Finding Fortune (24 page)

Concentrate on the placement of one foot in front of the other
. I stared down at the dirt path and realized what I was looking at—wheelchair tracks and the imprints of Garrett's giant work boots. I smiled to myself. So maybe Hildy had been the first one to christen the labyrinth after all.

I kept spiraling slowly, adding my tracks to Hildy's and Garrett's, until all at once I was there, in the middle of the labyrinth.
Pause on reaching the center. Surrender your burdens.
I closed my eyes and saw the four of us—Mom, Dad, Nora, and me—sitting on a blanket by the river, eating my special brownies that Dad had ordered. Blue was there too, waiting in the truck behind us, because after the picnic, Dad and I would take him for a ramble in the woods and then I'd go back to Dad's new place to spend the night. That might be kind of fun, I thought, having a sleepover with just my father and Old Blue.

“Hi, Ren!”

I glanced up from my surrendering. Hugh was standing at the entrance waving wildly as if I'd been lost on a desert island. “Stay there!” he called. “I'm coming in!”

I wondered what the Labyrinth Society would think of Hugh's walking style. He started out with his head down, moving speedily along the pathway like he was Mr. Pac-Man. But then his jerky little march turned into a jog, and about halfway to the middle he made his arms into airplane wings. By the time he reached the last spiral, he was shuffling.

“Is this your first time through?” I asked when he joined me at the center.

“Uh-huh. Garrett made us wait for Hildy. The pearls tired her out so much that she wasn't ready to come out here until after dinner last night.”

“Garrett pushed her in the wheelchair?”

“Yeah, and then the mosquitoes came out and it got kind of dark, so Mine said I should wait till this morning. She said the vibe would be better without the bugs and a flashlight.”

I laughed. “So what do you think of the vibe so far?”

“Pretty good.” Hugh shrugged. He surveyed the little circle of open space at our feet. “You think it's okay if we sit down?”

“I think so,” I said. I didn't remember reading anything on the labyrinth sites that said “No Sitting Allowed.”

When Hugh splayed across the labyrinth's center, I told him it might be better if we sat in a yoga sort of pose, so we ended up side by side, facing the school, with our legs crisscrossed in front of us.

“Can you believe it, Hugh?” I asked as we sat gazing across the field of shells at the school. “We did it. We're the Fortune Hunters.”

Hugh grinned, squinting one eye and peering at the sun coming over the tower. “Now we
have
to carve our names up there.”

“We will,” I assured him. “As soon as there's a new rail for me to hold onto. And no more wasps.”

“I already asked Garrett about fixing the tower and he said he'd work on it. But he's got to hurry up and do it before Tucker has to go home.” Hugh was quiet for a second. “And before I have to go back to Chicago.”

“What?”
My chest squeezed with dismay. “What do you mean, go back to Chicago?”

“Mine says we're probably moving back there once Hildy's all better.”

“But … but I thought Mine liked it here. She's made friends with Hildy and she's gotten so much better at cooking. And I thought you liked it too.”

“I do!” Hugh said. “I like lots of stuff. You and Hildy and Garrett. And Wayne. I'm his second favorite person now besides the Mayor. And Sister Loud wants to keep giving me piano lessons, and I like my bunk bed and the card catalog, and I'm even starting to think buttons are interesting.” Hugh stopped and dug in his pocket for his button blank. “You still got yours?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, I think I've learned that I might be better off making my own luck from now on.”

Hugh studied the button blank cupped in his palm. “Part of me really wants to stay here,” he said in a faraway voice. “But when everybody's busy or gone, it gets kind of lonely, you know?” I couldn't answer. Then I felt his hand on my arm, delicate as a leaf.

“I'm going to miss you, Hugh,” I said, trying to swallow the ache in my throat.

“I'll come and visit sometimes.”

I nodded. They were the same words I had said to him about a month ago. It seemed like years had passed since then. “I know you will,” I told him.

I traced my finger through one of Hildy's wheelchair tracks near my knee. What was it she had told me yesterday on the stage? Something about taking life and changes as they come—good and bad—one step at a time.

“You ready to walk back out?” I asked.

“Just a second.” Hugh leaned over to the nearest upturned shell and carefully placed his button blank inside its pearly hollow, covering one of the holes that had been cut so long ago. “Okay, I'm ready,” he said as he pushed himself to his feet.

Then, with a little bow, he swept his hand forward. “Ladies first.”

I bowed back and stepped onto the path.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The idea for this book began more than ten years ago, about 1,500 miles from the Iowa banks of the Mississippi. I was vacationing with my family on Captiva Island in Florida, and one rainy day we found ourselves at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in nearby Sanibel. I remember following behind my three young daughters as they flitted around the exhibits, marveling over record-size conch shells and other exotic specimens from the deep waters of Florida and the Caribbean. Then, just as the girls had hit their museum limit and were pulling me toward the door, I spotted a shell punched with holes in one of the display cases. The label underneath mentioned Muscatine, Iowa. Until that moment, I had no idea that buttons were once made from shells or that the former “Pearl Button Capital of the World” was only a forty-five-minute drive from my adopted home in Iowa City.

For me, like most people, the Midwest had always meant farm country. So I was fascinated when I made my first visit to the Muscatine History and Industry Center and learned about the brief stretch of time during the early 1900s when Iowa was more famous for its harvest of freshwater shells than its production of corn and soybeans. My original visit to the Center was full of interesting surprises: in 1911, for example, there were so many children under fourteen working in Muscatine's pearl button factories that they formed their own union; Ronald Reagan, when he was still an actor, thirty-five years before he became president of the United States, had had the honor of selecting Muscatine's Pearl Button Queen; buttons made from shell feel cold to the touch compared to those made from plastic; and most exciting of all, some clammers made their fortune by finding pearls inside the humble-looking shells that they dragged from the river.

Though the field trip to Muscatine had captured my imagination, I was preoccupied with another book project at the time. I tucked the History and Industry Center brochure into my “Idea File” and soon forgot about it. Then, a few years later, I stumbled across an article in the
Des Moines Register
called “Fading Away.” The piece told the story of Le Roy, the smallest incorporated town left in Iowa. Population: 13. According to the article, the street signs were falling down. The sidewalks were overgrown. But the town still had a mayor—a seventy-one-year-old man named Emmet Joy who happened to own an outspoken donkey named Wayne and who still conducted city-council meetings in an old hog-weighing station.

On a whim, I tracked down Mayor Joy's phone number and asked if I could come for a visit. I'd always been intrigued by modern-day ghost towns like Le Roy. On countless car trips through different states, I had seen lonely old main streets with shuttered buildings flash by, and I could never help wondering: Who had lived there once and who on earth would want to stick around? Now was my chance to hear some of those stories firsthand.

By the time I met Mayor Joy at his farm on the outskirts of town, Wayne had sadly passed away and two more people had moved out of Le Roy, continuing a trend that had started when the railroad stopped running there in 1946. Once we were finished chatting, the mayor said I should go see the old brick school. It had closed in 1981, but someone had recently bought it for $3,500. The first tenants, a young family, had moved into a corner of the building where the school offices used to be. “Just bang on the door and holler,” the mayor told me. “They'll let you in.” Luckily they did, and driving home that day I thought back to my discoveries in Muscatine, and the fictional town of Fortune began to take shape in my mind.

While Muscatine managed to survive the rise and fall of the pearl-button industry, other former button towns scattered along our country's rivers—from Minnesota to Tennessee—disappeared with the changing times, leaving barely a trace. I wrote this book in the hope that it will encourage curious readers to always be on the lookout for the Mayor Joys and Hildys of the world, who keep our fading history alive.

A typical family-run clamming camp along the banks of the Mississippi, circa
1915
. While men worked the shell beds, women and children set up camp, cooked meals, and kept the fires burning under the metal tanks where the mussels would be steamed open and prepared for cleaning. (Courtesy of the Arnold Miller Photograph Collection, Musser Public Library, Muscatine, Iowa)

Father and son with cut-shell pile, circa 1940
. Like the character of Tom, many boys worked alongside their fathers on clamming boats. Others were put to work onshore, hauling buckets of shells and sorting them according to size before the cutting process. (Courtesy of the Muscatine History and Industry Center)

The cutting shop at the U.S. Button Company, circa 1915.
Shell-cutting was a dangerous business that required skill, as well as patience with unpleasant working conditions. As jets of water sprayed over their machinery to control heat, dust, and flying bits of debris, the cutters held each shell in place with tongs and used tubular saws to produce the blanks. (Courtesy of the Muscatine History and Industry Center)