Deliver Us from Evie Read online

  Deliver Us from Evie

  M. E. Kerr

  For Robert O. Warren,

  skillful editor,

  fast walker,

  smooth talker …

  with thanks for years of help.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  A Personal History by M. E. Kerr

  1

  PIG WEEK BEGINS THE first Monday after Labor Day at County High.

  The freshmen and the transfers from Duffton School are “the pigs.”

  The seniors are out to get you. They call “SOU-weeeee! Pig, pig, pig!” at you, and they put you in a trash can, tie the lid with rope, and kick you around in it. You learn how to curl into a ball and cover your head with your arms. That happened to me first thing in the morning. I was a transfer junior from Duffton.

  Then, in the afternoon, a few got me by my locker. They read my name on the door, PARR BURRMAN, and one of them said, “Hey, we know your brother. What’s his name again?”

  “Doug Burrman,” I said.

  They said, “Not that brother! Your other brother.”

  “I only have one brother,” I said.

  They said, “What about Evie?”

  Then they began to laugh. They began to say things like “You remember him, don’t you? Doesn’t he live with you? Sure he does! The Burrman brothers: Doug, Parr, and Evie!”

  I didn’t mention it when I got home.

  “How’d things go, Parr?” my mother said.

  “Okay. I’m glad Doug warned me about how to curl up in that trash can.”

  “Did they make you roll in the mud?”

  “They didn’t have any mud today—but they said we’d better not wear our good clothes tomorrow.”

  “Ah, well, I guess they’ll have the pigpen ready tomorrow.” My mother had a tuna fish sandwich ready for me before I changed and went out to do my chores. She said, “They never gave a warning to Doug or Evie. You should have seen their clothes!”

  Mother was the reason I was named Parr.

  She’d been Cynthia Parr when she met Dad at the University of Missouri. He’d been in the Agricultural College there.

  Now my brother Doug was following in his footsteps. Of the three of us—me, almost sixteen; Evie, eighteen; and Doug, twenty—I was the only one who didn’t want to be a farmer.

  I could hear the combine working its way through the field out behind the house. I knew Evie was driving the thing. It’d grab the entire plant of corn, strip off its ears, take the kernels, pump them into a storage tank, and dump the rest of the plant back into the field behind it.

  Sometimes I’d look at my mother and wonder how she’d ever brought someone like Evie into the world.

  The only thing they had in common was a love of reading. Evie wrote some, too, like Mom used to when she was her age. But they weren’t alike in any other way. They didn’t even look alike. Evie had Dad’s height—she was almost six foot—and she had Dad’s brown hair instead of being blond like Mom.

  You’d say Evie was handsome. You’d say Mom was pretty.

  Then there was the difference in the way both of them dressed.

  My mother wasn’t like most farm women, who wear jeans and sweatshirts. She had a few pairs of slacks, but mostly she wore skirts or dresses, and the only time I ever saw her in men’s clothes was sometimes when we were harvesting. She’d bring some sandwiches out to us and she might have on an old shirt of Doug’s or my father’s gloves, maybe my boots, but she was as uncomfortable in men’s things as Evie seemed to be in female stuff.

  I knew Mom would hate it if I told her the kids had called Evie my brother.

  She was trying hard to change Evie that fall, trying everything, but it was like trying to change the direction of the wind.

  2

  HALLOWEEN NIGHT THE DUFFS always invited everyone from nearby farms to come to theirs.

  Our town got its name from the Duffs. Their family had founded it way back.

  They had a thousand acres. We had a hundred and fifty.

  Mr. Duff was a banker, too, and he held the mortgage on most of the farms that weren’t paid off yet, including ours.

  Evie didn’t want to go to the party. Way past dark she was still out in the middle of a back field fooling around with a balky diesel engine, welding something that had broken.

  My father said let her stay there, what the heck, but my mother insisted Evie come in and change her clothes and go with us.

  I could hear them arguing upstairs while my father sat in front of the TV, watching news of hog and corn futures broadcast on The Farm Report.

  “It’d fit you, Evie!” my mother was telling her.

  “It might fit me but it doesn’t suit me!”

  “Try it, that’s all.”

  “Wear a skirt to the Duffs’? I don’t care about the Duffs! That’s your problem, not mine!”

  “What’s my problem, Evie?”

  “Wishing you were high class is your problem!”

  “I am high class.”

  “You were high class, maybe, back when you were a Parr. Now you’re just a farmer’s wife, Mother—get used to it!”

  My father could hear them, too.

  He said to me, “Tell those two we’re not going anyplace if they don’t get down here right now.”

  I called up, “So long! We’re leaving.”

  My mother came downstairs in a long black skirt with black boots and a white silk blouse. Her blond hair spilled down to her shoulders, and she had on pearls my father’d bought her back when they first got married.

  I was in jeans, boots, and a white shirt.

  My dad was in jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt.

  When Evie appeared she was in jeans, boots, and a heavy sweatshirt that said GET HIGH ON MILK! OUR COWS ARE ON GRASS!

  She wore her hair very short, with a streak of light blond she’d made with peroxide. That was as close as she’d ever come to makeup. She’d written one of her nonrhyming poems about it. (Mom called them “statements.”) It began There’s only a ribbon of color I put in my black-and-white life./Combed back you can hardly see it, just like my black-and-white life.

  She cocked her hand like a gun and shot at me.

  “Let’s go!” she said.

  You could see the blue of her eyes all the way across a room. I thought she looked a little like Elvis Presley.

  My father guffawed when he saw the sweatshirt. “Where’d you get that thing?”

  Evie always talked out of the side of her mouth. “I got it out at the mall. Like it?”

  “Evie,” my mother said, “it’s not appropriate to wear to the Duffs’.”

  “Why isn’t it appropriate?” my father said. He wasn’t crazy about the Duffs, for one thing; for another, he always took up for my sister.

  My mother liked to say that’s how Evie got to be the way she was. She only listened to my father. Listened to him, walked like him, talked like him, told jokes like him.

  While Evie drove us over to the Duffs’, Dad started griping about The Duffton National Bank, and how hard they were on t
he farmers who got behind in their mortgages.

  “These are hard times for everybody,” my mother said.

  Evie said, “Only difference between a pigeon and a farmer today is a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere tractor.”

  My father let out a hoot and gave her back a slap.

  “Where’d you hear that one?” he asked, laughing.

  In the backseat, beside me, my mother just sighed.

  3

  WE NEVER SAW MUCH of Patsy Duff because she went to private school and summer camp, but she was home for a long weekend.

  I watched her that night and thought of that case, a while back, about the babies being switched in the hospital, each one going home to the wrong family.

  Patsy looked enough like my mother to be her daughter. Her blond hair fell down her back and she had that same flirty quality my mother had with people, smiling easily into their eyes, listening nicely, and saying the right things back. She had class, like my mother, and seemed older than seventeen.

  “Your husband’s so handsome, Mrs. Burrman,” she told my mother, passing her a mug of cider.

  “Oh, Douglas would like to hear that,” said my mother.

  “I heard you met him in college.”

  Then my mother went into her story about how she never expected to date an ag student, how she always imagined she’d go for a law student or a journalism student, but Douglas just swept her off her feet, she guessed it was those dimples of his, that smile, instant chemistry, she said, and here I am on a farm in Missouri when I always thought I’d be working for a New York City newspaper.

  “Were you in journalism school?” Patsy asked, and my mother nodded.

  I hung around in the background, smiling. I wasn’t unlike my dad in looks. I was tall and skinny as he was, no dimples but a good smile when I smiled. I didn’t often smile at people, as he did. That was more Evie’s style. She’d walk right up and glad-hand them and grin at them.

  I stood there hoping Patsy Duff would look my way.

  My mother read my mind and said to Patsy, “Have you met my son Parr?”

  “Hello, Parr,” Patsy said. She had on a white wool skirt and a red sweater. “Excuse me, please, Mother may need some help ’long about now.”

  I watched her walk away. At one end of the large room Evie was down on her knees with her head in a pail of water, ducking for apples, while all the little kids there laughed and clapped.

  At the other end of the room the men were gathered around Mr. Duff. He was short and fat, his red face cut with a wide white smile. He had on a blue blazer with gold buttons, and a white turtleneck sweater. He never looked like anyone else in Duffton. Neither did his farm. There was a swimming pool behind the house, and he always had a new-that-year sports car parked in the garage. And not that he ever personally drove a tractor, but if he felt like it there were several of the latest enclosed air-conditioned International Harvesters out near his barn. His help had it real good at Duffarm, which is what the gold sign out front said.

  It wasn’t that Mr. Duff didn’t do good things for the town; he did. There was the Duffton Municipal Swimming Pool he’d paid for; there was the Duffton Community Center. And there was the Veterans’ Memorial Statue, center of town—a stone guy in a helmet, charging with a fixed bayonet.

  Kids hung things on the bayonet nights they roamed homeward from the movie or the bowling alley. A rubber chicken, a bra, a rubber tire—you never knew what you’d see hanging off it first thing in the morning.

  I saw some guys I’d gone to Duffton School with, ones who didn’t finish over at County High, dropouts, farming now. Most of them had their own pickups, and they seemed older than me suddenly, talking farm stuff while they shot pool in Mr. Duff’s rec room. I hung out with them. Some of them planted and harvested for us, since Doug was in college. One of them was Cord Whittle, who had a crush on Evie. He kept talking about how she could do anything a man could do, then he nudged me and said, “Well, almost!”

  We didn’t stay late.

  Dad had an appointment early the next morning with someone from the Rayborn Company. They serviced farms with things like stacked cages for chickens that never got outside, layers that lived several birds to a cage and never even saw a rooster. Modern farming! It made Mom and me sick to think about it. But Dad wasn’t going into the chicken business. If anything, we’d cut way back on all livestock but hogs. We had new ones from Europe that were supposed to produce a lean, low-cholesterol pork, since the whole country seemed to be on a health kick.

  Dad just wanted a part-time sales job to help us along. When Mom said she’d just as soon get a job, he asked her what she thought she already had—keeping our books, running our farm.

  He wanted Evie to go to the university, too, when he could spare her. Ag school like Doug, so she’d be up on all the new techniques, like learning about the soybean plants they grew in China, ones that could take a good ground soaking better than ours … That was behind his job hunt, too—Evie’s education.

  On the way home Mom suddenly noticed Evie had on a different sweatshirt. It was white with a gold seal that said APPLEPERSON ACADEMY.

  “Where’s your shirt, Evie?”

  “I got it wet. Patsy lent me this, and then we decided to trade shirts. This is her school shirt.”

  “I thought she went to Appleman Academy.”

  “She does. But the students call it Appleperson Academy, for fun. You know, Mom, you’re supposed to say spokesperson for spokesman, and chairperson for chairman. You can’t be sexist.”

  Dad chuckled and said, “Does that make us the Burrpeople?”

  “I guess we should change our name,” Evie said. “Patsy said her little nieces and nephews can’t play cowboys and Indians, anymore, either. They have to play cowpeople and Native Americans.”

  “She’s such a lovely girl,” said Mom. “I tried to get something going between you two tonight, but I couldn’t seem to do it, could I?”

  Evie’s face got red. “Why would you try to do that?” she snapped, and she almost drove off the road. “What did you say to her?”

  There was a pause before my mother said, “I didn’t mean between you and Patsy, Evie. I meant between Parr and Patsy.”

  No one said anything for a while.

  Then my dad said, “Parr’s got a case on Toni Atlee, anyway. He doesn’t want some girl goes miles away to boarding school.”

  I said, “I wouldn’t mind, but I’d never get to first base with her kind.”

  Evie didn’t say anything the rest of the way home.

  4

  AT THANKSGIVING DOUG CAME home from college for the weekend, bringing this sorority girl with him. She was a Tri Delt named Bella Hanna, and I doubt she’d ever been on a farm before.

  I think everyone in our family except Doug was thinking the same thing: Don’t let her be the one.

  She was this redheaded princess who didn’t offer to do anything to help Mom get the dinner on, and anytime Doug said he wanted to show her something out back, she’d say, “Do we have to?”

  Mostly she sat in the living room reading magazines she’d brought with her: the thick kind filled with fashion ads and the sweet-smelling inserts Mom liked to tear out and put in her underwear drawer. When Evie told Bella Hanna Mom liked to use them for that, she just shrugged and said she never heard of someone doing that. She didn’t offer any of them to Mom.

  Later I heard her ask Doug if Evie was “all right” and Doug said, “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she seems a little odd, the way she dresses and stuff.”

  “She’s a farmer!” Doug said, and he laughed and got red.

  “If that’s what happens when you’re a farmer, spare me,” she said.

  “Evie’s okay,” Doug said.

  I could remember when Doug would punch out guys who made any cracks about Evie around him. Next to Dad, Doug was Evie’s main defender: She was his kid sister he didn’t take any lip about. But Bella Hanna was differ
ent. She had Doug wrapped around her little finger. He was actually worried about things like were we going to use linen napkins for dinner, and not paper ones. And who was Mom going to sit on the other side of Bella—not Cord Whittle, he hoped!

  Mom said, “Cord’s not even invited. Evie doesn’t want him here.”

  “Good!” Doug said, relieved.

  “What have you got against Cord, Doug?”

  “He’s a real hick, Mom! If Bella got stuck with that dropout, she’d think that’s what farmers are like.”

  “He’s a good farmer, Doug!”

  “Yeah, well Melvin’s got more sense!”

  Melvin was our mule. Evie claimed Melvin was the type of animal who’d work patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once hard.

  I’d never seen my brother in the state he was in. It was as threatening to me as a dark funnel in a pink sky, because I was counting on Doug’s decision to farm. As good as Evie was, there was no way she could run our place all by herself … and our father was already nearing fifty. If Doug changed his mind—if someone like Bella Hanna changed it for him—there was going to be pressure on me.

  We had a dozen relatives come for Thanksgiving dinner. I was appointed to say grace and I included a line about keeping our farm safe from harm, hoping it’d go from my lips to God’s ears, figuring God would know what I was really talking about.

  Mom seated one of the little kids next to Bella Hanna and she blossomed, talking baby talk to him, cutting his meat for him, and announcing she wanted a big family. She said there were five in her family, and that she was from Vermont, and she’d come all the way to Missouri to study journalism.

  “Oh, I wanted to be a newspaperwoman too,” said my mother.

  “What happened?” Bella asked her.

  “Mr. Burrman,” my mother answered.

  “So you sold out for love,” said Bella.

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, myself,” my mother said.

  Bella Hanna said, “Women always used to give up their dreams for men. It’s time men gave up theirs for women.”

  I could see Doug’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard, and he pushed a lock of blond hair out of his face.