The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer Page A

fellow creature. She moved through the days of her life poorer than she might have liked, but with the inborn certainty that her contentment and salvation would come not through riches or book learning, to which she was not partial, but through her husband, and through the children her body had been created to create, and through a simple, unquestioning faith in the teachings of Jesus, as related by the Baptist church.
    Bud, for his part, in high school had worn his hair long in the protest fashion of the time—more for the fashion than for the political protest it then implied—and had drunk his quota of high school beer; but he turned short-haired and straight by his wedding day. At times he would simmer with some inner rage which after a marital squabble early on would lead him to storm from the house in silence, hunting rifle in hand, not saying where he was going—leaving Tricia to wait and wonder whether she had misjudged the man she’d hoped was hidden in the boy, to wonder whether he would return at all, whether he might, to quiet some demon beyond her ken, even turn the rifle on himself. But then he would return. With the passing years the rifle walking happened less and less, and then stopped altogether, except for genuine hunting, as the calm in the man overcame the frenzy in the boy. Bud worked for the city of Ada for two years as a bookkeeper, of all things—book learning might have been a path open to him had he chosen to follow it—and then signed on at the feed mill, a solid provider. With the help of Bud’s parents, they purchased a frame house on Ninth Street, a house with a hole in the porch that Bud eventually repaired. There, they started a family: Rhonda was born in 1974. She grew up blond as her mother and thin as a beanpole and pretty as a far-off New York model, with one troublesome freckle smack at the point of her otherwise perfect nose. Then came C. L. Wolf III, in 1977, called “Buddy,” a boy with a bowl haircut and a gap between his two front teeth, a boy who always had a frog in his pocket, real or imaginary. Then there was Laura Sue, in 1978, cute and loving and most likely of all to curl up trusting as a puppy in the nearest available lap. This Bud and Tricia had, along with the assorted foster children and Tricia’s brothers and sisters crashing in their house from time to time—taking advantage of them, others would say. But this was a view that never seemed to cross Tricia’s mind—her family was as her flesh—and Bud, having married both spirit and flesh, was willing to put up with all of them as his own. If on occasion their telephone was disconnected because the relatives ran up bills that Bud’s paycheck couldn’t cover, this and other material discomforts would usually be numbered among the minor testings of the Lord. No sweat—or not too much sweat, most of the time.
    Joel, the next oldest after Tricia, was the most ambitious of the Wards. He attended Oklahoma State Tech, a vocational college near Tulsa, for two years, became an auto mechanic, developed the most solid earning capacity in the family. He went to work in Tulsa, bought a house there. After Jesse Ward died in 1979, Susie, as the family called her, or Miz Ward, as everyone else did, came to rely on Tricia and Joel as the two sturdy rocks of her family.
    Melva, one of the twins, also tall and solid, married an Army man; she moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, where her husband was stationed. Melvin, the other twin, blue-eyed bearer of his own rowdy streak, saw Jimmy getting into trouble, felt that if he stayed in Ada the same would happen to him. He enlisted in the Navy, was stationed in Virginia. Joice, the stocky street runner among the girls, married a heavyset fellow named Robert Cavins. They had three kids, moved from job to job in the Ada area, Joice exhibiting a boisterous, inflammable personality that perhaps was a cover for insecurity. Kay, by six years the youngest, pretty and quieter than the others,