Running on Red Dog Road by Drema Hall Berkheimer

Author:Drema Hall Berkheimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

Hursey, home for the summer, was threatening to tear a page out of the Bobbsey Twins book I was reading because he claimed I’d lost a piece of his jigsaw puzzle, while I tried to convince him that I hadn’t done any such thing. The argument had progressed to the did, did not, did too stage. Grandma tired of our bickering and sent us outside so she could have some peace and quiet.

Right away Hursey let me know he wasn’t going to play any silly girl games, so that left my favorite doll Peggy out, but he let me tag along. He took a suit of Grandpa’s underwear off the clothesline and stuffed it with straw. The head was a flour sack with eyes and a mustache drawn on with a piece of coal. Hursey said the War would be over soon because Hitler had been killed.

When I asked who Hitler was, he said if I wasn’t a dumb girl I’d know about Hitler. But I didn’t care about Hitler anymore. I didn’t care about being called a dumb girl.

The War would be over.

My mother would be coming home.

Hursey named the straw man Hitler and hung him from a noose looped over an apple tree branch. We marched around the tree, spitting out hateful words and throwing rotten apples at Hitler until we worked our little mob all the way up to an assassination. Hursey struck a stolen kitchen match and held the fire to Hitler’s feet. The straw man flamed, slowly at first, then the whole body crackled and blazed. The wind picked up a burning clump of straw and dropped it on a pup tent we had set up to play army. It went up with an impressive whoosh.

Grandpa, hearing me squall, came running from the garden and grabbed the water hose to douse the flames before the roof of the fruit house caught fire. That’s where we stored jars of canned goods and cured hams and barrels of apples and potatoes and cabbages, enough to see us through the winter.

Grandma told me if she ever caught me near a match I’d soon wish she hadn’t.

I’d never had a spanking.

But that put the possibility in my mind.

Hursey was the one that made the straw Hitler. He had stolen the match and set the fire, but I never heard Grandma say a thing to him, although to be fair I suppose she could have. He got away with murder because he was deaf, or so I told myself. But deep down I believed it was because Grandma favored boys. She favored Uncle Vertis too. Everybody knew that, but Grandma claimed there was no truth to it whatsoever—she said she simply had higher expectations for the girls.

And we accepted it—higher expectations and all.

The War was soon over and Mother came home, blending back into our lives without fanfare. Of course, Grandma had cleaned the house top to bottom because she said she didn’t want Mother to think we’d been living in a pigsty.

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