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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

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BOOK: The Rampant Reaper
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M
YRTLE WAS ALL the name on the stone. It was the bent-over, tall, oblong slab rounded at the top that Charlie had ducked behind, embarrassed when her cellular had gone off. “She died before the Civil War.”
“Old town. Old graveyard. Old people. So sue us.”
“Was she kind of like a founding mother?”
“You could say that. If you couldn't think of a better reason.”
“She was only eighteen when she died.” Libby's age, gulp.
“People didn't use to live to retire and beyond and beyond some more in them days.”
“Marlys, do you think there's a murderer up at Gentle Oaks killing the helpless?” Charlie had jumped off the grave when the old woman told her she was standing on Myrtle, actually jumped up off the grave because it was quite an indentation. Not surprising when you thought of how long ago it was filled with Myrtle and then with sucking dirt. The reason the stone was bent over could possibly be the bare tree root crossing just in front of it—probably right over Myrtle's head.
Charlie decided to think of other things, until the ancient Marlys Dittberner said, “Whole place is a contract with the devil. Most folks won't even come up and visit you there because they know their time's coming next. It's our curse, the devil's dram. It's spreading, I hear—but it's always been this way in Myrtle. You look at the dates on these stones, girl. People live long here. Myrtle, she left a curse on this town—
been dying since she was murdered, but can't die. You ought to take your mother and get out of here while you can. Them that stay are doomed.”
“But how do you explain Del Brunsvold coming back to his roots here? And Kenny Cowper?”
Marlys Dittberner kicked daintily at the bare oak root above Myrtle's head and looked directly at Charlie. “Dumb explains most folks if you think on it too long.”
Charlie was about to ask how Myrtle was murdered when the mewling in her purse distracted her just long enough to lose Marlys again. To regular people who were not tone deaf, it might have sounded like music, but to Charlie it sounded like a sick cat, extreme sick. It was Mitch Hilsten, big-deal superstar.
“My God, Charlie, I've been trying to get you for two days. What are you doing?”
“Looking for Marlys. If I were a writer, I'd have a ball with this place.”
“What place?”
“Myrtle, Iowa. Edwina and I are looking into the welfare of seriously ancient relatives.”
“Charlie, tell me no one's been murdered in Myrtle.”
“Myrtle for one.”
Charlie roamed among tombstones and indentations that had been people checking out the dates on the stones and looking for Marlys while Mitch Hilsten explained why he'd hardly be out of town for his new project because most of it was interiors and much of the exteriors could be shot on the lot or in redwood forests in California.
“Tell me you didn't take on Bambo, please? That's so corny.” Why didn't he get engaged to some vacuous starlet again and leave Charlie alone?
“Hey, deer are popular and they are everywhere. What's the matter with Bambo?”
“Mitch, you know deer aren't aggressive unless they're in
rut. You're a conservationist.” He wasn't dangerous in rut even. But he was good.
“Birds weren't either until Hitchcock got ahold of them.”
“Talk to you later. Busy now. Bye.”
“Charlie? Be careful. It's not only the full moon, but your vulnerable time of the month.”
“Pervert.” She hung up and looked for Marlys, who was plenty strange herself. The sucking dirt was after Charlie's boots again.
Bartusek, Sievertsen, Wyborny, Auchmoody, Hogoboom, Fellwoek, Longbotham, Enabnit, Nimglet, Talgoth, Bublitz, Streblow, Stubbe, Overgaard, Truex. All kinds of people here who weren't Cowpers or Staudts or Norwegian, either. Lots more than three or four families for sure represented here. Marlys was nuts. Charlie went back to the Staudts' section—it was pronounced “stout”—and the dirty diaper which supported the idea that Marlys lacked screws, and then started looking for Edwina's parents. But she couldn't remember their first names. Edwina had mentioned them by name surely in Charlie's youth, or was it just Mom and Dad?
So she started looking for Marlys again without much hope, wandering among the dead in the dark under the trees until she got so depressed she gave up and headed back to town and Gentle Oaks. She saw a couple, whose butts would never fit on an airplane in the coach class, raking leaves in their front yard. They nodded as she passed. Many, if not most, of the people she saw at the cemetery and church yesterday were not obese, many quite slim. It was just that those who were heavy were so unbelievably enormous—they were the unforgettable ones, and you went away remembering only them.
The sun was warm enough away from the Myrtle Cemetery that Charlie hooked her leather jacket over her shoulder by a thumb and enjoyed the colors and lack of people and traffic. There's a lot to be said for a small town.
Was
it only the job opportunities that drove the young to the cities? Or the guilt thing as well?
Because of her teen pregnancy and her father's heart attack and death before Libby's birth, Charlie had lived a life drowned with guilt. But she was beginning to get an inkling here in Myrtle, Iowa, as to how heavy a guilt load could really get—especially for previous generations caught up in old ways. The shunning could come about simply because you got above yourself, dared to step out of the prescribed pecking order. Edwina—a strong, competent, often grating woman—could be reduced to childhood helplessness by a look back here at the place of her roots. Even after years of ignoring those roots and Myrtle, even after having formed her own life, family, career.
Myrtle was beautiful today, despite sizable shoddy patches of neglect, and had been yesterday, too. Edwina had rarely spoken of Iowa that Charlie could remember, but when she did, it had been with a shudder and often about relentless, bug-ridden, smothering humidity and heat in summer and bone-chilling cold in winter. Charlie's mom had three fingers on one hand that would turn white on the ends when they got cold just putting away frozen groceries. She never tired of telling Charlie it was caused by frostbite from walking to school in an Iowa winter wearing heavy mittens, while Charlie ran off to school bareheaded without gloves or boots because fashionable kids didn't wear jerky stuff. Charlie lived only a block and a half from her grade school, for godsake.
She passed a derelict Solemn Lutheran Church that looked rather cheerful with the sun shining through all the holes and the bright colors of the maples around it.
She could hear footsteps behind her on the white rock drive to Gentle Oaks, but didn't turn and look. With any luck, poor, demented Marlys Dittberner had been curious enough to follow her.
But when she reached the white columns holding up the porch roof, it was the deep and unmistakable voice of Kenny Cowper behind her that said, “I'll say one thing for you Auchmoodys—you
sure know how to move right in a pair of jeans.”
Charlie's gut knew a dangerous man when her eyes saw one, ears heard one. An if-it-looks-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is kind of thing. Her inner voice reminded her of what Mitch Hilsten had said a short time ago—she was particularly vulnerable right now and it had little to do with the full moon, but a lot to do with her female rhythms, as Marlys put it. There were certain times of certain months when Charlie didn't go out at night. And it wasn't only to protect herself.
He held the outer door for her and she stepped in, but he didn't follow. She turned to see him facing the drive with hands on hips. He appeared to be breathing deeply. It wasn't until she'd crossed the lobby that she realized he too had Charlie's, Libby's, and Marlys's almost black eyes. Was one of Charlie's progenitors a Cowper? But his hair was so dark—brown, not black, but dark—and he had a pronounced widow's peak. Inbreeding? Different traits appear? Could inbreeding explain the unreasonably long-lived people here even when they're at death's door?
Charlie carefully opened the inner door this time, nobody flew out and no alarm startled the quiet of the place. Now the odor was of cooked food rather than what it would become later. She'd turned toward a nurses' station when a clanking sounded behind her and a raspy voice said, “Got a match?”
Something hard poked the middle of her back. “No.”
“Got a cigarette?”
“No.” Nobody would have a gun in a nursing home, would they? Sure what it felt like.
“You smoke?”
“No.” Charlie whirled to find a small man pointing a cane at her.
“Can I borrow a cigarette?”
“I don't have any. I don't smoke. Now leave me alone.”
He wore overalls way too short for him and a shapeless
pinstripe suit jacket that looked like gangster-era Chicago. So did his hat. And shapeless slippers with white socks. His ankles were enormous.
“Well, you don't have to get nasty about it.” The clanking started up again the minute he did. “Tart.”
“Sherman, you get back here with that silverware.” An RN, by her badge, came around the curve in the hallway and passed Charlie to grab his arm. “Hi. You must be the girl from L.A. Come on in the dining room. Got to unload his socks.”
“The silverware?”
“Yeah. Wouldn't mind so much but he steals the dirty stuff off the trays before we can get to it. Before I went into nursing, I used to work in a preschool and believe me, it was easier than this.”
“Is he an Auchmoody or a Dittberner or—”
“Sherman's a Rochester—and a disgusting one. This is awful, old man. Look at your socks. Ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Ciga-riga-roo?” A florid lady howled from across the room—the only person left except for the busboy who came to put Sherman's stolen goods in a pan with water.
“Harvey's father?”
“Grandfather. His father blew his own head off with a hunting rifle out in a field. Very moody, the Rochesters. Isn't that right, Sherman?”
“Head was all over the place,” Sherman said gleefully. His ankles had shrunk to sticks.
“Like in
Jane Eyre
?”
“Never heard of it. That in Iowa?” Her badge identified her as Mary Lou Hogoboom. Her butt wouldn't fit in coach either.
“Ciga-riga-roooo?”
“Off to see the wizaaard.” A large-screen TV hung from the ceiling in one corner. Only the busboy paid attention to
Judy Garland skipping down the yellow brick road with men dressed like animal, tin, and straw.
“I was looking for my mother—Edwina.”
“I know. She and Helen are around here somewhere. All the aides are busy getting the residents off their potty chairs and down for naps right now. I have to smoke Flo and Sherman and me. Come with us and I'll show you where they might be. Or we'll come across somebody who knows.”
The smoker was a glassed-in porch at the back of the building, heated in winter, with screens all around to air it out. There were several windows along the hall here looking down on loading docks and employee parking. There must be a walkout basement below at least this section of the building. Edwina, Cousin Helen, Marshal Del, and Kenny Cowper stood watching a gurney with a covered figure on it get its legs folded so it could slide into a Floyd County Sheriff's Department van. Great-aunt Annabel, no doubt.
C
OUSIN HELEN, CHARLIE, and Edwina stood in the hall gazing into the smoker, mostly at Kenny Cowper, who squatted next to a woman in a wheelchair. She puffed on a cigarette in one hand and patted him on the head with the other. Even squatting, he was taller than she was in her wheelchair and she had to reach up to pat him.
“That his mother?” Charlie asked.
“Grandmother,” Helen said with a sniff. “Mother remarried when his dad got run over by a combine. She moved off to Florida. Can you imagine?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Charlie's mom answered. “Definitely absolutely.”
The residents may have been shuffled off of potty chairs to their beds for naps, but it seemed that televisions were tuned to blasting in every room up and down the hall. Helen explained that it helped the inmates feel less alone. “They don't really hear it, and it helps the staff with a pretty dreary job, too.”
Something tugged at Charlie's jacket sleeve and she looked down to see Gladys and her extended leg and wheelchair. “He's one of my five boyfriends.” She pointed to Kenny, who turned to look at them all standing there admiring him. He winked at Gladys and turned back to his grandmother. “See? Told you, didn't I? We talk dirty together. How many boyfriends do you have?”
“Not a one, Gladys. I stand in awe of you.”
“Least you can stand.”
“Edwina, I keep telling you, Iowa's not so bad—just your memory of it. Our memories do not improve with age, you know. And you look wonderful, but we both know you aren't getting any younger.”
“If Iowa is so wonderful, why do you and Buz go to Tucson for three months during the winter?”
“Because I have to get away from this and you-know-who or go nuts. It's not Iowa. And we've raised four children. It's time for us now.”
There was a growling behind them and everybody but Gladys turned when a pretty young aide in tears shouted, “Fatty Staudt and Fatty Truex are at it again. I quit.”
“Disgusting old geezers,” Gladys pronounced the two grinning, skeletal men racing after the young aide in their wheelchairs by paddling with their feet on the floor rather than rolling the wheels with their hands. “I don't know what they see in her, do you?”
“Your mom and Helen are sort of the last of the female line in the responsible generation, them responsible for the last generation and all before that,” Uncle Elmo explained to Charlie as Cousin Helen and Edwina fought it out in the kitchen at the home place. “All you folks who go off to California, or whose parents do, don't know what's going on back at the home places in the country. What's happening is the old folks are stacking up knee-deep, what's happening.”
They kicked around, literally, inside the rickety barn, stirred up mice and dust and probably memories for him and her mother, who was too busy fending off guilt and cousins to enjoy them. Charlie was beginning to see why she was needed here. Edwina needed her help in a gargantuan struggle with guilt instilled in a childhood so long ago that she couldn't remember half of it. But the residue clung like Kenny Cowper.
“Every generation—” Uncle Elmo looked up at disgruntled pigeons in the rafters and the sky between the roof that
was there and the roof that wasn't “—people live longer and more of them live longer. Always been people over a hundred—just damn few.”
“But all those women here at the dinner last night, surely they don't need Edwina, too. They live here. She hasn't for years.”
“They all got other branches of older Staudts and in-laws to see to. Your mom and Helen are all that's left of the direct issue of the Myrtle Staudts.”
“Why does it have to be women? Look at the marshal.”
“Doesn't have to be women, but they're more likely to live long enough to see the older generations cared for properly. They're also more responsible as a general rule for seeing to the needs of others.”
“And more responsive to the agonies of guilt if they don't.”
“Imagine a California girl learning about real life. Miracle. Women don't do what's expected, they don't get to enjoy life anyway—might as well knuckle under. And the marshal went off and left a wife and three children when his folks were and are still seeing to the past generations. Plus which, he's got a sister-in-law in town.”
“So what's Edwina's guilt-ridden role in all this family stuff?”
“Someone's got to see to Abigail. And nobody wants anything to do with her and her bossy piety. Spent the last sixty years making enemies of her family and the town. Helen's got her hands full with me and a bunch of Staudts at the Oaks. Time your mother took on her fair share.”
“She works full time, what can she do? She's got at least five more years before retirement and could work longer—which she probably will. She loves her work.”
“She's widowed. Her child is grown and on her own. Who better? She's going to put rats and bats before family?” Edwina was a professor of biology at the University of Colorado, specializing in rats and bats of the high desert plateau.
“Her job means nothing because she's a woman. Time she
gets ahold of reality and her role. Don't you see how ridiculous that sounds to the modern world? She could lose what is meaningful in her life, and her means of paying for her retirement. And her mind as well. Who would want to live with Great-aunt Abigail, for godsake?”
“Don't matter. Edwina was born and raised here. It's in her blood to do the right thing. You already did what was in your blood.”
It was early evening when Charlie and Edwina drove Cousin Helen home. Apparently, Helen didn't drive. Buz drove her to work and back. Theirs was a nice house for Myrtle, well kept. And not three blocks from the entrance to the Oaks. They weren't invited in.
Edwina had changed since her confrontation in the kitchen at the home place. It was in the air and her mood had lifted, while Charlie's had tanked. Charlie wanted out of here.
“I smell french fries,” Edwina said when they drove down Main Street. “Let's have a beer and bar food at Viagra's before we head back to that ramshackle place and Uncle Elmo's snoring. What do you say, Daughter?”
“I say absolutely, Mother, extreme absolutely. Maybe we can pick up a six-pack for Uncle Elmo. He's about out.”
Viagra's was full of pheasant hunters—lots of plaid jackets and matching caps—several admiring each other's kill pulled out of cloth sacks. The TV above the bar played a sport show about pheasant hunting, starring guys in plaid jackets and matching caps.
On one side of the TV flashed a lighted sign of the Budweiser bull frog. On the other was an enlarged photo in black and white with a bunch of guys standing around, leaning on, and hanging out of an ancient vintage automobile. Their clothes reminded Charlie of Sherman Rochester's coat. Their hats pushed back at jaunty angles and cigarettes in hand reminded her even more of old Sherman.
Of the living here, one woman with tight jeans and a loose grin played pool with the guys. The rest were guys. There was one empty booth, and the Greenes took it just as Kenny Cowper came down a flight of stairs at the back of the room, lit from behind by a bare bulb he'd had to almost double over to avoid. The place had gone silent except for the television, and Kenny followed the direction of the gaze and smirks in the rest of the room. The place smelled like french fries, beer, and secondhand smoke.
Kenny skirted the pool table to their booth. The slow smile spreading across his teeth actually reached his eyes this time. “What can I do for you ladies?”
“We're women, Squirt,” Charlie's mother told him, and his smile turned into a laugh.
He hit the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. “Goddam, I knew that.”
Then he slid in beside Edwina. “So you do remember me.”
“Taken me all day to sort you out. You couldn't have been more than three or four the only other time we've met.”
“Five, actually. I didn't start growing till about ten. Know how I remember you? You called me ‘Squirt' in front of a bunch of guys. They called me that until I got so big, they didn't dare.”
“You wouldn't hurt anybody,” Edwina said softly, and Charlie stared at this “woman” she called mother. Well, okay, when she forgot, she did.
“Yeah, but you get big enough—nobody dares find that out. Specials tonight—and there are two specials every night and that's all there is, so we don't need menus—are walleyed pike or pork tenderloin on a sesame-seed bun with fries and a salad. What'll it be, women?”
Charlie ordered the pike and Edwina the tenderloin and whatever was on draft. The beer of course came right away and they each took two healthy gulps, leaned back into the booth, which had head-high backs, and sighed. “Might not be heaven, but like Squirt said, it's all there is.”
“That laser surgery did wonders. You're not even walleyed anymore. When did you have it done?”
“Before I took six weeks out of my life and living to nurse you back to humanity after the accident. You didn't even notice. Your neighbors did, and Libby, but I swore them to secrecy. I've got this theory, Charlie. People see what they expect to see, not what's there. Besides, you were dealing with a lot of your own problems at that time.”
“Okay, so why are you so changed after that knockdown drag-out with Cousin Helen? Sounded to me like you were losing big time. ‘Just because you move across the country doesn't mean you cancel out your responsibilities to the people who came before you, who nurtured you, cuz.' Stuff like that. You were eating guilt and then all of a sudden you were back in control.”
“Because, Charlie, I rose from the sea of despond with a wonderful idea.”
“About what to do with Great Witch Abigail? Edwina, as your only daughter and the mother of your only granddaughter, I forbid you to give up the only life you have and come back here to take care of Abigail Staudt. She can go live at Gentle Oaks like everybody else.”
“That's just it, Charlie, she can't. She's old, but she's not ill mentally or physically. Boulder, however, has independent-living facilities for the elderly that watch out for the frail and encourage their independence for as long as possible. She's not dying. She's not senile. She's just old.”
“Don't they have places like that in Mason City?”
“Probably, but there's a passel of Staudts needing seeing to there, too, and the number of young people who've skipped off to other places makes it hard.”
“They're expecting you to come back and take care of her. Live here. Give up your work and everything.”
“You and I both know that won't happen. If Howard were alive, they wouldn't even think to ask it.”
“Would you be able to even stand having her in Boulder?”
“Just down the hill from the university there's a place called the Good Samaritan, with an eight- or nine-story apartment building for seniors and one floor of assisted-living for those who need more, plus a nursing home attached for those who need the most. For the apartment dwellers, there are scheduled activities, a dining room, in-room cooking facilities, bus trips. Everything she'll need. Once a week I could walk down from the labs to have lunch with her and that would be it. And she could hurl accusations, opinions, and self-righteousness every which way and nobody would care because they're not from Myrtle and she's nobody to them. Kind of sweet, huh?”
Somehow, Charlie had the feeling that this would backfire, but was so glad Edwina had a positive thought she didn't relay that feeling. She'd much prefer to get her mother out of here without Great-aunt Abigail Staudt.
BOOK: The Rampant Reaper
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