And the Waters Turned to Blood by Rodney Barker

Author:Rodney Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

PART FOUR

“Hey, there’s something out there. There has to be.”

14

Part of what had initially drawn JoAnn Burkholder to a career in science was that she felt she did not understand or get along very well with people. Growing up, she’d had little in common with the neighbor kids, and her older sister treated her as a tagalong to be pushed out of playhouses and locked out of cars. As a result, at an age when most children were striving to develop an identity by asserting themselves or establishing their difference, JoAnn was the child who tried to disappear. Her closet was her reading room, the floor of her bedroom a runway she would slide across to a place under her bed that was her haven. Then, in the seventh grade, when the boy who could have won the Mr. Popularity contest developed a crush on her, she had been ostracized by jealous female classmates who spread nasty rumors about her morals, and that was the first time she remembers thinking, Expect the worst about people, and you won’t be disappointed.

This was why, as a child, she had gravitated toward the animal world. The books that were important to her had titles like Old Mister Buzzard, Peter Rabbit, and Bowser the Hound. She wanted a dog of her own but her mother wouldn’t allow it, so she “adopted” a Pekingese named FeFe, which belonged to an elderly woman who lived down the street. No bigger than a cat, missing most of her teeth, and with a mashed-in face that looked as if it had been battered, not genetically determined, FeFe was a testament to the adage that what counted was the size of the fight in the dog, not vice versa. It was a quality of character JoAnn could relate to.

Even JoAnn’s relationship with her mother was sometimes uneasy. Half-English and half-Sicilian, with a classical, beautiful face and long, curly black hair, Ethyl Galboa was one generation removed from immigrants who, on her father’s side of the family, had come to this country as stowaways. She had survived a hardscrabble Depression upbringing, and at the age of fourteen worked full-time to make it possible to finish her high school education. She was highly intelligent and was interested in health and medicine, but in her generation, science was a “man’s field.” Deeply religious, she followed the traditional course and married, gave up her career, and became a mother and homemaker. She wanted JoAnn to have opportunities that she had had to pass, especially to develop a career as an executive secretary. For years she tried very hard to push her daughter in that direction, fearing that science would be too hard a life.

Her father was a more dominant influence. Half-Danish and a quarter Irish, with a long face and prominent nose that were attributed to his Cherokee grandmother, Marcus Burkholder also emerged from a Depression family. To make ends meet, his mother had to work fulltime as a laundress, and had to leave him in a Catholic orphanage while at her job.

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