Growing up Stupid

I spent a great deal of my childhood living in Kentucky and Texas. I was a military brat moving quite often without a say of my own, but I learned to adapt. I was able to make friends and cope with strange, new environments, but being shy and introverted didn’t make those endeavors easy. I began to watch though and I began to listen. I read, and I read more. I wrote in a tiny, pink diary that had a lock and key, and in time, scrawled lines in spiral notebooks that I hid in a pile under a blanket in the closet.

I have to believe that observing from a distance and listening in on myriad conversations or discussions of others, combined well with all that reading and writing. I became a thinker with a lust for knowledge and, thank goodness, a mind of my own.

 At moments, though I need to put in words what I am thinking. That is when I am drawn to the keyboard; it becomes imperative to “speak out” the best way I can – by writing. Today is one of those times. And why? The bigotry and violence that have been at the forefront of the news recently disturb me to the core. I choose the verb disturb carefully because it puts a silencer on a maelstrom of emotions colliding inside me.

I am reminded of the movie Forrest Gump, for some reason, perhaps because of the bullying and unfounded hatred he often endured. A couple of lines have been playing over and over in my head. On the bus to school, young, little Jenny asks Forrest, “Are you stupid or something?” His reply is perfect. “Mama says ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’” He had a good Mama. And she made a good point. So, I’m writing today about Darla, a girl who grew up stupid.

~~~

            It wasn’t Darla’s fault really – the fact that she grew up stupid. She was born, just like her brothers and one sister in the back, upstairs bedroom of Grandma’s two-story, gabled farmhouse. She was the last of five . . . five children who did not get very far. Their papa took off to God only knew where when their mama told him she was in the family way . . . again, this time with what turned out to be Darla, and their mama took up waitressing in town once Darla saw daylight, just to make ends meet. It was not a pretty picture.

The whole brood moved into Grandma’s on Christmas Eve 1955, with everything they owned jammed into three suitcases and four cardboard boxes. The worst snowstorm in a century blew in the night they arrived and for fourteen days Grandma refereed scuffles while Mama wiped sniffles. When they finally managed to wrestle the front door open after two weeks of breathing stale, infected air, the boys sported three black eyes, a broken nose, a sprained ankle, and the two girls had cases of influenza so bad it was a wonder baby Darla survived. But she did . . . to grow up stupid . . . just like her siblings.

The boys departed school, not a minute too soon to their way of thinking, just after sixth grade in order to tend Grandma’s farm. Three tow-headed rascals, eleven, twelve, and thirteen saw it as a way out. Not one of them could tolerate any teacher and left their last classroom reading at a third-grade level, and that suited them fine.

“Who needs to read?” Jesse asserted for all of them. “Can’t plow with a book. ‘Sides, Grandpa never read a lick himself.”

It was a truth. Grandpa’s grandsons had inherited his aversion to schooling though that didn’t matter anymore. He was long gone.

 “Grandpa went on up to heaven, I reckon,” Grandma told Darla when she was old enough to hear the story, “because he didn’t have the gumption to keep plowing his paltry fifty-five acres.”

Grandpa had acquired the land, Darla learned, through no fault of his own. Old Will Buckenridge had gambled the parcel away back in the early thirties when moonshine whiskey had taken away all the poor boy’s senses. It was too bad for Will but something of a windfall for Grandpa who up until he was handed the deed had not had a pot to piss in.

“Hot damn,” he had blurted to Grandma when he had shown her the rumpled title certificate. Then he had swooped her into his arms and carried her over the threshold as though she were a blushing bride.

“Grandpa didn’t take to farming much,” Grandma told Darla and her sister, Scarlett, who was fourteen and ready for marriage to Jimmy somebody. Their first baby, Scarlett said, was already in the breadbasket.

“I’m planning on an even dozen of those little whippersnappers,” Scarlett proclaimed, patting her plumping belly.

When Scarlett finally exited the farm with Jimmy, Darla was left to her own devices, which consisted of not much. She baked the odd batch of cookies or swept Grandma’s kitchen with a straw broom that made the dust bloom up into angry swirls before it settled back to where it had been in the first place. She shooed a litter of feral cats away time after time and stood at the back door of the house for long minutes, her feet bare and her mind empty. Darla hated school as much as her brothers had, so she feigned illnesses, or drove off with Abel Winfield in his rusted, Ford pickup out to the flats where they had sweaty sex on a scratchy blanket in the sun. Abel wasn’t much to look at, but he had a nice smile - only one front tooth missing. And one eye wandered from time to time. Darla had a hard time following.

They were a couple but they had friends too, other dropouts who cruised the country roads looking for trouble . . . vandalizing businesses in the dead of night, scrawling obscenities on signposts and the side of the First Baptist Church, edge of town. Someone had the idea to burn a cross or two there, as well as farther down the road where a line of tiny shacks lined the cemetery. When the crosses roared into flame they sent burning embers into the dark sky. Darla remembered but she forgot as well . . . the smell of singed hair, a dog’s howl in the darkness, a man’s deep curse, and a bellowing cry from an infant not far away.

It’s the way it was for Darla . . . a familiar existence, a normal way of being, living a life that was going nowhere. Darla didn’t give a rat’s ass about that either. She was incapable of even considering. She was oblivious to the fact that it had happened . . . she had grown up stupid.

www.jdechesere-boyle.com