Thula

Thula, Joe Rantz’s stepmother, is introduced through the strain of sustaining a family in poverty after she, Harry Rantz, and their children left Joe behind in Sequim. In the fall of 1934, Joe finds the family in Seattle and tries to renew contact, only to have Thula tell him to make his own life and stay out of theirs. Her story holds two difficult facts together: she works to keep a household going under severe material pressure, and she refuses the stepson who comes to its door.

Family Circumstances

Thula and her family had been living in Seattle since the night in 1929 when they drove away and left Joe behind in Sequim. Their first home was a dilapidated two-room waterfront shed near Seattle Hooverville. One room had to serve as both kitchen and bathroom; the other, warmed by a woodstove, was living and sleeping space for all six family members. Trucks passed only inches from the front door, while rats moved through the rooms. Harry could not find the work that had brought them to the city and went on public relief.

The family moved from the shed to an old house on Phinney Ridge, but the change offered little security. Built in 1885 and unrepaired since, it had one electrical outlet and a single woodstove, for which they often could not afford firewood. Exposed to cold winds, the house made warmth and food daily problems. Thula went to soup kitchens and the neighborhood commissary organized by the Unemployed Citizens League, which distributed food and firewood to people in need. The supplies were meager: meals she managed to prepare for the children were often thin stews of parsnips, rutabagas, potatoes, and chipped beef.

When there was no wood for the stove, Thula turned an electric iron upside down, plugged it into the house’s one outlet, and cooked the stew on it. The detail makes her hardship concrete without making her merely a passive figure in it: she improvised with the limited resources at hand to feed the household. Yet the family’s need extended beyond what her resourcefulness could solve. Her mother, who lived nearby, permitted the children to come for a bowl of Cream of Wheat each Sunday morning, but offered no further support. Thula understood the ritual as a rebuke. She told Harry to leave and not return until he had found a job.

Harry went to Los Angeles and came back six months later with a motorcycle but no job. Thula issued another ultimatum. He eventually found work as head mechanic at the Golden Rule Dairy and Bakery in Fremont. The shop’s low wages were still wages, and Harry moved the family to a small but respectable house at Thirty-Ninth and Bagley. It was there that Joe located them in the fall of 1934, at an address his brother Fred had finally given him.

The Visit at Bagley

Joe came to the house with Joyce Simdars. They parked, climbed the concrete steps to the porch holding hands, and heard a violin playing inside. After Joe knocked on the yellow Dutch door, the music stopped. Someone moved behind the lace curtain in its upper half; after a pause, Thula opened the door only halfway. The threshold became the boundary of the encounter: she acknowledged the visitors but did not invite them in.

Thula did not appear surprised. Joe had the sense that she had expected his arrival for a long time, though the scene does not establish what she had anticipated or why she had waited. She nodded pleasantly enough to Joyce. In the silence that followed, Joe saw her as careworn and exhausted, older than her thirty-six years, with a pale, drawn face, sunken eyes, and red, chafed fingers. Those observations register the cost of the years of poverty described in the family’s history, but Thula herself gives no explanation of her feelings.

Joe finally said, “Hello, Thula. We just came by to see how you are doing.” She looked at him silently before answering, “We’re fine, Joe. We’re doing fine now. How is school going?” Joe told her that school was going well and that he was on the crew. Thula had heard about his rowing and said his father was proud of him. She also asked after Joyce’s parents and expressed regret when Joyce told her that her father was quite ill. Her questions and acknowledgment show that she could speak civilly with Joe and Joyce, even as the visit remained constrained by her refusal to welcome them inside.

Refusal and Family Conflict

When Joe asked to come in and see Harry and the children, Thula said Harry was at work and the children were visiting friends. Joe then asked whether he and Joyce might return another time. Thula abruptly raised her eyes and answered, “No,” followed by, “Make your own life, Joe. Stay out of ours.” She closed the door gently and slid the deadbolt into place. The quiet click completes the rejection: Joe has found the household he spent years not knowing how to reach, but discovery does not restore his place in it.

As Joe and Joyce drove away, Joyce’s anger gave voice to questions Joe did not ask aloud. Over time she had learned about his mother’s death, the lonely train journey to Pennsylvania, and what had happened before the family left him in Sequim. She could not understand Thula’s coldness toward a motherless child, Harry’s apparent passivity, or Joe’s continued attempts to ingratiate himself with his parents. Near the judge’s home, she demanded to know why Joe did not show anger, insist on seeing his half siblings, or confront his parents about the harm they had done. She was nearly sobbing by the end.

Joe did not turn to face her. Joyce saw that his eyes were full of hurt, but his jaw remained set and he stared ahead over the steering wheel. The scene does not resolve the conflict between Joyce’s demand for an explicit reckoning and Joe’s silence. It instead leaves the family injury visible in the contrast between her anguished questions and his controlled posture. Thula’s refusal is decisive in the immediate plot, while the account preserves the hardship surrounding her and stops short of explaining her private motives. She remains both the resourceful keeper of a precarious household and the person who bars Joe from returning to it.