VIEW FROM THE TURKEY HOUSE

PROLOGUE for a memoir or blog

Most people can’t remember before the age of five, but I remember the block house in Baltimore on Oakford Avenue almost in detail. I looked it up on Google the other day. Its red brick exterior appeared clean with a small trimmed front lawn. The house stands in line with other connected well-maintained ones marching up the street The residents would be low middle-class like us, probably African-American.

I remember the house as a pleasant place with all the amenities a 3-year-old would need. The backyard held a sandbox and odds and ends of a toy dinner set. A tiny red tricycle and wagon had been supplied for my fun. It’s important for my readers to know my home in Baltimore held many happy moments. My parents loved me and took good care of me. This story is not one of abuse or neglect or even poverty. Any suffering I experienced came from myself years later, and it was not physical. But I suppose we could all say the same thing to some degree, especially if we don’t know how to reverse it.

I remember the stairs going up to the bedrooms, the bath at the top and mine to the right, and then Vera’s and Daddy and Mama’s with bay windows overlooking the street.

My sister Dorothy visited on Sundays--18 and married to a 32-year-old man named Dick. I sensed a darkness about him—not his skin color but a dark atmosphere of uneasiness crept in when he stepped through the door. Dark brown wavy hair and sharp features on a tall thin frame reminded me of Dick Tracy from the 1940’s comics.

They lived in a tiny apartment somewhere in Baltimore. Dorothy set up a small room as a studio where she drew and painted. Her talent in art made my parents proud, but marriage at 15 caused them to give up hope for a future in art or anything else. They signed the legal marriage parental agreement to keep her from running away.

This wasn’t the only opportunity Dorothy threw away for her lover, a man who had stalked her outside her school. I suppose his talk made her feel special and pretty as she hobbled over to him on his visits to the playground. A victim of polio as an infant, she had one leg smaller than the other, and wore ugly brown leather braces and platform shoes.

Soon Dorothy and Dick began going for rides on his motorcycle after classes. When my parents found out, they called her main teacher for help. He wouldn’t get involved and informed them the school could not be responsible. That’s how such things got handled in the 1940s. Later we heard that teacher fondled female students himself.
Dorothy quit high school to marry but not before being offered a partial college scholarship because of her excellence in geometry and math. At least my parents said so.

My years at Baltimore with Dorothy carry some negative memories. Her artistic talent made my parents and other relatives proud. But it hid an ominous fear for me. Teasing seemed the only way she related to me. One time when my parents went shopping with Vera, they had Dorothy come by to baby-sit. We played a card game, Old Maids, in the dining room until Dorothy got bored. She limped to the hall closet where she kept some art supplies and pulled out a large blackboard and a metal container of colored chalk. Fear came over me; I had been through this before, but Vera had been there to protect me. Not so today.

“Let’s see what we can bring to life today,” she said with a wicked smile as she set up the board. In no time, she created the scariest monster.

“See, he has blood dripping from his long fingernails,” she said. And he did. I can still see them today. I ran screaming from the room. Dorothy followed me laughing and holding the board in front of her. Then we heard our parents open the front door. I saw Dorothy sweep her arm across the board transferring the monster to the sleeve of her shirt. She destroyed the evidence, but I still felt the monster existed there on her.

One Sunday when Dorothy and her husband came to visit, she showed us bruises and scratches on her neck. She told a story of being attacked coming home one day in the alley behind the apartment house.

“I don’t know why he went after me.” She said. “I struggled and screamed until he let me go.” “He grabbed for my purse, but when I screamed, he let me go of the purse. Dick came running out, but he was gone.”

In looking back I don’t believe the attack happened. In later years Vera shared other clues indicating abuse.
But the incident happened before our move to The Turkey House.

In the spring when I was 3, Daddy put the block house up for sale. We sold it to a middle-aged lady with a teen-aged son. I remember her as grandmotherly, a bit overweight with graying hair. Today she would be known as a single mother. Children don’t forget adults who pay attention to them, and this lady thought me “cute” and gave me a tiny jade dog with a chain on it. I think I still have it somewhere.

My parents spent weeks looking at different houses and lots in Howard County, a farming community then. I recall the three-story stone house (now part of a country club and golf course) but not enough land. My father settled on a 65-acre parcel near a river; but no house except for a small guest house, a horse stable, some sheds, and a long gray building last serving as a turkey house with one room for a caretaker.

The main house of the once-lovely estate had burned down. Its blackened chimneys stood out above bricks and wood now sunken into the ground and covered by honeysuckle and other vines. Surrounding the ruins we marveled at an overgrown landscaped garden. Roses, peonies, orange blossom bushes, lilacs, wisteria still kept their respective places in spite of weeds. An elongated pond, home to frogs and tadpoles and masses of eggs in translucent wraps sitting atop green algae, took up one side of the yard.

We moved into the three-room guest house before summer and my birthday on June 1. It took me awhile to get used to the outhouse in the back; I refused to use it unless accompanied by Vera or my mother.

Meanwhile my father installed pipes running from an ice-cold spring we used for refrigeration. Located in a forest uphill, he dug a deep gully from the spring all the way down to the Turkey House (as it became known), crossing a creek on the way. No electricity lit up our rooms—kerosene lamps helped us see at night. My father purchased two large round metal tubs from the nearest store—a large quansit hut two miles away, and we filled them with water drawn from the creek. In them we put our clothes with laundry soap and rubbed each item across wash boards until they looked and smelled clean. We rinsed them in the second tub of cold water and hung them to dry on makeshift lines. With the addition of some boiling water to the creek water, we used the same tubs for bathing. This pioneer life lasted through the summer until the completion of the Turkey House

The metal roof of the Turkey House reflected the sun, my father said, serving as a marker for the just-opened airport 20 minutes away. My two sisters, mother, father and cousins helped clean out the Turkey House. They took apart roosting screens, egg and nesting hutches, removed most of the old ceiling to floor windows (made so the turkeys could see out of them). I watched and played as the team scooped out inches of gray-looking excrement from the floors. After days of cleaning and washing every inch of the Turkey House, my father began the task of insulating the walls. He used old newspapers when he ran out of insulating material. Next he divided the long house into several rooms. The caretaker’s room became the kitchen, and he moved our green and ivory wood cooking stove into it.
The rough wallboard of those days (or maybe that’s all we could afford) made thin partitions between rooms. My parents put my room next to the living room with its large kerosene stove to get more warmth. A hallway went down one side of the house passing three bedrooms and ended at a utility room where the washing machine and bathroom landed. My father installed a large water heater for tub and shower.

There would be no electric for several years since it had not come to this rural area. Interestingly, we had a telephone from the beginning. The Turkey House has kept the last four digits of that original number ever since. Not daunted by the lack of electric lights, my father wired up his own using a small windmill and batteries for energy. But kerosene lamps stayed as our primary reading and study lighting even after I started school. And soon after electric did come to our house, so did television.

The Turkey House could not hold all our Baltimore furniture. My second sister, Vera, took piano lessons and my parents promised me I could continue. But when we sold the house and moved to the country. my father put our precious piano in the stable where it joined two other pianos from the previous owner. He never came back for them and all three folded into themselves and ended their musical destiny as skeletons of keys, wood, and pedals to be hauled away with demolition of the stable. I am sad for all of them as two appeared to be antiques.

Until its demise, the stable with its loft of thick dusty wooden planks, served as a play area in my early years. There my cousins and I found yellowing books of yesteryear, old toys, and even a skeleton. The skeleton became a treasure for me to show off and have them wonder how it got there. (The former property owner taught as a professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.)

Other buildings included two chicken coops, a wood shed, and garage. My father purchased a 1939 Ford tractor when we had a cabin in Virginia. We sold that property about ten years later since we didn’t get there much after leaving Baltimore. My father hired a truck to transport the tractor to Maryland where we needed it for plowing soil in the spring for gardens and snow in the winter. By the following year mother had a large vegetable garden planted in what eventually became the front yard. We had chickens in one of the coops, and fields of corn and soya beans in other parts of the property.

In time we sold parcels to various relatives at low prices. First my Aunt Ella came with her husband and two of her five children (the others were adults). Years later Uncle Carlton and wife lived in the guest house until they bought a lot and put in a basement but moved to Florida before its completion. Aunt Daisy and husband purchased and finished it.

My Uncle Jesse left his adulterous wife and adult children and came to live with us. He built a tiny house equivalent of one room and lived there for some ten years until he built a second larger house for himself and pooch, Brownie.

A craftsman, he worked for neighbors. Most was outside, and his skin got so burned it peeled off in blisters. He smoked and liked to drink, walking five miles to the nearest bar or persuading someone to take him. But he and Brownie lived happily in the second house until around 80 a stroke took him to a VA facility for the rest of his life. Brownie, as grizzled and old as his master, soon passed on. I remember my Uncle Jesse with fondness as he told stories about his war years and things he heard on his radio.

When I was 8, sister Dorothy, her husband, and 3-year-old son came to live in the guest house. Not long after, she overdosed. My family didn't explain her disappearance for two weeks. I didn't know why she died until a cousin told me when I was 30! Several troublesome years of grief followed. Her husband married a 16-year-old and left Dorothy's grave unmarked. Years later it could not be found.

I stayed with Aunt Daisy at her city home for one summer. She cared about me.