Deliver Us From Evie

PIG WEEK BEGINS THE first Monday after Labor Day at County High.

The freshmen and the transfers from Duffton School are “the pigs.”

The seniors are out to get you. They call “SOU-weeeee! Pig, pig, pig!” at you, and they put you in a trash can, tie the lid with rope, and kick you around in it. You learn how to curl into a ball and cover your head with your arms. That happened to me first thing in the morning. I was a transfer junior from Duffton.

Then, in the afternoon, a few got me by my locker. They read my name on the door, PARR BURRMAN, and one of them said, “Hey, we know your brother. What’s his name again?”

“Doug Burrman,” I said.

They said, “Not that brother! Your other brother.”

“I only have one brother,” I said.

They said, “What about Evie?”

Then they began to laugh. They began to say things like “You remember him, don’t you? Doesn’t he live with you? Sure he does! The Burrman brothers: Doug, Parr, and Evie!”

I didn’t mention it when I got home.

“How’d things go, Parr?” my mother said.

“Okay. I’m glad Doug warned me about how to curl up in that trash can.”

“Did they make you roll in the mud?”

“They didn’t have any mud today-but they said we’d better not wear our good clothes tomorrow.”

“Ah, well, I guess they’ll have the pigpen ready tomorrow.” My mother had a tuna fish sandwich ready for me before I changed and went out to do my chores. She said, “They never gave a warning to Doug or Evie. You should have seen their clothes!”

Mother was the reason I was named Parr.

She’d been Cynthia Parr when she met Dad at the University of Missouri. He’d been in the Agricultural College there.

Now my brother Doug was following in his footsteps. Of the three of us-me, almost sixteen; Evie, eighteen; and Doug, twenty -I was the only one who didn’t want to be a farmer.

I could hear the combine working its way through the field out behind the house. I knew Evie was driving the thing. It’d grab the entire plant of corn, strip off its ears, take the kernels, pump them into a storage tank, and dump the rest of the plant back into the field behind it.

Sometimes I’d look at my mother and wonder how she’d ever brought someone like Evie into the world.

The only thing they had in common was a love of reading. Evie wrote some, too, like Mom used to when she was her age. But they weren’t alike in any other way. They didn’t even look alike. Evie had Dad’s height-she was almost six foot-and she had Dad’s brown hair instead of being blond like Mom.

You’d say Evie was handsome. You’d say Mom was pretty. Then there was the difference in the way both of them dressed.

My mother wasn’t like most farm women, who wear jeans and sweatshirts. She had a few pairs of slacks, but mostly she wore skirts or dresses, and the only time I ever saw her in men’s clothes was sometimes when we were harvesting. She’d bring some sandwiches out to us and she might have on an old shirt of Doug’s or my father’s gloves, maybe my boots, but she was as uncomfortable in men’s things as Evie seemed to be in female stuff.

I knew Mom would hate it if I told her the kids had called Evie my brother.

She was trying hard to change Evie that fall, trying everything, but it was like trying to change the direction of the wind.