Early didn’t say much more.
He merely continued to work while I watched. Then, after Papa paid him his due, he doused the fire, loaded his anvil and tools to his wagon bin, and left our Betsy with a warm iron slipper on every hoof.
As I went to sleep that night, I could picture a pair of small pink slippers beneath the bed of a very strong and gentle man.
Miss Kelly
SHE EARNED THIRTEEN DOLLARS A WEEK.
Where? In a red-brick one-room schoolhouse on a Vermont clay road. She was the only teacher I knew for six years.
Behind her orderly desk, on an unpainted wall, an angular needlepoint plaque hung from a crooked nail:
We were marched to the washstand if we smelled dirty, appeared dirty, or talked dirty. Whenever we were in the wrong, Miss Kelly knew it and we knew it. Discipline did not require discussion. Octagon soap solved many a problem. Even now, whenever I cuss, I can still taste it on my tongue.
Miss Kelly read us Ivanhoe and Tom Sawyer and The Wind in the Willows.
On my very first trip to Rutland, the only nearby town of any size, an aunt (knowing my liking for books) pointed at a downtown structure. “Look there, Robert. That’s a library.”
Shaking my head in disbelief, I knew it wasn’t. Because we had a library in our schoolroom. It was a short wooden plank nailed in one corner of the room, upon which sat our two dozen books. Well chosen and well worn. To me, a library couldn’t be a building. It was a piece of wood.
A library board.
Miss Kelly had a rule: Only clean hands were allowed to touch our precious prizes.
If we objected or sulked at Octagonal discipline, Miss Kelly used her term of explanation. Standing very erect, she’d utter her favorite word:
“Standards.”
At the time, we students were the poorly dressed sons and daughters of farmers, widows, hog butchers, paper millers, and lumberjacks. Most of our parents were illiterate, early aged by brutal work and bitter winters. Our teacher collected old newspapers from her neighbors, brought them to school, sometimes read parts of them to us, and stuffed them flat inside our shirts and home-knit sweaters on subzero days.
Weather, in Vermont, was always a popular subject because we had so dreadful much of it. Miss Kelly explained to the twenty-eight of us that every year has four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. Raising my hand, I told our teacher, “Mama says there’s only two seasons in Vermont. She claims there’s just winter and canning.”
It made Miss Kelly smile. “Robert,” she said, regaining her usual dignity, “your mother is also correct.”
We learned to read and to write. But we were never to feel ashamed, Miss Kelly often warned us, that our mothers or fathers could do neither. “Jesus,” she said, “was a carpenter’s son, and He probable never went to school.”
I recall one dreadful day.
Miss Kelly had been reading us poems. A poem, she informed us, was merely a song without music. And a person didn’t have to be British to be a soldier like Oliver Cromwell, a sea captain such as Lord Nelson, or a poet. Anyone could write one. Even children. “Tonight,” she commanded us, “I’m asking each of you to compose a poem.”
We groaned beneath the burden of this impossible task.
“Following chores and supper,” Miss Kelly said, “sit quietly at your kitchen table and write about something you know. Show it to me. And allow my hands, as I read your poem tomorrow, to touch the warmth of your cow. Or pet your dog. Take me to your own barn. Let me see your calf. Hear your chickens. Or taste your cow’s warm fresh morning milk.”
None of us said boo.
Miss Kelly smiled. “Do your best,” she said, “and an angel can do no better.”
Before leaving the school that afternoon, each of us received two sheets of paper and a stubby pencil from our teacher. Many a local residence lacked such luxuries. Upon arriving home, I found Mama in our kitchen (our main room for cooking, washing clothes or kids, eating, and entertaining). My mother stood where she so often did. At our sink. I told her my problem, showing her the pencil and paper, and expressing that I had no idea whatsoever for my poem.
“Sarah’s probable out to the barn,” Mama said, “with her new batch of kittens. They’re all so precious pretty, you could write a song about them. Her kittens are so wondrous and Miss Sarah’s so proud.”
My mother was again right.
That evening, I did my very first piece of writing. Having recently learned the word wondrous, I figured it applied, and composed my poem.
I titled it “Sarah’s Wondrous Thing.”
Next morning, I handed it in to Miss Kelly. She looked at it, along with all twenty-seven others. Pulling open her desk drawer, she extracted a little box, and then licked a tiny gold star to press on my paper. It was my first gold star. But then came the bad part. I had to stand up front, face my classmates, and read my poem … in my itchy underwear and with Norma Jean Bissell watching.
SARAH’S WONDROUS THING
Sarah is our tabby cat,
And always every spring,
She steals away out to the barn
And does a wondrous thing.
Somehow, she has some kittens
In the hay up in the loft.
They all don’t look like Sarah
But they touch so wondrous soft.
Each day I hurry home from school
And up the barnyard path.
And there is Sarah giving each
And every one a bath.
Sarah licks each tiny ear
And tiny tail of silk.
Then they have their supper,
Which is really Sarah’s milk.
I don’t know how she does it,
But she does it every spring.
It makes me want to whistle,
’Cause it’s such a wondrous thing.
At the end of the school day we all lined up, like usual, to shake hands with Miss Kelly before being paroled into freedom’s compelling call.
I was last in line.
“Good night, Miss Kelly,” I said, as I had said hundreds of earlier times.
“Good night, Robert.” Her hand brushed my face. Leaning over an inch or two toward me, she said softly, “I think you might do more in this world than kill hogs.”
She knew about Papa’s part-time job. After saying it, she almost seemed to be sorry that it had slipped out. Then she told me that teachers and farmers did a similar sort of work. Both were raisers, in charge of the green and growing.
“A farmer,” she told me, “gets up and goes to his garden.” She smiled. “But I’m luckier. My garden comes to me.”
So much of what I learned for six years in that one room has stayed with me. In mind, and in heart. She was my free pass from poverty. Because of Miss Kelly, I’ve included her three values of Scholarship, Manners, and Soap in more than one novel. A lot more.
And shared them with Anne and Christopher.
My children.
A Tender Man
HIS FACE WAS BLACKENED BY COAL.
Working a job like his, using a shovel to stoke coal from the tender into the boiler fire of a locomotive, no one could remain clean. There was always a rag or bandanna tied around his neck.
The train didn’t come every day.
Ours was a rural area of Vermont, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Even in boom times (nobody could recall too many of those), the freight train was rarely longer than a score of cars.
I remember bringing an empty burlap bag to school. After final recess, I’d separate myself from the other children in order to visit the water tower at the grade crossing. Here was a place where the giant black engine would slow and then shudder to a dead stop. And hiss. Clouds of vapor billowed from beneath the long horizontal boiler.
In winter (because of the season, mountains, and latitude), it was promising dark by four o’clock. As there was very little light at the water tower, I had to feel around for lumps of coal to bring home. If
I heard the train whistle, I’d wait. It took a long time for the creeping freight to arrive. But worthy of the waiting. Its jerky stop loosened lumps of coal from the tender, just behind the engine. With fortune, I could fill my burlap sack with more fuel than I could drag to where we lived.
Every inch was an uproad trek.
Sometimes there was no coal at all on the ground. The engineer, who throttled the train, never seemed to notice. If so, he didn’t care. But his partner, the fireman, would always contribute on the sly. Once in a while I’d prompt him, holding up my empty bag, hoping he’d see me.
The fireman and I had a secret code between us that I figured his boss (the engineer) didn’t know. Somehow the tender guy managed to spill a few black lumps. They tumbled downward to freckle the fresh snow.
It made no sense to try to yell up a “Thank you, Mister,” because of the locomotive’s persistent noise.
But I waved, and he waved back. Or sort of threatened me with the handle of his shining shovel.
During my boyhood, the railroad must have donated half a ton of coal to our big black six-hundred-pound Acme American kitchen stove. Free coal baked a bunch of biscuits for the Peck family.
I was hoping that the fireman (the tender man) wouldn’t be found out and given the boot due to his benevolence. Because it was, after all, the railroad company’s coal, not the fireman’s to give away. The fireman, however, had a way of protecting his job. After spilling a few lumps of coal, his custom was to yell down at me. Fisting a hand to tell me to keep away from the tracks and to vacate the railroad’s right-of-way property. Don’t ask me how I figured he didn’t mean all of his hostile words or gestures. I just knew. Even though I never learned his name.
At night, especially after hauling home a half-full bag, I’d always remember the locomotive fireman in my prayers. I never forgot the tender man because he never forgot me.
Years later, I drove my car to the grade crossing, stopped, got out, and inhaled a black memory. Now, beneath my feet, there were no lumps of coal for a kid to lug home. None at all. The coal tender was gone because the locomotive engine was no longer steam. It was now a diesel. An oil burner.
Perhaps there are trains up in Heaven.
Maybe, instead of diesel engines or electricity, the Holy Heaven R.R. still rolls behind smoking coal-burners, with an engineer and a very tender man for a fireman. One who wastes a few nuggets of coal for cold children who have an empty burlap bag.
I pray his face is finally clean.
Keepsake
SOUP VINSON HEARD THE NEWS.
He told me. At the time, Luther Wesley Vinson was eleven. And I was ten.
It’s an age when frisky boys consider climbing the rickety stairs that lead to what we imagined as maturity. Manhood, our adolescence reasoned, was possessing not qualities or virtues, but tangible trinkets of proof to show off to our less-advanced contemporaries. For example, matches and stubby Lucky Strike butts. Or a handy pocket opener to flick caps off bottles of beer not yet acquired, or even an acquired taste.
Soup and I were veteran drinkers of sweet apple cider. From a jug!
However, the latest fad, a few high school giants informed us, was carrying a particular grown-up article in one’s pocket, solid evidence that you were one of the guys.
This coveted equipment, so recently in fashion, could be quietly purchased at the drugstore, but only by adults. Or big boys. Kids like us, even with money in hand, would be rejected and dejected customers. Not only that. Twerps who tried would probably be laughed at. Or worse, reported to their parents.
There was, according to rumor, a new secret coin machine. Only one of its kind in town. This mechanical marvel was located on the wall of the men’s room down the road at the Diesel Fuel. Here the prize was available to all. Its price was a quarter. No pennies, nickels, or dimes (items that dominated our savings) were accepted. Quarters only. The dispenser didn’t sell penny gumballs.
This machine was big-time!
Soup and I casually sneaked into the Diesel Fuel’s only restroom, bolted the door, looked around, and there it was. A foreign rectangular object hung on the wall, up high, flashing the brand name of its forbidden fruit:
TROJAN
Earlier, we’d cashed in our long-collected small change, a total of twenty-five cents, and now were financially prepared. Inside my clenched fist I felt our quarter, burning hot, panting for adventure.
Reverently, we read the instructions:
Quarters only.
Insert quarter in slot.
Select type desired.
Pull lever completely down.
Package will appear in tray.
Clearly printed, easy-to-follow directions. But a problem had suddenly confronted us. Select type desired? The selection was made, we then learned upon closer examination of the machine’s technical demands, by pushing one of its three flaming-red buttons:
American Hero
French Tickler
Arabian Stallion
The American Hero style, we concluded, lacked a certain man-of-the-world appeal. Yet choosing between the two remaining choices was no snap-judgment decision. It required that Soup and I exchange our vast reservoirs of romantic sophistication and social experience, weighing all opinions of French or Arab behavior.
“Maybe,” said Soup, “we ought to flip a coin.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Heads it’s French, and tails it’s Arabian.”
“You flip,” Soup told me, “and I’ll catch it.”
An errant toss, plus a fumbled catch, and our precious quarter went jingling to the concrete floor, then rolled across the dampness to underneath the toilet tank. Down on our knees, in unpleasant moistures and aromas, we groped for our twenty-five cents. “I can see it,” Soup said, “but I can’t quite seem to reach it.”
Whack. Whack.
Somebody was outside the door!
“Hey, anybody in there?” asked a trucky male voice. “Open up. Or else.”
“What’ll we do?” I whispered too loudly.
“Be right out,” Soup croaked in a wavering soprano.
The trucker said a colorful word. A real zinger. “You kids got no right to be in there. Hurry up and come on out. And pronto.”
With a desperate ram of my hand into an area about which I knew (or wanted to know) nothing, I managed to reclaim the quarter, dirt and all. Rising, I inserted the gritty coin in the machine’s slot as Soup hurriedly mashed a button. At this point, any selection would do. I yanked down the lever. After a click, and an eternity of a full second, down into the tray thumped our prize, an American Hero Trojan.
Patriotism had triumphed over exotica.
WHACK!
“Open that door,” threatened an irate voice, “or I’ll bust it down and throttle you kids. And I mean now!”
We opened the door. There stood a beefy trucker, holding a quarter. Behind him, seated in the cab of his truck, a lady was shouting a suggestion.
“Hurry it up, Harry. I only got half an hour.”
“In a minute, Gladice. Okay?”
Soup and I decided not to wait around to offer Harry any advice on what, of the three selections, he should purchase. We ran like flushed rabbits. I felt my face blushing with guilt, fearing that Soup and I would be caught and jailed for life. A bold headline on the front page of our local Weekly would trumpet the tawdry news to the entire world:
TROJAN BUYERS NABBED!
After a brief shoot-out, the Vermont Vice Squad announced that two underage criminals, Luther Wesley Vinson and Robert Newton Peck, were apprehended on Saturday as the pair were trying to make their escape from a daring daylight shopping spree in the men’s restroom of the Diesel Fuel Truck Stop. Evidence was confiscated, marked, and identified as a package of American Hero. Both convicts are shackled, hand and foot, to await trial in a solitary maximum-security dungeon. The District Attorney expects a sure life-sentence conviction, claiming he has a key witness, a trucker named Harry, and another possible
observer, who pleaded not to be identified and not to mention anybody named Gladice.
We ran for at least a mile.
Over fences, through bull pastures, splashing through a shallow crick and then pulling up to breathe.
A close call.
We stashed our American Hero in a variety of remote locations: Stoddard’s Ice House, under a rain barrel behind Higbee’s Hardware, and in assorted nooks known only to us.
Unfamiliar with Vermont’s codified Statute of Limitations, we waited and played it cool, spurning the folly of flashing the take of our caper to any of our socially underachieving classmates. After several nervous weeks, we concluded that the proverbial coast was clear. At last we could offer our American Hero its long-awaited debut.
Its virgin excursion came on a Saturday night in May. As customary, we were allowed to come to town with our parents, wearing our good shirts, and promenade to and fro along a very short Main Street, to strut with the concealed confidence that Trojan ownership provides, and to give all the chicks a chance to admire our swaggering masculinity.
We took turns carrying the American Hero.
Having noticed where the high school boys packed theirs, we did likewise. Inside the right front pocket of blue jeans there’s another tiny pocket, about two inches square. Our mothers told us that this was a watch pocket. We both, however, knew its true purpose. It was where a tiger tucks a Trojan.
Days passed, and then weeks, the inevitable changing of seasons, year after year. Several pairs of blue jeans were outworn and outgrown, yet my American Hero managed to adjust to the transition for close to a decade. There it rode, secure in its denim cockpit, ready to serve its ultimate purpose if ever the opportunity presented. Originally (we opened the package and peeked) it was white. But as the years flew by, it yellowed, turned green, and darkened into decay.
Weeds in Bloom Page 4