Serendipity Green (14 page)

Eleanor Hbracek hopes no one in the crowd has heard her son's language. “What a thing to say.”

“It's true,” her son says. “You know what they used to call Victorians? Painted Ladies.”

“Which ones are the Victorians?” Bob Hbracek asks.

“Even the Greek Revivals were painted in bright colors,” his son says. “Yellow ochre. Pumpkin orange. Indigo blue.”

“Which ones are the Greek Revivals?” Bob Hbracek asks.

Eleanor Hbracek defends the homeowners. “I think they look nice all white.”

The word
nice
eats through Hugh Harbinger's Solhzacnumbed nerve endings like sharks through a school of San Francisco Bay grunion. He has hated that word since high school Latin, when Brother Peter Paul Tummler, explaining how old words often take on new meanings, said that
nice
, now meaning pleasing or good, is from the Latin word
nescius
, meaning ignorant. Everything else Brother Tummler taught that semester farted right out Hugh's ears. But the fact that
nice
really meant
ignorant
could not escape his ears. It soaked into his brain, prickling his already tender synapses, transfixing him, supporting his earliest suspicions about life's terminal absurdity, justifying his adolescent withdrawal and rebellion. From that right-after-lunch Latin class on, Hugh would reject anything deemed nice by others: Nice clothes, nice music, nice girls, nice times, nice thoughts, nice art, nice words. No longer could he conform or be average. Conformity and averageness were nice things, ignorant things. How, he wondered, could anyone intentionally accept ignorance? And so he went go off to the Cleveland Institute of Art where his aversion for all things nice was immediately recognized as genius. And where does a brilliant American art school graduate go but into advertising? Where to but New York City? Where to but the anything-but-nice, anything-but-ignorant streets of the East Village? To friendships with people like Jean Jacques Bistrot and Buzzy. To rampant, unemotional copulation with the very rich Zee Levant.

But now Hugh Harbinger is no longer among his fellow un-nice in New York City. He is in Tuttwyler, Ohio, following a junior high school band and a whipped cream-bleeding cupcake, and his parents, to the cemetery, to memorialize everyone who's died since 1803.

The slate sidewalk takes Hugh Harbinger and the Hbraceks up a slight knoll. At the top of the knoll Hugh lets out a bedazzled “Oh Momma!”

Ernest Not Irish dos not follow the parade to the cemetery for the memorial services. He stays on the square, walking slowly along the row of food tents. He buys a Coke and a big cookie from the Knights of Columbus. “Enjoy,” the woman working the counter says to him. She is wearing a gold badge with red ribbons. DELORES POLTRUSKI SQUAW DAYS COMMITTEE, it reads. She also is wearing a construction paper headband and feather, just like the kids in the junior high band.

Ernest Not Irish, with his Coke in one hand and his I'M A REAL INDIAN placard in the other, has to let Delores Poltruski stick the big cookie between his teeth. “Are you really a real Indian?” she asks.

He nods that he is.

“Well, thank you so much for coming,” she says.

Earnest Not Irish walks to the gazebo and sits on the steps. The Coke is good and cold. The cookie tasty. He takes a letter from the back pocket of his Levis and reads it for the umpteenth time:

Dear Mr. Not Irish,

If you think Chief Wahoo is a disgrace to your people, you should come to Squaw Days.

The letter is not signed. But there is a PS:

Be sure to stick around for the Re-Enactment!

Ernest Not Irish finishes his cookie and walks back to the Knights of Columbus tent. “What time is this Re-Enactment?” he asks the woman named Delores Poltruski.

“Nine sharp at G.A. Hemphill Elementary School,” she tells him.

“What exactly do they re-enact? Not the clubbing I hope?”

“Goodness no,” Doris Poltruski laughs. “Princess Pogawedka's rising out of the smoke. You'll love it.”

Ernest Not Irish buys another big cookie.

The same bedazzling sight that forces an “Oh Momma!” from Hugh Harbinger's lips also stops his feet. He notices that it has not only stopped his feet, but also his parents feet, and, momentarily at least, the feet of almost everyone else flooding towards the cemetery. “Tell me, mother,” he says. “Do you think that house looks nice?”

“Nice?” she says. “It's the ugliest house I've ever seen.” She and Bob hurry down the sidewalk.

Hugh Harbinger does not hurry on. He wobbles off the sidewalk. He sits on the unmowed grass. His eyes fix on the great shimmering truth before him. Inside him the sharks are still feasting on the grunion. “Now that is
green
,” he says.

He has never seen such a green. It is not, thank God, hunter green, the green that for a decade now has permeated every product line from polo shirts to potato peeler handles; permeated every economic class, so that even the poorest of the poor are these days wearing hunter green jogging shorts and drinking coffee brewed in hunter green coffeemakers. Yes, thank God, it is not hunter green. Nor is it the festive green of cups and saucers made during the fifties. Nor the green of sixties' miniskirts or seventies' polyester leisure suits. Nor is it the green of eighties' punk-rock hair. Nor the green of all those shutters on the impressive houses up and down this street, the green of grass dripping spring dew, the green of grass coated with autumn frost.

It also is not the green of April leaves or May leaves or June leaves or July leaves or August leaves or September leaves, not the green of pine needles or fern fonds or cactus or palm, nor the green of plastic Easter eggs. It is not the green of the pants middle-aged men wear to play golf, not the green Girl Scouts wear, not the fertile green the Irish love so much. It is not the rainforest green Amazonian Indians hunt monkey in, nor the green of tundra moss Eskimos track caribou across, or the green of deep water. It is not the sugary green of Kool-Aid, the anemic green of hospital walls, the green of iceberg lettuce, the green of canned peas. It is not the green of guacamole, of cabbage rolls, of olives. Or the green of traffic lights, ambulances, or Army tanks. It not the green of Eleanor Hbracek's puffy Christmas slippers, the green of the clip-on necktie Bob Hbracek wears to Christmas mass, or the green of the highway signs that point you east toward New York. It is not any of the greens you'd find in even the biggest box of Crayolas, any of the greens you'd find on an artists' pallet. It is not the green of American money.

It is a green such as Hugh Harbinger, renowned genius of color, has never seen before. To the trained technician in him, it is a mysterious green that refuses to stay at a fixed position on the color spectrum—from 490 to 570 nanometers its fickle wavelengths are flying, at once yellowy and blue, at once warm and cool, at once transparent and opaque, at once glossy and flat. To the artist in him, it is a green at once soothing and irritating, at once feminine and masculine, yin and yang, kind and cruel, obstinate and submissive, envious and generous, at once filled with and devoid of hope, of love and hatred, love and loneliness, love and the absence of love. It is a green not only racing back and forth along the color spectrum, but also a green balanced precariously on the spectrum of precious
Time
, between the verdancy of life and the fly-infested rot of death. It is the green of God's fluttering cape and Satan's stomping boots. It is the green of Hugh Harbinger's depression and the green of his resurrection. It is a green he understands better than anyone alive, save maybe the owner of this little two-story frame house.

It is a green that keeps Hugh Harbinger seated on this unmowed lawn while Bob and Eleanor Hbracek drift with the crowd toward the cemetery for the Squaw Days memorial service, where all those buried beneath the green grass will be remembered.

12

The Ferris wheel is still turning, but the midway is all but empty. The food tents on the square are still open, but the sloppy joes and French fries go unsold. Talented village women still man their craft booths, but their quilts and Christmas decorations go unmolested. It is 8:45, the sun is falling, and the crowd is gathering at G.A. Hemphill Elementary School for the Re-Enactment.

It is an old brick school, built in the thirties when, despite the raging depression, schools were still considered monuments to the future; and therefore its temple-like entrance and the sandstone reliefs cornicing the entire three-story building like a halo were not seen, as they would be seen today, as a waste of taxpayers money, but as the very best possible use of it.

Erected right in front of the school's temple-like entrance is a stage. There is a backdrop of painted trees and hills and log cabins with chimneys trickling frozen smoke. In the center of the stage is a pile of real tree stumps. On the corners of the stage sit magnificent stacks of speakers, borrowed from The Gizzard Girls—a local rock band comprised of four despondent high school boys from the expensive new developments. To the left of the stage sits the high school band, the legs of their folding chairs slowing sinking into the ground. To the right of the stage sits the Singing Doves, an ad hoc chorus comprised of the choirs from every church in Tuttwyler, save the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee's non-affiliated Assemblage of the Lord, which believes Christian voices never should be lifted for secular purposes—not even for a worthy event like Squaw Days.

It is three minutes after nine now and the Davy Crockett band director raps on his music stand. The band erupts into the very recognizable
Star Wars
theme:
Bum-BUMMM, bum-bum-bum-bum BUMMM-bum
.

This first piece is just to get the crowd's attention. And it does. And now as the sun is all but spent, and blue floodlights turn the stage ghostly, the band takes the crowd back to the early nineteenth century with a dirge-like rendition of the Beatles' “Yesterday.” The boy playing the bass drum, who after school is the drummer for the Gizzard Girls, is thumping out an Indian pow-wow beat:
DOOM-doom-doom-doom, DOOM-doom-doom-doom
.

The Singing Doves beings to howl eerily. Canisters of dry ice are opened, drowning the stage in unruly smoke. People dressed as pioneers drift into the smoke, completing the tableau. Most of the pioneer men have axes over their shoulders. Most of the pioneer women are carrying baskets. “Yesterday” drags to an end. One of the ax-carrying men walks to the microphone. “Well,” he almost shouts, “we've worked all day a-cuttin' these trees and a-pullin' out these stumps with our horses and oxen, the same beasts of burden that brought us west from our homes in Connecticut. Now let's set these stumps a-blazin', so all the world knows where Tuttwyler is, and will always be!”

A basket-carrying woman joins him at the microphone. She holds up a plaster of Paris roasted chicken. “And let us feast,” she almost shouts, “as our forefathers and fore-mothers feasted at the first Thanksgiving in faraway Plymouth, Massachusetts, thankful for this bountiful land, which God hath bequeathed.”

Now an old man steps to the microphone. He is wearing a tattered Revolutionary War uniform. Many in the crowd applaud. They know who this old man really is. He is Donald Grinspoon, the former mayor, former owner of Grinspoon's Department Store, until this year, chairman of the Squaw Days Committee. He waits for the applause to die, then almost shouts: “And let us not forget the men who gave their lives so that this nation could be born. Nor should we forget the men who will die in wars to come—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War One and World War Two, the Korean Police Action and the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm and all the little wars in between.”

Two children step to the microphone. They carry old-fashioned school slates and they are dressed like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. Donald Grinspoon adjusts the microphone stand for them, sending a screech of feedback across the crowd. The boy almost shouts first: “What about the Indians? We must never forget that this was their land first.”

“That is right,” almost-shouts the girl. “Nor should we forget Princess Pogawedka or tiny Kapusta.”

Another pioneer man, ax over his shoulder, strides to the microphone. “Princess Pogawedka and tiny Kapusta?” he actually shouts. “I am new to this land. Who were they?”

Now another pioneer woman steps to the microphone. She is not carrying a basket, but a huge book. Many in the crowd applaud. They know who this woman really is. She is Katherine Hardihood, head librarian at the Tuttwyler branch, and founding member of the Squaw Days Committee. For ten minutes she reads aloud about the Western Reserve and the coming of the first white settlers. She reads about how John and Amos Tuttwyler who, while hunting for a spot on Three Fish Creek to build their grist mill, happened across the Indian squaw Pogawedka, and perhaps thinking they were in danger of being attacked by other noble savages hiding in the great trees, clubbed her and her baby to death, only to have great remorse afterwards, and to suffer for their mistake the rest of their lives, though they did help build a prosperous village, a village that prospers still, and remembers still poor Princess Pogawedka and tiny Kapusta. As the crowd applauds, many of them snorting away tears, Katherine Hardihood retreats into the billowing dry ice, visibly relieved her part in the Re-Enactment is finished.

The Marching Wildcat Band begins to play a peppy martial version of Pachebel's “Canon in D major.” From the back of the crowd comes a pioneer man with a real torch. He is preceded by a sheriff's deputy who parts the crowd so no one accidentally gets burned. Once on the stage, the man holds the torch high, first to his left, then to his right, then full center, and then, as if this were the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics, lowers the torch into the stumps. There is the sudden buzz of electric fans as strips of shimmering yellow, red and gold plastic are blown skyward.