Serendipity Green (3 page)

The strip on West Wooseman leaves precious little important commerce for the old brick buildings surrounding the square. And so there is Paula Varney's Just Giraffes stuffed animal shop where H. W. Colby's Hardware used to be; an art gallery and framing shop where Borden Brother's Shoes used to be; one antique shop where Porter's Western Auto used to be, another where Morton's IGA used to be; a travel agency where Klinger's Paint used to be; the Pizza Tepee with its wooden Indian holding a large Italian pie, each pepperoni slice intricately carved, where Sylvia's Family Restaurant used to be; the Daydream Beanery with its muffins and cappuccino and brain-numbing dulcimer music, where Grinspoon's Department Store used to be.

So all the real businesses and the real business people are gone from the square, either forced to close or forced to relocate to one of the asphalt-moated plazas on West Wooseman, on the flat fertile soil that used to be the Van Welter family farm and the Grabenstetter family farm and the Warner family farm and the McBiffy family farm.

When Karen Aitchbone feels her husband slip into bed, she whispers what she whispers at least three nights a week. “How'd your meeting go, honey bun?”

D. William Aitchbone kisses his wife's cold ear. “That woman has got more brass than a marching band.”

She knows who he's talking about. He's talking about Katherine Hardihood.

3

Katherine Hardihood is the last to leave the library community room. She is the last to leave because she has the key. She has the key because she is head librarian of the Tuttwyler branch. She has been head librarian for twenty-one years now. She also is one of the original members of the Squaw Days Committee, along with Donald Grinspoon, Delores Poltruski, and unfortunately, D. William Aitchbone.

A year shy of fifty, Katherine Hardihood has not a single physical feature a man might find appetizing. She is a throwback—and she knows it—to the time when all unappetizing women—if their brains could carry it—served their communities as either schoolteachers or librarians. But no one in Tuttwyler feels particularly sorry for Katherine Hardihood. It is obvious to all that she loves her solitary librarian's life.

She pulls the plug on the Mr. Coffee and turns the thermostat down to sixty. Before clicking off the lights, she pulls a white knit hat over her straight, chopped-at-the-jaw librarian's hair. She loops a matching scarf around her spindly librarian's neck. She spider-walks her dry librarian's fingers into a pair of white mittens, then pulls on a noisy caramel-brown polyester coat. It falls all the way to her blue Eskimo boots, which she had worn throughout the meeting to keep her flat librarian's feet warm. She closes the door behind her, twice shaking the knob to make sure it's locked. She ascends into the horizontal snow, her enormous librarian's glasses protecting her square librarian's head like the visor on a welder's helmet.

Despite I-491, Tuttwyler is still far enough from Cleveland for Katherine Hardihood to walk home alone in the dark, though she does hold the community room key ready in her be-mittened hand. She knows just what to do if she's attacked: She'll take that key and pop the rapist's eye like a raw oyster, and scream at the top of her librarian's lungs,
fire, fire, fire
. She's read somewhere that yelling
help
chases good Samaritans away, while yelling
fire
brings them in droves. So she'll yell
fire, fire, fire
.

She walks down East Wooseman to North Grant. The old three-story Odd Fellows building, now an antique mall, keeps the wind and snow away from her for an entire block. The In & Out convenience store is still open and she considers going in for a pint of lime sherbet, but through the front window she sees Dick Mueller and Delores Poltruski browsing the snack aisle. She will give them their space. Who in their right mind eats sherbet on a night like this, anyway? She crosses the snow covered parking lot and heads up Oak Street.

Oak is a modest street, lined not with oaks but with evergreens and sycamore. Most of the houses on Oak were built just after World War II, affordable starter homes for newly returned GIs and their high school sweetheart brides. They are tiny, two-bedroom ranches with one bathroom, no dining room, and a kitchen hardly wide enough for a table. Despite their modest profiles, these houses are painted the same soapy white as the impressive giants on South Mill. And all have dark green shutters.

Katherine Hardihood's tiny ranch is exactly half way down Oak Street. Still three houses away she can see her orange cat, Rhubarb, sitting on the window table, as straight and still as a bowling trophy. “There's my little mister,” she sings out. She exchanges the community room key for her house key and goes in. The dark-yellow stench of ammonia fills her narrow librarian's nose. “Jiminy Cricket, Rhubarb, not again!”

What Rhubarb has done again is piss the curio cabinet. Backed up and pissed it like an African lion marking the baobab tree where he hangs his kill.

Katherine Hardihood goes immediately for the rag and Pine Sol she keeps under the sink. Still in her noisy coat, knit hat and mittens, she wipes down the cabinet, then goes twice around her miniature living room with a spraycan of Glade. She picks up Rhubarb and cradles him on his back like a human baby. She buries her face in his soft belly, his full tomcat balls just a half-inch from her hollow librarian's cheek. “You're worse than Bill Aitchbone, do you know that?” she says in that high gooey voice people reserve for babies and pets. “Do you know that? Do you? Hmmm?”

As she talks to Rhubarb she can see Dick Mueller pull into his driveway. A few seconds later Delores Poltruski pulls in. Snacks in hand they go inside. A bad night for sherbet, maybe, but a good night for love.

Katherine Hardihood does not mind that Dick and Delores are copulating right across the street from her. She does not mind that people up and down Oak Street are copulating. She does not mind that people all over Old Tuttwyler and New Tuttwyler, and all over the world are copulating. She loves her uncomplicated, uncopulative life. She loves her little house and her big pissing tomcat. Most of all she loves the library.

Katherine Hardihood never knew Rhubarb's first human name, if indeed he ever had one. She found him three hot Junes ago, already full-grown, licking the melted chocolate off a Milky Way wrapper in the parking lot of the In & Out. It was obvious from his intense licking, and the enormous size of his head in relationship to the rest of his scrawny frame, that he was a starving street cat. So she took him home and fed him milk and tunafish and bowl after bowl of Meow Mix. And she cuddled him and snuggled him and talked and sang to him, and went for the Pine Sol whenever he pissed the curio cabinet she inherited from her Aunt Edith. She named the cat Melvil, after Melvil Dewey, originator of the Dewey Decimal system.

One August morning, when Melvil was finally fat, and his head again in proper proportion to his body, she let him outside. He disappeared until November, reappearing at her back door during the year's first real snow, as scrawny and big-headed as before. The following summer when she again let Melvil outside, she tied him to twenty feet of clothesline. Fastened to a stake in the middle of the yard, Melvil was free to explore as he wished now, though his world was infinitely smaller, and no matter which direction he went, he always ended up back where he began.

Melvil at first hated the clothesline and his bejeweled pink collar, and his Magellan-like existence. He strained so hard to pull free that he wore the fur off his neck. But after a few outings he surrendered to his mistress' madness and accepted his shrunken world. When he was hungry or thirsty he'd circle to the backdoor where his Meow Mix and water bowls sat. When he wanted to warm up, he'd sit in full sun on the edge of the concrete patio. When he got too warm, he'd make a half-circle to the rhubarb patch, and shade himself under the broad green leaves.

Katherine Hardihood had not planted the rhubarb. It had been planted years ago by the original owner of the house, Phil Davenport, high school buddy of Artie Brown—the same Artie Brown who came home from World War II with one foot and a Congressional Medal of Honor, and in the glow of his celebrity, impregnated Lois Dornick, an appetizing girl still in high school.

Seeing Melvil encamped under the rhubarb leaves made Katherine Hardihood laugh, and made her love him more. Soon she was calling him Rhubarb more than Melvil. Soon Rhubarb was his name.

Sometimes she would anger Rhubarb by clipping off the red stalks that supported his leafy canopy, and then bake them into a pie. Once she had given a piece of her rhubarb pie to Howie Dornick when he was working in front of her house, cleaning out the storm sewer. He ate it in four or five bites and told her it was very good. For a few days afterward she considered baking him an entire rhubarb pie, and taking it to his unpainted house on South Mill. But in the end she didn't. Despite being born of a beautiful high school girl, and sired by a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Howie Dornick was as unappetizing as she.

Katherine Hardihood loves the library because that's where the
facts
are. She loves facts—any fact that pertains to something or someone other than herself. She loves finding out that tomatoes aren't a vegetable but a fruit; that the button was invented in 1200 AD; that the words
truth, tree
and
endure
share the same Indo-European root,
deru;
that the gestation period for the opossum is just 13 days; that a black man from Cleveland, Garrett A. Morgan, invented those automatic traffic lights that go from red to yellow to green, like the new one at South Mill and Tocqueville.

She knows other facts as well: that fathers don't always return home from the wars they fight; that mothers sometimes die in car accidents; that the aunts who take you in have fat, wonderful laps; that uncles, when their fat-lapped wives are away shopping, are not always as nice as they seem. In short, Katherine Hardihood discovered early in her life that facts about other things keep your mind off the facts about yourself.

Her need for facts about other things drew her to the library. My, the facts in there! Billions of them. Gathered. Numbed. Alphabetized. Indexed. Chronologized. Footnoted. Explained. Defined. Put in plain English. Tantalizingly sprinkled into poetry. Churned into wonderful works of fiction. Scrupulously researched and worried over by others who love facts as much as she does.

It is this love of facts that brought Katherine Hardihood so willingly to the Squaw Days Committee thirteen years before. It is this love of facts that keeps her on the committee now, fighting her relentless guerrilla war against those who do not.

Squaw Days had been Donald Grinspoon's idea—at least the idea of holding some kind of annual festival had been his idea. “The town's drying up like a prune,” he told the handful of carefully-selected people gathered in his office one November night. He and fellow Republican Ronald Reagan had just won re-election to their respective jobs. “Tuttwyler Mills has been closed for a decade now, and nobody's shown a lick of interest in taking over the snack cake plant. Two-thirds of the stores on the square are empty. Even some of the houses on South Mill are for sale. We need a shot in the arm.”

D. William Aitchbone, then just one year out of law school, had an idea. “We need a Japanese auto plant.”

Dick Mueller, serving his first stint as post commander of the VFW, rejected that idea immediately. “No we don't.”

D. William Aitchbone persisted. “They're building plants all over the United States now. Why shouldn't we get one? Think of the jobs!”

That brought Dick Mueller straight out of his chair. “Think of Artie Brown, young man! He left his right foot on Guadalcanal.”

That ended any further discussion of luring a Japanese auto plant to Tuttwyler.

“There's no way any new plant is coming here anyway,” Donald Grinspoon said, “not without the I-491 leg. And we'll all be long in the grave before that gets built.”

“Maybe we could get a junior college,” Katherine Hardihood suggested.

“Or a prison,” Sheriff Norman F. Cole said.

“Or a landfill,” D. William Aitchbone said.

“Or a nuclear power plant,” Delores Poltruski said.

“I like Katherine's junior college idea,” said Phyllis Bastinado, principal at G.A. Hemphill Elementary. Phyllis Bastinado was a huge woman, the approximate weight and shape of a fully inflated farm tractor tire.

That's when Donald Grinspoon demonstrated just why he never lost an election. “Those are all fine ideas. Even the Japanese auto plant is a fine idea, Bill, if you eliminate the Japanese part. But all of those things would take years. We need something now. Something that puts us back on the map right away. Tuttwyler's drying up like a prune.”

“Are you sure we can't get the snack cake line back?” asked Dick Mueller. “Your wife's a Tuttwyler.”

Donald Grinspoon's eyes filled with tears. “The Tuttwyler's haven't had a say in the company since the Fifties. If they had, it wouldn't have moved to Tennessee in the first place.”

Dick Mueller understood the tears in the mayor's eyes. His wife was in bad shape, too. “What do hillbillies know about making snack cakes?”

Everyone nodded. The company's baked goods never tasted the same since the move, especially their famous chocolate cupcakes, with their script frosting
T
and whipped cream surprise inside.

“I think we should have a festival,” Donald Grinspoon finally said, revealing the real reason for the meeting. “An annual festival that brings in folks from all over the state. From other states, too. A grand festival that will put us back on the map. Something that will make Tuttwyler so damn famous people will visit all year long. Tourism, ladies and gentlemen. That's our ticket to prosperity.”

Everyone agreed that an annual festival was grand idea. Everyone but Katherine Hardihood. “What are we going to be festive about?” she asked.