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Chapter 1:  Babies Making Babies

Babies making babies.  Pfft…I ain’t never heard any good story come about when two teenagers set out, ready to conquer the world, only come to find out that they went and got themselves knocked-up after just one night’s fit of passion, leaving all their fancy ideas of what life was gonna be like, splayed like toilet paper on their heels behind them.  Mama said that’s precisely what happened to her and Daddy, that they was nothing more than just babies making babies when they gave birth to that stubborn, curly-headed, terror-of-a-sister-of mine, Bartlett.  

The way Mama tells it, she met daddy out at the Southern Speedway; the race car track down off Highway 77 in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Mama says that whole night long, Daddy kept trying to kiss her, telling her she sure was the prettiest thing he ever did saw, but Mama told him she was a lady and she was raised better than that.  Daddy must have known she wasn’t gonna let any man touch her before she got married, so he up and asked her, straight-away, to marry him on impulse.  They didn’t even know each other more than a few hours when my flattered, exasperated mother laughed and looked up at him with her shiny, steel blue eyes and finally gave in to him, “Yes, I’ll marry you, Earl, but not before you go out to my house and ask my Mama and Daddy for permission.” 

Mama turned to me, more staring through me than anything, as she slowly recanted that evening so long ago.  I watched as something deep within her stirred and fluttered and reared its head, as she began to tell me about that night, talking how they sat on the cold bleachers and watched as those loud, colorful race cars zoomed by them at breakneck speeds while Daddy tried to fondle and flirt with and hear her above the crowd and the noise.  I could almost smell the exhaust and the asphalt and rubber, she told the story so well. She said that night she believed she could love my daddy forever.  “Barley, your father was the handsomest man in all of Carter County.  It’s true, don’t laugh,” she said, eyeing me as I giggled nervously.  ”Everyone thought he looked just like Elvis Presley back then, all dark-haired, tall and tan and thin and so confident, your Daddy was. Why, all them girls out at that race track just wished they was me that night,” Mama said, as her smile slowly began to fade.  She was suddenly rummaging around in her thoughts, picking them up, one-by-one and ruminating about herself, a different person in a different body at a different time, and for a moment, I thought I had lost her completely to her memories.  “Oh Mama, hurry up already.  Tell me more,” I finally said, bringing her back to the here and now. 

That next Monday morning, Grandpa had his first serious talk with Daddy, the groom-to-be, and gave him what mama called, The Three Nevers Talk.  “Never hit her, ever,” my Grandpa said slowly, looking him straight in the eye, taking a long pause for effect, while spitting his tobacco in the Folgers Coffee can he used as a spittoon sitting next to him.  I ain’t never hit her and nor should you.  Starting up again, grimacing and contemplating his next words, he slowly sucked the tobacco from his teeth he said, “Never let her go hungry, and never stray from her and find yourself another woman, because she’s the best your ever gonna find.  Ya hear me?  If you can promise me these three things, Anita and me, well…we will give y’all our blessings, and you can marry our Franny,” Grandpa said in a foreboding voice. 

Later that morning, my Mama, just fifteen at the time, powdered her skin and got all dressed-up in her Sunday finery, kissed her Mama on the nose, and left the only home she ever knew, all giddy and excited, ambling down a dirt road, heading towards her destiny with a man she barely knew in a dilapidated Chevy truck.  Hopeful and reckless with her heart’s out-and-out abandon, she stood solemnly, thinking about what it would be like to be married to the stranger next to her, in front of the Justice of the Peace in the Carter County Courthouse.  She married Daddy while my mother’s brother, Uncle John and his wife, June, looked on.  Mama never liked old June much, and I could see just mentioning her name gave her the worst case of the willies and that in turn caused the goose pimples to surface on my arm.  I brushed them away and finished listening to Mama tell me more about the day she married my daddy.

Nine months after Mama said I do, she gave birth to Bartlett (like the pear), two years and a month before I was born.  Mama always had a thing for food, and named me Barley (like the grain.)  Seven years later, my baby brother, Graham (like the cracker) came.  Us three never knew what hit us, being born a Sullivan.  My third grade teacher, Miss Espich, says never knowing what hits you is an idiom relating to very bad consequences in which the people involved were totally unsuspecting. That’s us, the Sullivan Three.