Oakhurst: Two Witches: Sawdust and Cake Icing

 

Much has changed around the first house my parents ever bought, on Oakhurst Street.  I am glad to see that the lot to the west has remained vacant.  It was part of our property, and it was an amazing  place for flying kites.  World War II had not been over long, and there was a shortage of housing in Jonesboro.  My parents had lived for a while with my mother's parents, and then they had rented a very small house about which I will write when I discuss my grandfather, but the house pictured was the first place they could call their own.  When they bought it there was a garage, but my father managed to burn it down killing weeds.  I found that very exciting, because a fire truck came.  There were windows on the side porch then.  I remember because that is where my mother's first washing machine lived, and I loved to sit on it and pretend it was a horse when it bucked on spin cycle, and I could look out at one of the witch's houses.

There was a thick shrubbery along the street side of the vacant lot then, and I could play Tarzan in its branches.  There wasn't much room to swing,  and in stead of the chimpanzee, Cheeta, I had a monkey, Boko, who sometimes took naps with me in the hedge.  

Today my mother and the two witches and the sons of the maybe-evil witch would probably be arrested for endangering the life of a three-year-old child--me--but for me at the time it was a paradise.  I was a free-range kid if ever there was such a thing.  My mother fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but in the periods in between, and after dinner in the summer, the whole world was mine to explore. Enter the witches.

Directly across from our house lived Mrs. Barkley, who was wrinkled and wore black and seemed immensely old to me.  She took in ironing, and always had a flock of grandchildren around, often playing under the hot iron.  Looking back, I don't remember anything she ever did that even bordered on the evil, but I liked to imagine she was a  bad witch.  Next door to her house, across from our empty lot, was one of the treasures of the world.  Some of her sons had a carpentry shop there, and at three-years old, it seemed a place of total enchantment, of wizardry even.  (I mean, shouldn't a witch's son be at least a wizard?)  The Barkley brothers converted planks of wood into anything one desired.  What I mostly desired, for reasons I have forgotten, was sawdust, and they gave me all the sawdust I could carry away in my little tin beach bucket.  (More than ten years later, they were still in business and my mother had them make me a  bookcase for Christmas that was even better than sawdust. Now they and their mother's house are gone.)

Then the lot to the east of the house was also vacant, and one the other side of it lived a good witch, Mrs Dodson.  She made cakes.  It was, one might say, a working class neighborhood.  And she had one of those new-style chrome and plastic bar stools on which a three-year old could perch to watch her work, and who was allowed to eat the icing left in the mixing bowl.  Not so useful as, but tastier than, sawdust. She made my birthday cakes for years, including the best one ever, which was related in a way to Mrs. Barkley and the hedge.  When I wasn't Tarzan, I was  Wild Bill Hickock.  For my fourth birthday, my cake featured a cowboy on a horse with his lasso spelling 'Happy Birthday, Dale'.  And I was given a Mattel Fanner 50. (I confess to having interrupted writing this blog to see if I could buy another one one eBay.) So, I did what I had seen many cowboys do.  I hid above the dusty street waiting to pounce on the bad buy.  The shrubbery had to substitute for the saloon roof, and it was one of Mrs. Barkley's grandsons' turn to be the bad buy.  When I pounced, I clobbered him in the head with the butt of my Fanner 50, just like in the movies, and he was knocked out, just like in the movies.  Unlike in the movies, everyone was quite upset, and he was taken into our living room and laid on the couch because his grandmother's living room was full of other people'' ironing, and the doctor was called.  The doctor said he would be fine.  (And probably didn't charge anything.  It was a working class neighborhood. Much has changed since then.)