No Ordinary Joes Read Online Free Page A

Shasta red firs. During the winters, snow piled up as high as the windows. Bob occupied his days during the summer picking wild berries, fishing for native trout, and hiking the rim of the lake. When his dad would allow it, he’d hang out in the shed, watching the men work on the equipment.
    It was a magical setting, but Bob felt isolated from kids his age. His brother, Darrell, was four years older and rarely had the time of day for him except to use him as a punching bag. At night Bob often stayed alone in the cabin, with no books or radio, while his dad played poker with the crew. Discipline came from a leather belt. He liked coming down out of the mountains to town. On this day, his grandmother had promised toserve him apple pie and homemade ice cream later, and to read to him. He liked the attention she lavished on him.
    His grandfather reappeared on the front porch and glared at him. Bob watched him walk to the shed at the side of the house and disappear inside, then reemerge carrying a big sledgehammer. He motioned for Bob to get out of the wagon. Then, with one mighty swing, he brought the head of the big hammer smashing down, shattering the wagon into a hundred pieces.
    Bob stared up at him, his tear-filled eyes pleading for an explanation.
    “There’ll be no noise on the Sabbath” was all that his grandfather said.
    Ten-year-old Bob Palmer sat in a chair at the foot of his mother’s four-poster mahogany bed in their small, clapboard home in Medford, a town of 5,000 in southern Oregon, twenty-nine miles from the California border. Her skin was gray, her eyes barely open. He touched her hand and she felt cold. “Please don’t die, Mama,” he whispered. She struggled to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. His father got up and closed the shades.
    It was hard for Bob to see his mom like this. She’d always been the backbone of the family, the steadying, nurturing force during these hard times. His father hadn’t said much about what was wrong, only that she’d had her appendix taken out and something had gone wrong, possibly an infection from a dirty instrument the doctor used.
    To Bob, it seemed that his father was madder at the doctor for chopping off his mom’s hair than for any medical mistake. His mother had not cut her hair for years in adherence to church rules, and it fell below her waist. But as she lay on her bed, twisting and turning in pain, she had become entangled in her hair, so the doctor cut it, incurring the wrath of Bob’s father.
    Keeping vigil at his mom’s bedside, Bob and his brother were not allowed to leave her side. Her breathing was labored. Finally, she summoned Bob’s father. He leaned in close to her, and in a voice barely above a whisper, yet loud enough for Bob to hear, she spoke: “Don’t beat the kids.”
    Those were her last words.
    For four unsettling days, Bob and his brother were made to sit next to her body, surrounded by grieving family—first while she lay on her deathbed, then when she was transferred to a cheap, gray casket. They watched their father take the hair the doctor had cut and clip it back on.
    In the weeks following the funeral, Bob saw her cold, ashen face reflected in store windows, mirrors, and lakes. He couldn’t escape it.
    Bob stood in the corner, his punishment for not cleaning the pinecones off the porch as ordered. Cora, his new stepmother, glared at him, and he braced himself for the next verbal barrage. She and Bob’s father had met when she was the cook for the Crater Lake crew, and they’d married less than a year after the funeral. She was always belittling Bob, always making him feel unwanted. His father did little to ease his discomfort.
    “You’re stupid!” Cora yelled. “Stupid and lazy!”
    Bob tried to block out the words. He didn’t think he was dumb, but maybe she was right. He struggled in school, disengaged, out of step, behind in his reading. Kids teased him.
    He looked at Cora, her hair in a bun so tight that it