PART TWO - THE DESERT

SECTION TWENTY-SEVEN (Pages 122-125)

Summary

Three days later, the girls hear footsteps at the front door and there is Dad. He is mean and angry, swinging at them and demanding they tell him where their mother is. He pulls over the china cupboard and breaks all the dishes inside. He breaks chairs across the dining room table and then finally finds Mom in the bathtub. They wrestle and fight and eventually they both have knives in their hands. Dad tells her she's a hell of a woman, and she tells him he's a stinking, rotten drunk. Then, Dad laughs and says that he knows that she loves this old drunk, and before you know it, the fight is over, and they are hugging and kissing. Of course, Jeannette has nothing to celebrate, because, after all he had put himself and them through, Dad has gone back to the booze. He has broken his promise to her.

Now, with Dad drinking again and no money coming in, Mom begins to talk about moving east to West Virginia, where Dad's parents live. She hopes they will keep him in line. She tells the kids that their grandparents are genuine hillbillies, and that they'd live in the forest there.

Then, she buys a used car through a Piggy Bank Special for two hundred dollars, but the kids are unsure of allowing Mom to drive them all the way to West Virginia. Meanwhile, Dad is refusing to come along. He wants to head out west and be a prospector all by himself. Mom decides she will not sell the house. They will leave it in case they need it later, keeping clothes on the line outside and dirty dishes in the sink to make intruders think they are still at home.

The following morning, they pack up the car while Dad sits in the living room sulking. They each have a warm winter coat for the season changes in West Virginia and one item they want to bring. Because she cannot bring her bike, Jeannette once again brings her rock. She runs into the back yard and says goodbye to the orange trees, and then, once she is in the car, Jeannette leans out the window and hollers, Dad, please come, we need you! All the rest of the family chimes in with same words. Dad throws away his cigarette, lopes over to the car, and tells Mom to move aside - he's driving. West Virginia, here they come!

Notes

Dad has broken his promise, but once again the family finds a way to stay together and move in a different direction. It's goodbye to the desert and hello to snow.

PART THREE - WELCH

SECTION ONE (Pages 129-132)

Summary

The family takes off in the Oldsmobile which they named the Piggy Bank Special, but it isn't a name that makes it special since Dad says it's such a heap, it doesn't deserve a name. It breaks down the first time an hour shy of the New Mexico border, but Dad gets it running again. The second time it breaks down, Dad gets it limping along at never any more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. They sleep inside of it every night, and when they arrive in Muskogee, Oklahoma late at night, they park on a downtown street to sleep. They awaken the next morning with a bunch of people surrounding the car and staring inside. Mom waves at them and laughs, because you know you're down and out when the Okies laugh at you. Jeannette is mortified that her family is the object of such humor, but Mom says, Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.

It takes them a month to cross the country. Once they cross the Mississippi, the kids begin to notice that instead of flat desert edged by craggy mountains, the land rolls and dips like a sheet when you shake it clean. Even the air feels different. It is very still, heavier and thicker, and somehow darker. For some reason, it makes them all grow quiet. They eventually find themselves in a deep valley with wooden houses and small brick buildings lining a river. They have arrived in Welch, West Virginia.

The family comes to a stop in front of big, worn house. It sits on the downhill side of the street and so they have to go down a set of stairs to get to it. Then, they meet their Dad's relatives: an enormous woman, with pasty skin and three chins, lank gray hair and a cigarette hanging from her mouth, who is their grandmother but insists they call her Erma; a fragile man with short white hair that stands straight up and allows the kids to call him grandpa even though his name is Ted; and a ruddy-faced man with a wild swirl of red hair peeking out from under a baseball cap named Uncle Stanley, who won't stop kissing and hugging them. Jeannette searches for features in these strangers, trying to find any that remind her of Dad, but she can't. As for Dad himself, he isn't smiling as he sees his family again. He's just pulling at the skin of his neck as if he is itchy.

Inside the house, Jeannette is hit by the smells of mold, cigarettes, and unwashed laundry. Erma pulls a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of her housedress, and Dad looks happy for the first time since they left Phoenix. Dinner consists of green beans cooked in fatback, until they're mushy, and served with Pillsbury biscuits. The food tastes so bad that Jeannette holds her nose like Mom taught her so as to swallow without actually tasting. Erma slaps her hand away from her face and tells her, Beggars can't be choosers.

There are three bedrooms upstairs, but they haven't been used for ten years, because the floorboards are rotted through. So Uncle Stanley offers to give them his room in the basement, and he'll sleep on a cot in the foyer. The basement is a big dank room with cinder-block walls and a green linoleum floor. The kids find a chest of drawers with Uncle Stanley's comic book collection, and Mom and Dad find a pullout couch where they can sleep. The kids sleep on Uncle Stanley's bed with two heads laying at one end and the other two at the other end. They begin biting each other's feet and giggling away until they hear a thump, thump, thump from upstairs. Erma orders them not to laugh, because they make too much noise and get on her nerves. Jeannette observes that she doesn't think Erma likes them too much. Mom says she's just an old woman who's had a tough life. Lori says they're all weird, but Mom says they will adapt (or move on, Jeannette thinks).

Notes

This first section of the third part of the book is full of metaphorical ideas: the car which is so beat up and old that it won't go any faster than twenty miles an hour represents the family and how their lives unfold; the laughing Okies, who are stereotypically down and out, but who laugh at the poor conditions of the Walls family; the change in the land and atmosphere of West Virginia from Phoenix which also reinforces the sense that the family is in even worse circumstances than they have ever been; the house which also reinforces being down and out with its downhill entrance, it's rotted floor boards, and strange odors; and Mom's assertion that no matter how weird their environment, they will adapt.