Three Tragic Childhood Experiences — Part Three
Photo by Thomas Park
It was a clear and warm early fall Saturday morning. I’d helped my mom hang out the clothes she’d washed and then hopped on my bike and rode the half mile to the post office. I wanted to take my friend, Karen, with me that morning to show her a path I’d discovered the afternoon before.
The day before, I had been riding outside of town along the flat part of the canal’s edge that I wasn’t supposed to be on. I could easily slip and go into the canal’s waters and drown, my mother would preach. But I didn’t always obey rules that seemed silly to me. In this case, I knew I was a good rider and was always very cautious, so I rode along the canal a lot.
As I peddled slowly along the water’s edge in an area I hadn’t been on before, I noticed a sturdy, hard-to-see, narrow, wooden bridge cross over the canal with an obvious path that led into a field of grass on the other side. I walked my bike across and laid it against one of the nearby apple trees then followed the path through the trees and tall grass. It led to an old house that hadn’t been lived in for years. I was surprised I had never noticed it before and wanted to explore it. Unfortunately, it was getting late and I needed to get home. I made plans to tell Karen about it the next day to see if she wanted to explore the house with me.
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That next morning, when I got to the post office and told Karen about the path, she was excited about the prospect of exploring the old house and ran to ask her mother if she could go with me for a ride.
I heard her mother tell her, “No. Not this morning.” But I couldn’t hear her explanation about why.
Karen came back and told me that her mom was doing laundry and needed her to watch the post office. “But I can go later when Mom is finished!” she told me excitedly.
Karen’s freckled face glowed with excitement about going later and her blue eyes sparkled. As she jumped up and down, her shoulder-length, dark blonde hair bounced and I couldn’t help but giggle. We were a lot alike with our freckled faces and light hair, except my eyes were green and my hair was longer and more reddish blonde, which I usually wore in a ponytail. Karen had to watch the post office a lot while her mother did household chores, so her excitement to go exploring with me was obvious, I was happy to note.
The post office was an addition built many years ago onto the front and to the side of their house. It had its own door to the left, whereas the door to the house was directly in front. The post office’s addition had a wall with metal boxes and small doors with combinations, each numbered for every family in town. People could get their mail and send out letters by putting them into a brass slot on the same wall at any time of the day. But sometimes people needed stamps or needed to mail a package or retrieve something that wouldn’t fit into their small box if they’d received a yellow notice in their mailbox, so there was another door to the left to enter where there was a counter. That was where the mail mistress stood to help with those matters, or to appear when someone would ring the bell on the counter if she wasn’t there at that moment. I knew all this because I came and got our mail nearly every morning in the summer. Our box number was thirteen.
“I’ll come and get you when I’m finished,” Karen told me. “I’m excited to see the path you found.”
I was disappointed that we had to wait because I wanted to show her then, not later. Since I no longer had my friend, Charlotte, to play with, Karen was the only one who I liked to hang with. The other girls were either too young, were older, or had interests that didn’t interest me, like playing with dolls instead of exploring, or they had chores of their own to do.
When I no longer had Charlotte around to play with because she had died, my parents kept telling me when I would ask about her, I was always perplexed about what that meant. The only thing I could compare the word died with was when some of our plants that hadn’t gotten enough water would wither up and turn brown, and my mother would say that they had died. But I couldn’t imagine Charlotte withering up and turning brown like the plants, and yet that was the only concept I had of the term at that young age.
I was in the same class with mostly eight-year-olds but since my birthday was in October, I was the youngest in the class and wouldn’t technically be eight for another month. I always mocked my friend’s replies when someone asked our ages, though, because I didn’t want to be looked at as a ‘baby.’ So, my understanding of things such as a friend having died was still beyond my comprehension.
But that reality came to hit me again all too soon.
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When Karen finally called me on our party line to let me know that she could go bike-riding with me, she said that she would meet me at the gas station, which was just across the road from our house. Her mother had given her some pennies for watching the post office while she did laundry and Karen wanted to buy some penny-pieces with her earned money.
Since I could ride across the street faster than she could ride from where the post office was, I was there picking my own penny-pieces with the five cents my mother had given me for helping her that morning when I saw Karen pull up on her bicycle.
My uncle — my dad’s sister’s husband — owned the gas station, and my cousin, Mike — who was four years older than me — was always there helping him during the summer and in the evenings after school because my uncle was usually in the garage working on a car.
As I was looking in the glass case with the penny-pieces, I noticed Mike climbing on top of the Coca-Cola cooler while chatting with some of his friends who were usually hanging out at the station.
I watched him reach up on top of a shelf and take hold of something long and brown to bring down just as I heard Karen say, “Hi! I’m here,” as she opened the screened door to step in.
I turned to look at her with a big smile when I heard a loud noise like a car muffler’s pop and then saw Karen fall back onto the cement, never getting inside the door.
Photo by Annie Spratt
I just stood in shock not knowing what had happened. I saw my cousin hop off the cooler with a rifle — I knew what that was because my dad had one for hunting — and he was crying out, “Daaaad!”
I ran to help Karen up when my uncle came charging in yelling and screaming at my cousin and then began sobbing when he went out to look at Karen. She wasn’t moving.
“Get her out of here!” my uncle told the other boys who were standing in shock, referring to me, and then told Mike, “Call an ambulance. Now!” After that, he told one of Mike’s friends to take me home, which he did, and I had no clue what had just happened.
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Later that afternoon, Judy, another cousin on my mother’s side of the family, who was a year older than I, and a couple of her friends, came to sit on our porch to talk about poor Karen while they cried. I didn’t know what they were crying about; Karen wasn’t their friend and they were always making fun of my friends because they were older and wiser, I’d guessed. But there they were, acting as if it was their best friend who was taken to the hospital in the white van that had a loud siren.
I had watched the ambulance when it came screeching under the canopy of the gas station, while people were sobbing and trying to console Karen’s parents, who had been called to come.
I was thinking about how we were all just one big family in that small community, and what happens to one person affects everyone, which was a pretty wise recognition, I thought.
It was after the ambulance had left with Karen and her parents that I sat on our porch feeling numb. I knew Karen had been hurt because I saw her blood ooze out around her head on the concrete and she wasn’t moving. But I thought they’d fix her and she’d be able to play with me again, to finally go on the path we were both excited to explore.
It was later that afternoon, with my cousin and some of her friends still hanging around lamenting about the sad situation, saying things like, “Poor Karen,” while shedding what I thought were make-believe tears, when the bishop of our church stopped by.
He walked up the steps to our porch and said, “I’m sorry to tell you that your little friend has died.”
Died. That word again. I just looked at him quizzically, not knowing how I should feel. The other girls were then sobbing for real and I thought I should be crying, too.
When the bishop took my hand and said to me, “You’ll miss Karen. I know you were good friends. I’m so sorry for your being unable to play with her again.”
That’s when the tears began to flow and I didn’t think they would ever stop.
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Click to read part one.
Or click to read part two.