Crunching Gravel Read Online Free

cleaning powders, soap, and a straggly Christmas cactus.
    You were struck immediately by the unfinished nature of the living room. My father had never covered the studs, and had instead tacked up old newspapers and flattened boxes for insulation. Culled pine boards, considered too imperfect by the lumber company to sell, protected us from some of the cold. Nail ends securing tar-paper protruded from the roof
    Despite its limitations, the room was cozy. A round oak table with much-chipped and ill-matched chairs sat near the kitchen. White china plates, cups and saucers, glasses, and much-abused flatware, plus an array of condiments. Behind the heater were hooks for drying clothes. A pair of small windows facing the yard were curtained with flannel. Two varnished rocking chairs. A shelf with a radio. We were waiting for Kate Smith to sing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” A sky radiant with northern lights produced the best reception. On other nights, we could hear only by clustering near the speaker. Dad was taking a correspondence course from the De Forest electronic school. Mom studied with him, teaching him to pronounce and understand the words he didn’t know. He turned pages by first wetting his finger with his tongue. His hands were large. Car grease was embedded in the skin around his cuticles. He was excited when his papers earned A’s.
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Root-Cellar Rat
    To reach the cellar you raised a door in the center of the living room. A crudely fashioned ladder led down into a black stench of decaying potatoes, onions, and carrots blended with damp seepage from earthen walls. It was advisable to cast a light before you descended. Shelves filled with mason jars were crammed with string beans, peas, carrots, beets, rhubarb, strawberries, wild blueberries, juneberries, raspberries, pickles, and watermelon preserves. There were also jars of chicken, venison, and pork. Potatoes buried in sand had started to sprout, sending out long, anemic, serpentine roots. Onions hung in bags from nails. There was also a crock of sauerkraut and the last of Dad’s home brew. My parents did well at gauging the amount of food we’d need. The cellar hole, about seven feet deep, sat well below the frost line.
    We heard a rat thumping in the cellar. Finally, our flashlight spied him. Dad knocked a wooden box apart, trimming the boards, narrowing the trap. He tied the trap door with a buckskin string and inserted a chunk of Welfare cheese. When the creature ate, the string would snap the door shut.
    On the third morning Dad had just left for work driving the Vilas County Relief truck when Mom and I heard a terrific clatter. We’d caught him! I climbed into the pit and retrieved the box with its enraged prisoner. He was the largest rat I’d ever seen.
    Mom removed the stove lid. I positioned the trap over the fire, with the door toward the flames. The rat’s frantic movements shook the box. With a heated poker I beat his toes, forcing him into the flames. Screams, the smell of singed fur.
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Rooms
    From the living room, one ascended two steps to my parents’ bedroom. The double bed had a brown metal frame, a cotton mattress, sheets of bleached flour sacks, and two patchwork comforters. Above the bed were a newspaper photo of Jesus cradling a lamb, a photo of my grandmother, and my parents’ wedding picture in an oval metal frame with a cluster of metal flowers at the base. In this portrait, my mother wore her hair in bangs, as was the fashion in 1923, and a string of fake pearls. My father wore a dark suit with a white shirt and tie; his hair was cropped at the sides. He was twenty, my mother sixteen.
    On the floor was a hooked rug my mother had made. My parents’ clothes hung from a birch pole angled across a corner. Like the living room, this room was unfinished. There was an old stool covered with geraniums, now dormant, in metal cans. Near the door was my four-year-old sister Nell’s