The Early Birds

by Laurie Graham

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Peggy, the southern belle. Kath, the pragmatist with the only Norfolk accent in New York state. Gayle, the preacher with healing hands. Mrs Colonel Audrey Rudman, forever keeping up the standards of the Officers' Wives Club. Lois, who's never had a thought she didn't voice. Loudly. Their menfolk may be long retired, but once a US Air Force wife, always an Air Force wife, and the bonds of friendship forged in base after military base are still going strong 50 years later. Time is rendering its Accounts Payable for all of them now: hip replacements, eye problems, forgetfulness and departures.

Release date: May 18, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

Sometimes, on a bad day, I think if it hadn’t been for Tucker Hoose’s broken tooth we could still be in Texas, living in God’s own country. Other things have happened, of course. Life’s never simple even when you have your health. One thing goes wrong and the whole house of cards can come tumbling down, and all for want of a horseshoe nail.

‘Mixed metaphor,’ says my darling friend Grice, who has no business peering over a person’s shoulder when they’re trying to tell a story.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t Tucker’s tooth that was the start of things going bad. The start of it was his legs. Legs were a noted weakness in the Hoose family so we might have seen that coming. They called it claudication of the arteries. Tucker’s mother lived to a hundred and three but as long as I knew her she walked with a cane and then eventually she took to an invalid carriage. If Tucker wasn’t available to push her, the help was required to do it or Grice, as a last resort. Not me, though. I did it once, when I first started visiting with them, trying to be a helpful guest an’ all, but she said I had a hasty, unmannerly way of pushing, so that was that. The house would have had to be burning down before she’d ever have consented to be pushed by me again.

By 1998 Tucker’s legs were failing. His mother’s old stair lift was still in place, kept as a sacred memorial to her, but it had seen better days. It’d start up, no problem, but then it’d stall and Tucker’d be left halfway up, halfway down, neither here nor there, cussing and talking of suing for his money back, which was wasted breath. The warranty on that contraption must have been older than the Declaration of Independence.

So we began to talk, me and Grice, in a roundabout way, of the advantages of single-level living. Tucker made a show of resisting but not for long. One of the realtor’s brochures caught his eye and he took the bait.

It was a corner lot on a new build, about five miles from our place in Corinth. Eagle Colony, very select. Four beds, gas fireplaces, granite counter tops, hardwood floors and a great view of Lewisville Lake, which isn’t a lake at all. It’s a reservoir, very clean, very neat. As Grice said, if a proper lake was a coat it would be an old Afghan goatskin, infested with creatures and none too fragrant, whereas a reservoir would be more like a good wool overcoat from Neiman Marcus. Grice comes out with these fanciful thoughts from time to time. He’s talked of writing poetry too but I believe it’s an empty threat.

Moving from Corinth to Eagle Colony was some project. There was too much stuff for the new house, big old pieces that had been in the Hoose family since BC, so Tucker, being a fair and generous man, gave his relatives first refusal before he sent anything for auction. Nieces and nephews and second cousins three times removed, people I’d never heard of before. I don’t believe Tucker even received Christmas cards from them but they came crawling out of the brushwood anyhow. It was like he’d wakened the dead, and one of the nephews, Sawyer Hoose III, developed an interest in more than the furniture. He wanted to know about our domestic arrangements.

Sawyer came blustering in from Lubbock, supposed to be appraising a mahogany bureau. First thing he wanted to know was did I have marital expectations of his uncle Tucker? Grice nearly choked on his lemonade.

I said, ‘Sawyer, I think you know your uncle’s not the marrying kind. We’re all friends here. We’re just three long shadows watching out for each other.’

Grice said, ‘Less of the long shadows, if you don’t mind, Peggy Dewey. I’m hardly out of my fifties.’

When Grice turned sixty it hit him very hard. He ever gets to seventy I fear he’ll fall into a depression.

‘Well,’ said Sawyer, ‘that’s as maybe but I won’t see my uncle Tucker preyed on. I’ll be keeping an eye on things from now on, just so’s you know.’

And that was the real start of our troubles.

‘Not troubles,’ says Grice. ‘Changes.’ He can’t resist looking over my shoulder when I’m writing.

We were all packed ready for Eagle Colony, rugs rolled, cartons everywhere, when I received a call from Crystal.

She said, ‘Mom, I think you should know Dad has twenty-five cases of canned meat in his basement. That’s approximately three thousand servings of Good ’n’ Hearty Beef Stew.’

Now, it had been been forty-three years since me and Vern Dewey got divorced. I said, ‘I guess there’s some reason you think this is any of my business?’

‘Dad’s losing his grip,’ she said. ‘He’s not been right since Martine passed away.’

Vern could never have stayed single for long. After we split he’d gone back up to Maine, started a bait farm, Vern’s Vermiculture, and married a plus-size widow called Martine. She had a boy, Eugene, a few years older than our Crystal. One of Eugene’s greatest pleasures in life also happened to be raising leather worms and night crawlers so you could say he was the perfect stepson for Vern.

‘And,’ said Crystal, ‘the Missing Link just makes matters worse.’

She has often referred to her step-brother as the Missing Link. I used to think she was suggesting he had a screw loose, but Grice informed me it referred to a lower form of human life, the kind that drags its knuckles along the ground.

Crystal said, ‘Eugene’s convinced Dad the end is nigh. December thirty-first, all the computers’ll crash, there’ll be anarchy in Safeway. End of civilization. He’s stockpiling food and ammo.’

A lot of people seemed worried about 1999 turning into 2000.

I said, ‘Funny you should bring that up. Gayle’s predicting the coming of the Antichrist that very same day.’

‘Gayle?’ said my darling daughter. ‘Remind me again. Which one is Gayle?’

‘Clairol Light Ash. Three husbands. TV healer.’

‘Got it.’

*

Gayle, Lois, Audrey, Betty and me. Future Homemakers of America. When it came to domestic skills some of us hadn’t been honor
students but one thing did unite us. We were all 96th Bomber Wing wives, posted to Norfolk, England, in 1951. A lifetime ago. You needed friends when you were married to the military, when your menfolk were away, patrolling the skies at 510 miles per hour, aiming to be Jock of the Week, and you were trying to turn a Wherry house into a home. You stuck together. There was nothing else to do, nowhere much to go. They say it’s different now. Tell me something that isn’t different now.

Back then if you got along with a few other wives you made the most of it, but you never allowed yourself to get too close because you knew you’d soon be moving on. Uncle Sam might have different plans for you next year. Like towards the end of 1952, most of our boys got orders for Wichita, Kansas, to train on the B-47s. Not Audrey’s husband, though. Lance Rudman got a promotion. I was going to say we left Audrey behind at the Norfolk base but, seeing her husband was the only one ever made captain, I guess it was Audrey who left us behind.

January 1953 the rest of us were reunited at USAF McConnell, Wichita. Another tour of duty, another cinderblock row. Betty was the first to arrive. She was five, maybe six months pregnant, swaying around like one of those stately Spanish galleons, but she had her drapes hung in no time. Gayle pitched up next. She and her darling Okey had been given quarters next door to me and Vern. I kind of looked out for her a bit. Seven years younger than me, she seemed no more than a kid. Now we’re both seniors. Funny how that happens.

Lois’s husband, Herb, was already on the base but Lois had gone to stay with his folks in Hoosick Falls, New York, for her confinement so she followed on later. ‘Confinement’s about right,’ she said. ‘Herb’s mom believes in two weeks lying-in, to stop your insides prolapsing, plus maple syrup pancakes every meal, for iron loss. Then she had me churched. You ever heard of that?’

We were all so happy to be back in the US. People say if you’re on base you’re in the US no matter where in the world it happens to be, but it’s never quite the same. Sure, you have the commissary and the PX but outside that perimeter fence you’re in foreign parts.

Drampton in Norfolk, England, was the only overseas posting I went on with Vern. It was a windswept saltmarsh, no mistake, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world because that was where we all met Kath Pharaoh. And that was where we saw how those poor English folk lived. Post-war austerity, they called it. My days, what an eye-opener! Our meeting Kath, chumming around with her, that changed a lot of lives, Kath’s included.

But to get back to Wichita, that was where I first made close acquaintance with tragedy. Air Force wives were always braced for it. You might not know the particulars of what friend husband got up to when he climbed into that cockpit but you sure as hell knew it wasn’t a country walk. When Vern was flying an F-84 he used to call her the Groundhog, on account of her reluctance to get airborne.

I used to say, ‘Vern, I don’t want to hear about it.’

There were accidents. Incidents, we called them. It was considered a more delicate word. And Wichita was where there was An Incident and Gayle’s Okey bought the farm. A B-47 was a skittish plane to land. If you deployed the drag chute, she was liable
to bounce. If she bounced she was liable to dip a wing, and if she dipped a wing then over she’d go, might have six thousand gallons of jet fuel in her.

When death came to your squadron you needed your friends, to keep you from falling to pieces and help you pack your bags. That roof over your head was only there as long as your man was alive and flying. An airman’s widow was no one at all. They gave you three weeks to clear the post. Thank you and goodbye.

So, now I calculate it, I’ve known Gayle more than fifty years. There were two more husbands after Okey. I’ve seen her up, I’ve seen her down. Slinging hash in a diner, fronting her own TV church, on the wagon and off it again more times than I can count. That’s Air Force friendships for you: you might not see one another for years but it’s till death do you part.

When a person passes I can never bring myself to cross their name out of my address book. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of names I have scratched out. People I lost touch with, some I grew to dislike, some I could hardly remember. But when a friend dies I just leave them there. Like Betty, who’s been gone since 1981. In fact, not only did I not strike out her entry but when my old address book fell to pieces a few years back, I copied her name into the new one, which, as my daughter Crystal said, was pure insanity.

And the really crazy thing is, I wasn’t even that fond of Betty. But out of them all I knew her the longest because we went back as far as high school. She was a Future Homemaker, I was captain of the softball team. We really didn’t have a darned thing in common until she married Ed Gillis and I married Vern Dewey and we found ourselves on the same transport out to Ladd Field, Alaska, both Bomber Wing wives. Summer nights when the boys were standing the duty, we used to put the kids to bed, my Crystal and Betty’s two girls, top to tail in one bed, and then we’d sit out together in the gloaming. Betty’d read out handy household tips from her magazine. I’d swat mosquitoes with the Sears catalogue.

I won’t speak ill of the dead but I wasn’t the only person to find Betty the tiniest bit irritating. She was one of those girls had everything taped, housekeeping-wise. It was Lois who christened her the Pie Crust Queen and Betty took it entirely as a compliment.

We all thought her dainty, homemaking ways were amusing before we knew any better. Later on we realized there was nothing very peachy about Betty’s life. Her kids were ingrates – leastways the first two were. Ed Gillis was a bully. And then she went and got an adenocarcinoma. Times like that you find out who your real friends are. Betty was back in San Antonio, Texas, but Lois came from down New York to see her, and Kath came all the way from England. Not Audrey, though. She was still over in England and I wondered if she’d come. But Audrey and Betty never were all that. Maybe they were too much alike. Chin up, best foot forward, wash those windows.

Gayle would have visited Betty too, I’m sure, but at that particular time she and Lemarr were on the road, on a healing tour, laying on hands in Tennessee and Kentucky. Anyway, with a gift like Gayle’s all she had to do was offer up a prayer. If God had wanted Betty to live Gayle would have been the one to fix it. I guess Betty’s time had come. And Gayle did send a very nice video eulogy.

So poor Betty was still there in my little book when I sent out my cards, end of 1999, with my change of address. Gayle was in North Carolina, a widow again. She reckoned she’s through with marrying.

‘Thy will be done, Lord,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had three good husbands and it’d be greedy to ask for more.’

Audrey was in DC. I didn’t hear a lot from her, but she always sent out very nice cards for the holidays, very tasteful, Baby Jesus or some olde English coaching inne, and Lois’d go out of her way to find a real garish one to send her back. She said, ‘I just love to think of all that glitter mussing up Audrey’s good rugs.’

Lois and Herb were back in White Plains, New York, by 1999. They’d tried retiring to Florida, but Lois said it was one long bad-hair day, and Herb didn’t settle. He couldn’t find a lumber yard worthy of the name. All plywood and laminates, he reckoned. Kath and Slick were in Eastchester, not far from Lois and Herb. Now there’s something I never would have dreamed. When I think back to the first time we met Kath, that freezing Norfolk morning waiting to see the King’s coffin go by on the Royal Train. February 1952. The world’s least likely woman to end up in New York with a five-bed colonial and a husband who calls her ‘Sweetchops’. Kath Pharaoh.

Kath flew over when Betty was near the end, wanted to see her one last time, and then she found she had a reason to stay on, to help Herb and Lois when their boy Kirk got sick. I guess Kath had realized before any of us that Kirk wasn’t Herb’s son. Lois fell pregnant when we were at USAF Drampton in Norfolk. She’d had a mad five minutes with Kath’s brother, John Pharaoh, and Kirk was the outcome. Trouble was, John Pharaoh landed her with more than a baby. He had an illness in his blood. It killed him and it killed Kirk in the end. Huntington’s chorea.

I’ll never forget that day when it all came out. Sitting with Kath in the parking lot outside Lois and Herb’s building, getting up the courage to go in and face certain facts. If it had been me I’d have left well alone. As far as we knew, Herb believed that boy was his child. Of course we underestimated Herb.

Anyway, Kath was determined to have it out, and when she saw Kirk for herself, saw he was going exactly the same way her brother had gone, she was heartbroken. I remember her saying, ‘I should have put a stop to it, Peg. I knew what was a-going on. I should have said something.’

But she had nothing to blame herself for. Lois had been itching to get off the base and have a bit of fun. She was bored. Well, we were all bored. The difference was, the rest of us didn’t go looking for trouble in trousers.

As soon as Kath had seen Kirk and confirmed her worst fears she started figuring how to stay on. She said, ‘He’s got the Huntington’s. I feared as much. Now Herb and Copper-knob are going to need all the help they can get.’

Kath had called Lois ‘Copper-knob’ when she first knew her and the name stuck even though the colour has been out of a bottle for many years now.

I said, ‘It’s not your job to help. They’ll have to get a nurse in.’

‘They will,’ she said. ‘But that don’t mean I can’t help as well. Prior experience, see, Peg? It’s the least I can do. And it won’t be the first mess John Pharaoh left me to mop up.’

‘Are there other children?’

‘Not so far as I know. No, I just meant his general shenanigans.’

‘My boy,’ she took to calling Kirk, which I guess was near enough the truth. Strictly speaking, he was her nephew. But she worried that the US authorities wouldn’t see it that way. She used to say, ‘What if I can’t prove Kirk’s got Pharaoh blood? If your immigration people come after me they’ll probably chuck me out. I could end up on a slow boat to China.’

But before that could happen Slick Bonney put a wedding band on her finger. I never saw that coming and I don’t think Kath did either, but she soon got over the surprise and set out her terms. She said, ‘I’ve told him I can’t live in Texas. I’ve got to be up here, with Lois and Herb and my boy.’

And Slick agreed. He said he’d let one good woman get away, by which he meant poor Betty, who he’d courted in vain because she was still lawfully wedded to Ed Gillis even though she was in Texas and he was in Indiana, and he didn’t intend losing another. He was willing to sell up and relocate. He was very ardent. When I asked Kath if she was going to accept him, she said, ‘Well, he’s a proper gent, and he’s got a bob or two himself, so it’s not my money he’s after.’

‘What money? You won another of those Premium Bonds?’

‘No. I’m just saying, Slick’s not a gold-digger. No cause to be.’

I said, ‘So is that a yes to marrying him?’

She laughed. ‘Wait till they hear about this at home,’ she said. ‘Wait till I write to May Gotobed.’

May was Kath’s best friend, another spinster, another of those tough old birds they breed in the wilds of Norfolk.

‘When May hears, that’ll be all over Brakey before teatime. “Have you heard? Kath Pharaoh’s took leave of her senses. She’s marrying a Yank.” One good thing, Peg, at my age at least they won’t say it’s a shotgun affair. They won’t say I must be in the pudding club.’

Slick and Kath were married in the spring of ’82, in San Antonio. It was one of the nicest weddings I ever organized and definitely
the smallest. Just me and Grice and Tucker, Lois and Herb’s girl Sandie, who attended on behalf of the Moon family, and Slick’s neighbours, Mr and Mrs Komisky. There was another neighbour on the guest list, a Florence Melon, but she declined. I think Miss Melon was a disappointed woman.

So that was how things stood towards the end of 1999. That’s what had become of the old crowd. Herb and Lois and Kath and Slick got together as usual for Thanksgiving up in White Plains. Audrey was being cheerful about spending the holidays on her own. Lance Three’s vacationing in Thailand, she wrote. She called him Lance Three because he was Lance T. Rudman III. Mikey just remarried, did I tell you? They have their own lives. I’m just fine. I’ll probably volunteer for something.

Gayle was in Fayetteville, North Carolina, steeling herself for the coming of the Antichrist. And I was at Eagle Colony trying to remember which packing case the stemware was in while Grice and Tucker did something real important, like argue over tree ornaments.

I left it till 5 January, then called my darling daughter. I said, ‘Well, the world didn’t end in Texas. How’re y’all doing in Maine?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘No sign of the Antichrist in Waterville. No looting in Safeway. But Eugene says the Millennium bug wasn’t the half of it. Him and Dad are still sitting on their stash of canned beef and they won’t be breaking into it any time soon.’

I told her not to worry. That stuff probably lasts for ever.

She said, ‘Then I guess I’ll just think of it as part of my inheritance. It’ll be something to look forward to. You finished unpacking?’

We hadn’t, nowhere near. I’d get up, look at the pile of boxes and, more often than not, I’d go out for a drive instead. I seemed to have run out of steam.

She said, ‘Grice not pulling his weight?’

It wasn’t that. Grice’d willingly open a box and make a start but then he’d spend all day deciding where to place one vase.

I said, ‘I’m not getting any younger.’ I was seventy-five, to be precise.

Crystal said, ‘Uh-oh. Here we go. I hope you’re not going to start playing the old-lady card. Bad enough I’ve got Dad driving me nuts. He’s getting real forgetful. Asking the same question over and over.’

As I pointed out, at least she was nearby to keep an eye on him. From her place to Belgrade Lakes couldn’t have been more than twelve, fifteen miles.

She said, ‘You call that an advantage?’

I said, ‘Those cans of beef stew? Every time you go over there you could take a few away with you. Like drawing down on a pension ahead of time?’

‘You mean enter the basement and breach a double-wrapped pallet? No, no, no. Eugene might take a shot at me. “Step away from the survival rations, Crystal. Hands in the air. Nice and slow.” Anyhow, they’re moving all the stuff to Eugene’s bunker. Did I tell you about the bunker?’

‘You mean like a bomb shelter?’

‘Bomb shelter. Survival pod for the End Times. Play den for grown men. By the way, Marc’s gone vegetarian so I don’t have much call for beef stew, these days.’

That didn’t surprise me. My son-in-law always was a bit different. The day they got married he was wearing leather bracelets.

Now, my daughter is a taxidermist by profession so I had to wonder how a vegetarian was living with that. I said, ‘How’s he coping with your workshop full of body parts? All those moose heads. Does he want you to go in for a different line of business?’

‘He’s got more sense than to ask. Besides, I don’t get so many moose heads nowadays. I’m doing a lot more salmon.’

‘Don’t fish count? To a vegetarian?’

She said it depended.

I always hated to get off the phone with Crystal. We’re neither of us sentimental types but Texas to Maine is a great distance between a mother and her only child.

‘Could be worse,’ she always joked. ‘You could be in Arizona.’

That day she said, ‘Mom, I didn’t mean it, about you playing the old-lady card. I do think of you. You know I’d be there for you if you needed me. Just right now, Dad needs me more. Miss you. Love you.’

So then I had to go out, drive to Lake Park for a quiet cry and an Old Faithful Peanut Cluster.

*

By April we were just about straight. We had to be because Kath and Slick planned on visiting us for Easter. Slick was looking forward to fishing for crappie. I’m sure they have plenty of panfish up in New York but Slick was always drawn back to Texas.

Kath did a tour of inspection of our new house. ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘It’s bigger than I expected, but I suppose you need it with the three of you. We should get a smaller place but Slick does like his space. We’ve got a three-car garage and I still have to park out front. You heard of this eBay business? He’s on there all the time bidding for things. I never know what’s going to turn up next. Pre-war tractors, that’s the latest.

‘May Gotobed’s got a council bungalow now, did I tell you? She’s got bad knees. Can’t manage stairs like she used to do. That’d be caused by all the damp of the fens, I suppose, and the cold, and wearing no stockings. However did we manage? Well, we’re paying for it now. I get a few twinges myself.’

‘Foo’ was how she pronounced it. A foo twinges. Kath has never lost her Norfolk way of speaking.

She said, ‘You’re still going on all right, though, Peg. You’re still sprightly.’

Kath was my source of information on Lois and Herb. Lois was a lousy correspondent, and if I phoned, I hardly ever caught her at home.

Kath said, ‘You know what she’s like. She won’t stay in. She goes to a seniors’ centre. One day they have singing. Another day she does Step.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Search me. She tried pottery but she never seemed to make anything. They do all sorts. Book club. Well, of course that doesn’t interest Copper-knob. Tee Chai. That’s supposed to stop you falling over and breaking your leg. The trouble with Lois is she doesn’t stick at anything for long. She’s like a flea at a fair. And, you know, the older she gets, the lairier she dresses. Purple plimsolls. Great dangling earrings.’

‘No law against that, Kath.’

‘But Herb’s such a quiet soul. He sits there in his cardigan, doing his whittling. He has the patience of a saint, that man.’

*

Easter Sunday we went to the Pooch Parade in Robert E. Lee Park, me, Kath and Grice. Slick didn’t hold with dogs wearing bonnets so he elected to go fishing instead. Tucker was feeling fatigued so he stayed home. They didn’t have winners at the parade, lest any non-winning dogs might get their feelings hurt. The taking part was all.

Grice said, ‘I don’t know that I follow the psychology of that. You dress a Doberman as a bumble bee you must be inflicting untold damage to his feelings anyhow. Seems to me the least you should do is award him a year’s supply of beef-hide chews. For bearing his humiliation with dignity.’

We headed back to Eagle Colony around five. I’d made a baked ham and a potato salad, thinking we could sit outside to eat, but it had commenced to rain.

I remember Grice saying, ‘Slick’ll be home before us. He won’t stay out fishing in this.’

Kath said, ‘Don’t you believe it. A spot of rain won’t stop him.’

But Grice was right. Slick’s rented SUV was on the drive when we pulled in. I remember every bit of what happened next. Kath was out of the car, Grice was reaching back inside for his roll of Lifesavers, I still had my belt fastened. The front door opened and Slick came out. He didn’t look right, somehow.

‘Kath,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Kath. ‘What’s up? Have you scraped the paintwork on that car?’

Slick shot a look at Grice.

So then we were all out of the car, getting rained on, and Slick stood barring our way.

He said, ‘It’s Tucker, Kath. I found him when I got back. He was on the floor.’

Grice went running into the house. ‘Tuck!’ he was shouting. ‘Tuck!’

Kath said, ‘How long ago? Where’s the ambulance?’

I said, ‘You did call nine. . .