Carry Me Home by Sandra Kring Page A

first, sugar is the only thing we can’t hog up, but before long, it’s a whole buncha things. We have to close the store down for pert’ near a whole week, and we gotta count every goddamn thing we got in there so we can tell the rationing board. We got to do that in our kitchen too, and so does everybody else. Them ladies sure get in a uproar about that. Mrs. Pritchard says it ain’t fair ’cause you lose eight points if you canned a jar of snap beans, but beans that week might only take three or four ration points, so look how many points you lose. Ma agrees that it ain’t fair, but says we gotta do what we can for the war effort.
    Ma don’t seem to give a shit about doing what we can for the war effort when them ration stamps come out, though. There is red stamps for meat and butter and cheese and margarine and canned fish, and there is red and green stamps for vegetables and fruits. Fruit costs so goddamn many stamps that two bites of canned peaches could practically hog up your whole book.
    Everything we sell in the store now is got a price on it for money and a price on it for ration points, and like Ma says, you can’t memorize the price of nothing ’cause them ration points change on a dime. If a lady buys a can of sugar peas for six ration points, she ain’t got no coupons to use but for them ten-point ones. She don’t get no change ’cause there ain’t no ration change, so that customer, she gets miffed enough to dig through the whole store looking for something worth three points. Them ladies make a goddamn mess of them shelves, and I’m the poor sucker who’s got to straighten ’em up.
    It’s a goddamn pain in the neck, this rationing, and Dad thinks so too, ’cause he’s got his own rationing mess down at the Skelly.
    First they ration the tires, and people gotta count how many tires they got on every one of their cars. Then they gotta count the tires they got laying around and turn in the ones they don’t need.
    Then comes the gas rationing, which Dad says is happening ’cause people ain’t doing so good on the tire rationing. When that starts, Dad goes into a whizzy-tizz. “Crissakes, just look at this mess,” he says as he’s staring down at the papers he’s got spread out on the counter. “Everyone’s gotta fill out these forms now, telling how many miles they drive back and forth to work. The ones who drive farthest will get a C sticker to put on their windshields, and those who don’t drive far will get an A stamp, and I’ve gotta keep track of it all. Crissakes, how are people with the A stamp going to even get by on this little bit of gas, and how in the hell am I supposed to keep my business afloat?
    “It’s a goddamn pain in the ass,” Dad tells Delbert Larson one day while we is standing in the Skelly parking lot. “Ben Olson was in here yesterday. His tire had a big ol’ slice in it. He had to go all the way down to the goddamn ration board, pick up a paper that me and the guy at Texaco across town had to sign saying his tire couldn’t be fixed, then he had to bring our signatures back to the board to get a ration coupon to buy a new one. Now he’s got to look all over kingdom come for somebody with a tire to sell him. I sure as hell didn’t have one the size he needed. Shit, I don’t hardly have any tires left, period. Soon folks won’t be fixing their cars either, if they can’t drive them anyway. Things keep up like this too long, and I’m gonna go belly-up.”
    “Did the Texaco have it?” Delbert asks.
    “Hell no. And now what’s he suppose to do? He can’t drive over to Ripley if he don’t have enough gas coupons to even get himself there and back.”
    Dad gets so crabby, he don’t even sit still and listen when Fibber McGee and Molly comes on. Before things went to shit at the station, Dad sat in his chair and laughed his ass off whenever Fibber came up with some harebrained fib to get hisself outta work or a hitch. And Dad used to about piss his