stained. After two or three days, Dahlia would command, "Josh Bailey, you better get cleanin' back there!" I would, armed with a handbrush, mop, pail and cleansers. Half an hour later, the little "see"-ment pond (as Dahlia called it) sparkled bright turquoise again, drying in the sunshine.
It made me laugh that we had our own see-ment pond just like The Beverly Hillbillies on TV. On Wednesday nights my father would take off his shoes, flip the handle on his Lay-Z-Boy, ease back and lose himself in the Hillbillies. Wallace loved the character Jethro whose antics would soon have Dad laughing convulsively in the recliner, his stockinged heels rising and falling on the chair's elevated footrest. I thought the show was funny, too. Dahlia thought it was just plain silly.
"That ain't nuthin'," she always said.
After Rawhide, Dahlia would get up and do something in the kitchen, leaving my father and me to the Hillbillies. Before long, as 9:30 p.m. approached, I was up from my spot on the couch and brushing my teeth before Jed Clampett and the clan waved goodbye till next week. Dahlia liked to talk about bedtime to Wallace's friends at the boat club, and to his co-workers at Jarrett Chevrolet where he worked as a used car appraiser.
"Yep, I run a tight ship," she always told them. "On school nights for Josh, it's lights out at 9:30—no ifs, ands or buts."
Of all the rules on her barge, bedtime was the strictest aboard. If I happened to be there on a Friday or Saturday night, I was awarded a half-hour extension.
If you were a good passenger and obeyed most of Dahlia's rules, things sailed along fairly smoothly. Just below bedtime in importance, the after-school schedule hailed me from a corkboard note pinned to the kitchen cabinets. Home from school, before stepping inside, I had to put my bike away in the carport closet. Then I observed a regimented sequence of 1) homework, 2) yardwork, 3) household "chore of the day," then 4) play, time permitting.
