New House

“Well, what do you think?” my dad asked as we pulled up to a big, white Spanish-style two-story house. He beamed with pride at the new home he’d found for us.

I ignored him and appealed directly to the only sane person in the family. “Mom, we can’t live here! This place is right in the middle of the worst part of Wentzville!”

“What’s wrong with it? It’s the biggest house in town,” Mom said.

“What’s wrong with it? Look! The main street goes right by the front yard! There’s railroad tracks right behind it. There’s a veterinary clinic next door and if the water tower falls, it’ll squash us!”

“Oh, yeah! I talked to the owner of the slaughterhouse across the street,” Dad interrupted, “and he said that they need part-time help over there. He said to send you over.”

“Slaughterhouse? There’s a slaughterhouse? I don’t want to live by a slaughterhouse, and I sure as hell don’t want to work there!”

“Language!” Dad said in his first-warning voice.

The only other houses on this side of the tracks belonged to Wentzville’s poorest citizens. We’d just been in Missouri for a few months and I was still trying to make friends and fit in at high school. So far, my friends all came from the class-conscious families at the ritzy development of Lake St. Louis. This house was a social disaster in the making.

My parents always rented off-beat places. The condo we were leaving was more of a furnished weekend lake retreat than a serious place to live. The owners had decorated it with beach furniture and all the African ceremonial masks they had picked up on safari. The masks scared the dog and drew doubtful looks from my friends.

“Why can’t we just stay in the condo?” I whined. “We were doing just fine there.”

“We’ve been over this. We told you that place was temporary. All the town employees have to live within city limits,” Mom answered, referring to dad’s job as city manager. “Besides, I seem to remember someone complaining about hating the last place because of all the masks."

“This might be the oldest building in town,” my dad said, but that idea didn’t sweeten the deal for me. “The railroad superintendent lived there and the town just grew up around it.”

“The shanty town, you mean.” I sulked all the way through the tour, wondering how I was going to deal with being the only white kid in a black neighborhood.

Mom eagerly showed me to my huge bedroom and the beautiful old armoire that came with it. I was unmoved. I remarked that the house must have been built before closets were invented.

My parents hoped that I would grow to love the place as much as they did, but things only grew worse in my eyes. Early Saturday mornings, truckloads of livestock lined up at the slaughterhouse, and the squealing woke me up. As soon as they killed the first pig, the rest of them screamed in terror, smelling death and sensing that their own end was near.

Several times per day, the railroad employees switched railcars right behind the house. The smell of diesel exhaust drifted over and when the containers crashed into each other, the sound was deafening. On kill days at the slaughterhouse, the smell of barnyard and blood kept us inside.

In those quiet moments when no trains chugged by and no animals were being slaughtered, we sat on the back balcony and looked at the middle class neighborhood across the tracks. I saw house after house of normal lives, distinguished only by paint color and brand of car in the driveway. It looked like heaven.

“You don’t want to live there,” my dad assured me, “that area is boring.”