was complete at seven kids. Susie got pregnant again. She had to spend the last three months of her term in the hospital. She bore a healthy daughter, Kay, making four boys and four girls. The doctor told her not to get pregnant again, that it might endanger her life; she didn’t.
Despite the differences in their ages, the eight Ward kids grew up in only two bedrooms, the four boys in one, the four girls across the hall. Jesse was the patriarch of the family, but his wages at the glass plant were stretched thin by a household of ten; once food was put on the table there was little money for anything else. The kids wore hand-me-downs to school; their classmates knew they were poor. Sometimes they were teased about this, or about their name, which the other kids transformed into Wart, or Warthog. A large, poor family who lived without plumbing on the edge of town: that was all the town knew about the Wards; their very numbers made them visible. But the kids themselves were as varied as the pecans on the tree out front. Some took the slights of the other children personally, and carried the hurt inside them long after. Joice was one of these; Tommy was another. Others with more inner strength, such as Tricia and Joel, absorbed the hurt, somehow understood the natural cruelties of childhood, and let it go.
Jimmy, the oldest boy, started smoking marijuana in his teens. Tricia, three years younger, heard about this from a friend. She was at an age, fourteen, when tattling on your big brother seemed a lovely thing to do. She told their dad about it. Instead of scolding Jimmy, their father called Tricia a liar; he told her he did not want to hear anything like that again. Tricia would think years later that if her father had put a stop to Jimmy’s drug use right then, all that followed might not have happened. But he didn’t; perhaps he sensed that he couldn’t. Jimmy got in with a bad crowd. He was never in serious trouble with the law, but he got a reputation in town as a lowlife, a drinker, a troublemaker; a reputation that would settle indiscriminately over all of the family: “those Wards.”
Jimmy in time went off to Vietnam to serve his country, came back with a nervous condition, was in and out of hospitals as he went through marriage, fatherhood, divorce. While on tranquilizers prescribed by doctors at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City, he would move through Ada quietly, a tall, pale specter, seeming invisible, living on disability payments.
Tricia, the oldest girl, was, perforce, her mother’s helper. After school she would take care of the little ones, Tommy and Kay. On Sunday mornings she would go to church with her mother and Joice. During periods when the others lapsed in their devotion, Tricia would go by herself, or take Tommy along, getting a ride with the preacher and his wife. One day when she was in the ninth grade, a boy in her class started pestering her, and grabbed her shoe. She threw a stick at him. He dropped her shoe into a sewer. She punched him in the eye, blackening it. His name was Charles L. Wolf Jr. He went by Bud. They didn’t speak for a year after that. She would go to her locker and find gross things in it, placed there by Bud. But when he asked her out on a date, she accepted. Attention turned to affection. They were married before graduation, while still in their teens, on St. Patrick’s Day.
They had no goals higher or lower than to raise a family and live their lives in Ada, with the blessing of Jesus their Lord. So they both desired it; so it would be.
Tricia was tall and thin and big-boned with blond hair worn long and straight in the high school fashion of the time, big-boned in a way that would soon accommodate a certain earthy fleshiness, which, if Bud ever complained about it, he did so only in jest; there was, as they might say at the feed mill later on, more to grab ahold of. She had an easygoing wholesomeness that brooked no ill will toward any
Despite the differences in their ages, the eight Ward kids grew up in only two bedrooms, the four boys in one, the four girls across the hall. Jesse was the patriarch of the family, but his wages at the glass plant were stretched thin by a household of ten; once food was put on the table there was little money for anything else. The kids wore hand-me-downs to school; their classmates knew they were poor. Sometimes they were teased about this, or about their name, which the other kids transformed into Wart, or Warthog. A large, poor family who lived without plumbing on the edge of town: that was all the town knew about the Wards; their very numbers made them visible. But the kids themselves were as varied as the pecans on the tree out front. Some took the slights of the other children personally, and carried the hurt inside them long after. Joice was one of these; Tommy was another. Others with more inner strength, such as Tricia and Joel, absorbed the hurt, somehow understood the natural cruelties of childhood, and let it go.
Jimmy, the oldest boy, started smoking marijuana in his teens. Tricia, three years younger, heard about this from a friend. She was at an age, fourteen, when tattling on your big brother seemed a lovely thing to do. She told their dad about it. Instead of scolding Jimmy, their father called Tricia a liar; he told her he did not want to hear anything like that again. Tricia would think years later that if her father had put a stop to Jimmy’s drug use right then, all that followed might not have happened. But he didn’t; perhaps he sensed that he couldn’t. Jimmy got in with a bad crowd. He was never in serious trouble with the law, but he got a reputation in town as a lowlife, a drinker, a troublemaker; a reputation that would settle indiscriminately over all of the family: “those Wards.”
Jimmy in time went off to Vietnam to serve his country, came back with a nervous condition, was in and out of hospitals as he went through marriage, fatherhood, divorce. While on tranquilizers prescribed by doctors at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City, he would move through Ada quietly, a tall, pale specter, seeming invisible, living on disability payments.
Tricia, the oldest girl, was, perforce, her mother’s helper. After school she would take care of the little ones, Tommy and Kay. On Sunday mornings she would go to church with her mother and Joice. During periods when the others lapsed in their devotion, Tricia would go by herself, or take Tommy along, getting a ride with the preacher and his wife. One day when she was in the ninth grade, a boy in her class started pestering her, and grabbed her shoe. She threw a stick at him. He dropped her shoe into a sewer. She punched him in the eye, blackening it. His name was Charles L. Wolf Jr. He went by Bud. They didn’t speak for a year after that. She would go to her locker and find gross things in it, placed there by Bud. But when he asked her out on a date, she accepted. Attention turned to affection. They were married before graduation, while still in their teens, on St. Patrick’s Day.
They had no goals higher or lower than to raise a family and live their lives in Ada, with the blessing of Jesus their Lord. So they both desired it; so it would be.
Tricia was tall and thin and big-boned with blond hair worn long and straight in the high school fashion of the time, big-boned in a way that would soon accommodate a certain earthy fleshiness, which, if Bud ever complained about it, he did so only in jest; there was, as they might say at the feed mill later on, more to grab ahold of. She had an easygoing wholesomeness that brooked no ill will toward any
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