Children in the Closet....Chapter Five

     Instead of boarding a train for Kansas City, we were loaded into a big black car. As it took us away from the station that day, it also took away all our hopes of seeing our Daddy. We were in a state of stunned confusion and could not make sense of anything that was happening. Lloydine and Lanita cried softly and Lonnie was fussy and fretting in my arms. Mother was holding Lu Ann close to her and neither she nor the ugly old man said more than a few words as he was driving and I couldn’t understand them. 

    The man turned out to be called “Pap,” and was the father of Clayton Collins with whom Mother was having an affair.  Mother was 31 years old while Clayton was in his 20’s and still living at home with his parents. That’s where we were taken.

               That first day was a waking nightmare for the four of us. Even Lonnie was upset and confused by the unfamiliar faces. We were given some sandwiches for lunch and then we sat huddled together, not knowing what else to do. Our first night we slept on the floor with just a thin blanket to provide a bit of cushion. It made a big pallet, though, and we found some small comfort in sleeping close to each other. Lloydine and Lanita cried themselves to sleep and I put my arm around Lonnie and crooned to him until he slept. Then I spent a long time staring up at the ceiling and tried to make sense out of what was happening to us. I simply couldn’t.

The next morning, just as in the previous one, I was the first to wake up. However, this awakening was a world away from the happy one of just 24 hours earlier. Sometimes, you go to sleep and wake up with no immediate memory of what has happened. I did not know where we were or why we were there. I looked around and saw a strange house and then slowly and painfully, I remembered.

I got up and walked around a bit. We had slept in the living room and all my siblings were, thankfully, still asleep. I went into the kitchen. No one was there. I found the bathroom and was happy about that except that there was a huge old fashioned wringer washing machine in there and it looked like a monster to me. I continued to wander around from room to room. It was a small house so it didn’t take long. A kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms and a living room. One bedroom had the door closed and I knew better than to open it. The other bedroom didn’t even have a door so I looked in there. There I saw two people in a bed together. I recognized Mother immediately but not the other person lying with her. All I could see was an arm draped around my mother’s shoulder. It was covered with freckles and, in my confused state of mind, I thought it was my Aunt Irene. She was the only one I knew who had freckled arms. I tiptoed into the room and whispered to Mother, trying to wake her up, but she didn’t budge. However, the naked man in bed with her did! He rose up and ordered me to go back to bed in the living room. This, then, woke my mother.  I did as the man said and it wasn’t too long before I heard Mother in the kitchen making coffee and looking for things to fix for breakfast. From the way in which she was searching, I could tell that she had never been here before either.

               Lloydine woke up next and got up so quietly that Lanita and Lonnie stayed asleep. She came in the kitchen with her eyes bright with tears. I could tell she was as shocked as I was when she woke up.

Mother was at the sink and Lloydine held onto the counter with one hand and standing in a crane position wailed, “You told me we were going to see my Daddy! I don’t know where I am!” Then she started to cry. I went to her to try and comfort her but all I really wanted to do was cry, too.

               Clayton’s mother was up by this time and she had gone into the living room to check on Lanita and Lonnie still lying on the floor. She had taken a cup of coffee with her and was dressed all in white, ready to go to work. She was a nurse. The ugly old man got a cup of coffee from the kitchen and joined her. Lanita’s very first memory was when she opened her eyes and saw an old man and woman drinking coffee on the couch and just looking at her. She was just three years old, so naturally, she started to cry. This, in turn, woke Lonnie up and he began to cry.

               We were quick to learn that crying was not something that was tolerated in this strange place.Instead of holding and comforting us, Mother became angry and told us all to hush. We were herded back to the living room and she turned the TV on and told us to sit there and be quiet.

               I changed Lonnie’s diaper while Mother went back to the bedroom where she had left Lu Ann asleep in a basket. We were scared and didn’t know what to do so we just sat and stared at the TV.

               I heard the grownups talking together in the kitchen and, just as it had been at Granny and Granddad’s house, the air was charged with tension.  Lu Ann was Clayton’s daughter and he wanted to keep her but wanted nothing to do with Mother’s other four children. Clayton and his parents were trying to talk Mother into taking us to the Lena Pope Orphans Home there in Fort Worth but she was insisting she wanted to keep us. They came up with a compromise.

               That afternoon we were shunted out to the backyard to play with strict instructions not to climb the big plum tree in the center of the yard. There was a small shed out there that was divided into two tiny rooms each with its own separate doors to enter. We learned that Pap was a hatter and half the shed was filled with the tools of his trade. The other half of the shed was to be our home. Mother took our suitcases out there and put them in a corner which would serve as our closet and then fashioned two makeshift beds for us to sleep on. From then on we lived in the shed while Mother, Clayton, Lu Ann, Pap and Grandma Collins all lived in the house. We were allowed to go inside only if neither Clayton nor Pap was home. That afternoon we began to learn the art of becoming invisible. In time, we became quite skilled at it.

               We had thought it was mean of Granny to make us stay outside all day, but now we faced living by ourselves in a small shed with no parental protection at all. When I asked Mother how we would go to the bathroom, she brought out a big Folger’s coffee can and said we could use that. It was a metal can and the rim was sharp and cut our bottoms before we learned not to put all our weight down on it. Lonnie was still in diapers and I wondered what would happen when we ran out of clean ones.

               That evening Mother brought a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter out to us and said we had the water hose for our drinking water. She also put a small plastic children’s wading pool at the side of the house then gave me a bar of soap and a pile of old rags to use as towels and that’s how we took a bath. We were grateful it was August but what we would do when winter came?

               I tried to pretend that we were playing house and it would be fun. In fact, I was scared. Our whole world had changed and it was impossible for us to understand why that had happened and so suddenly.

               With only one more clean diaper for Lonnie, I put Lloydine, Lanita and Lonnie in bed and, once they were all sound asleep, took the wet and dirty diapers out to the wading pool and scrubbed them in our used bath water. I hung them on the line and went back in to check on my siblings and make up a bed for myself out of some rough blankets I found in the corner. I went to sleep that second night on Waggoman Street with my mind full of questions and no answers to them.

               What had happened to our mother that she would lie to us and trick us the way she did? Why did she give no thought to how traumatized we were with all that had happened to us in the last 36 hours? Why did Mother even have the taxi cab take us to the train station if she had no intention of us going to Kansas City?  Would we ever see Daddy again? Who was going to take care of us?

               That night both Lloydine and Nita wet the bed. They would continue to wet the bed for years to come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It has been said that children are extremely resilient. I suppose that is true. We began learning how to cope and survive. Lanita and Lonnie were so young that they were just now forming memories that would stay with them.  They remembered very little of our life before. It was different for Lloydine and me. We could remember the “normal” years, as brief as they were. We were old enough to remember and to mourn our present situation.

               I finally confronted Mother about what was happening to us one day when no one else was in the house with her. She told me that Clayton was supposed to have set up an apartment for all of us and she thought that was where Pap was taking us.  She didn’t even pretend that she hadn’t been lying to us all this time about taking the train to Kansas City. She told me how much she was counting on me to help with the younger children. I tried my best to be brave but I was scared, and now I wasn’t even certain I could trust what Mother was saying. I wanted to ask her for reassurance that we would get to stay together. I wanted to tell her I had heard what they were all saying in the kitchen about taking us to the orphanage. But, in the end, I didn’t ask her anything. By this time I knew she probably wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway.

               My siblings and I settled down to our new daily routine. Every morning Lloydine and I would hang the wet sheets on the line to dry from the nightly bedwetting. We tried to spray them with the water hose and rinse out some of the pee if Pap wasn’t around. He was a mean man and didn’t want us to use his water hose.

               The backyard was actually a nice safe place for us to play hide-and-seek and other simple games. There were few neighborhood children and the ones we saw were afraid of Pap and kept their distance. I found some paper and a pencil and practiced “school” for Lloydine. I would draw pictures or letters and numbers using the dot-to- dot system and then she would connect the dots. We would pretend to wear high heels and Lanita took it a step further. She found a couple of pieces of wooden blocks and put them in the heel of her socks and pranced around on her tiny feet. I was so proud of her for thinking up that idea all on her own.

               Clayton was still driving an ambulance for Smith and Harris Funeral Home. His hours were random so we never knew when we would be able to go in the house. Sometimes on Saturday mornings, if he was gone, Mother let us come in and eat bowls of cereal sitting on the floor in front of the television watching cartoons. We were allowed to use the bathroom and I would bring in the Folger’s Coffee can and dump the waste down the commode. We used that scary wringer washing machine to do our laundry and then I would hang them outside on the line. We loved getting to wash the sheets in real soapy water. No matter where we were or what we were doing, when we heard Clayton’s or Pap’s car pull up in the driveway, we ran like little mice back to our shed. When Pap was working in his hatter’s shop, we tried to be so quiet that he would not know we were there. Days and days would go by with neither Pap nor Clayton seeing or even hearing us. Grandma Collins wasn’t like her husband or son. She was kind to us and was, in fact, much nicer to us than our very own Granny. We didn’t have to run and hide from her.

               One other thing we had to be careful about was seeing Lu Ann. Clayton isolated her from us and refused to even allow us to see her. She was kept in the bedroom and we didn’t see her for weeks after that first day when we arrived.

               I heard that Social Services had been to visit but we never saw them. The neighbor told me over the fence one day that she had called them. No one seemed to like Pap and this neighbor sure didn’t either but they seemed to like us well enough. Looking back, I’m sure she felt sorry for us. One day she gave us a few pieces of candy. We learned not to tell anyone where we really lived and not to answer questions. The less we said the better.

               The one bright spot in my life during that time was books. Clayton bought huge cardboard boxes full of books at auctions. After he went through the books, Mother would let me take any that he didn’t want. Reading was my escape. Even though I had only finished second grade, I could read very well. I read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  While I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I would read it again and again in later years. It was rather thrilling seeing the scenes in my mind of David groping around in the dark on the stairs with the dreaded fear of falling through as they abruptly stopped. He had no light to shine in order to see his way. This struck home with me and I could relate to the feeling of being surrounded in darkness and not knowing where the next step might take me.

               I remember the day I opened up a copy of Martha Mitchell’s book, Gone With the Wind. I could read and lose myself completely in that book. I was back in the old South with Melanie and Scarlet and all the wonderful characters and drama of that time. It felt good to disappear for a little while. Books would continue to be a comfort and pleasure to me for the rest of my life and I suppose that, even as evil as Clayton was, God can use whatever good there may be in a situation for our benefit.

 We had been there a couple of weeks when it was time for school to start. I was going into the third grade at South Fort Worth Elementary. We had been going barefoot most of the time that summer and when I went to put my shoes on, they wouldn’t fit. I told Mother about it and a few days later she loaded us all up in that big black car and we went to buy a pair for me. Normally, I would have stayed in the car with the kids while she went in but this time I had to go in with her so I could get the right size shoes. As we were getting out of the car, Mother told Lloydine, “If the car should start to roll, just hold your foot down hard on the brake. That freaked Lloydine out and as soon as we got out of the car, she slid over and pushed on the brake as hard as she could. She was so upset and was pushing so hard that her little legs started to hurt, and tears began to stream down her face. She was just five years old. Lanita, who was two years younger than Lloydine, decided to get out of the car and see if she could see Mother and me coming back. When she couldn’t see us, she told Lloydine that she would help her hold the car. She got down by the back wheel and put her little hands on each side of the tire. Lonnie was two years old and hung out the window to watch her. When we walked back up to the car, there was Lanita in a t shirt and a pair of panties crouching under the car holding on to that tire. Lloydine had stopped crying but her face was all streaked and red. Mother was put out with them and mad at Lanita for getting her hands all black and dirty. Lanita couldn’t understand why Mother wasn’t proud of her for helping Lloydine keep the car from rolling.

               When we got back, we walked straight down the driveway to the shed without even going through the house since Clayton was still home.  I cleaned up my sister’s hands as best I could, but that black stuff just would not come off. It would have helped if we had been able to get in the bathroom and use a bar of soap.

               On school mornings, I would get up earlier than the others and get dressed for school, then I would go outside and brush my teeth by the water hose. I just turned it on a little bit so the sound would not draw Pap’s attention. Then I would go up to the back door to see if Mother had left some breakfast food out for us. She usually did but sometimes she forgot.

               While I had been taking total care of my siblings since we arrived on Waggoman Street, Mother now had no choice but to keep them inside the house with her and Lu Ann while I was at school. Once I got home, they were back in my care and the door was shut again. I was happy to go to school. It gave me a sense of security. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Matney. School was my safe place so I was always in a hurry to get there. I walked much slower when I returned to Waggoman Street knowing I would be expected to collect my younger siblings and we would all have to go back to the shed or backyard to play.

               Mother hadn’t been able to buy new school clothes for me that year like she had the previous two. I tried to keep my dress as clean as possible for as long as possible. Mother would do our washing at the same time she did the other laundry while I was at school and when I got home I would hang all the clothes on the line. After they dried, I would put the adults’ clothes in a basket and leave it by the back door. Lloydine and I would fold ours up and put them back in the suitcase. I no longer had to wash things out by hand in the little wading pool and for that I was grateful. We were all still growing so I would give Lloydine the clothes and shoes that no longer fit me and Lloydine, in turn, handed hers down to Lanita. Poor Lonnie was growing fast and did good to get just a diaper and a shirt. Our Aunt Alice would send me some of Mae Ellen’s outgrown clothing so we all at least had something to wear even if it was ill fitting.

               On Saturdays, Mother would tell us to get in the big old black car which she drove as hers by this time and we would make the rounds. That meant she would drive and I would run in at the different places to do errands. One of our favorite stops was the August Pie Factory on College Avenue. I loved that place. It had a great big wooden screen door and I liked the sound it made slapping against the frame when I would go in and then back out. They sold seconds of their baked goods, things that didn’t turn out just perfect, as well as day old goods. There was a huge dark wood counter and everyone who worked there wore big white aprons and white hair nets. Mother would send me in with some coins and I would get as much as they would buy. They often had day old apricot pies and those were my favorite. Bread, donuts, pastries, everything was fairly cheap. We couldn’t store much food in the shed due to the ants so when we got a pie we had to eat it up fairly quickly.

               From there we would go to the Vandervoort’s Dairy Company on South Main where I would run in and get milk. After the errands were done and, if we had been very good, Mother would take us to get a snow cone and we would drive around while we ate them.

               My favorite time for going on a drive was in the early evening when people were just turning on the lights in their houses. I dearly loved seeing in the windows of cozy little houses as we drove slowly past. I most liked the ones that had curtains draped up in swags at either side of the window and with a lamp in the middle. I would daydream about us living in such a beautiful place with a pretty bathroom, real towels and washcloths and bars of scented soap and tubes of toothpaste. I would imagine that nice families lived there and everyone was happy. If it were dinner time, I could see them in my mind’s eye all sitting at the kitchen table holding hands and saying grace.

               As September and October went by, the weather got colder and life in the shed became harder.

We didn’t have enough warm clothing or bedding. I was nine years old and yet I was taking care of three younger siblings. Mother continued to keep Lu Ann inside with her. Just as I was about to ask her what we were going to do now that it was getting cold, she told me that Aunt Ruby and Uncle Hummie would be taking Lloydine, Lanita and me to live with them for the winter and that Lonnie was going to stay with our Aunt Winnie. This was good news to us. We would get to live in a house again.

                No other family was allowed to come to the house on Waggoman Street, so early in November, Mother dropped us off with Aunt Ruby and took Lonnie to Aunt Winnie. Mother must have been grateful that our maternal relatives helped take care of us even when our grandparents would not. I suppose they thought they had done enough over the years.

               Lanita had the one and only birthday party of her childhood on November 5^th, 1957. She was four years old and Aunt Ruby made her a birthday cake and had a record made that played Happy Birthday. We loved our Aunt Ruby!  She loved us and made us feel welcome. She showed us great kindness when we were in desperate need of some. We regained a bit of stability during the months we stayed with her.

               I was the only one in school at the time so I rode the city bus to downtown Fort Worth where I changed buses to one that let me out close to my school. I had to get up real early and it was a cold winter. Aunt Ruby made hot chocolate for me to drink before I left and bundled me up for the walk to the bus stop. They didn’t have a lot of money so when she ran out of hot chocolate she would weaken down a cup of coffee and add some milk to it. It was wonderful of them to take us in and assume the expense of feeding and clothing us.

               It was a little scary to ride the bus downtown and then change to another one. Aunt Ruby wrote the directions down on a piece of paper and I kept it in my coat pocket in case I forgot which bus to take.

The first bus stopped at Kresge’s drugstore in downtown Fort Worth. It had a long soda fountain where commuters would sit and visit over a cup of coffee. I waited just inside the doors and watched for the next bus to arrive, always terrified I would miss it and not knowing what I would do if that ever happened. It never did. I reversed the trip after school. Once there was a nice lady inside the drug store and, after seeing me get off the bus every day, offered to buy me a Coke. I was extremely shy and had been taught not to speak to strangers. Also, this lady smoked. Smoking was unheard of in my small world. Preachers said it was a sin to smoke, drink, cuss or dance. I didn’t do any of these things and didn’t know anyone who did except Pap.  So, I told her, ‘Thank you, but I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.’ I told my aunt all about it when I got home that afternoon. I even told her about seeing the lady smoking. Aunt Ruby assured me that it would be okay to accept her offer of a Coca-Cola if she ever asked me again. Sure enough, she was there the next day and I told her my aunt had said it would be okay for me to have a pop as we called Coke, Diet Rite Cola, 7-Up or any other carbonated beverage. I felt so grown up sitting at the counter with her.

               Aunt Ruby and Uncle Hummie still had two daughters living at home.  The oldest was named Vada Merl and the youngest was Rose Mary. Rose Mary was 16 years old and had just become engaged. She showed me her diamond engagement ring. The very next morning she could not find it! She was hysterical and searched and searched but the ring was lost. When I got home from school and learned she couldn’t find that beautiful ring, I joined in the search. I found it for her! You know where it was? Rose Mary had a book case headboard and she must have flung her hand up as she was sleeping during the night. The ring had not been sized yet so it was loose on her finger. I found the ring up against the inside of the bookcase right there by where she slept. Once again, I felt so grown up and pleased that I found it for her.

               Lanita and Lloydine stayed with Aunt Ruby while I was at school. Every single morning, Aunt Ruby would help Lloydine bathe and put on fresh underwear. She never once complained about having to change the sheet every day and she never made Lloydine feel badly about it. Lanita stayed dry at night now but Lloydine could not stop the bedwetting even though she wanted to. At least she was able to sleep in a clean bed every night.

               We had a Christmas party at school that year. I loved my teacher and wished I had something to give her like the other children did. We had to bring one gift for the gift exchange and Aunt Ruby had bought a box of 10 rolls of Life Savers for my gift. It cost fifty cents. Then we drew names and exchanged our gifts before eating the Christmas cookies some of the mothers had sent for the whole class. I noticed that every single child except me had a gift for the teacher. Mrs. Matney knew that I was living with an aunt and uncle because they were the ones who signed my report card as well as my homework papers. Before I left school that day, I slipped up to my teacher and told her how sorry I was that I didn’t have a present for her. She put her arms around me and told me I was gift enough.

               We spent Christmas with our aunt and uncle that year. It was not like the family Christmas we had loved a few years ago, but it was not as unhappy as the one we had experienced the year before.

They were so very good to us. Aunt Ruby and Uncle Hummie have been gone from this world for many, many years and yet we will always remember their great kindness.

               After the holidays, Mrs. Matney invited me to live with her and her husband for the remainder of the school year. It made going to school ever so much easier and nicer. I even had my own bedroom with a single twin bed just for me. Sometimes Lloydine would get to come over and spend the weekend with me. Mrs. Matney was a very good housekeeper and she cautioned us to keep our feet off the furniture. Since Lloydine still wet the bed, she would sleep on the vinyl sofa. However, she never once let her feet touch the sofa, even though she was barefoot. She always hung her feet off the side so she wouldn’t get into trouble. We didn’t understand then that it was only if we had shoes on that we shouldn’t put our feet on the couch and we would never even have dreamed of doing that!

               Mr. and Mrs. Matney had not been able to have children and they thought seriously of adopting me. So much had changed in our lives recently that I was wondering if I would be separated from my siblings and would ever get to see them again. One Saturday night the Matney’s were going to an event and Mother came over to babysit us at their house. That’s when Mother told me they were considering adopting me. Lloydine cried and I tried not to. In the end, they decided against it and later went on to have three children of their own. I was both disappointed and relieved at the same time.

               Mother had told us that when school was out we could come back and live in the shed again.

However, that didn’t happen as she said it would. Instead, my sisters and I continued to live with Aunt Ruby and her family for the summer and Lonnie stayed with Aunt Winnie.  Mother then promised we could come home in the fall when school began. Lloydine would be starting first grade.

               We soon learned the reason we couldn’t come home. Mother was pregnant again. This time it was with twins.