Daddy's Girl - Marie B (read with me TXT) 📗

Daddy's Girl

I often think back on my childhood days and I find that most of them were beautiful, and some were not so. One of the beautiful days was when John Jr., Margie and I, three stair-steps, waited at the gate in front of our house for daddy to come ambling up the hillside. Of course, none of us could tell time. I guess we could sense by the cool of the evening, or by the bees about the daisies, or maybe it was by the ebbing of the sun beneath the horizon that it was time for daddy’s legs to appear at the top of the hill. we would dash down the dirt road and straddle his shoes and he would carry us heavy laden kids all the way home. At the gate daddy would lift us high up to the sky and then back down to him, kissing each one of us before placing us on the ground. I don’t remember when it stopped, but it was a slow change that happened and he wasn’t the same anymore. He had withdrawn far into himself.

The younger kids never got to know the daddy that I knew. He was so full of love that it just went every where at once. The drinking wasn‘t so bad at first, and then as time went by it became tarnished with depression and hatred for himself. Mom hated to see his drinking buddies come around, and I hated them all, with a passion. I was sure that they were the source of all his unhappiness. He hadn’t always gone out drinking alcohol with his buddy’s, instead he had taken us on bus rides to Charleston. I loved the bus rides every weekend. Getting up on the big red bus and sitting at the window watching the trees and giant buildings go by was entertaining. It was also a time when blacks weren’t allowed to sit down inside some of the restaurants and eat, and so, we would stand outside the Diamond Store while daddy went in to buy us a hotdog and a drink.

“Stay right here till I get back.” He’d say. We wouldn’t move an inch, waiting patiently for our daddy to return, and when he did, he’d have a greasy spotted, brown, paper bag and three cups filled with soda pop. After eating the hotdogs we’d walk across the street to the peanut shop where the air was filled with the aroma of roasted nuts.

The rubber plant bus always smelled of strong gasoline and hot sweaty folk. The loud sound of the motor and closing of the automatic doors meant we were on our way home. Even when I got sick from the rumble and tumble mixed with gasoline smell I loved the bus ride. daddy learned to stop the bus driver and get off before I’d get sick. When we reached the top of the hillside leading to home, he’d pick all three of us up like baby kittens and carry us on his shoulder to the top of the hill. There was a comforting thumping where I laid my head on daddy’s chest. Nobody in the world was as strong as my daddy.

Chapter 2


“John Jr., wake up.” I teetered on my feet gazing down at my brother’s languid body stretched out on the carpeted floor. “Get up. We gotta go.” I mumbled. “They’ll be here any minute. Daddy’s worse” I pulled at my brother’s arm trying to awaken him. I didn’t want nobody to see us in this condition. Mom would lecture us about the sins of alcohol and I would be miserable knowing that she was right.

Maybe something cold to drink would help him sober up, I thought to myself, but not beer. No---- not our usual morning beer. I stumbled into the kitchen and came back with a glass half full of water. “Daddy’s real sick this time.” I said. I hesitated before turning the glass upside down. Startled, he sat straight up, water dripping from his nappy hair onto his surprised face. I stood stupefied, holding the empty glass in my hand. It was like the start of the water battles we often had when we were kids. He always managed to get me back in some kind of way. Maybe he would forgive me this time.

“Daddy”s sick” I said, “mom’s on her way ta get us.”

“What? Get er body outa here.” He slurred not noticing that everybody was already gone.

I splashed cool water on my face and pressed the cloth over both eyes until I felt somewhat lucid. I was glad that I had left Jason, my son, with my sister, Katharine. When I went back down the stairway, John was dressed, ready to go, sitting silently, absorbing what I had just told him. He looked attentively at me.

“It’s gonna be ok.” I said. John shook his head from side to side in disbelief, and then he nodded. I slumped down next to him on the sofa and continued to stare into space with him. John was twenty and I was twenty-three. He took care of me---- and I took care of him. He carried me up muddy dirt roads after weekend parties, and I supplied him money for cocaine that he always managed to pay back to me.

One day he told me, his eyes pleading, “Neely don’t you ever do it. You couldn’t handle it.” I didn’t listen to daddy when he said, “never drink liquor Neely,” but for some reason the drugs are different. I feel compelled to tell you how bad it really is.

Jason’s daddy was one of many infatuations in my life. He was Irresistible funny, I fell for him like the child that I was. Maybe it was because of the twenty-year age difference. He took me places that I had never been before and showed me things that I had never seen before. I didn’t follow any of the rules though and so I found myself pregnant at the age of eighteen. Daddy was as angry as I had ever seen him before, but after tying a rag around his head, he softened some. My son Jason seemed to be my daddy’s only real joy in life.

“You bet’ not do it a’gin. I’ll kill you both.” He said. Daddy put the fear in me that day, and I knew that he meant it.

“Why would I wanna do that.” I mumbled.
“Wha’d you say?”
“Nothing.” I hung my head and humbly left the room. Daddy and I were never close after that. Jason’s daddy didn’t want to have anything to do with me and him. He moved to another state and we never heard from him again. Daddy and mom took care of Jason while I went back to school.

My sister Margie’s rapping at the door brought John and I instantly to our feet. Eleven months apart, you would have thought that I was the level headed one however, Margie was the one with sound thinking. Always making the right decisions. She was perfect. I figured if God would give me my daddy back again, the one that I knew before the alcohol that I would become the perfect daughter.

Crisp, cool, early -morning air was deceptive, by noon it would be a sweltering hot day. Mom sat on the passengers side of the car while John and I jumped into the back seat. I wondered if mom or Margie noticed that John and I were exceptionally quiet. If we kept our mouths closed, they may not guess what had transpired the night before. You know, smoke from the long twisted gray-blue pipe that was passed around the room, nothing mattered except the gray-blue pipe.

The road was a winding hill encamped by trees that looked like marching men and sprays of multicolored flowers until we reached the interstate leading to Clarksburg Veterans Hospital. The closer we got to our destination, I realized that nobody was talking, not even my mother. No one cared about our drunken stupor that night. Our daddy was sick, and that‘s all that mattered now. Mom had said that she chose the three of us kids to go with her because we were the oldest.

After a night of drinking with his buddy’s, daddy would come home cursing and messing up everybody’s night. The next day he couldn’t say, I love you, enough. He wanted to convey to us how sorry he really was, and so, he would get mom to play the big black piano in the dinning room grandpa Maize had brought for grandma. Daddy would have her play that song, “What a friend we have in Jesus,” and we all would sing along, even daddy. Mom said his drinking so much these days was because he felt hopeless without God in his life. He couldn’t give his children the things that they needed. It was worse after he had a slight stroke with hardening of the arteries in his head. We were all old enough to know that it had to be more than just hardening of the arteries and alcohol.

We didn’t know that we were poor. Poor was a word for other folk, not us. We didn’t notice not going to the department store to buy clothes for school. Mom made them. We didn’t realize that we were not the majority that went to pick up commodities each month. We just knew that we were a family are supposed to be happy.

We had a dog named Rusty and two cats, Madeline and fat cat. Rusty was an old stray dog with a rusty brown coat and a patch of black on his right ear. Mom always said that Rusty must be kin to us, for real, because he didn’t let anything ruffle his feathers. Even when a gang of dogs jumped on him one day, he just licked his wounds and went on, however he did walk with a limp after that. Madeline was somebody’s lost Siamese cat. She could turn the doorknob leading to the back porch and go out and come back when she got ready. One day she left and just never did come back. All of us missed that cat. Daddy said some wild animal may have killed her. I would rather think that she found her way back to her old home where they missed and loved her as much as we did. Fat cat never left us. She was dedicated and committed to a life with the Wilkerson‘s. Daddy would feed all the stray dogs and cats that came around. Mom would always say, “John, stop feeding those dogs, they’ll just keep coming back for more.” But daddy never stopped.