IV : Marriage

1940

Blanchardville

I think next fall I can go to Antioch to study, Dad says he will help me. With what I’m saving up from the switchboard now, and they say older students are welcome there because of the Depression and all. A lot of folks have to work at the same time so I wouldn’t stand out. Wouldn’t it be fun to read all day long? No one saying STOP READING! Grandma Healy even likes the idea because they let women go there so early on. Some of the professors there are women too. Their motto is so beautiful. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” I talked to Mary Pernunzio after church, she went there, now she’s going to teach at Kenyon. She speaks Italian, she said because her father read her Dante’s Inferno on Sundays, so now she learned to read the original. I think that would be so interesting. Or maybe learn Russian and read Brothers Karamazov since we read it in 10th grade but skipped the whole middle section on account of Sister said it was not an orthodox Christian view. I could be a teacher I think and teach history maybe, or theology but Mother says women shouldn’t mess with God, since that is a man’s idea to begin with. I meant to ask her what was the woman’s idea to begin with; I think she’ll say everything else. Maybe I could teach history, I like history, so many good stories. The story of Joan of Arc, or Saint Theresa of Avila, though the Franciscans frown on her sort of extremism. Our neighbor Dennis Deidelbach went to Antioch he said he wanted to work for the National Geographic as an ornithologist but he spent most of the year working for the county game warden making sure no one shot too many pheasant. We could afford it working part of the year. I could do stenography or shorthand and typing since I did have that business class Dad made us take just out of high school, my but that was boring. I was pretty good at Latin in High School maybe I could study more Latin or Greek I could read Homer, but not Chapman’s Homer, the original Greek one. Sing to me of the Muse! Or sing to me of the Man which was it? If it’s sing to me of the man I’m not sure that’s anything to sing about. Of course it would depend on who the man is.

Now Bess she’ll sing about any man. Here she comes. I can tell it’s her feet on the stairs. She’ll push open my door without knocking.

“Bess, what a surprise.”

“Can you believe it?”

“Well I’m sure I can, if you tell me what it is.”

“After I went and spent money on the dress just for that.”

“For what?”

“Oh Rose don’t you ever look up? Louis Armstrong’s coming to Detroit but Carl has to work at the elevator all night because it’s harvest time, so now he can’t take me.”

“That’s a tragedy Bess. Tell him if he really cared about you, well they would just let that wheat crop rot in the fields.”

“Oh go back to your book why don’t you.”

“I’m trying.”

1941

West Main Cross Street. Blanchardville

Was a sticky summer afternoon. My sister Jeanne and I were rocking on the front porch swing, trying to find a breeze, swinging always seemed to cool things off. Jeanne was just pregnant with her first child, she had recently married Jack Jones, so must have been visiting from Columbus where they lived.

She was talking about the ice business his family ran.

“Day like this wish I had my own ice factory.”

“We could move in for the summer.”

“Now Mike and his dad are starting a delivery business, delivering ice to stores all over, he’s gone a lot. But they’re saying they’re going to install ice machines in all the big stores. Don’t rock so hard makes me nauseous. He says ice machines are the next big thing.”

I was thinking it was sad to be married to the iceman of course because well it just seemed cold, and years later after Eugene O’Neil’s play, and after Jack got rich off the ice machine business we all kidded him, “the Iceman Cometh” we’d say. Course that’s a sad play all about drunks and nightmares, don’t go see it. That day on the porch, at the time you think you’re gonna have a hundred days like it but maybe you just have that one. Oh poor Jeanne! The way she went so suddenly, without any warning.

One day she was in her kitchen making a ham casserole, only her backward daughter Francie there, who never left home. Did you know the FBI caught her running naked on the White House lawn once? No one ever knew what was wrong with Frances well she was an RH baby had to have a blood transfusion when she was an infant and I always thought that had something to do with it. Well poor thing she was sitting there looking on when Jeanne just dropped her Pyrex dish and fell over dead of a heart attack in the middle of her kitchen. Had she been feeling bad? We don’t know because she would never have said anything if she had, so selfless always and she’d already been nursing Bill for some years. Though she had said she didn’t want to be buried next to him, so she bought the plot next to mine said she wanted to be buried up here in Blanchardville near her own family on account of Jack was not faithful to her. Had a girlfriend they said. I always wondered why her five boys, all so handsome, but seemed so angry, seemed like. Once he was gone they came right out and said he was a horror. Oh it hurt me when she died, so sudden too, I missed her a lot.

I missed her when she was alive because we never lived in the same town. She lived down in Columbus and we lived in Cleveland or here in Blanchardville. Oh I suppose I got off the point there. But I remember that day I was with Jeanne thinking about what it must be like to be married.

Swinging on the porch swing, the spring creaking and our feet tapping, when out of the blue we hear a strange sound clumpity clump, clump, sounds like horses galloping. Well this was already 1941, everybody had a car by now, so it was quite unusual to see horses in town.

“What on earth?’ Jeanne says and we stand up to look. Then round the church corner they come, these two young men cantering down the middle of West Main Cross street on the prettiest Palomino horses you ever saw. They were going fast, racing I think. Jeanne and I are standing on the edge of the porch watching so of course they see us.

“Whoa,” they say and pull the horses right up to stop, making a big to do.

“Hello ladies,” they say and tip their hats. Both of them wearing cowboy hats, that was also unusual, like a Tom Mix movie. We were a little hesitant, didn’t know ’em from Adam.

“Nice day for a ride isn’t it?” one of them says and we grin and shrug our shoulders. Then my little brother Tom comes out, and says, “Hi Rusty, hey Bud.” Tom was about fourteen but he washed dishes at the bar and knew everybody in town.

“Hey it’s Tom Healy,” Rusty said then they rode the horses right onto the sidewalk in front of our house till you could smell the horses and the leather boots they wore, all glistening in the sun.

“How ya doing Tom, I didn’t know you lived here. You didn’t tell us you had sisters.”

“Oh I have four of them. This is Rose and Jeanne.”

“That’s right he’s our little brother Tom,” Jeanne said, protectively.

“Nice to meet you ladies,” Rusty said, and I never will forget, he made his horse bow his head.

Was a beautiful Palomino horse with a creamy white mane and a body the color of caramel sauce. I guess I liked his horse.

“We know young Tom from Healy’s Bar, that your family’s place?”

“Yes it is.” Jeanne was doing all the talking.

“I occasionally do some business there.”

“Is that right?” Jeanne says.

I occasionally do some business there. First two minutes I knew him he told me the truth. I should have marked those words. Don’t you know it. All the clues in life are always there early on but you don’t know what you’re looking for to explain what’s going to happen, because you don’t know what’s going to happen in order to look for the clues.

“Yes ma’am. We were just as a matter of fact thinking of a cool drink. Though I’m feeling refreshed already.” Said that looking right at me and smiling.

Later I asked Tom about him, said Rusty and his brother were sort of notorious in town for riding their horses around. Bud, and Rusty, short for Lester and Earl. Bud the dark haired one is older and some say crazy. Rusty he’s the younger one I think he just rides along. It’s all kind of silly I think but the girls fuss over them. Their father raises horses right on the edge of town there, Palominos. Dad says he’s seen them at the bar, and they tie the horses up to the light post, while they drink. While the men drink, not the horses.

A few weeks later, I was walking down Main Street on my way to lunch. As I passed Beltz’s the men’s clothing store, there was a man leaning against the window smoking a cigarette.

He stood up and tipped his hat to me. Said “Hello Rose, how’s your family?”

I said hello just to be polite but for the life of me I couldn’t place him. He looked so different without the hat and boots. Well he must have noticed I looked confused and said:

“Oh I’m sorry, you probably don’t recognize me without my horse, I’m a little shorter. Rusty Koehner.”

“You’re right,” I said, “Different hat too.” We laughed.

“What brings you to the commercial hub of the great metropolis?”

Oh, he was witty in his day. Said “I saw your Tom the other day, he said you work downtown at the phone company.”

“That’s right.”

“Well I guess then you must get a lot of fellas calling you.” He made me laugh and before I knew what had happened it turned out I was going to the dance in Toledo with him because Benny Goodman was playing so if I didn’t have any other plans.

“Suppose I give you a call at home,” he asked.

“That’s fine,” I said, “but will we be traveling on horseback?”

He thought that was funny. “I got a jalopy, don’t worry. A’course my horse is a little faster.”

I don’t know what it was I liked about him at first. It’s hard to remember so many years back. You’ve been in love. There’s a reason they call it falling, isn’t there. Because whatever you were thinking or doing beforehand rushes by and disappears. Who can explain it. The course of love never did run smooth. He was going to Blanchard College which was ambitious at the time. Always had tickets to the dance, had a job too, and some wit. He dressed well too, not that I cared so much about that. His hair was even more red then than you probably remember it, and he was rail thin, like your own son.

That day he wore high-waisted pants and a light tan suit, with a watch on a chain that attached to a belt loop that hung down and draped into his right hand pocket, a little outrageous. Had matching tie clip and cufflinks, that kind of thing. Everybody in town liked him; he had been the high school quarterback. Natty Bumppo from the Last of the Mohicans. Well he picked me up in an old Model T, and we went to Toledo, he was quite the dancer. I wasn’t so swift and deft as he, he loved to dance, was so athletic you know.

I was dancing with Danny Lynch for one dance, cause I knew Dan and we had been friends. Dan worked as a photographer at his family’s studio in town, well Rusty was dancing with as many girls as he could, took his jacket off.

I was sitting and talking to Dan, having a beer when he finished and came over to the table.

“Thanks for entertaining my date Dan, now get the hell outa here! Oh I’m just kiddin ya, how ya been?”

“Well good, but I didn’t know she was your date on account of all those other women you had your arms around.”

“Well Danny boy you gotta hold ’em up once they get going or they get all floppy and fall off their heels. I was just trying to be helpful, give ’em something to lean against.”

“Otherwise they’d be falling all over you,” Dan nodded.

“No, now my Rose needed to rest her little hooves, I’ve been trottin her around the ring a few times.”

“Oh I’m not gonna talk to either one of you now,” I said, “you’re both all wet.”

“Come outside, for a breath of air,” he said. I think that was the first time I kissed him.

I’m telling you what I can remember that he was then, having lived since with all that he wasn’t, though the seeds of one must have been in the other. He was very attentive, and he was intelligent. I never denied that. Not a literary person not bookish, but he was intelligent, good at math. More alert than a lot of the boys I met. Always moving, playing something, tennis, swimming. We used to go for picnics out at the limestone quarry where everybody swam, well I didn’t. I watched him mostly. Watched him dive off the rock ledge in his perfect swan dive into that clear green water. He was a polite man deep down, that sounds strange but there was something about that, even in the worst of his drinking see he was never coarse or violent, he was always trying to make it all right. Opposites attract they say but that’s not it exactly. He wasn’t ever patient, of course when you’re a young woman you don’t want someone who is patient you want someone who is a little ambitious and he was. That was part of the difficulty.

·

Was just the winter following the summer we met, 1941. It was a cold Sunday in December, and I was sitting in front of the switchboard thinking of doing some Christmas shopping. Telephone Company was usually quiet on weekends, not that many calls to put through.

I had gotten this job at Ohio Bell and had been promoted to long distance switchboard supervisor; headquarters up on Main Street. Those days you sat in front of a big board full of circuits, had a row of little sockets with lights above them to show what circuits were free, you took a line from one side then put it on the open socket to connect the call; but like I said there were very few calls that day.

I was sitting there looking out the window watching a fireman on a ladder hanging up the Christmas wreaths over the street. Then all the sudden the whole board just started buzzing and lighting up like fireworks on the Fourth of July, every circuit blinking, and buzzing. I didn’t know what had happened, I tried to put a call through but all the lines were busy. Wasn’t anything I could do. Betty Riley was there, it was just she and I up front.

“What in the world? What do you think it is Rose?”

“Well the equipment must have gone haywire.”

“I don’t know what to do, Rose.”

She got all upset, waving her hands around all flustered, and pulling back from the board like it was gonna come after her. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Now just sit down Betty,” I said.

“It’s not gonna all blow up is it Rose?”

“No it’s not. Maybe Roosevelt died, he’s been sick.”

“Oh no.”

We went through each wire we could, “All circuits are busy please try your call again.”

Mrs. Wilson the manager came in from the back about five minutes later, we knew it was serious when she came in because she was a fat lady who never got out of her chair.

“Oh girls” she said, “say your prayers the Japanese have attacked us.”

We couldn’t believe it. In Hawaii, she said. Well that was cold comfort, we knew it was far away but Betty burst into tears and said, “I want to go home to Mama.”

Mrs. Wilson said, “You will Betty, right after your shift is finished,” and she sat her right back down. Well we were busy all night see. At that time we didn’t know, nobody knew if they were going to attack somewhere else, or what. We stuck it out for hours.

Next morning of course all the papers had the story and that evening was busy at dad’s bar, Healy’s Bar it was called then, on Main Street. Well it was just the thing to do in an emergency was go get a drink, we all went, all the regulars there, and everyone had their opinion.

“We ought to go in there, have the whole thing over within a month or two. Mop up the whole shebang.” Stranahan, the mailman, he was a loudmouth, started pontificating.

“Suppose your neighbor sneaks in your back door and takes your wife and kids.”

“He can take mine,” Bill Walsh says.

“Now Walsh I’m on the level here, it’s a dirty underhanded thing to do.”

“Oh hell,” Howard the clerk at the hotel next door said, “What’s the use of worrying about what’s gonna happen, I had a good sleep last night, and a good meal this morning and I’ll enlist this afternoon if anybody asks me to.”

I remember Howard saying that, because later when he died in the war it seemed like he knew somehow.

My dad was a pacifist see, no one thought there should be another war, said we should stick to diplomatic methods. No one was looking for a fight, people were worn down, seemed like we had all been fighting enough just to get through the Depression, no one wanted to go to war. But the bombing changed public sentiment and a few days later Roosevelt made his declaration. We all listened to it on the radio at Grandma’s house, supposed it would only take a few months. We were sure it wouldn’t last.

Course that wasn’t the case. But it was Bess’s idea to join. What year was that it was the springtime after, so 1942. Would have been the next summer.

Mom was cooking a roast for Sunday. There was a breeze coming in through the back porch and we could hear Mr. Weiserman mowing his lawn with the push mower which he did on Sunday being Jewish, and it used to make Father Drake so mad on account of the back of the rectory and Weiserman’s yards backed up against each other, as luck would have it. Dad called that yard “Where the Old Testament Meets the New.”

It smelled good in the kitchen, like pork roast and I was sitting reading the paper, when Bess comes downstairs.

“Mom have you seen those posters downtown for girls in the military. Margaret Swanson is going to be a WAC. I saw her today at Wilson’s. She said they have a woman in the office right next to the enlistment guy, just for the women to go to, right there in the office next to the bakery. I saw Kathy Reninger go in there and she can’t even be out of high school. Margaret said you might get to go to New York City, I’d like to live in New York City.”

Mom was checking the roast and put it back in the oven for a few more minutes and closed the oven door with her knee as she always used to; and wiped her hands on her apron.

“Theresa if you think your father is going to let you run off like that you got another think coming. It’s fine if you don’t have anything else; Reninger closed his store a long time ago. I don’t think those girls have much to look forward to, but you have a good job. You could go to college if you save your money like I’ve been telling you instead of buying clothes you don’t need. “

“Mom, we need clothes. And besides I’m not the one who wants to go to college, Rose wants to go to college. I don’t want to sit around all day in some stuffy room, I want to see the world. Look Rose, I went in and got the brochure.”

She sat down at the table and spread it out. We poured over it.

“Here are the requirements, we could do this.” She read it all out.

“WAVE Enlisted Candidates: Applicants of Enlistment must have general and physical qualifications described above. Age bracket is from twenty to thirty-six years. Educational qualifications must include a certificate of graduation from high school or business school or evidence of completion of courses at business school and subsequent business experience sufficient to be considered the equivalent of a high-school education.”

“You’re just twenty last year.”

“Well twenty is twenty. We have all that. Plus we know the switchboard. That’s maybe worth something. ”

“Is that on the list?”

Says, “Applicants may fill the following positions. Storekeeper. Ship’s cook. Baker. Radioman. Specialist. Chauffeur. Mail-room clerk. Messenger. Librarian. Information Bureau line Assistant. Escort. Waitress. Mess cook. Mimeograph operator. Yeoman. Pharmacist’s mate. Aviation machinist’s mate. Aviation metalsmith. Photographer’s mate. Aerographer’s mate. Parachute rigger.”

Mom was looking over our shoulder. “Rose maybe you could be a librarian.”

“Yeah. cause you already act like one,” Bess added.

“Whadaya suppose an aerographer’s mate does?”

“Graph means to write so they must write in the air?”

“Oh stop being silly Bess,” Mom talked stern but never raised her voice.

“Who looks after those girls so far from their families? All those soldiers around God knows who, anyone can join up who wants to, you don’t have to take a character test. You don’t know how men are. Why on earth would you want some sergeant barking at you in the crack of dawn, I can’t imagine.”

Mom lifted the pot of potatoes from the stove with her round strong arms and drained the boiling water in to the sink, a huge cloud of steam rose up between the two of them.

“Give me the masher.”

Mom started to mash hard like she did when she was mad, hammering the masher down into the pot. “Have to get up at 5:00 a.m. every morning and at night all those soldiers off duty.”

“That’s the whole point Mother, that’s what Bess wants to see.”

“Oh you stop.”

“You know it’s true you want to go because all the boys are there.” Bess did love the boys and they loved her too, there was always someone on the porch.

“Well they are aren’t they. Anyway I do not. President Roosevelt says everyone should help. I just thought it might be fun to see other places. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to see the world a little.”

“You can see it, look right out the window there, there’s the world.” Mom said. She was pointing out the back door where right then the green trees were bent over by a gust of wind that lifted open, then slammed closed, the screen door.

In the very next second Carl Ayers appeared, under the black walnut tree coming up the back sidewalk. Bess saw him and bolted out of the kitchen then up the stairs running so that he could still hear her footsteps echoing when he got to the door.

“Hello, Walt,” Mom said pouring the milk into the potatoes.

“Hello, Mrs. Healy, I was just going by and saw your door open.”

“Uh huh. You were just going by? Did your family move from Genera?”

She winked at me. She was kidding him; since they lived ten miles in the opposite direction, and since we were near the edge of town it was highly unlikely that he would happen by. He looked at the stairs furtively where Bess had disappeared.

“Well I can’t stay.”

“Well before you worry about staying, why don’t you come in.”

“I see you’re about to have dinner so I won’t bother you.”

“You’re not bothering me, yet.” She glanced at me again and we tried not to laugh.

“We haven’t started. We’ll wait till James gets home with the little ones. Come on in. Can I get you a coffee?” she asked, nodding at the percolator she always had going on the counter. She put down the loaf of bread she was about to slice and poured him a cup and set it in a saucer on the table before he could answer.

”Sit a minute, tell us how things are.”

“I’m fine.”

The Protestants we noticed never said very much. Carl was a Protestant. He stood there in the doorway, with the summer green yard behind him, and his striped shirt and a crooked tie with it. I wondered why he was wearing a tie, since he worked at the grain mill, but I kept reading my book, and Mom kept working at her cooking. She was always cooking and talking. Put her loaf in the bread slicer and pushed it back and forth. She loved her bread slicer, left over from her restaurant days, but that’s off the point.

I always thought Carl was strange looking, sort of a crooked smile, but he was easy going. His family were country people from over near Genera, Bess had met him at a dance. Now she was upstairs doing something to her hair and putting on lipstick I knew that. She was silly about men, it almost didn’t matter who they were, she acted the same. Like she didn’t know what to do.

“How are you Rose?”

I looked up from my book. “I’m good Walt, nice to see you around here.”

There was a long pause with the sound of Mom stirring her lemonade with the wooden spoon in her big glass pitcher.

“I’ve been downtown and signed up for the Air Force,” he blurted out.

“Oh is that right?” Mom asked. “Seems to be going around.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Going around, I mean everyone wanting to sign up.”

We heard Bess’s footsteps on the stairs. She came in smelling of powder and acted surprised to see him.

“Oh hi Walter.”

He stood up, “Hey Bess.”

“Guess who signed up for the Air Force!” I asked her, I couldn’t resist. She looked at me, and at Carl and back at Mother.

“I signed up for the Air Force today Bess,” Carl said.

She glared at him fit to shame the devil. Pulled herself up and pursed her lips and walked right past all of us and out the back door and let the screen door slam.

He followed her out of course. They were engaged before the roast came out of the oven.

1942

Blanchardville

Tomorrow we will leave by train from Toledo on our way to New York. The paper from the Navy says we can only pack essentials since they will be issuing us uniforms and everything else. Mother says we must have new underwear and nightgowns. If Bess keeps coming in here crying one more time I’ll barricade the door. I’ll play ball with the boys out in the yard instead or step over to the church, I wonder how we’ll go to church there. Rusty is stationed in Massachusetts now too, so I might even see him; though he says they’re likely to ship out in the next few weeks. I want to see New York but I don’t know what they’ll let us do, they say there are soldiers from everywhere, and I’ll be trained at Hunter College. I guess I’ll have to give up my dream of going to Antioch. I would like to go to college, they always say I’m a good scholar, but I don’t know when I’ll find the time now.

I’m taking the rosary Grandma Tindal gave me from the Shrine at Carey in case I need a miracle, it was in the drawer here where did it go, if I can’t find that, oh no, and I might take my collection of Dickens but not the ones I’ve read already, I’ll take Bleak House but that doesn’t sound cheerful, or maybe I’ll take P.G. Wodehouse that’s more fun, but books are heavy to carry. Dad has agreed to let us join the Navy only because we can go together, he doesn’t like the idea of one of us wandering around a military base at night he says any man in their right mind would grab us, and it wouldn’t be proper. We can’t wait.

1942

Baltimore, Maryland

My bunk is next to Genevieve Richel from New York. She has a picture of her mother on the little table between the two beds. I hate having to get up so early. Last night it was late maybe one or two in the morning, and there was a fire alarm. So we spring up out of bed, everyone’s rushing, we’re told to take a blanket off the bed and go, and she turns to me and says, “Rose, should I take Mama’s picture?” And I say “No Genevieve, no. We need to go right now.” Well it turned out to be a false alarm but I never will forget her saying that. Should I take Mama’s picture. Marching makes me crazy. Get up in the freezing cold and march around in a line. Down the field and back, the most pointless thing I’ve ever done. Left right, left right. I’m always falling out of step. My mind wanders.

My new job as store keeper is not bad. My typing has gotten much better, I have to type out all the invoices for the payments that go out to the soldiers tomorrow. And Lieutenant Winslow called me into her office and asked me if I would mind being photographed wearing the new Navy hats they’ve designed. Said I was picked out from all the girls in the barracks for being nice looking. Makes me feel a little shy. But I have to go on Wednesday, they’re going to style my hair and all. I guess they’re going to put me on the poster for the new uniforms, or something.

Letters this afternoon right after lunch. Roasted carrots and corned beef hash. Ruth Goldblatt set beside me and I like her because she talks about New Jersey and how they do at her house about her Father who is the baker, how they don’t like to drink milk. I got two letters, one from Mom and one from Rusty. Mom sends Holy Cards. Gotta read Rusty’s.

Dearest,

Talked with the Sargent, he did promise me a leave before I go overseas. Its rather indefinite Darling but whenever it is and wherever you are I am coming to see you. I don’t understand how the Army and Navy can be so cruel about moving each of us at the wrong time but they sure have done a good job of it.

I received a letter from Lowell Aller the other day telling me about his trip to Texas to see Bill. It was a swell letter and I sure was glad to get it. From his letter I find Bill is much the same old Bill and is taking everything very well. Since I have more opportunities and facilities for writing I am going to get back in the groove of writing all my ol’ buddies regular again. As for you my love, I promise I’ll write you at least twice a week, that is if you also cooperate and tell me you love me at least that often, and “darling” if ever for any reason you find you don’t love me, please tell me then, and I probably won’t but I’ll try to understand. (But please don’t say it).

Honey I haven’t been to that photographer yet. I had an appointment for the 5th of January but I had to go to N.J. to pick up an A.W.O.L prisoner and I couldn’t keep it. Since then I haven’t had an opportunity. I will send you one soon as I can. Since you haven’t got a picture I’ll tell you something about this guy who is so very much in love with you. He’s 25yrs young, 5’11½ tall, weighs 168 lbs (I gained some), dirty strawberry blond hair, has most of his own teeth, wears an Army Officer’s Uniform, works hard and when opportunity permits plays even harder. Enjoys a drink only when alone or with somebody. His social life has been very dull lately and he does not like WACs. but loves a WAVE. He sleeps with both feet under the covers and snores only when asleep. Financial condition very fluctuating. Highly recommended by all who don’t know him. Do you still want a picture?

Darling I have to go check the guard so I’ll bring this volume to a close. Please tell me about your new station and send me your telephone number. Also tell me all about your leave. Say hello to your beautiful sis for me and to the other little waves who are rippling around. Be a good little sailor and remember I love you more than I can ever tell you.

All my love, Rusty

Post Mortem #1

What store are you keeper of ? I was just thinking I could use a good store keeper in the Mess. If you are interested in this job write to

Lt. E.L. Koehner

Bty “B” 491st AAA AWB Fort Devens, Mass

1947

Cleveland, Ohio

We were married of course right after the war. You’ve seen those pictures. I think the drinking started to get bad when he was traveling as a salesman for Diamond Match. He sold matches, not the kind between a man and a woman, but the kind that you light, well what he mostly sold was the advertising, the business name on the book of matches. Every restaurant, grocery store, oh and hardware store, or sporting goods store would order matches with their name on them in those days. People needed matches to light their smokes and it was good advertising.

Diamond Match was a big company then. They also sold restaurant supplies, paper straws and like that. So many of his accounts were in restaurants or hotels; those days the late 40’s and early 50’s most of the hotels were still downtown, and of course each one had a restaurant and a bar. So you can imagine.

What made him a good salesman was he was gregarious, he liked to tell a story or hear one, and he was a good listener, well as long as he could still hear, but that was only a problem later. So he’d get to a town, have two or three appointments scheduled. Youngstown say, a big steel town in those days. He’d meet with the hotel managers and so forth, he’d maybe know the guy after a few months on the circuit.

So one of them would say “Well let’s sit and have a beer,” while they went over the order. That would be lunch, and then in the afternoon, another guy “Can I give you a drink, have a seat.”

“We got your toothpicks, drinking straws, and matches, you need anything else, coffee stirs we have those. And I need you to just sign off on this slogan for the cover.”

“That looks good until next month. What about Ohio State this year, they gonna go to the Rose Bowl.”

“No, John I think it’s the toilet bowl they’re going to.”

“Who they got quarterbacking this year?”

“That kid Keller. But he can’t throw further than the table.”

“That whole throwing game is what it’s coming too isn’t it. My day, why we liked to run the ball, that way you always knew where it was, didn’t take any chances. Course that was a while ago. Before pads, you know what I’m talking about. Did you play yourself.”

“Yea, I did a little time on the gridiron, love the game.”

“What position?”

“Well quarterback as a matter a fact. One year of college before the war. Now I could throw in those days. You say it’s safe to run with the ball but you gotta remember you can always throw a ball a helluva lot faster than a man can run. So sure you gotta take a risk, but the payoff is there. I always gave it a throw to see if anybody would catch it.”

“You like gambling in general?”

“Do I like gambling in general, well no, I like gambling in the evening.”

“Ha I like that. A course I know where some games are, if you’re ever in the mood.”

“Thanks John I’ll let you know. Got three baby girls I’m gambling on right now.”

“Three women, you poor sucker. How old?”

“Let’s see, the oldest is five, going to school, then three I think and two.”

“You didn’t waste any time getting to it. Did you go over in the War.”

“I sure did, France and England.”

“See the guys who were away they are always the ones who come back and can’t get enough. Makes a man hungry for his own country, and American women. God when I was in Italy, I was in the supply line, I cried one day just thinking about Cleveland, not any one thing I could put my finger on, just being there or belonging there. Now it seems damn silly but at the time I was hurting.”

“No, I know what you mean. I felt that way in Normandy, landing there wishing I was landing in New York.”

“Normandy huh, what day did you get there?”

“Oh not until the third day, I wasn’t on the beach, would never take that away from the guys who were. We were backing up the front line once they took Omaha, sending in the tanks to follow, stayed awake for three days but that’s not so bad.”

“Have another drink on us? Wilma, get this thirsty veteran a drink!”

“Thanks John. How about you, any kids?”

“One son, just one. I went right into college after I got out, accounting and finance. I always liked numbers. GI bill you know, you didn’t go for it?”

“No, I had the girls right away see, so.”

“Well a course. I gotta go to some god-awful meeting but Wilma is gonna take care of you here. Nice to see you Rusty, nice to talk with you. You take care now.”

·

How many times can you have the same conversation?

Each night of course he had to stop in a new place. Which was all well and good until it got to be after dinner and other guys going home, and he with nowhere to go but upstairs to a musty little hotel room, with a bed and a chair, and a sooty window looking onto a dark alley. This was before television, you know. So he sat at the bar, for the company of it.

I suppose he would start thinking sometime after the second whiskey, that his life now, driving from Youngstown to Columbus to Detroit selling matches and toothpicks, wasn’t the glory he’d counted on after liberating Paris and marching down the Champs Elysées. Then with the children coming pretty quickly. Our apartment in Cleveland crowded too, but I really don’t think he minded that.

By the third whiskey he could talk to whoever was there, the bartender, the fat lady on the corner stool, make the hours pass so he could go to that empty room and not see it clearly enough to know where he was.

Course not wanting to face an empty room seems like a small obstacle after all, but sometimes it’s that little thing that does you in. You know the story of Achilles. His mother Thetis dipped him in the potion of immortality, but that little spot where she held his ankle to dip him, that didn’t get covered. How are you’re gonna protect someone from every possible hardship. He did say once that the pressure of having to make the sales, since he worked on commission, weighed on him but the truth was he never had trouble selling anybody anything. Everybody who knew Russ liked him, but he wasn’t used to being where no one knew him. He grew up in this town where everybody spoke to each other by name. He was a small town boy in that way. Then to be sleeping alone every night in a bed that isn’t yours, in a room with only a number on the door to make it different from any other one. You’re just the man sleeping in there, no one knowing your name or how well you could dance or how far you could throw a football, being anonymous like that.

Not that I’m here to make excuses for him. I just want you to think about what might have happened in his view.

·

A strange thing about that time, I always wondered about it; when we’d heard he got the job and I mentioned it to my mother.

She said, “Diamond Match he’s gonna work for?”

“Yes, out of Barberton.”

She said, “When I was growing up my Neuman cousins had a friend worked in Akron for Diamond Match. Well they worked in that factory, got paid hardly anything, but then well they all started getting some awful necrosis of the cartilage in their jaws. Turned out there was phosphorous in the matches and that’s poisonous, it started attacking their jaw cartilage, was terrible, a whole town full of people with disfigured faces who couldn’t eat or smile, and the owner, Columbus Barberton, didn’t do a damn thing for ’em. Till someone in his company invented a way to make the matches without phosphorous, then President Taft said he had to make that patent public, to protect the workers and he did. But not without having his arm twisted. Now that must be a sin somebody is paying for, I wouldn’t want my husband working for such a company as that.”

“But Mom they don’t do that anymore, you said so yourself.”

“They don’t but all those poor souls. Not being able to talk or eat. Who’s making up for the sins of that company? For what they couldn’t say, and now your husband, well he’ll be lining the pockets of those shysters. I don’t like it. I don’t like that outfit at all. Wouldn’t let mine get involved in a place that destroys people’s faces, I just wouldn’t. Sometimes if it looks like a frog it is.”

“Mom he needs a job, he’s not going to hurt anybody.”

“I know he’s not but it just worries me, if they treat people like that. Best not to get mixed up with the likes of them. God will punish them.”

I thought of her later, when the loneliness of that job made his drinking become so obvious, he spent a good quarter of his pay before we even saw it. It added up $2 or $3 a night; in those days it was a lot. When he came home he was all right, oh he’d have a few beers at night but it wasn’t a big deal, I didn’t think, until later.

Summer 1953

Cleveland

We were living in that yellow brick apartment building on Fifty-first Street, about a mile from the lakeshore, called that neighborhood the Detroit Shoreway. Thank God it was a solid old building. You went there recently with your sister to see her old school St. Stephens, and to see what you could of my life before you were born. St. Stephens was a pretty old German church. Of course now like so many little parishes it’s running out of people. Just old folks there now. But it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, I read, I guess because we went there, hah. No, it’s a beautiful Gothic church right in among the houses, a lovely carved walnut wood altarpiece, stained glass shipped over from Bavaria. Was the school still going did you say, I can’t recall. Not much else there now I’d recognize. Same brick houses. Vietnamese groceries and Baptist rescue missions. Oh, after the War it was a crowded neighborhood, always kids out playing. Like I was saying.

I was taking a load of clothes off the clothesline on the back porch, we were on the second storey. I looked up over the rooftops to that copper-colored sky, not an insect stirring. I felt the heat just settle out of the air and it was damp almost, you just could feel something coming. The older girls felt it too, they came running back from the playground down the street, came running up the back stairs. Your father was home for once.

Well just a few minutes later the siren at the fire station went off, that was the warning to take cover in case of tornado. And the siren started going just as hail started to hit the windows, hail the size of golf balls, was like the pestilence in the Bible, I thought it would break them sure. That’s when I gathered the children into the hall.

You could hear it before anything. A terrible high pitched screeching noise, and a rumbling that shook the ground like a freight train pitching right down the middle of the street. Like the furies shooting out of hell it sounded, with a wicked darkness too. The girls were hiding under a blanket; I sat on the floor holding onto the smaller children there in the hallway, all of them quiet as ghosts for fear and trembling against my shoulder. I’m trying to hold onto all my children at once, trying to find a hand or ankle I can press under my arm, feeling fury at the wind that might take them from me. I can see down the hall to the kitchen window and branches blowing by scraping the wood, and clanging steel garbage cans rolling, glass breaking, and then dead silence.

The girls popped their heads out of their blanket.

“Is it over?”

“No,” I say. “I think we’re in the eye of the tornado. Don’t you move. Stay right here.” I waited. I knew the worst wasn’t over. Never truer words were spoken.

But your father of course, the eternal optimist, he’s watching it from the front room.

“I think that’s the worst of it passed,” he says. “Boy that was a big one, I never saw anything like it.”

He’s standing there watching in the eerie quiet.

I say “Rusty come away from the windows. I don’t think this storm is over.”

But he walks into the kitchen instead. Then whoosh the wind starts up again and right before my eyes a beam that was holding up the back porch roof comes loose, slams through the door into his shoulder and he goes down.

“Oh damn it, damn it,” he’s saying, “I’m all right, it just a crack damn it.”

Then the roaring comes tearing through again, with a huge gust blowing through the open door, the cries of the children now ripped out of their mouths into the screeching wind. I squeeze baby Timothy to my chest, close my eyes. In a minute it’s over. I hear it in the distance now. The children are clutching me, Mary’s little fisted fingernails gripping my wrist so tight there’s a drop of blood, but no one is hurt.

He’s getting up off the floor. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he’s saying, “just sprained my shoulder.” He had a flashlight. “Oh its nothing,” he said, made jokes to the children.

He was so good with children really, had M&M’s in his coat pocket and calms them all down with the candy. We get blankets and sleep in the hall.

Was a freak thing, how that beam came through the door, a miracle it didn’t come down on his head. He has a broken collarbone, we find out the next day. Things are shut down for a few days but then he can’t drive for a few more weeks, he can’t work.

I had tried to tell him, this is the eye of the storm. But he didn’t listen.

Was like there were two tornados that summer, one was that twisting wind, and then what followed.

Autumn 1953

Cleveland

9:15 Good Lord, I can’t believe they’re here already this morning, I didn’t even get a chance to do the dishes, well they’re not taking the dishes as far as that goes. I guess furniture dealers don’t take dishes or I’m sure they’d take the bowls out of my child’s hands. Silver already sold, so no value there. Poor children don’t know what to make of all this. Four big men clomping through the rooms. If he were here it would help, said he had to go make some arrangement, said he’d be back in an hour but he won’t be back until tonight. He’s too ashamed, I know. Too ashamed to watch what he’s doing to us. One thing to sell my belongings to pay his gambling debts, quite another thing to have to be home to watch it. Becky’s been hiding behind my skirt since the movers came in, what’s she so afraid of. Maybe she’s smiling, I can’t tell. Oh the baby needs to be changed. Glad Mary’s four now, she’s a help.

But she’s asking the men, why are you taking our rocking chair, taking the rocking chair I rocked my babies in, now Becky wrapping her arms around his leg saying, no no, mine, mine. Oh stop children it’s hard enough. Why are they stealing our things Mary keeps asking. They are taking them to sell, we are going to a smaller place, we’ll get other things. Oh never mind. Just never mind. Let’s go in this room so you don’t have to watch.

“Come back here sit on the bed with me, sweetheart.”

How many boxes do I have in here, seven, eight cardboard boxes, clothes mostly, hardly space to get to the bed to sit, oh it’s a mess alright. It is a mess. I have to stay composed enough not to alarm the children, who are already excited with the moving men. Ostermans Moving, their van says, a brown van parked outside, they call each other Bud, are they all named Bud? The black man is kinder than the other two, calls me Mam. Tell the children to stop staring at him.

“Mam is this settee going?

“Yes it is.”

“Am I to take this silver Mam?”

Yes, yes, I’m holding the baby Tim. Trying to keep the two girls out of the way thank goodness the older ones are off at school.

They’re taking the grandfather clock away from the wall not that it kept time but it had been Grandfather’s, and it is pretty. Used to have a matching art deco radio with a curved oak cabinet. Was just a nice set in a room. He’s at the tavern, I expect. That night he said, we will have to sell what we can and move back to Blanchardville that’s all there is to it. We have to do that or what, I ask him. Well it’s just the way it is, he says, I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll get a fresh start and we can get new things. Or what, we have to or what? Or I’m not sure what will happen, the way he said that. What do you mean? I want to know what he means but he can’t bring himself to say the words. Would they hurt him, kill him. I don’t know. Over a few thousand dollars? Who on earth is he mixed up with? Cleveland mafia I’m pretty sure. Italians no doubt.

I said we had to keep the beds, and Grandmother’s armoire to put our clothes in. I can’t watch this, stay in the bedroom and close the door. Here is the pile of quilts that Grandma gave me, she had an interest in the old patterns. Wedding rings, log-cabin. I’ll spread it out. Come on children up here on the beautiful quilt. Their footsteps sound so heavy on the stairs must wear big boots, coming up and down, it’s better not to watch them taking what is being taken. Listen to it go. Sit here on the bed with the baby and my sweet girls. That must be my cedar chest they are sliding across the floor a wedding gift from my grandparents. Mom put in a dozen embroidered linen luncheon napkins decorated with roses, doesn’t matter it’s going. Gambling debts, he was gonna strike it big. Sure. Phone would ring, before they took the phone. Why did he close the kitchen door. Didn’t want me to hear. Admitted he didn’t have rent money. Pawned my engagement ring, thought that was the worst of it. Not too much to ask for a roof over your head. But I didn’t see the depth of it; I should have seen this coming. But I didn’t. If I talk it will calm the children. I should tell them a story.

“Would you like me to tell you where all the pieces of cloth in the quilt came from.”

“Yes tell us a story. Read a book Momma.”

“Well let’s just look at the quilt. Patch a story together. That checked gingham, now this was the dress Mary wore to get her little lamb do you remember Mary’s little lamb? This dark blue here now that was part of a flag that was raised after we won the Civil War, your great-great-grandfather carried it out of Shenandoah and they had tried to shoot it down, the flag, but he carried it up right while the bullets flew, he and the little drummer boy. Now this was part of a sail, this white one here, a sail on a ship that came across the lake in a big storm, Grandma found it on the beach. She did. Yes. Now look at their little fingers pointing here, here. This one, no this one. Don’t fight. We will hear all of them. This striped shirt was the railroad man Casey Jones who drove the train that took the family to the enchanted mountain where the caverns were made of gold, but when he got there the brakes on the train wouldn’t stop and it ran right on through to the other door, but everyone was fine. This, oh that green wool was the cape your Great Aunt Odeline wore when she came to this country on a ship, her name was Odeline and she wanted to go to school but her mother said, no you have to stay home and eat cookies and ice cream all day and she said please Mother, can’t I go to school so finally her mother said well alright. That dotted swiss fabric was part of a dress a little girl wore just before there was a frog that flopped down beside her and she thought it was a prince but he wasn’t, he was just a frog. Good to hear them laugh. This blue velvet now that was part of the little girl’s dress all the little girls had blue velvet dresses when I was little and we wore them even when we were sleeping because we liked the feel of it.”

Mary’s pointing now to Timothy, he’s sleeping finally. Shsh. Let him sleep.

This is not a good day walking into the living room where there is nothing to sit on, nowhere to put down a book and he’s at the tavern. The kids loved it though, they’re happy with all the empty space dancing around the room that is suddenly so big. Got their tricycle from the back porch, the two of them riding it around the living room, I let them. I have some potatoes and bacon, and milk for the children but not much else, I have cigarettes thank God. It scares me to be honest with myself, these bare floors, and the echo of the emptiness. I’m scared what will become of us.

Anyway it is wrong to cling to worldly goods. Store ye up the treasures of heaven. Oh what’s that psalm, hell I can’t even remember.

Put the potatoes on to boil. Wished I had some green beans because that’s a good dish, potatoes and bacon and green beans. I don’t even know where we’re going to stay. Mom just moved into a little apartment, she doesn’t have room for us. I talked to Bess her husband is sick with Hodgkins disease, I can’t trouble her. He said this morning he’s making arrangements. He’s sitting there making arrangements all right, where to get his next beer. I told the older girls that we were moving to Blanchardville so they would have more room to play outside, they should be back from school in a few minutes.

I have some coffee and if I could get the two little girls to take a nap I can sit down and read for a minute, and have this smoke. Now there, I didn’t know my hands were shaking.

1954

Locust Street. Blanchardville

When we left Cleveland I had nowhere to go but to my mother, who at the time was in a little house on Park Street out on the South End. I had the five children. The older ones, Jane and Linda wondered why Dad was not coming with us. I said because he had to continue to work. But the truth was it was dangerous, the mob he got involved with. He went down to Texas to see his uncle because he had to get out of town. Well if he would have come with us they might have looked for him in Blanchardville. I think they did even go ask his mom where he was. Still don’t like to think of it. Cleveland mafia I guess, though he never did tell me either.

Mom’s house on Park Street was small, she was living there with my brother Tom. He was only about twenty-two, hadn’t gotten married yet, he was working at the bar. They had only two bedrooms, well I moved into Mom’s room we had three little single beds in there, Jane had one, we put the crib in the living room, while the rest of them had to sleep in the basement. It was a finished basement; we fixed up a room down there as best we could. I thought maybe I’d leave him then get a legal separation. He begged me not to, and the children said, “Where’s Dad, where’s Dad.” That about broke my heart.

When he came back from Texas his brother got him a job at the sugar beet factory for a while. Then we moved to Locust Street. That was a nice house for kids, had a big yard with old trees in it, had some room, and it was close to Dinnell Pond and park; they spent a lot of time roller skating there or ice skating on the pond when it was winter. Your dad was always optimistic. “Oh” he would say, “it will be alright, we’ll fix it up,” and then he would paint the rooms and borrow ladders and climb around and work hard for awhile. We’re gonna have a new start he would say, got a little off track and I would believe him and then the same thing would start all over.

That house on Locust had an old coal furnace and one winter well we didn’t have money to buy more coal so we ran out. He would go to his mother’s when things got bad.

It was the middle of winter and the house was freezing cold. So I put the kids in the kitchen where there were gas burners for the cook stove. I turned on the burners and we brought blankets and pillows and put them on the kitchen floor, or we would have frozen to death, we slept there for a few nights. Course I was terrified one of the children would touch the open flames you know get up in the middle of the night, but they didn’t.

Losing the heat in winter was always a problem for us. You remember some mornings when there was frost on the inside of the windows. Those starlike crystalline patterns, like some magical but sinister emblem of the threatening cold. How did the cold get inside our house? Your breath on the frost, your mouth against the glass. Your lips will stick to it. By the late 60’s they had a law, that you couldn’t turn people’s heat off in winter for non-payment. Well that was a boon to me.

He got a job finally selling men’s clothes at a Britts department store, had to look good. So we would all be wearing hand me downs but he would always be immaculately dressed in the latest suit and tie. That lasted a couple of years.

So I never mentioned most of this to you when he was alive. What good would it have done. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. You had a better chance in life thinking that your father was a reliable person than thinking he wasn’t. Children need a hopeful world.

1965

Pine Street. Blanchardville

You must have been five or six, it was March I think, rainy and gray but not too cold. And your sister Carrie and you were bickering.

“I’m going to the Sundry Shoppe,” Carrie started, “you can come but I’m not buying you anything.”

“I wanna go” you said, “I have a dime Grandma gave me.”

“You can’t get Sweetarts for that much, they’re fifteen now.”

“So I’ll get Pixie Sticks. They’re only a nickel.”

“They never have those.”

“You girls quit arguing.”

“We’re not arguing, were going to the Sundry Shoppe.”

You girls loved that little store just around the corner on Main Street. had things like felt and glitter and candy, greeting cards, two old ladies ran it, wasn’t any bigger than a closet.

“It’s Monday they’re closed,” I said and you looked about to cry.

“Come with me instead, I’m going to mail a letter.”

I feel the memories you come back to, they are warm to me like a place where someone has been sitting.

As I said, I had a letter to mail, so we were walking out together to the nearest mailbox which was two blocks around the corner, past the Moores’ and then through the wide school yard of Washington School. We walked in through the gate in the fence, passed the monkey bars where you often played and the basketball hoops around the side of the building, but no one was out that day. We walked past the wide windows of the basement kindergarten room where you all went before going off to St. Michaels on the other side of town. We turned and walked toward the mailbox.

It has just rained, and the rain has brought down the red buds of the maple trees, they are staining the sidewalk crimson and crunching underfoot. Grey clouds whip through the sky. The wind is threatening more rain but there is something else too.

Something worried in my face you see. You feel my worry; children do of course, its tangible in the air. We walk by the broad green lawn that stretches on one side of the school and there is a flagpole there and the flag is twisting and snapping in the wind like something caught. You take hold of my hand, as if to comfort me.

Why is Mother worried, you’re wondering. What will happen now. It seems to do with father; it is the seeming of things that all children remember. He has a sickness that has to do with beer, so he doesn’t always work. Last year we had gone to a large hospital with many old men who were missing legs and arms, to see him because he was staying there. They had all been in wars. Some were very old and they sat on a big front porch in wheelchairs and had called out and reached their hands toward you when you visited because they didn’t often see pretty little girls come there. But that was not today.

You said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing sweetheart, I’m fine,” I said, but you went on.

“Why are you so worried?”

So I answered, “ I was waiting on a check from the Veterans since your Dad’s not working.”

“What if this check doesn’t come?”

“Well then we won’t have money,” I said, not really thinking.

“But if we don’t have money to buy food what will happen to us?”

Then I realized how worried you were and I turned and bent to reassure you.

“You mustn’t worry. Say your prayers.”

We were at the mailbox.

“You can put it in,” I said.

You pulled down the blue metal flap and put the letter inside. It closed with a clang. We turned to go home, but you kept on.

“But what will we do, what will happen to us if we don’t have food,” you said.

So I stopped again and I looked at you so you wouldn’t forget this time, so you would stop worrying. I told you.

“God will provide.”

There is a clearing in the forest of your memories where these words are planted.

“God will provide.”

I think you were confused, to think that it was not me, your mother who would take care of things, it was God. A distant man you had never met, who lived somewhere in that grey cloudy sky. You thought well is God someone Mother knows? Has she met him, and talked to him? Did he know about us? Would we have to meet him? Just the weight of his name I think, made you look awful forlorn.

The wind blew. We walked on. You wondered had the letter been sent to God? Was that why your mother seemed so confident? Was it true, would God provide?

Well I hadn’t meant to frighten you by invoking the presence of God, but eventually you came to see what I meant. Didn’t you?

Everything that can’t be known for sure, every chance that was taken, every journey you took where the end wasn’t known, God provided. Call it what you will.

Maybe my reassuring you like that wasn’t the best thing after all. Gave you a confidence to run into the world without the fear you should have had to protect you. But He did provide didn’t he. All the risks you took, hitchhiking, flying over volcanoes, wondering the streets of New York all night long who do you think was watching?

That was a memory I left you, that sentence strung together like an heirloom necklace of precious jewels. God will provide.

Words that make a person brave; and that part worked on you. But I’m not sure you ever stopped to ask what it was you wanted God to provide exactly. Then again maybe you shouldn’t be asking him at all, better off to ask yourself what you want to provide for you. Be your own mother.

1967

The Trestle. Blanchardville

Religion was a help to me in my life. Kept the mystery present in my mind, and so I lived in light of it. Of course just getting to church was an ordeal, none of you very willing.

Then too, it would have been easier for us to get from the house on Pine Street to St. Michael’s school and church if the river had not divided one from the other in such a crooked way. The swale wallowed out to the west of us, so we had to take the Cory Street bridge; a good three or four blocks out of the way since none of us could walk on water, far as I know.

I always told you children, stay out of the swale. It was all wild in there, full of foul-smelling mudflats, reeds beds and willow bush left from some wild oxbow meander the river had taken just out of spite, I think, to upset the order of streets on our side of town. There were pockets of quicksand in there too, and one of you could get caught in there you’d never get out. Of course if I said stay out, well off you’d go, straight there. Hoodlums hanging around in there too, racing motorcycles around and drinking beer. I will say the swale was a good place to collect insects for biology class. You’d make a butterfly net out of a wire coat hanger and a bit of old sheer curtain, mayonnaise jar with lighter fluid, and catch all kinds of things back there, tiger swallowtails, praying mantis, golden beetles, and a walking stick I remember you showing me, a little brown twig with legs, just fascinated you and you tried to keep it alive in a shoe box. You loved just collecting insects, finding where the different ones lived, how each one had a flower or tree they called home, a whole world of homes out there.

The ground shifted there every spring when the river was high, so nobody built there until a few years ago. They filled it in now, made it into four big softball fields with lights and all, granddaughter Jessie plays out there, she’s quite the softball champion, gets all your brother’s attention, while he ignores his own son Daniel who isn’t athletic. Goes around comes around.

But now my story is getting all bogged down in the wilderness of the swale; well there’s nothing wild around here now, but what I wanted to say was how the straightest route to school would have been the route the railroad took; not Cory Street and the bridge.

You had to cross the tracks before you got to the bridge. I always worried about you children crossing the bridge because I knew the trestle would be a temptation. Of course I shouldn’t talk about the danger on account of that one time, or maybe two.

That one morning I walked to school with you. It was rare that I would, but I had a job interview at Manpower over on Harding Street just two blocks from the school.

·

I have to sit for a minute to curl my hair. Missus Ursalitz said 9:00 a.m. but I’m not sure how I will get there. If it worked. Say a prayer it would at least give us some income to rely on. Can’t sit here hoping anymore. Can’t but try. Said they needed someone who could run a switchboard, and I can do that. Probably all new equipment though. What kind of test would they give for that. Wonder if I could get away without wearing stockings it’s warm and all. Oh I guess I better, maybe one of the older girls has a pair of pantyhose, they’ll complain about that, God I hate those things, garters are more comfortable but you can’t even buy them now. I hope he stays sleeping. Who knows what time he came in, kills me that we have to have the bed right here in the room next to the living room, where you can see it from the front door almost and now with the mattress on the floor cause of his back being thrown out, gives him another excuse. Wish I had just a bit of privacy to get dressed without someone walking through, oh well. That’s a cardinal out the window, that flash of red, seems early but some winter over. Ms. Ursalitz said they needed someone ten to six. Well that’s not so bad. I know a lot of people in town so that might help, as they need contacts she said. Poor Mary Queen of Scots, that was a bad deal she got. Cardinal out the window made me think of it, blood red cardinal. I never met a cardinal but I met a bishop. Maybe I can stop at the library too, get another in that historic series. Father Fleck said I could ask for a legal separation if it gets any worse. Might be but a few hours a week, won’t amount to much. Hope I can stop and see Bess on the way home, maybe she’ll have a cup of coffee, course the little one is gonna be home from Kindergarten. I don’t know if his father will still be here or not. Wonder if Bess is better off with her Carl gone, and five children left to do for. She doesn’t have much but that regular social security check, and that pretty old house. I smell something burning.

“Steph are you burning toast?”

“No, Mom Joseph did it.”

And Carl was always so jolly. Course she said she could barely pay for the heat last winter. Did they each get a bologna sandwich today, four bags, I guess so. Wonder if I have fifty cents for a pack of smokes, looks like. Better try and get back by noon. I don’t know if this watch even keeps good time, seems to be ticking.

“Children, are you ready?”

You remember that morning I walked with you to school because it was so rare that any adult would presume upon your territory. You all seemed happy at the novelty of it. You wanted to hold my hand. I felt like a queen had come out to greet her subjects.

We were running behind but I didn’t want to be late for the appointment, so when we came to the railroad crossing. I looked to the left where the tracks angled direct toward Hardin Street and said, “Shall we take the trestle?”

It was you two youngest girls and Luke and Tim, five of us. You looked at me like I was from the moon, then you started elbowing and shushing each other because you didn’t want to say that you took the trestle half the time, though I’d warned you against it.

“Sure if you think we should,” you all stammered like fools.

Luke smiled and ran ahead down the tracks. I don’t know why but I thought of Anna Karenina, losing her child and throwing herself in front of the train, which always seemed like a stupid thing to do as there would have at least been some hope of seeing the boy again. I was glad my children were with me. Maybe Tolstoy had that one right that it was worse to lose your child than your husband, usually men don’t understand about children but I think maybe Tolstoy did. Of course he didn’t treat his wife very well either, gave all their money away.

We were almost at the start of the trestle now, you were chattering away.

“Luke said little kids like me could fall right through the ties into the river below, so it’s best not to look down. Or if you don’t fall through you can get your leg caught. You could be stuck there trying to get your leg out while the train came. When you cross the stripes tie, water, tie, water it can hypnotize you if you are not careful. If you hear a train whistle you have to run back, but they don’t always whistle. If it came fast you would have to climb over the black iron railing and jump into the Blanchard below, and you’ll probably die.”

“Oh now don’t be morbid. Watch what you’re doing.”

Our feet echoed across the wooden ties, the smell of creosote sharp in the balmy air. The trees were not in leaf yet, though the light of the year had risen high. Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil amen. Birds sang, in the trees, in the river below a fish jumped.

“Step carefully children.”

Luke was walking along the top of one rail holding his arms out like an airplane.

“Look I won’t step on the ties the whole time.”

“Stop that you’ll twist your ankle, quickly now, hold your sister’s hand Steph.”

“Are we supposed to do this?” you asked.

“Well I don’t think it’s illegal,” I said, “and there’s no point in being put off by a slight danger if the risk is reasonable.”

“Ah, Mom wait, I’m caught.”

“Sure you are” Carrie called back “we’re not even looking.”

Well I turned and sure enough there he was, the poor kid on all fours with his foot between the ties and my stomach just sank. Oh God, I thought, if it’s broken I won’t be able to carry him, let alone get to the interview on time.

“It’s stuck, it’s stuck,” he was squealing frantic already like a little fox in a trap.

I bent to help him, he just needed to turn his foot the other way and it came out.

“Now see? Didn’t I tell you not to play like that?”

“Stupid Goddamn railroad tie,” he said as he wiped away a tear.

I guess I shouldn’t have taken the trestle. You don’t think how everything you do is going to affect your children at the time. I didn’t think, oh if we walk the trestle today you’ll all grow up to take the dangerous back routes through life; I was just trying to get to my appointment on time.

Maybe it is true in this family we’re set on going. Thinking of the trestle reminds me.

1964

Pine Street. Blanchardville

“I want to go on a train” you said, pulling at my arm as I sat in my chair at the table in the dining room on Pine Street. We were home together that year, had your baby brother, but the rest of the children were in school.

We had a big wooden table in that dining room, where we all could fit, with Grandma’s old buffet running along the back wall, several of its doors missing now. There was a tall window there and since it opened into the side yard I never put a curtain up, so the light was strong. I think because your sister had read you one of the little Golden Books we had, The Little Engine That Could, you said.

“I want to ride a train. Can we ride a train sometime?”

“There used to be trains here,” I said, thinking of the trains Grandpa Healy worked on, “but they don’t stop anymore.”

“Why not?” You frowned and put your head on my shoulder as if the news was a great tragedy. I wanted to read my book and have a smoke while the baby was napping and the others in school, but I saw you needed some attention so I roused myself.

“We can make a train,” I said. “I’ll show you. Get all the chairs and line them up here.” We pushed the dining room chairs across the brown linoleum. Old wooden chairs we had mismatched, but high backed and strong.

“Line them up,” I said. “No not side by side sweetheart, seat to back, seat to back, in a line see like this.”

“Wait there a minute,” I said, and I climbed the stairs to take a white bed sheet off your sister’s bed. I came down stairs, tore a page off the Reader’s Digest on the table.

“You’ll need a ticket, to give to the conductor, when he asks. Here’s your ticket. Now get on.”

You sat on a chair your legs crossed in front of you.

“Now then, close your eyes and I’ll make a train.”

I shook the white sheet in crackling billows overhead, you looked up as the sheet came down over the backs of the chairs, making the roof of the train and each chair a separate compartment. You were inside a train now.

“Are you ready now?”

“Yes. You come too alright.”

“No, I’ll stay here, in case the baby wakes up.”

The train took off with such momentum that you were pressed into the back of your seat; you marveled at the speed this train traveled, so fast. You were not sure where it was going, or if you were supposed to know, or would it be allowed, but your heart thrilled and you were happy. Traveling on a train, there was snow outside. Outside the train windows you watched the snow covered mountains passing, across the aisle there were foreign-looking strangers and they wondered why one so young was allowed to travel alone, you wished your mother were with you, you can ask her you would say. You pretended not to notice them. The conductor was coming to collect tickets. You thought this is what it means to travel; this is what I have been waiting here for.

I went on reading until about half an hour passed and the baby woke; you finally said:

“When will I be at the next place?”

“Soon enough. You want to take your little brother along too?”

“He can ride in the caboose,” you answered, ducking under the edge of the sheet to fetch him. Even while the train moved slowly along, you pulled his chubby bare legs up onto the last dining room chair.

“Stay,” you ordered him, running to get back to your car.

“Where does this train go to anyway?” you asked, peeking out from under the edge of the sheet.

“That’s up to you,” I said.

The train gathered speed again. I stood there and watched you go.

You can never tell ahead of time how one little event will effect things to come. I think of that day now when you’re moping around about your leaving home so prematurely. Occurs to me now that you seemed headed in that direction from early on.

Well you’re a big gardener, so you should know. Watching a child grow is like looking at the flower on the seed packet then waiting for them to come up. They can’t be some other kind of flower.

1967

Pine Street. Blanchardville

One winter, must have been the week after Christmas because you were still out of school. We didn’t have any money; had run out of bread. Maybe you had seen the last piece get eaten from the brown kitchen counter or looked in the long plastic bag for it yourself. I remember saying it, “We’re running out of food, I don’t know what we’re going to do.” You watched me standing in the living room, I went to the window that opened onto the alleyway and pulled the curtains back, as if there might be something there to help but there was just another view of snow and icicles leaking from the eaves.

One loaf of bread was 35 cents then. It’s not much unless you haven’t got it. Your brothers were going out to see if the field around the corner where they played hockey was frozen over. You took your mittens from where they were drying on the cold linoleum in front of the black gas heater and went out with them.

You always liked to walk around the neighborhood anyway. You’d spend an hour just watching the snow fall, and the mysterious winter light that was always blue somewhere. Along Pine Street the broad maple tree trunks lined the sidewalk like pillars in an abandoned palace. Overhead their bare black branches etched the sky in ever smaller lines, like veins in someone’s hand. You felt that the spreading branches were reaching toward something you couldn’t name, an expectation of something about to end or begin. Half your childhood in breathless anticipation of what?

It was getting on twilight. You followed your brothers toward the field, a low yard behind the grocery store. You walked by the Weakes house, on Clinton Street. You fought with those kids, called them the Weaklings. But one day in the summer they had just hung a star in the window, which meant that their son had died in Vietnam, and a few days later rumor went round that the house was haunted by his spirit you could see a window blind moving up and down on its own in the upstairs window. Children came and stood on the sidewalk outside the house and waited to see something. But nothing happened.

That same street had a Methodist church on the corner, where it intersected Pine. One Sunday in spring, in front of that church, a dark car had unloaded a small white coffin, and it had been covered with yellow daffodils. Why is it so small you asked, it is a child’s coffin I said. We watched them carry it inside, you asked me who it was and why the child died, but I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know them. Must have been a baby I said, it happens. Say a prayer.

Now the snow had melted back enough to leave the limestone sidewalks bare, and dry. Your brothers went on, you kept walking around the block. You were thinking that the twilight was coming, days were so short it would be dark soon, you were thinking of the problem of the bare branches reaching overhead, and how would we would all eat.

And then it was there in front of you on the sidewalk. A blue vinyl wallet, dry and cold. Remember the crispness of the vinyl as you picked it up. First you looked around but there was no one. You took your mitten off to unsnap the change purse pocket on the back and found the quarter and the dime that made 35¢ for the loaf of bread, and you knew that God was with you. You opened the fold; there was a five-dollar bill. There was no name inside.

Your brothers caught up with you just then.

“I found a wallet, look five dollars and thirty-five cents.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“Right here on the sidewalk.”

“I saw that first give it to me.”

“You didn’t just find it laying there.”

“Yes I did.”

“It’s probably stolen. Did you steal it?”

“No I found it right here.”

“Sure, you did.”

“Let’s go to the carryout and get some pop and chips.”

“No I’m going home to give it to Mom.”

“She’ll make you give it back.”

“To who, there’s no one around.”

The lights were dark at the two houses nearby.

“There’s no one to ask here. Plus we need it. I’m taking it home.”

You were sure that the wallet would change everything; that everyone at home would finally be happy. You ran toward the house, racing around the corner by the church, you ran into the street, and when I heard a car screech on its breaks I went to the window to look, but you were still running into the yard now and you jumped over the two broken steps and pushed the door open into the living room and gave me the wallet. We both knew what had happened. God had provided, just as I’d said he would. Usually.

1970

Blanchardville

I’ve known Mildred Walsh for ten years and I never did like her. Knew her when I was working for the answering service over on Lima Avenue there, she was the front desk girl. Could never stand the way she smiled and nodded her head when ever her husband Frank said a word, with her tight little curls and false eyelashes, has an eagerness reminds me of a poodle on a leash. I don’t like women who are overly fussy with their nails and such, hers are bright red, pointed like daggers. Frank was a bricklayer but then he got some county job laying sidewalks out in the new subdivision, she got her job with the county from someone he knew on the sidewalk committee, that kind of thing.

Rusty’s been out of work all summer, irony is he’s sober now, but lost so many jobs that he can’t just walk into a another. Lucky if he ever works again. Couldn’t even pay the rent this month and six children to get ready for school, I don’t have money to buy a piece of notebook paper, let alone shoes. I don’t know what else to do but go to the County so I call and just my luck get Mildred. Talk about adding insult to injury.

Well wouldn’t you know the County office was there in the old phone company building on Hardin Street. It’s all been redone to where you couldn’t recognize it. I don’t know what I expected, some trace of the old switchboard, or the offices above that which used to look out over the floor, but not a trace of anything left from the time I worked there.

Bell starts ringing when I come through the door, sounds like a warning, what a dark little waiting room and who should be there but Mr. Doolittle, sitting there in his overalls with his head against the wall snoring. Bell woke him up, I guess. He’s sitting up, grinning at me with his three remaining teeth and his no remaining hair, keeps nodding, well he’s feeble minded there’s no doubt. I’ve never seen him sitting down before, Doolittles are usually walking around downtown, he and the wife and six or seven children all in a line like refugees on a forced march down Main Street. One has Downs Syndrome, one’s in a leg brace, one’s cross-eyed and I’m not making this up, poor things. Whole family of misfortune. Just my luck to get in there with Mr. Doolittle. All my girls think the family is named Doolittle because they do so little, sit around and wait for help, or that they’re related to the guy that talks to the animals, but they’re just simple minded, it’s not their fault.

Oh I wonder who the receptionist is, looks like one of the Lynch girls.

“Hello, I had an appointment with Mildred Walsh.”

“Was that in Family Assistance?” She says it like I couldn’t possibly remember.

“Yes it was.”

“Mildred’s in the first door on the left, you can go ahead in.”

Wasn’t this hallway even here when I worked here. What ugly wood paneling, and cheep framed pictures of the County Commissioners and the Mayor shaking hands with LBJ. Must not have known LBJ was a Democrat. Door’s open, of course she’s doing her nails.

“Hello Mildred.”

“Hello Rose, so nice to see you. You come right in here and sit down. You must be awful tired.”

How would you know what I am Mildred, don’t dare say it of course.

“I’m fine thank you.”

“So let me get your file out. You’re here to see what we can do in the way of county relief. Well I can imagine with all those children this must be very difficult for you. Now how’s your husband Rusty? He’s such a nice man. Haven’t seen him out at the golf course lately, you know he and Frank used to golf together.”

“He’s fine. Has had some trouble finding work.”

“I see that here on your form. Now you haven’t paid your rent this month?”

Says it like I’m a misbehaving child.

“That’s right.”

“How much is it you normally pay. When you do pay I mean.”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Goodness gracious I didn’t know you still could rent a house for that price.”

You don’t know anything Mildred so I’m not surprised.

“I guess it isn’t much unless you don’t have it.” Best try to be light or I might turn on her.

“I understand. Now how many children exactly do you have?” she asks me gripping her pencil in her blood red talons.

How many children exactly? Like I usually just estimate, or like I might not know.

“Seven still at home.”

“That’s right, that’s what it says here. Oh I bet you have your hands full, that must be hard with three boys too.”

Have to bite my tongue not to turn on her. What is hard, Mildred, is my having to sit here and share the difficulties of my life with the likes of you who has never read a book in your life and can’t think beyond your fingernails. It is hard to sit in this chair across the table from you in this building where I used to manage fifteen women and be asked asinine questions, while you sit there like Lady Catherine De Bourg in Pride and Prejudice, like it’s your money you’re giving away. I know it’s not charitable. I’m sure Mildred tries but it’s just about more than a soul can bear. Doesn’t see Rusty at his golf game. If he would sell his golf clubs we could get a week’s worth of groceries but the idea would never cross his mind.

·

What amount of money they gave I forget, but it had to be spent so much on each child and I had to bring receipts, you little girls were excited to have a new dress; you picked out a little green cotton shift with bright yellow and red embroidery across the top; even if those clothes always seemed sad to you later when you wore them, and then some months later avoided wearing on account of the associations they brought.

Now this was before food stamps, this was earlier and we were given an amount of credit at the grocery store, and then we could go buy what we needed. But each item had to be written down, on a yellow legal pad, and then why there would be a balance at the end or not. I had them send it to the Food Center which was a little further away from us and not as good a selection as Food Town which was right down the alley. Food Center was up there on North Main, past the piano store where you kids used to get the piano boxes and turn them into hideout forts in the back yard, one block further up next to the Sundry Shoppe and next to where in later years your sister’s husband would have a pizza place. Food Center was smaller, a little slower so everyone didn’t have to see our situation. Wouldn’t slow up the line so much.

It was more of an old-fashioned grocery with the high ceiling fans and black-and-white tiles on the floor. I know I shouldn’t have, but I used to send you children to do the shopping there, I couldn’t always face it. I would send a list with you, they had a good meat counter in the back, made their own Dutch loaf and pickled pimento spread I bought for sandwiches.

You were always allowed to pick out a treat for yourselves, you and your sister would push the cart along the aisles, peanut butter, miracle whip, a box of powdered donuts or Kool-Aid and chips or what have you, sometimes it was hard for you to reach the goods on the top shelf.

The two of you little girls would go through the list and wander around in there, then go up to the checkout line. You’d argue about who was gonna say it.

Carrie would say, “Oh you have to tell them this time.”

“No I told last time.”

“Well I’m leaving then.” Always so stubborn, she’d start walking away from you.

“No, don’t go, I’m leaving the cart right there then, I won’t do it.”

“You have to do it.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Oh just say it,” and then you would blurt it out all at once. “We have a food order under Koehner.”

The clerk would look down at you children barely able to see over the counter, and the expression on her face would change from the numb common-place of her cash register rhythm, her eyebrows would go up and there would be either interest or pity, and sometimes a sort of pulling back as if the fear of hunger was hovering around you. The older women, the ones with dyed hair and cigarettes in their apron pocket, were the best to get. They understood and reached under the counter to where the yellow legal pad was kept and got it out, and started the process without a lot of fuss. But some time you would get one of the college girls and she’d get all flustered, frown and look around for your mother, then ask the other cashier.

“Do you know what they want? What’s a food order?”

Or she would say wait here a minute, and she would have to go get the manager who would come down in his short sleeved shirt and tie and explain it to her, and during all those long minutes other people waiting in line or just staring, so that was the sort of uproar you wanted to avoid if at all possible.

You stood by the cart and you watched their faces carefully, as they wrote each item down on the yellow pad of paper. You wondered if the yellow pad were evidence of some beneficent being who had decreed that you would not go hungry, even if there was no money at home, a being who controlled all the women and the store too. Was it like the story of the Little Lame Prince, one of your favorites, who was given a magic carpet to ride around on because he had trouble walking. You felt something illicit in the whole transaction, a sense of what shouldn’t be that was, and hunger so much stronger. You remember the taste of powdered donuts.

·

Sometimes in the fall, when we lived on Pine Street, I used to sit and watch you and your sister out the dining room window which looked onto the side yard. You’d rake up all the maple leaves from the front yard and the neighbors, too, the rakes scraping rhythmic through the grass until you had a good big mound of scarlet yellow leaves well above your waist, the dry broken smell of the leaves coming in through the open window. One thing I have noticed, children love the world around them. They naturally do, if you watch them, they are designed to love and understand all they see and touch.

I’d watch you then take big armloads of leaves and shake them out of your arms into long lines about a foot wide and thick, one coming behind with the rake to help form the line, going back to the pile for more then shaking them into lines, then turning at a right angle and making another row until I could see the outline of the house that you were drawing across the yard.

Making one room, then another inside the larger outer square, then raking doorways through the rooms. A breeze would sweep in and the leaves go swirling away in a little red cyclone no sooner than you placed them down, but you’d go back and repair the breach, until all the borders of the house were set clear and straight.

This construction took some time and your sister would tire of it and go off, but you would stay in the yard adding another room or hallway. It took you a while to get clear in your mind who the characters were who would live in the house, what were they to each other, what did they do and want? This was the exciting part, but always it seemed that darkness came before you could answer. So much time taken up with the physical construction that there never was enough time to inhabit what you had made, and this left you a feeling of longing,

I wonder if you aren’t still doing that, walking around the perimeter, wanting to go inside.

But at that time I didn’t see a problem. I saw you walking in the yard living brief half-imagined lives around a house of leaves. A house without walls or a ceiling or whose walls and ceiling were clear and weightless as a child’s mind.

1966

Blanchardville

Usually I tried to behave as if I weren’t in the center of a tornado even when I was. I tried to maintain some forbearance and humor, as I thought that was the example you children most needed; but I must admit there were times I failed to see the point of it. I know you remember some of those. One day I had been downtown to get my hair done, I think I’d just gotten the job at the Paper. I was all dressed up, had my good shoes on. It had been a nice autumn day with the maple leaves blowing red and crackly around the sidewalk. The paper’s office was next to the courthouse at that time, right around the corner from Aunt Bess’s, so I stopped in for a cup of coffee at about three. Bess put the percolator on.

Mother was living with her then. Always sitting in her brocade armchair there in the parlor on the left as you came in. Well that helped Bess some as Mom could contribute some of her social security. Was nice having my sister and mother in the same house and that parlor was so pleasant, Bess always had a huge vase of lilacs there in front of the fireplace in the springtime or waxed leaves in the fall, her place was so clean and elegant. So we were visiting, when a huge peel of thunder came down from the sky, startled us, and a downpour followed.

“Good Lord that come out of nowhere.”

“Raining cats and dogs now.”

“Those kids will be soaked to the bone, catch their death of cold out there.”

“There the umbrella sits,” I told Mike, “take the umbrella, but you’d think I was talking to the door.”

The rain had caught you children enroute home from school and you all came running up onto the porch squealing with your hair plastered to your faces. Bess said stay in the vestibule there, and don’t drip all over the wood floor, she got some towels and we spread your wet books and whatnot out on some newspaper to dry and toweled you off. You and Bess’s daughter Kat were just a few months apart weren’t you, well you two went upstairs to play. We used to just sit and visit in that big old Victorian house, talking of the news and who said what. The rain just got worse and worse and I wondered how we’d get home. I sat and had the coffee and another one but it didn’t look like it was gonna let up. I called your dad, of course he wasn’t there. Well, Bess needed to start making dinner, so I called the Vets Cab.

We all piled in, you and Carrie and Luke while I sat in front. Could barely hear over the wipers, going like mad and hail pounding the top of the car like a tin drum.

“Nasty weather isn’t it,” the driver said. He wasn’t one of the fellows I knew. I knew a few of them.

“It sure is,” I said. “Not fit for man nor beast. 122 East Pine, please.”

A few minutes later, just as the rain stopped of course, he pulled up in the alley beside the house. I said go ahead get out to you children, go on now, while I get my purse. Now what’s the charge, he turned the meter over to $2.50.

“Oh dear I need to get some more change, I’m sorry let me run in and get that for you.”

“Uh huh” he said, but I saw the fellow’s face fall then. So I stepped out and walked up the stairs to the inside and locked the door behind me.

“Now don’t you go to the window” I said.

“Why what’s at the window.”

“Just do as I ask.”

Taxi driver waited a few minutes then started honking his horn, honk, honk, and you children said. “Why is he honking the horn?”

“Never you mind.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to get paid, but I don’t have it to give him.”

“He’s going to come and get us,” Carrie yelled and you and she hid upstairs with the excitement of it, peeking out the upstairs window down on the alley where the green taxi waited like a hungry reptile growling and squawking, blowing his horn, and the rain starting again.

·

Not that being inside a house really ever saved us from anything.

One January your brother Luke was sick with strep throat and I didn’t have money for the doctor, so we waited an awful long time seeing if he wouldn’t get better. Got so he couldn’t swallow anything, well I feared scarlet fever of course, so I finally found a doctor I didn’t already owe money to, he was awful sick by the time we took him. I moved him downstairs into my bed so I could watch him. Drifts of snow up to the windows. He had been restless all night but the penicillin was working now so he was sleeping and I was dozing finally in my chair.

Well, in my dream it seemed like someone was hacking at my front door with a giant axe, swinging against it again and again, was like the Huns sweeping out of the North and I knew the best thing would be to keep away from whoever it was that was pounding like that, knew that I shouldn’t open that door, not under any circumstance, a terrible aversion I had to that sound I can recall to this day.

But one of you girls, I think it was you, woke me, pulling on my sleeve said Mom, Mom, somebody’s knocking on the door, I said see who it is and tell them to come back another time, people are sick here, I thought thinking it was a damn Jehovah’s Witness or some such.

So you opened the door and I couldn’t quite hear but then heard a man’s voice I couldn’t place at first, and you came back and said Mom it’s Marcella Santini, and Bill, and I thought well what does she want with us, they lived way out of town. But it was sub-zero cold I couldn’t very well leave them standing on the porch, so I said to let them in and they walk in the living room each of them carrying a couple of bags of groceries.

“Hi Rose, I heard Luke was sick, and well I thought maybe you could use some extra groceries, I didn’t know if you could get out.” Marcella said.

Well I wondered why Linda had told her, our business didn’t need to be known by the whole town. Linda had just gotten engaged to Bill. Of course they had to get married because she was pregnant, it wasn’t her first choice, she had had a journalism scholarship all lined up at Ohio State for the coming fall and now that was done.

I said “Oh Marcella you didn’t have to do that we’re fine.” I felt like maybe she was checking up on me.

“Oh well I just thought…” she said.

Marcella looked more worried than I did.

“How’s he doing?”

“Oh some fever but doctor gave him a shot of penicillin that should help.”

She was a good Italian woman from Cleveland, she knew what it was to want, I guess, but it was hard for me sometimes.

“Well I picked up some ice cream I thought if he couldn’t eat it then one of the other kids could. “

Then Caroline came in, you could both see there was ice cream and cookies sticking out the top of the bag.

I wanted to ask her in to sit down, but there wasn’t a clear place to sit. Bill was still holding the groceries.

Trying to smile at you girls, trying to get your attention. “Hi Steph, hi Carrie.”

I didn’t like the way he was friendly with you, I didn’t like anything about him.

“Is there anything else I can do to help?” Marcella asked.

It’s not charitable, I know but I wanted to say get out of my house so I don’t have to stand here in front of my children taking charity from you the mother of the boy who got my daughter pregnant when she never wanted to marry him in the first place.

As if that wasn’t enough trouble. And Bill would cause our family plenty more trouble in the future. I don’t need to tell you that. So when his Marcella comes standing at the door with the two bags of groceries, I know that there is a lot more in those bags than orange juice and chicken noodle soup; a lot more to make up for than simple neighborly help. I wished I could have just said “woman mind to the sickness in your own house and take your groceries back with you.” But then there is always someone else isn’t there, another child standing there looking up at the ice cream.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten what happened. I’ve been thinking all this time, while we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking, maybe I’ll never know what would so propel a person out of a town with all the energy you put into your leaving, but maybe I do.

·

Luke got better a course, but when your dad was sick and dying everyone came to visit but not Luke. He was so solitary as a child, didn’t like school at all. I used to send them all off to school but Luke would crawl back into the house and hide behind the couch until about noon. He just couldn’t go along.

I never will forget one summer day, must have been the same year, it was hot and all the sudden the screen door slams and the kids come running into the kitchen saying, “Mom, there’s a police car Mom the police are here!”

Well I think to myself Rusty fell down drunk again. He would come home with a bloody ear or eye now and again. So I go to the door and see two police cars pulled up in front of the house, with the sirens going and the lights flashing.

Back door opens on one of the cars and there’s Luke coming out, fat cops on each side. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old. Well he’s white as a sheet of course, looking at the ground and crying.

“We’re looking for Missus Koehner”

“Yes, I am she.”

“Is this your son?”

“Yes it is, officer.” They’re still holding onto him one on each side.

“We found this boy and another, set off an alarm at Foodtown and we were called on suspicion of attempted robbery.”

There were three or four officers there, and one of them had his hand on his gun as if we were common criminals.

“We didn’t break anything,” Luke said. He had a tear going down the dust on his sunburned face. “Howard dared me to kick the door, so I just kicked the ball against it, we were just playing around there.”

“They say they just kicked the door accidentally, but this is very serious. Does your son have a record of this behavior? Mam, they may think they were playing around but I call it running from the scene of a crime, had they been two inches taller we would have had to fire.”

Can you imagine the officer saying that? I was so mad I was literally dumbstruck. Stood there with my mouth open.

“Yes Mam, if this boy would have been two inches taller, we would have fired.”

I thought you malicious son of a bitch. Made me so angry, I was fit to be tied. I wanted to say oh no you would not fire at a child, at a boy running around on a summer day. That is my child, my son, not something you kill you damn fool idiot. That is a child that came from a woman; that is my baby or some other mother’s that is not a suspect. You can see who he is and what he is. And you have the nerve to stand there with your hand on your gun and tell me, tell me you almost killed my child. What did you think I would say. Think I’m gonna stand here and say what. Say thank you?

Oh, I have half a notion to call the chief of police right then, but I can’t ‘cause your father owes court fines and speeding tickets.

“Doesn’t seem like a huge offense, officer. They’re just boys,” I manage to say.

As if I didn’t have enough trouble. Oh he was trying to imply of course, that I wasn’t watching my children, and was his father home. No. Don’t think I don’t know that they look at the house, my other children outside, the falling down porch and talk to me like that. Think they’d go out to the country club and say that to a mother? No I don’t think so. And the lot of ’em no more educated than a pig in a poke. Shoot at some barefoot boys who are playing in a parking kicking a ball around. Make some claim so you can use your gun and feel important, well I hope you rot in hell the lot of you. I kept thinking, I don’t know why exactly, of the Grapes of Wrath and how Ma Joad hides her son Tom after he hits the policeman. John Steinbeck knew something. But don’t start now comparing me to Ma Joad, please. Still, after that I took the side of the kids if any trouble came up. Especially with the boys cause who else was around to stick up for them?

1968

Cedar Point. Port Clinton, Ohio

This summer has been hotter than any I can remember, but maybe I just don’t remember, it’s too hot to think. August after all, like a steam bath. Rained last night a little, just heated it up more. Not a breath of air moving through this dining room. Called time and temperature this morning said 98. More than two weeks it’s been near that, all over the Midwest. More headlines about the old women in those Chicago high rises, dropping like flies. Poor things. Fact that the bars are air-conditioned doesn’t help him. At least I’m working. Heat makes me determined to get to that lake. Been thinking of when we used to go to Grandma’s cabin. Always a breeze there. Well just once it would be nice to have a family outing. Doesn’t seem too much to ask. These weeks seem to drag. Tired of saying no to the children all the time, we can’t go there or here, can’t have that or this. Just once it would be nice to not have to deny them. All this summer children coming in to wherever I’m sitting, here at the dining room table reading and having a smoke. They’re begging me, can we go to the lake, can we go to Cedar Point. But they keep asking can we go somewhere, and I say yes you can go outside and play. I give them credit they walk out to the pool almost every day to swim and we have the tent set up in the back yard so they can sleep out, but that’s all.

They need a little treat occasionally. The weight of his disease shouldn’t weigh so heavily on them. The older children especially, I worry the boys will start to despair before they’ve even had a chance to try themselves out in life. What with their sisters’ husbands over in Vietnam, everyone talking about the Kent State killings, such a terrible tragedy. They need something to relieve that. What’s there for a young man to look toward these days. Maybe I worry more than they do, make do with what you have only goes so far, Pollyana. I don’t know. What was it Pangloss said? Everything happens for the best, in the best of all possible worlds, I used to believe that but anymore I don’t know. Candide wasn’t it? French aren’t practical. How does it end, after he goes around and loses everything, “tend your own garden” does he say. Stay home and tend your own garden. Like to see him do that in this heat.

They’ve wanted to go up to Cedar Point since school let out. Well it doesn’t help having all the neighbor kids come up here on the porch and talk about going up two or three times already, talking about the Blue Streak and the Needle Drop every kid in the neighborhood bragging and little Luke just nodding. Thank God he won that Green Bay Packers football uniform in the Gatorade mail sweepstakes he’s been happy ever since that, well he tore the box open and started putting it on in the yard here before I could even get it in the house. We never won anything before.

I never had any interest in amusement parks but it’s nice being by the lake, and cooler. Better take the trash out. It reeks in this heat. Oh is it lunchtime already must be there’s Mr. Cramer next door back from the dairy. Now whose sled dog is that running down the alley, poor animal probably trying to get back to the Arctic, oh lord it’s pulling its chain and the stake on the end of it.

·

“Hi dog, you look hot.” Oh it’s the Stones’ poor thing, why they would keep a Siberian husky in this climate I’ll never know. Belongs in the Arctic, like Call of the Wild, those blue eyes are striking though.

“Go home dog, go home.” Don’t want it bothering the kittens in the garage, mother cat comes here you’ll be sorry dog. Franky Stone there chasing it.

“Come on Blue, come on boy.”

“Lost your dog Frank?”

“Pulled the stake right out of the ground, if Skip gets home and he’s not there I’ll be in big trouble, there I got him now, come Blue.”

“Luke Roy Koehner I hope you’re watching that your Mother had to take the trash out herself because she got so tired of asking you to do it.”

“We’re in the middle of a game Mom.”

“You shouldn’t be playing football in this heat anyway, you’ll have a heatstroke.”

·

Might as well save my breath as talk to those boys. Too hot to insist on anything.

Food Town has a special discount this week, buy $20 worth of groceries and get a family pass for only $10, about a $20 dollar saving is what it amounts to. I can just about swing it with what I got last week, paid early because of Labor Day coming up next week but he doesn’t know. I’ll buy it I just have to get him to drive us tomorrow. I mentioned it and he didn’t say no. But he’ll take issue with it anything I suggest. He’ll find fault with. That’s him pulling in. See how drunk he is before I talk to him. Well he’s stopping to throw the football with the boys in the backyard there so maybe he isn’t so bad off.

·

“Hello.”

“Hello, how did the spring get pulled off the screen door here? I wondered why it wasn’t closing.”

“It’s been off there for the last month, it needs a new hook for the spring to go into.”

“Well what the hell happened to the old one?”

“Who knows, things break. Are we still planning to go to Cedar Point on tomorrow?

“When?”

“Tomorrow, Wednesday?’

“Wednesday, well why Wednesday?”

“Well that’s what you suggested, I don’t have to work.”

He knows I work Monday, Friday Saturday, those three afternoons a week he drops me at the paper’s office. I wonder, has the drink gone now to his brain?

“Well I don’t know how we’re all gonna fit in the car to go that far.”

“Well the older girls don’t want to go, they have other things, so it’s just the youngest six.”

“Well with us that makes eight.”

“Yes so four in the front and four in the back. I can hold little Jo.”

“Well I suppose. If that’s what you want to do.”

“It’s not what I want to do, the children.”

“Well it’s not just the cost of the tickets you know it’s everything else when you get up there like how are we going to feed them and that?”

“We can pack a picnic lunch.”

“Oh you know they’ll be asking for this and that won’t they.”

“Well let ’em ask.”

“All right I’m going to see my mother, told her I’d mow her lawn.”

·

Go ahead. Go see your mother. Think she’ll give you money for the bar tonight, well maybe she will. I don’t know where you get it. Her with her neat little house and her cooking. Why can’t I be like his mother that’s what he thinks, why don’t I stand around all day ironing, and making pie crusts, her with her sixth grade education, and her incessant pedal-powered Singer sewing machine. Oh her peach pies, he says. She can cook. Never occurs to him that the oven here’s been broken for a year, or that she has a washer and dryer so she can iron the clean linen all day. Married at fourteen, right off the farm well she’s a good woman but God forbid you’d have to ask her a serious question, she’ll clap her hands together and say “Is that so!” and smile no matter what you tell her. Course she can’t hear and he’s getting hard of hearing too. It’s congenital. Never occurs to him that it might be harder to keep a house clean with eight children in it. Oh let ’em sit there and talk to her damn parakeet. He’s not to be relied on, not in this state. But I’m hoping.

·

Do you remember this event? I walked over to Food Town with your brothers Tim and Luke, I told them we might be going and they danced around. We’re going to Cedar Point we’re going to Cedar Point; we’re going to tomorrow, are we going? Yes, I think so. We’ll see, I have to say that see, what if he’s out drinking all night and then to say no to them. The two boys were barefoot, and they had just tarred and graveled the little alleyway that cuts from Pine Street over to the grocery. But they were walking right through the tar, look it’s so soft and squishy and their little feet leaving footprints in the tar. Now you’ll never get that off your feet, I tell them, and my shoes too, getting black tar all over my shoes, and them sticking to the ground.

Well we got ham for sandwiches and some Oreos and chips, some treats like I said, so we won’t have to buy food there, and milk and potatoes that I needed anyway. The boys pushed the grocery cart home. They were all excited now. I asked them to please take the cart back to the grocery, well it’s two blocks away, but no it sets there by the porch and five of them walk by it and it doesn’t happen unless I beg them, they have no discipline see, discipline comes from a father.

Later that night he came home and he wasn’t in too bad a shape. I thought well now he knows the children are watching him, waiting for him, maybe that will straighten him up a little. He even had the nerve to scold me about the groceries, didn’t like the way I had bought the groceries. Oh well that’s not gonna be enough, he said, you didn’t get cheese for the sandwiches, and what are we gonna carry this all in? Well what’s wrong with a paper bag? I say, and he says, now we’re not going to walk around carrying a paper bag all day, oh he’s always worried about how something is going to look to the outside world but doesn’t even notice whether his children have enough to eat. You didn’t get anything to drink he says, they can drink water I say. And you children stood around and watched us arguing wondering if that meant we wouldn’t go, but I knew his arguing meant that we would.

Do you remember how it started out? Well we got up early and I made the sandwiches, we packed up a bottle of water with ice, and all, get all the kids in the car.

The car was parked there in front of the garage. Dad starts up the engine and oh there’s a terrible squealing sound and a big burst of fur comes wafting out of the engine, like a huge storm of dandelion fluff in the wind, a terrible cloud of it right out over the hood. I recognize the color, but I don’t say.

“What in the hell,” he says, turns the car off.

“What was that, what was it?” all you children are yelling.

He goes and opens the hood and you children start to get out.

“You just stay in the car now.” He’s yelling and cursing, “Oh for God’s sake.”

I knew. I got out to see if I could help him. Well when I heard the squeal I thought it sounded like a kitten, and sure enough a kitten had crawled up there into the engine and when the fan belt went on, well, you can imagine. It was terrible. He went and got a grocery bag, and the dustpan and scooped up the poor little torn body, and closed it. I thought we should bury it but he said a dog would find it so he wrapped it up in newspaper and put it in the garbage can with the lid on tight. The kids had the windows rolled down in the car, the boys saying, I want to see. No you’re not, he said, just stay in the car. That was how the day started. You and your sister were crying for the poor little kitten. Which one was it, you wanted to know, was it one of the black ones with the white paws, or the calico? But we couldn’t say right then.

“Well now don’t cry, there wasn’t anything anyone could do, it was an accident, that happens, God has his plans.”

I hadn’t seen mother cat, but I worried for her when she returned to the dark garage and tried to count them up.

We went up Rt. 68, I used to drive that way with my father when he went up to the lake to fish, or in earlier years when the Healys had the cottage there and we were small children.

“Are we going to see the beach,” you wanted to know. You were set on seeing a beach. Joseph was on my lap in the front and kept crawling over into the back seat and then back it was hot of course though we had the windows down. We had gotten up early, so the boys slept, and Carrie read her Nancy Drew book.

When we got there of course the older kids wanted to go one way and the younger kids another. They weren’t tall enough to go on the bigger rides. I can’t quite recall but that we all went in different directions, I had said let’s make a point to meet back here in two hours, at this picnic spot, and they all said yes.

I remember you and I rode the gondola that carries you over the park, and how I held little Joseph worried that he was small enough to fall through the bar that holds you in place. And there was the new ride, the Log Run where you’re in a boat that slides down into a pool of water and everyone gets wet, and we did that several times. But somewhere around there you were lost with your sister Carrie. The two of you wandering around, looking for the beach, which you finally found, but it was on the other side of a chain link fence, and no way to get to it. By the time you got back the lunch was mostly gone and the cookies all eaten. So all summer you had been waiting for this day but when it came, you ended up pressing your face against a fence and walking around hungry and thirsty, or so you said. We spent a little time in Frontier Town just you and I, together. They had crafts people making soap and candles. There was a blacksmith and a glassblower twisting big globes of liquid glass, which you liked, and I reminded you that your grandfather was a glassblower.

Meanwhile your father had gone off to have a look around, and get a cold beer to have with lunch. Of course he didn’t stop there, and by afternoon when I saw him again he was unsteady on his feet. By then it was getting to be around five and everyone was getting tired and hungry again. So we get in the car.

Patty always had to have the radio.

“CKLW Motor City Music, Bringing you the Motown Sound with the Sizzling Sound of the Summer Countdown…”

“Do we have any cookies left I didn’t get any.”

“They’re all gone.”

“I’m hungry.”

“It’s gonna be ‘Light My Fire,’ try to set the night on FIIIIYAAA, yea’….”

“That’s enough of that. Now turn it off it gets on my nerves.”

“Mom I got sunburned look at my shoulder.”

“I told you to wear sleeves and you wouldn’t listen.”

It took forever to get out of that parking lot as I recall, we sat there in a long line of idling cars, had all the windows down, still our legs were sticking to the hot plastic seats, packed in against one another, and I could see that your father was looking sleepy already.

I said, “You better take the smaller roads, so you can take your time.” I knew he wouldn’t have to go as fast, seeing what condition he was in, so we did go down through Fostoria way. He would be OK for a minute, but it was awful hot and muggy, was like the motion of the car was putting him to sleep, and a few times he drifted side to side. We got into Fostoria, you know that’s a railroad center, and we stopped to wait for a long train there, well he started to doze off at the crossing. I reached over and took the keys out of the ignition. He didn’t even notice when the train had passed.

I said. “Alright we’ll just stay right here and the cars behind us will have to go around.” And they did.

There we were at the railroad crossing with him asleep, literally at the wheel. Oh I never wished so much that I could drive as I did right then. Bess and I were going to learn to drive when we got out of the Navy but we never did, I know I must have been the last woman in America didn’t know how to drive. I thought now what am I going to do. Evening coming on and still thirty miles from home, stuck at a railroad crossing, police will come and take him to jail sure as hell.

Tim was about 14, he said, “I’ll drive, I’ll drive us.”

“Now nofody belse needs to drie this car,” your father says waking up.

“Oh yes they do.” I said to him, I was angry then. “I have the keys and you’re not getting them. I’m not gonna sit here and let you kill us all.”

“Now relax. For God’s sake now there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Sure there isn’t, you just try to take these and I will get the police here. You can roll it over to the curb there, just take a nap then, or get some coffee somewhere.”

“Now just gimme the keys.”

“No I won’t.” I wouldn’t do it.

Well you little ones in the back were starting to plead and cry, I want to go home, how are we going to get home. Little Joseph had been sleeping against the door woke up and started crying.

And you piped up shouting at me, “We never should have tried to go to Cedar Point to begin with, then the kitten wouldn’t be dead and we wouldn’t all be stuck here.”

I thought you might be right, I thought now God’s punishing me for trying to put pleasure in our lives when the fates had ordained against it. Why I couldn’t seem to learn that I don’t know.

“I’ll drive, I know how to drive,” Tim said.

“No I will,” Rebecca argued, “I’m older.”

“But I’ve practiced more,” Tim said, “but if the police stop us what are we going to say?”

“Well, I’ll just have to tell them what happened. He’s not fit to drive, if he doesn’t kill us he’ll run into someone else.”

“Alright now Russ you scoot over.”

“Now I don’t need him to drive.”

“Let him drive, Dad, don’t, you can’t.” Carrie and Luke are crying, and then little Joseph half hysterical screams, “Dad let Tim drive!”

And so he did. Always did whatever little Jo said.

I gave Tim the keys.

“Go slowly Tim.”

“I will.”

We got onto Route 224 and went along pretty smoothly.

“Gas tank’s on empty but I think we have enough to get home,” Tim said.

It was starting to get dusk, and lights were coming on in the houses along the road. The big red Bonneville cruised along, you children were quiet. It took us awhile but we got home. Pulled up under the maple tree out front, and the doors on all sides opened, we jump out like swimmers off a sinking ship. Left him there sleeping in the front seat. I carried little Joseph up the creaking porch steps.

First fire-fly out there by the garage, the green light against the grey, I’ve never thought about it but it’s interesting that their light comes and goes without sound, just a lighting and a darkness and a quiet around it. Yet it has a kind of music.

It was sad for the children, but they joked about it in later years. I had hoped to make a treat for them, but it seems like I had gone against the nature of what our lives were then and that just made things worse.

I thought of that day when Dad won the horse race so big, the same day his mother went to her deathbed.

So after that I didn’t try too much to make our situation seem more promising than it actually was. I don’t know if that was a good idea or not.