The car ride

We were migrants ourselves back then in the post-depression years. My father had left the farm to enter the army after World War I, and when he got out the family farm was no more. Jobs were scarce, and after his stint in the CCC, he married, started a family, and worked at a variety of jobs to support his family and pay the rent. The work was not steady, and he had to move to where he could get to work, a total of 6 times in about 6 years. During one of the moves, we were all to get in the car so he could take care of details, one of which was to visit the then landlord. My father was behind the wheel and my sister and I were already in the back seat, waiting for my mother and brother to join us, when my mother called out from the doorway to tell my father that Joseph had gotten sick and they couldn't join us. My father started the short drive down the hill toward the landlord's house, probably to settle accounts prior to the move. I remember feeling a surge of fear and panic that my mother was not coming with us. We had never gone anywhere without her up to then, pretty usual behavior for those times when fathers typically had little to do with rearing young children except spend most of their waking hours working to support them. Leisurely drives were non-existent; travel was serious business. If I had been familiar with the word kidnapped, that is how i would have described the situation. I did not want to go anywhere without my mother, though if my older brother had been with us, I would have felt some measure of familiarity and security. Anyway, we arrived at our destination, my sister and I huddled in the cavernous back seat. My father got out of the car, and engaged in converation with the man he'd gone to meet. An endless conversation, it seemed, to the 2 of us miserable little kids in the back of the car. It seemed my father had forgotten all about us, as we sat in silence. We seldom spoke out about anything, backward little country kids as we were. After what seemed like hours and hours, something even more ominous happened. The 2 men walked around the corner of a barn, out of our sight, I'm sure now to talk about cows or crops or such. Real fear swept over me, as we waited and waited ever longer and longer. I abandoned all hope of my father's ever re-appearing, certain he'd forgotten all about us. As perhaps in truth he had Finally, I said to my sister, who was probably less than 3 years old, let's get out of the car. I remember her standing on the floorboards in the back seat looking confused, and even to me, not as terrified as I was feeling. She asked why and I told her we had to go home. Being little, she didn't ask any more questions but followed me out of the car. I led her out of the barnyard driveway to the road. Our house was pretty close by and though we'd never walked that road before, we started up the hill toward where I was pretty sure our house was. We'd walked only a short distance when, to our amazement, we saw our mother walking down the road toward the farm. Evidently we had been gone for much too long a time, and she was concerned about what could possibly have taken such a long time. "There's Mommy," cried out Dorothy and started to run up the road toward her, like the near baby that she was.
"No," I said, "we should go into the field to hide ourselves and run home from there so Mommy won't see us and know that we got out of the car without telling Daddy." But she paid no attention to me and ran toward Mommy, while I dragged myself along through the ditch, full of shame and worry that I would be blamed for leaving the car and taking my sister with me. I can still remember that I felt hot and sweaty and guilty and scared and most of all ashamed that I had displeased my mother. As it turned out, my mother was very glad to have found us, and she was not at all angry nor did she ever blame us. What she may have said to our father about his seeming to forget us had nothing to do with us. But I still have a vivid memory of how I felt. It's odd that I remember so well what I did and how I felt, but it's hard to reconcile the sharpness of what I was thinking with what I was not thinking: my plan had been to sneak back up to the house and just be there. I had no thought of how I was going to explain, or any concept that anyone would ask how we came to be there while the car was not. I hope it's because that type of behavior is normal for a four-year-old, and that it's not because I was a really stupid child.