Episodes from a Wayne Childhood, Pt.7

VICTORY VEGETABLES AND CHICKENS

Out back, along Lenoir Avenue, was our gravel driveway and the carriage barn, with hinged double doors, used by us to house two cars, while upstairs, in the earliest years, there were fifty chickens (a victory effort and my brother Jack's first "business") and he and Chuck would go to collect eggs each day.  Later all the chickens were slaughtered, hung upside down, by Jack's account, killed by a single cut up the beak and into the brain, bled, soaked in a steaming tub and plucked, then sold or eaten:  a sheer labor of killing that my mother referred to ever after with revulsion.  By war's end, the chicken roost was turned into a playroom, where my brothers had parties, where they built a mammoth "O" gauge model train layout, and where an intercom was strung, so Mom could call them to dinner.           

Midway along the back property line, which joined Mr. Smith's yard (Mr. Smith taught science at Radnor High), grew a venerable oak, five feet across at the trunk and highest in the yard.  A good twenty feet up, level with the top of the barn, the boys had built a tree house in the central crotch:  walls, windows, roof, and a trapdoor underneath, through which they disappeared by means of a rope ladder that swung and swayed and I was forbidden, ever, to climb.  When I did test its lower rungs, its unanchored twisting and give left me hanging in fright.  Later, after one of the neighborhood kids wandered into our yard, climbed without permission, and fell from the ladder and broke his arm, the tree house was torn down.  I never got to see inside of it.

Down Smith's fence to our back corner ran a long grape arbor, over whose lattice my brothers climbed and from which, later, they hung the chickens for killing.  Police Chief Captain Bones's yard began at the corner and bordered ours back out to Bloomingdale.  In front Bones's yard and house stood level with ours, but his back yard rose steeply to a terrace, where a reservoir from Wayne's earliest days had been filled in.  In the back corner, its bank was only three or four feet high, but it grew to as much as six feet farther down.  The slope up from our side had been planted by Nana Henry as a rock garden, with boulders I jumped from, one to another, without crushing the flowers between.  Up on the terrace, Bones's yard was left wild and overgrown as a woods, and to me as exotic, since we were forbidden to climb into it, though my brothers sometimes did to retrieve a baseball or to dig BB's out of the rotten tree they used for target practice out their bedroom window.   The tree had been struck by lightning and burned, and crows, which Captain Bones himself would shoot at from his back porch, would flock to its leafless branches.  The first time Jack let me shoot his BB gun, a pump model, he had me sight the tree from the window sill in his room.     

The victory garden was in that quadrant of our back yard, too, enclosed by a picket fence with an arbor and gate, and with plank walks between the beds of vegetables (so plentiful that they fed not only us but half of Lenoir Avenue as well, according to Mom).  Because the boys used to lock me in here, teasingly, it was my first thought when I heard "Don't Fence Me In," a popular song then.  Between the garden and the back porch stoop with its overhang was Mom's clothesline, strung like telephone wires between poles and propped up with notched clothes props, which the boys later used for stilts.  Where kitchen and pantry wall abutted part of the living room and the side of the sun porch, with its door and wide steps, was a flagstone patio, also enclosed by a picket fence with an arbored gate.  Off this patio, down from the rock garden and rhododendron bushes and up against Bones's shed, was a weeping willow that had grown from a twig that Grandpop had stuck in the ground twenty years before.  A wooden swing hung from one branch, where Judy would push me; also we would tear off strands, strip the leaves, and  snap them like whips at each other.  Or I would walk and turn through the fronds, which felt like hair.  Patio, willow, and the area off the back stoop formed our favorite family spot, for its privacy and shade.  In a family film, Nana Henry sits on a bench under the willow, sprinkling us with a hose as we dart around, skinny in our bathing suits, and jump in and out of a zinc laundry tub.  Fat, complacent, bemused, a little devilish:  she waters us like animated flowers. 

For the home movie clip, see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJYRzTnbBmw