The Cape Ann (6 page)

In my dormer window in our new house, I wanted a seat like the boy’s. When Mama woke up, I was going to show her the Cape Ann and also the illustration in
Happy Stories for Bedtime
so that she could start planning the window seat.

She might sleep all afternoon. Mama almost never napped, but she’d been up the whole night waiting for Papa and me. I watched
her, her chin set even in sleep, hand clutching the bright, rose-strewn handkerchief as if it might be stolen from her.

The westbound passenger train descended upon us, blowing and groaning. Mama didn’t stir. We were so used to the sounds of trains, they could not rouse us from sleep unless we were ready to wake up. Out on the platform, I heard Papa calling to a brakeman or conductor or maybe to a baggage handler.

When at length the train pulled out of the station, the wall beside the crib hummed beneath my fingers. A passenger with a grip in one hand and a sample case in the other walked east, toward the Harvester Arms Hotel, sweat darkening his gray suit between his shoulder blades and under his arms. The May afternoon had grown unseasonably warm.

The freight wagon rumbled over the uneven brick platform. Papa pulled it around the end of the depot and off-loaded several heavy cartons onto the back of the pickup. I lay down, shy to have him see me through the window. He had not come home for lunch. Probably he had gone downtown to the Loon Cafe, where he ate when Mama was out of town. No one at the Loon Cafe would be surprised to see him.

Sometimes he took me there in the afternoon for a root beer. Freckled and pink, the two waitresses were unmarried, Irish Catholic women approaching middle age. They teased and pampered Papa, and he laughed at everything they said and left them a big tip no matter what we ordered.

They asked him about his fancy new Oldsmobile, and he said he’d give them a ride whenever they were ready. He never talked that way to Mama, and she never flattered him as they did. Mama and Papa did not like giving in to each other for fear of being defeated.

Would Papa come home for supper? I thought of him staying away through supper and maybe through the night. It made my stomach feel hard and sharp, as though it had corners.

On the wall beside the crib was a banjo clock. In addition to a clock face, it held behind glass an idyllic country scene. Green meadows rolled away to an intensely blue sky. In the foreground, hollyhocks and larkspur and poppies bespoke a pretty cottage just out of sight.

I lay in the crib, willing myself, as I often did, into that landscape, which I had furnished with everything I could desire: a small
grape arbor like Grandpa Erhardt’s; a big, red tricycle to replace the little one that somebody had run over out in the parking lot; and a tree house perched among the spreading limbs of an old shade tree.

When I visited the clock, my hair curled and returned to the blond color it had known before kindergarten, my bony arms and legs responded to my every command, turning perfect cartwheels and tapping out pulsing, staccato dances like those Sally Wheeler was learning at Martha Beverton’s Tap and Toe classes.

Picking some of the larkspur to carry into the cottage with me, I skipped down a flagstone path to a trellised doorway.

At half past three, I woke, sweaty and rumpled, my starched, red dress drooping like sad, old curtains. Mama was not on the big bed. In the kitchen a spoon scraped the inside of a saucepan. Climbing out of the crib with the Cape Ann booklet, I picked up my shoes and carried them to the kitchen.

“What’re you making?” I asked, sitting down at the table to put on my shoes.

“Penuche frosting.”

“Is there enough for candy?”

“Yes.”

Mama usually made extra penuche frosting for candies, which she spooned out on waxed paper, pressing a walnut half into each.

“Can I show you a house plan called the Cape Ann?”

“Not now.”

“Can I go outside?”

She looked at me. “Put on an old dress. Why did you wear that one to bed?”

“I couldn’t undo the buttons.”

She set down the big spoon and unbuttoned the back of my dress.

“Can I walk down the tracks?”

“Not too far.”

When I had pulled on an old pink dress whose bodice smocking was coming unsmocked, I asked Mama, “Do we have any money saved for the house?”

“We had five hundred dollars.”

“How much do we have now?”

“Your fool papa lost two hundred dollars, so we’ve got three hundred left.” She poured frosting on the cake. “I could kill him,” she said, smoothing the frosting with vicious swipes of the back of the big spoon.

“Is he coming home for supper?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” She was almost as mad as she’d been in the morning. I could feel her anger like the summer heat that rose in waves from the brick platform.

“You
be home for supper,” she said as I went out the door.

Tiptoeing past the office windows, I kept my eyes downcast. It was as though in not coming home to lunch, Papa had turned his back on me as well as on Mama. What would I say to him when I saw him? What would he say to me? I squirmed and hurried west, following the sun down the tracks.

Looking both ways first, I ran fast across Fourth Street. Businesses sprawled messily out along Fourth Street, vacant lots and weedy patches between them; businesses that didn’t fit on Main Street, due either to their nature or their size. Rayzeen’s Lumberyard. Grubb’s Junkyard and Body Shop. The Nite Time Saloon, which because of local law served only beer. And Marcella’s Permanent Wave, which Mama said was a cover-up for the bootleg, hard liquor business of Marcella’s husband, Barney Finney. Beverly Ridza from catechism class lived down there, past Grubb’s Junkyard.

On the other side of Fourth Street, I slowed to stare into the hobo jungle on the left. A couple of hundred yards distant from the depot, the hobo jungle was the exposed basement of a warehouse long ago razed or burned to the ground. It was a hole in the ground with concrete and stone walls, but no stairs. In one corner a pair of empty oil drums, one smaller than the other, served as steps. In the center of the space, someone had collected old bricks, lined them up, and laid a metal grill over them. Here the men who stopped over cooked cans of beans or soup, toasted bread, and made coffee.

If the weather was good and Mama had half a dozen magazines to throw away, she’d pack them in a grocery bag with a couple of cans of Campbell’s soup and send me with them down to the jungle. If someone was there, I’d leave them at the edge, telling the men, “From Mama.” If no one was camped, I’d climb
down the oil cans and rummage around. Interesting relics could be found: a key to a door somewhere, a half-full can of snoose, a jewel-like piece of melted glass from the ashes of the fire. Once I found a letter, never sealed, addressed, or mailed.

“What does it say?” I asked Mama.

“I don’t think we should read it,” Mama said. “Maybe he’s just gone looking for a meal. He’ll come back and find it gone.”

“No, he won’t. Nobody’s been in the jungle for two days.”

Mama sat down at the table and looked at the envelope. She was of two minds. At length she slipped the letter out and unfolded it. Written on cheap, lined paper, it was dated October 15, 1938.

“I wish I knew where that Bill lived, and I’d send him this,” Mama said.

“Why didn’t Earl mail the letter, Mama?”

“Maybe he didn’t have the price of a stamp.” She carried the letter in the bedroom and put it in her bureau drawer.

I found the letter in the hobo jungle last fall, in October. This was May. Had Earl Samson come back to Minnesota with the warm weather, or had he found “something steady” down south? I would like to meet him. Could he be one of these men in the jungle today? The one reading the magazine looked too young, the one sleeping, too old.

I passed by. Leaving the tracks, I crossed the shallow ditch, wading through the high, warm grass. It was cool among the cottonwoods. This was where the tramps lay around during hot summer days when they weren’t out looking for work or a handout. At night they slept in the basement, where dogs couldn’t bother them. There were a couple of wooden crates here, big ones, that gave some protection from the rain.

I picked my way through the silken grass and debris, searching for relics. Maybe evidence of Earl Samson. There wasn’t much
here today. I crouched to inspect a brown leather shoe, cracked and scuffed till it was nearly white, a hole in the sole the size of a silver dollar. I put my hand inside the shoe and stuck my fingers through the hole. All of them fit. Further on I picked up an empty half-pint whiskey bottle, decided the label wasn’t pretty, and threw it aside again. Propped against one of the cottonwoods was a hoe with a broken-off handle. The men used it to bury their bowel movements when they relieved themselves in this grove.

When I had sifted through everything that was new and found no treasures, I returned to the tracks and continued west out of town, tightrope walking, putting one foot directly in front of the other, along the rail, my arms outstretched, like someone trying to fly.

As Harvester fell behind me, tall shrubs and pussy willows sprang up along the ditches on either side of the rail bed. They were forests for short people like me. I had come earlier in the spring with Mama to pick pussy willows for the living room, for Mama’s friends, and for Father Delias. Mama took special care for old Father Delias. She asked at the Loon Cafe for an empty lard can, and they gave her one the size of a slop pail. She scrubbed it out, covered it with a scrap of maroon-and-cream-striped satin upholstery fabric, weighted it with small rocks, and arranged tall pussy willows in it for his office in the rectory.

When Father saw it, he exclaimed, “Why, that’s fit for a castle, Arlene.” He always called Mama by her first name, as if she were a little sister or a favored niece. “You must have remembered the dark red chairs in the office!”

Cinders were one of the few bad things about trains. I sat down on one of the rails, pulled off a shoe, and dumped out a cinder. Ahead about a hundred yards was a trestle over a dry gulch. It wasn’t very high, but “high enough to break your neck,” Mama told me. She didn’t know that I sometimes crossed it when she wasn’t with me. I was careful, though. I didn’t want to break my neck. Otto Monke, one of the custodians at school, broke his back when he was young. Now he was bent over and looked like he had a box in his back.

When I came to the trestle, I walked between the rails, stepping carefully from tie to tie, looking down at the scrubby gulch. Leroy Mosely from catechism class had told me he’d seen a rattlesnake down there. But he was a liar who spent his spare time scaring
girls. The only good thing about him was that he would be in the confessional longer than I was, when we had our first confession next spring.

Mama said there weren’t any poisonous snakes in south central Minnesota. Up in the North Woods there were a few timber snakes that were poisonous, she said, but she’d never seen one. If Leroy Mosely had seen a snake in the gulch, Mama explained, it was a garter snake or a gopher snake, and they weren’t poisonous.

A jackrabbit jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and shot across the gulch. It startled me and I lurched, nearly losing my balance. My heart raced. I sat down on the trestle. For several minutes I rested, but my heart went on pounding. I was afraid. Yet a jackrabbit was nothing to fear. Snakes must be making me feel this way. Thinking about snakes could make you sweaty and shaky.

At the other end of the trestle, on the embankment, was a big patch of mustard, looking like butter spread across the ground. I thought I spied wild onion not far from some box elders at the top of the embankment, maybe fifty yards down the gulch.

Rising slowly, gingerly, I stood up, not moving, like someone who has had a dizzy spell. At length I set out, but hesitantly, not as jaunty as I’d been. When I reached the far side of the railroad bridge, I turned right, toward the wildflowers. The dry earth of the embankment crumbled beneath my feet. My shoes filled with it, and my socks turned dusty gray.