The Cape Ann (35 page)

As winter dragged into spring, we heard increasing news on the radio and in the newspaper about the war. Men argued around Navarin’s Sinclair station about whether we would get into the fighting. They were pretty evenly divided yes and no. Mama said the Germans in Harvester were snappish when asked about yet another war begun by their people.
“We
didn’t invent Mr. Hitler,” they said. “We’re Americans.” But there were those in town who called them goose-steppers and krauts behind their backs.

Our last name was German, but no one ever directed any comments to me or, so far as I knew, to Mama or Papa, maybe because Papa was so outspokenly anti-German. When he dropped into
Navarin’s station, which he often did in the evenings before Mr. Navarin closed up and before the freight came through, he talked war with Mr. Navarin and Sonny Steen and Axel Nelson and whoever was hanging around.

“If it wasn’t for my bad leg,” Papa told them, “I wouldn’t mind bein’ over there, carrying a gun against the Heinies. We’re gonna fight ’em later. Might as well fight ’em sooner and get it over with.”

I thought about the Witch, Ilsa Kraus, in Morgan Lake. Were people calling her a Heinie? I wondered if she ever heard from Uncle Stan, who was working in Hollywood?

At Christmas he had called Aunt Betty long-distance and told her it wouldn’t be long before he had the money to send for her and set up housekeeping. It had taken more time than he’d expected because the car had broken down and cost him a good deal of money. It was necessary to have a car in California, he assured her.

Aunt Betty had worked as temporary Christmas help at the Ben Franklin Five and Dime in Blue Lake, and after Christmas the owner, a Mr. Miller, had asked her to stay on. She hadn’t told Uncle Stan about this development, as she was determined to save her wages for the fare to California, turning up in Hollywood one day to surprise the socks off Uncle Stan.

I loved to imagine it: Uncle Stan, after work, returning to Cousin Lloyd’s house from the movie studio and sitting on the front steps. Pulling off his shoes because his feet hurt from standing all day, he’d sit in his stocking feet, smoking a Lucky Strike. Up the street, carrying her grip and looking very smart, would march Aunt Betty, jaunty and tickled, anticipating Uncle Stan’s surprise. Then, glancing up and spotting her, he would smack his forehead and holler, his socks flying right off his feet and landing in a banana tree.

I wondered if Aunt Betty would leave before I had my first communion in May. As the cold spring sun melted the snow and the chill breeze dried the runoff, the countryside emerged brown and gray. This was the only season I didn’t like. It was as though winter and spring fought over Minnesota. The sun shone weakly but determinedly; the cold wind blew kitty-corner down across the Dakotas. For two or three weeks you stopped believing in spring altogether. The year was stuck in the slowly drying mud.

Then one day late in April you walked home from school,
carrying your jacket. Your heart grew light at the certainty that winter had been beaten back into the north. It was time to break out the roller skates and jump ropes and hopscotch chalk, to put away the long cotton stockings, the garter belts, and long underwear, the snowsuits and heavy mittens and scarves!

It was nearly time for First Communion.

But First Communion meant first confession. When that knowledge came over me, unexpected, while I tied my new brown oxfords or gathered pussy willow branches outside of town along the tracks, the air grew cold again.

I studied early and late. Sally and Beverly and I went over the lessons twice a week, once at Sally’s on Tuesday; the second time at my house on Friday.

April zipped out of sight as if on greased skids, and then it was the first week in May.

“Sally, ‘What sins are we bound to confess?’” I read from the
Baltimore Catechism
, slouching on a chair in the Wheeler kitchen.

“We are bound to confess all our mortal sins, but it is well also to confess our venial sins,” she responded.

Sister was going to test us randomly on Saturday on all the chapters pertaining to confession and communion. Communion was also called the Holy Eucharist. Holy Eucharist was the name of the wafer you were given that must not be chewed, but must be allowed to slide down your throat without hindrance since it was the body of our Lord Jesus. You wouldn’t
chew
the body of your Lord, would you? If you stopped to think about it, you probably wouldn’t put the body of your Lord in your mouth at all.

One time I made a joke to Papa. He said he was going to play euchre with the boys over at Mr. Navarin’s station after closing, and I told him he was a Holy Eucharist. At first he laughed hard, but then he got mad and told me never to say that again, that it was blasphemy. I still thought it was funny.

Sally and Beverly and I had been studying for half an hour now, and hadn’t seen Mrs. Wheeler, although I could hear someone upstairs, pacing back and forth. Sally’s parents’ room was directly above the kitchen, so it must be Mrs. Wheeler. We rarely saw her anymore, but I was always aware of her, as if she were hiding in the corners, not in a sneaky way, but like a frightened animal. And yet there was a streak of courage in Mrs. Wheeler, if one remembered her saving Hilly from the men in the car.

“Lark.” Beverly sat with her left elbow on the table, head resting on the palm of her hand, and read from the catechism book, “‘What is the Holy Eucharist?’”

“Somebody who plays euchre every Sunday.”

She looked at me dumbly, then the light of comprehension came on, and she slapped her knee with the catechism and laughed with her head thrown back. “Godsakes. Ha ha ha ha. Godsakes.”

Sally stared as if we’d gone mad. I was laughing, too. It was impossible to see Beverly laugh without joining her.

“Doncha get it?” Beverly said, and again broke into wild guffaws. She slipped off her chair, onto the floor and lay laughing in a heap. After a while we forgot what we were laughing about, but we couldn’t stop.

Sally looked away as if we embarrassed her. But there was more in her expression. A wariness. As if she didn’t trust such uncontrolled reactions.

Beverly gasped, “Uncle Eddie plays euchre every Sunday afternoon. Ain’t that somethin’? He does, I swear to God.” She hooted.

“Stop laughing!” Sally shouted. “Do you hear me?” She was out of her chair and standing over Beverly. “Go home then, Beverly. If you can’t stop, go home.”

No one my own age, not even my best friend, was going to tell me I couldn’t laugh. I was running out of steam and about to wind down when she got upset. Now I redoubled my laughing, although it was no longer real. She gave me a dark, wild look, as if she wanted to slap my face. “You’re crazy,” she snapped at me, shoving me so that I would have fallen off the chair but for the edge of the table. “I don’t want you ever to come here again.” Whirling, she ran past me out of the kitchen. I heard her pounding up the stairs to her bedroom.

“Godsakes, what’s wrong?” Beverly questioned. “She turning into a crybaby or something?”

“She wasn’t crying,” I defended, although I, too, was bewildered. And a cold little hand of meanness grabbed my heart, its voice whispering in my ear, “Let her go. Let her cry up there in her room. Serves her right.”

“Let’s go to my house, Beverly.” I began gathering my things. “Maybe Mama will let you stay for supper.”

Loudly, so that Sally might hear, Beverly answered, “Yeah, let’s go to your house, Lark. Your ma makes better cookies anyhow.”

Out the back door we went, Beverly slamming it behind us. “She sure acted like a baby,” Beverly exclaimed as we minced across the muddy backyard to the street.

Glancing back as we reached the corner, I thought I saw Sally at her bedroom window, standing behind the dimity curtain, watching us depart.

“Where’s Sally?” Mama asked.

“She couldn’t come.”

Mama’s typewriter was on the kitchen table, but she carried it into the living room. “I nearly pounded the keys off that machine today,” she told us. “I can type forty words a minute now.”

Beverly and I sat down at the table and took turns reading and answering questions while Mama scrubbed baking potatoes, greased the skins, pricked them and popped them into the hot oven. I noted that she included one for Beverly. Nudging Beverly under the table, I nodded.

But, for all our seeming insouciance, our bad consciences held our noses to the catechism, and we did not let up until Papa came in to supper.

Papa and Beverly enjoyed a strange relationship. There were levels on which Papa did not approve of Beverly. She was not “womanly” in appearance or behavior. And she came from a distinctly “low-class” situation. While he himself derived from the hardworking poor, he greatly mistrusted the ragtag and bobtail who lived in the shacks south of the junkyard, suspecting them of the criminality and moral decay to which he might sink, were he in their place. Papa was never sure I ought to be associating with Beverly.

On the other hand, Beverly was in many ways the son for which he secretly wished. She could catch a softball or shinny up a telephone pole. Fearless and brash, she was a daredevil with a hearty laugh and the confident swagger of a self-made man. Her “Godsakes” he found both naughty and irresistible, and he laughed as though it were a joke between them. Had I said “Godsakes,” he would have slapped me or grabbed my arm, leaving bruises, asking me who did I think I was, taking God’s name in vain?

Mama did not interfere between Papa and Beverly. If it was on this basis that Beverly could come to our house with Papa’s blessing, then Mama would go along, but she never treated Beverly in that manner herself.

“Time to get out the fishing poles,” Papa observed at supper. “You fish?” he asked Beverly.

“Sure,” she said, cramming a spoonful of baked potato and gravy into her mouth.

“You got a pole?”

“Sure.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I made it myself.”

“That so? Catch anything?”

“Godsakes, I got twelve bullheads once last spring.”

Papa laughed, as if at a sparkling witticism.

After supper Mama said, “I’ll take Beverly home on my way to bridge club.”

“Bridge club?” Papa said, as though this were the first he’d heard of it.

“Don’t pull that,” Mama warned. “I told you at lunch.”

Beverly jumped down from the table and ran in the living room, settling herself in the red leatherette rocker Santa had brought me. Beverly was simple-minded over my red rocker. Sometimes I got peeved when she plunked herself down in it, rocking hard enough to wear the rockers down to a sliver, but Mama said it was an opportunity to practice my generosity.

“I’ll be back,” Papa said, going next door to the office.

“I’m leaving for bridge at quarter past seven,” Mama told him.

When the time came for her to go, taking Beverly with her, Papa hadn’t come home yet. We could hear his typewriter on the other side of the wall.

“If he’s not here in ten minutes, Lark,” Mama said, “you pound on the wall.” We sometimes did that to let him know it was time to come home.

After Mama had kissed me good-bye, and she and Beverly had departed in the truck, I undressed and pulled on my nightie. Easing the sin notebook out from under the mattress, I found a pencil in the kitchen and climbed into the crib.

What Beverly and I had done to Sally that afternoon must be a sin. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t feel so crummy about it. I sat for a long time over the notebook, trying to decide which commandment we had broken.

The list of my transgressions went on for page after page. Some I had entered in great detail, some were one word: “sassed”
or “cussed.” The notebook contained more than a year’s worth of sin. The old ones from when I had first started the entries, were getting blurry and smudged. I went over some of them now, wetting the lead on my tongue and sharpening up the hazy printing so I would be able to read it in the confessional.

How embarrassing it was going to be, kneeling in the confessional, reciting this endless litany of evil. I would be mortified. After my first confession, I promised myself, I would never sin again. I couldn’t endure this worry and disgrace a second time.

A week from tomorrow. That was the day of first confession. Then I could throw the notebook away. In the meantime, confused about my sin against Sally, I wrote: “hurt Sally’s feelings.” Outside the bedroom window the sky was light. In the trees alongside the Harvester Arms Hotel, birds were noisily bedding down for the night. Beverly was probably out playing kick-the-can with the other kids who lived south of the junkyard. I put my head down for a minute to listen to the birds and the rhythmic pounding of Papa’s typewriter.

The next thing I knew, I was awake and shivering. I’d fallen asleep without pulling up the quilt. But that wasn’t what woke me, I soon realized. It was Papa, standing beside the crib, terrible emanations of disgust and humiliation rolling out from him in scalding waves.

“What is this?” he demanded, sounding physically ill from the shock of what he had found.

“What?”

“This!” He held up the sin notebook.

“No!” I jumped up to snatch it from him, but he was too quick. He held it high above my head. “Papa, please! Give it to me,” I cried. “Please, Papa. You’re not supposed to read it.”

“I’ve already read it,” he told me, each word an indictment.

“No, Papa! Please. It’s mine.” I climbed down from the crib and fastened myself at his waist. “Please give it to me! Sister said no one should see it. It’s just to help us confess.”

“You’re going to confess all of
that?”

What was he saying? That I should withhold some of it?

“We have to, otherwise we can’t go to heaven,” I wept.

“Do you really think you’re going to heaven?”

I was no longer sure. “Sister said. If we’re really sorry …”

Unfastening my arms from his waist, he asked, “What kind of kid are you? Where did you come from?” Tossing the notebook into the crib, he turned and walked out of the bedroom and out of the house.

SALLY WAS NOT SPEAKING
to Beverly or me. For that matter, she spoke very little to anyone. I believe she would not have come to my house to study catechism on Tuesday, but Mama was sewing communion dresses for Sally and Beverly as well as for me, and she had to pin Sally’s hem on Tuesday. She told me to tell Sally and I did. Sally didn’t answer yes, no, or maybe, but she headed for my house after school, walking half a block behind Beverly and me.