by Lamar Herrin
IV
THE YEARS WORE ON. Your favorite team lost a game they’d waited years to play, and you, their biggest fan, didn’t see how you could live through the following day, but you did, and then your team’s loss became a footnote, a day in the team’s history you taught your eyes to jump over, and life began again. Or you switched favorite teams, or found another sport to devote your fanship to. Sports scars were famously quick to heal. Most scars were if you gave them time. Some scars you might even forget where to look for on your body. Which leg? Which arm? Using mirrors you could inspect every inch of your flesh because you knew the scar had to be there somewhere, even though it wasn’t, even though it was gone. Scars did not last lifetimes because lives did not last lifetimes. We all had more than one. A life’s stories came in multiples, so unless someone is there to pull you back into an earlier lifetime, pull you back and pull you back, maybe only for the sport of it, never intending to land you for good, you could outlive your scars and emerge at last as pristine as the day you were born.
I’m assuming there was such a someone, Walter said. For the sport of it. To pull you back.
There was, but not my mother. She was too staunchly partisan and eager to pick a fight to be a source of reliable information. She fought with my Aunt Lily the day of Rosalyn’s funeral, there in the Whalen house where I had last seen Rosalyn alive. They fought over a desk that my grandfather had made with his own hands and had told my mother was intended for me. Which made sense since I was the only grandchild he’d lived to see. Lily claimed her father had always intended it for her, which also made sense since the desk was as rugged and rough-hewn as Lily prided herself on being. Rosalyn, who had room in her house, had been taking care of it along with more desirable pieces of furniture, but it was the desk that my mother and Lily fought over, and it was Lily who walked away with it, leading my mother to declare that that was it with Lily and with the Whalens too. And she meant it. Big Howie had been more than she could take, no one had quite gotten over Little Howie’s loss, and if Ellie was prepared to go off the deep end, my mother presumed she knew how to swim. No, it wouldn’t be my mother who pulled me back. If it was information about the Whalen family I wanted, I’d have to go to my sister, and I haven’t told you about her, Walter.
Only that she lived close enough to your mother to keep an eye on her.
The next town over, twenty miles away. Any closer and my mother might have swallowed her whole, but twenty miles of curving roads and a lot of farm traffic was just enough to persuade my mother to turn her attention elsewhere. My sister was married to a decent enough guy, a regional rep for a big breakfast cereal conglomerate, who was on the road a lot, and once she had her two kids in school and our mother caught up in her political causes, she took a look around to see what she could do. The important thing to understand about my sister, Walter, is that there was no end to her energy. So she had to expend it. She couldn’t just let it get bottled up. And she had a hunch about things. On a small-town scale, she lived out ahead of the curve. What didn’t her little town have that would cost almost nothing to bring about? It didn’t have its own art gallery, it occurred to her, somewhere local artists could show their art, presenting their town and its surrounding countryside in its best light. No overhead, except literally what was up there, little spots trained onto the walls. For next to nothing she opened such a gallery. She managed to get some community funding, and when that still didn’t all add up, she engaged quilters in town and turned it into a quilt gallery, too. Of course, quilts took up a lot of room, so she expanded into the empty space next door. And when that brought in viewers but still not sufficient revenue, she opened a coffee shop, which soon became a coffee shop with someone posing as a real barista, who invited you to smell the beans as he ground them, so you could sit and admire the art, smell and drink the coffee, flirt with the barista if you were so disposed, for my sister did hire a Latino-looking guy with a handsome black beard, and eat the pastry baked locally by neighbors of yours. And when that still came up short, my sister got hold of some cookbooks from a restaurant called Moosewood and introduced a vegetarian menu in her town, in effect daring her customers and townspeople not to find tasty—and healthy—something not slathered in meat gravy or fried to a sickening crisp. When the restaurant (cum art and quilt galley, cum barista-ground coffee shop) caught on, she had the inspired idea of inviting townspeople to submit vegetarian recipes of their own, one of which she would feature each week, with the winners brought in to act as honorary chefs and their photographs displayed in the window. And when that began to make her money and she had a stack of recipes and photographs to fall back on, my sister had another idea, which made her considerably more money and stayed squarely within the compass of her small town.
At first it seemed a step backward. She’d noticed that her townspeople couldn’t resist yard and garage sales and spent their weekend mornings driving, in a herded sort of way, from one sale to another. My sister might have fixed on the nosiness and the small-minded acquisitiveness in this craze, but chose to view it communally instead, and asked herself what if people were being driven—as they drove around burning up gas—by the need to escape their same-old lives and get inside somebody else’s for a while? What if they wanted to renew their lives by entering, piece by piece, object by object, the lives of others, who happened to be townspeople of theirs? Why wasn’t this good? Why wasn’t this a form of sharing? Why wasn’t this what a community was all about? So my sister rented yet another space, a much larger one, and created not a bargain basement center but what she presented as a redistribution hub, where townspeople were invited not to donate but to put up for sale pieces of their furniture, clothing, kitchenware, crockery, anything really except machinery, and not records or books, there were plenty of places where those could be bought and sold, and maybe not sporting goods, either, like golf clubs, old baseball mitts, or fishing gear, but anything else, really, decorative objects, lamps, silverware, tableware, the bric-a-brac and knickknacks scattered throughout our lives, for which the owners could always be paid cash (minus the center’s commission), but why not take a better deal on store credit instead, so that the person with something once dear to sell—dear but not defunct, that was the key—could replenish his or her life with something once dear to a neighbor of hers? My sister did not call her redistribution center a center of “used” anything. Nothing she took in on consignment and nothing she sold was ever referred to as “used.” It had only been “previously enjoyed.” Except for old tools, like shovels and pickaxes, and maybe those sporting goods, too, she pretty much put garage and yard sales out of business in her town. The downside was, as her business took on a life of its own, she needed a new outlet for that energy of hers and, with her husband traveling and her children behaving and her aging but still active mother a town away, she eventually found her way back to what was left of the Whalens, that is, to Ellie and her two girls, plus Leland Oldham and his four freeloading sons—yes, they were all boys—and began to feed information to me, pulling me back in.
Let me stop you there, Walter said. Your sister sounds like a real enthusiast, maybe for the town she lives in just a little bit larger than life. Without ever having laid eyes on the lady, are we sure she can be trusted for reliable information?
Who are you addressing here, Walter, a judge or a jury?
Neither. Just a friend who’s making his case.
His case?
Telling his story.
I trust her, I said. She may have a somewhat expansive personality—
Which you believe you can gauge.
Which I believe I can gauge. And which allows her to reach out to more and more family members. When I talk about nephews and nieces and cousins galore, I’m talking almost in the abstract. I may be the oldest, but I’m also the most distant and the least in touch. My sister knows all those kinfolk. Every summer there were huge family reunions up at the Whalen house on the lake in the mountains. After Big How
ie’s death Rosalyn had to build a second, larger house to accommodate them all. My sister and her children attended those reunions, but as soon as I got out of school and away from all that, except for one occasion I did not. My sister—
Name, please.
Jean. Her business, her “redistribution hub,” was called Jean’s Junction. Children, Nicky, for Nicholas, and Mary, for the Virgin Mary, I suppose. Her husband is a very gregarious Irish American, Garrett O’Higgins. When she’s needling him, or when she’s really pissed, she’ll accuse him of mumbling Vatican-speak or papal nonsense. Take off your beanie and sit down, we’re ready to eat. That sort of thing. Actually my brother-in-law is a sweet, cheerful guy, a mass-goer only on sentimental occasions. I imagine when he’s off the road on the weekends, he and my sister have a fine time.
Now, that may be more information than I need, Walter said.
The point is, during those two-week reunions on the lake my sister is an all-inclusive sort. So she’s privy to what’s going on.
The toad?
In that we were like-minded.
And couldn’t you have told her, I don’t want to know, go down there if you have to, take your kids, splash around in the lake, take out the boats, water-ski, roar in and out of coves and ride the waves, then sit out in the evening on the terrace as the lake smooths out and the light turns that dusky orange and things get so quiet that the boathouse begins to creak, and you can hear a fish striking halfway across the lake, and some kids all the way over there, yelping their last before they’re sent to bed—that is, couldn’t you have told her, You go down there and take it all in but leave me out of it.
My god, Walter, you’ve been there!
’S no different up here.
That’s where you’re wrong. Down south, any paradise regained is only a poor substitute for the one that was lost.
Paradise lost? Paradise lost? Are we talking the Plantation South here, the Old Order, the weary but contented slaves singing low and mellow across fields of cotton whiter than white? That the paradise you have in mind? I don’t think so, Jim.
Of course not.
Then why not tell your sister—
There’s nothing left to tell now. It’s all over. History.
Well, I’m beginning to gather that. Yet here you are, doing the telling.
That’s that little pickerel’s fault. If you hadn’t offered to take it off the hook, and it hadn’t given me that sideways look out of its eye …
So let’s go catch some more pickerel and you can stare them down and lay it all to rest.
Funny, I said, but it may be the best idea you’ve had yet.
So, shall I get out the tackle?
There’s an undertow, Walter—
In this lake? Look at it, have you ever seen a more domesticated body of water?
—and my sister knew it, but she had this kind of exuberant nature that rode over everything. She could kick free from any undertow. But about the toad, you can trust me, we were like-minded. We all occupy little worlds we cast large. If you could surround yourself with enough WPA artifacts, you could probably ride out the rest of your days content and convince yourself it was all like that. I remember a child’s slide in a park in Cincinnati from my days there. Cincinnati is a hilly place. This slide was carved out of stone, and it took you all the way down one of those hillsides. At the bottom there was a little plaque. A WPA product. Indestructible, Walter. You owe it to yourself to go slide down that side. It’ll keep the child in you alive. I had no real choice in the matter—my sister didn’t either—our little world was the Whalen world, the Whalen magic, that’s the way it was, but just don’t let a toad come along and take it away from you, and take away your littlest cousin, the child of your favorite aunt, whom you failed, in the bargain. A toad shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
You’re preaching to the choir here, Walter said. That’s one toad that shouldn’t have been allowed to cross the road.
I am told—and unless I say otherwise, it’s my sister whose word we’re going to have to take—that Leland Oldham sat in the front row beside Ellie during my aunt’s funeral and let loose with audible and visibly wracking sobs. His sons sat in the second and third rows and didn’t try to outsob their father but were giving it their bereft best. Ellie sat stunned, Jean said, and let the Oldham family do the grieving. At the cemetery, Leland stood beside Ellie at the graveside, and it was Leland who got his hands on the clods of dirt and, when Ellie demurred, threw them in, maybe one for each Oldham, which made a drumroll effect on the coffin lid. According to Jean. Rosalyn was buried on one side of her husband, her son on the other, each with his own marker and all within the wingspan of an enormous marble monument on which the letters WHALEN were engraved. There was, of course, a burial plot left. My sister wouldn’t say, when the ceremony was over and they’d all turned and headed to the cars, that Ellie was being led as though to her own execution, only that she seemed powerless to move independent of that Oldham squad, that she was pale and shaky and seemingly sedated, not yet drunk, that would come when they were all back at the Whalen house, where various little confrontations would take place, including my mother’s with my aunt Lily over that desk. Ellie’s fair-headed daughters were with their father, who seemed to be keeping them at a safe distance from the Oldham clan, but that might have been a chance piece of staging. Really, all Jean could swear to was that there were the dark-suited and unhealthy-looking Oldhams, as though they were all awaiting their day in the sun, with Ellie among them, and then there was everybody else, which included the Pritchard girls, the Pritchard girls’ families, and the town at large, none of whom was unaware that only one Whalen was left.
But back home at the Whalen house, my sister kept a close eye on our cousin Ellie, and Ellie sat in the parlor in Aunt Rosalyn’s favorite chair, a rose mallow wing chair, and with her flanks shielded by the chair’s wings allowed Leland Oldham to bring her drink after drink and did get drunk. My sister was there in case Ellie tried to get up, but she didn’t, she didn’t seem to have it in her or any need since Leland kept her glass full. He filled his own, too. Eventually I got more information about how he’d shown up in the Whalens’ town. The charity Leland Oldham ran through the church was a church affair in name only. It had been endowed by Big Howie, and it had actually been set up before Little Howie died, so that he knew about it, too, and its purpose was to get disadvantaged boys and girls off the streets and out in nature where they could get their lives off to an undiseased and undisfigured start, and it bore Little Howie’s name—well, both his and his father’s name, as if one emerged indistinguishably from the other—the Howard Whalen Youth Crusade, the “crusade” part perhaps coming at the insistence of Reverend Crawly, who wanted to give it a religious cast. It wasn’t just boys and girls learning the ways of white-tailed deer or largemouth bass, it was the deer and the bass and all of nature as a step toward the Christian awakening of their souls. A crusade that, with the Whalen deaths occurring in such quick succession, Reverend Crawly tried to run out of his office until he had some breathing room and could find someone to permanently direct it for the church. The endowment would support the appointment of a director, and it only seemed fitting that Ellie Whalen be asked to lead the search team in honor of her brother and her father and the name they both bore in benefit of the town so that its youth—
Wait, Walter said. You’re going to tell me that Ellie led a committee to appoint a director for this charity her father had set up and which her mother professed to know so little about …
Because Rosalyn knew, as far as her daughter was concerned, what a shameful end it had accomplished.
And Ellie took on the job because it honored her father and brother and it got her out of the house where her marriage was falling apart …
And because she was her father’s little girl and because her brother had set the bar so high.
So even if it was a committee of three, say, she as a Whalen was a committee of one, and she
took it seriously enough to look around her part of the state, and maybe a state or two away, kudzu states all, so she looked under the kudzu and …
You can quit drawing it out, Walter. You know what happened.
She found the toad.
He had the experience. Scout camps, Y camps, a charitable string of successes to his credit, that sort of thing. Yes, she recruited him and he came.