“You worry too much, Anne,” my father said, waving away my mother’s concern. “You will see. Mr. Ingersoll will astound everyone.”
But everyone wasn’t going to hear Mr. Ingersoll speak.
My mother wasn’t because she was already growing larger with the next baby, a literally built-in excuse for not going anywhere. The boys barely sat through lectures at school, let alone a lecture on a Saturday. Ethel was too young, Mary too needed, and Nan too good hearted to slip out without finishing her chores.
I was going. And I knew enough to keep my saucebox shut about it. Otherwise, I’d be plucked up for a task that would surely keep me from being astounded. My father had been reading Mr. Ingersoll’s speeches to me over my mending and I had to say, unlike Mr. Henry George, Mr. Ingersoll was no bore. Also, there would be lunch.
When Father put on his hat, I slinked quietly for the door to make sure that when he left, I left. My mother had moved on to wringing out the laundry. She knew he would do as he wanted. It was what my father did. And what he wanted was to invite Mr. Bob Ingersoll—great orator, freethinker, and infamous atheist—to Corning to speak inside of Father Coghlan’s town hall.
* * *
It was just the two of us, as we knew it would be. The day was one of those early October afternoons when the sky was bluer than my father’s eyes, and the cool air seemed to lift us up with each step. My father was even more excited than I was, and I listened as he repeated all his favorite of Ingersoll’s ideas on the walk to the train station. There is no God. There is no place called hell. And women should be able to wear pants.
The pants idea he added just for me. He knew how much I loved to hear it. Pants! What a dream. Dresses dragged, pants floated. Just like my father’s words. And I couldn’t wait to meet this man who would let me wear a pair of pants.
I heard him before I saw him. He was loudly saying his good-byes to people on the train. I knew it was him because my father smiled down at me, his eyes telling me to get ready.
I stood straighter, hands at my sides, a serious look on my face . . . a pants-wearing look.
A giant man emerged and grabbed my father’s entire arm just to shake his hand. His laugh bounced off my chest. He smelled like starched sweat. “Is this Margaret?” he asked.
He put out his large hand so that I might shake it. I’d never shaken anyone’s hand before, so when I didn’t immediately reach out, he took my hand from my side and waggled my arm, his dark eyes piercing mine from under great bushy eyebrows that reached off his forehead like antlers off a buck. “I hear you’re the big bug.”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered politely. “A very big bug.”
The force of his laugh knocked me backward into my father’s coat buttons.
The three of us marched down Market Street, the Chemung River glistening in the sunshine between the buildings. My father and Bob—as he’d told my father and me to please call him—never stopped chattering, not even to listen to each other. Bob was to speak at the town hall at two o’clock. But before this . . . there would be lunch. This “big bug” planned on eating big. I knew my father had money in his pocket and my plan was chicken legs, corn fritters, and mashed potatoes.
I did get potatoes, but they weren’t mashed. They were rotten.
The first one hit me in the shoulder. The second one hit me in the shin. Then the air was full of rotten everything: beets, tomatoes, apples, and even dried ears of corn. The corn didn’t hurt much. But the apples did. Surprisingly, so did the beets.
My father howled at our attackers to knock it off. Not only did they not listen, they threw more, and with increased vigor, all while dodging at us and shrieking from contorted, angry faces.
Cold spit dripped down my neck and a tomato squished inside one of my boots. I wrapped my arms around my head and tried to move forward down the road, but it was obvious we weren’t going to make it to the town hall. My father tucked me under his arm, and the three of us retreated back toward the train station. The distance lessened the amount of rotten food pelting us, and for the first time I heard their terrible words.
“Return to hell!”
“Get thee back, Satan!”
“Infidel!”
“Devils!”
Once we were safely back at the station, my father—his face as red as his hair—threatened to return to town and take on the entire tomato-throwing troupe. But a second, smaller crowd at the station convinced him not to, along with Mr. Bob Ingersoll.
“Let them be. Remember, Michael,” he said, “anger blows out the lamp of the mind.”
Someone suggested that we wash up in the station, and that Bob give his speech over on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was decided. As we crossed the tracks, I said a silent farewell to my mashed potatoes . . . and the sweet butter I had been planning on drowning them in, since Mary wasn’t going to be there to stop me.
But once Bob began to speak, I forgot about my empty stomach. Like my father, Bob spoke with powerful excitement about freedom, education, and equality. For everyone. Black, white . . . even women. And like my father, he did not believe in God.
“What kind of god drowns his own children?” Bob asked.
I decided I liked Bob. Listening to him, I forgot all about my back bruised by beets, and the anger-twisted faces of the people on Market Street. His words were gentle and kind and welcoming to all. Sitting out in the woods being warmed by a brighter idea of what the world could be, I thought how wrong Father Coghlan was to worry my mother.
* * *
When the McGill brothers left their front porch and followed Joseph, Thomas, Nan, and Ethel down Erie Avenue laughing and shouting at their backs, my brothers and sisters didn’t know yet about the rotten vegetables and shower of spittle, or that Father and I were sitting on soft pine needles having our ears filled with Bob’s preaching on free thought. My brothers’ and sisters’ thoughts were on laundry. They’d gone to pick up what we Higginses called “hill laundry,” which my mother and Mary washed for people who lived on the hill.
But the McGill brothers knew about Bob. As it turned out, all of Corning knew about Bob.
Even so, those McGill boys should not have followed my brothers out of town. They should have known better. Thomas was small, but he made up for it by punching hard.
We all arrived home at the same time. My brothers were covered in blood, my father and I were covered in beet stains. Nan told us what happened with the McGills. I told them what happened with Bob. When I mentioned the part about God drowning his own children, Nan gasped.
“Everyone will hate us,” she said.
“I don’t care!” I shouted.
“Enough,” my mother ordered.
She commanded all of us to get out of our soiled clothes, and then placed Nan and me in charge of washing out the blood and beet stains. “Every speck of it.”
“Every speck?”
Her look withered me. There were a lot of specks. There were even entire splotches.
Nan and I scrubbed until our knuckles were sore and our fingers wrinkled by water.
And on Monday morning at school, when Emma walked right by my desk like I was invisible . . . I cared.