Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  Surely those didn’t count toward the main matter, which was to survive for the time being in a household where Aunt Kate seemed to wear the pants and Herman tended to his knitting in the company of beings with names like Winnetou and Old Shatterhand.

  In the light of day it was clear that if I knew what was good for me, I had better fit somewhere in between them, tight as the fit might be, and strolling in at breakfast with a sunny “Good morning!” and the white lie “I slept real good” ought to be the place to start.

  Only to be met, before I even was out of the stairwell, by raised voices.

  “Will you kindly quit playing with your food? How many times have I told you it’s disgusting.”

  “Same number I telled you, it helps with the digestion.”

  “Toast does not need help!”

  “Hah. Shows what you know. More to it than feed your face like a cow.”

  Whoa. I backed off to the bathroom, out of range of the blowup in the kitchen, in a hurry. Staying in there a good long while, I ran the faucets full blast and flushed the toilet a couple of times to announce my presence, and finally cracked the door open to test the atmosphere. Not a sound of any kind. Deafening silence, to call it that, was spooky in its own way and maybe not an improvement, but I couldn’t stay in the bathroom permanently. Mustering myself, I approached the deadly quiet kitchen.

  Herman was nowhere to be seen. Aunt Kate was sitting by herself there, in a peppermint-striped flannel robe and fuzzy pink slippers that would never be mistaken for part of Kate Smith’s wardrobe, drinking coffee while reading the newspaper spread open on the table. “There you are, sugarplum.” She looked up as if reminding herself of my existence, before I could say anything. That voice made the simplest greeting musical. “Did you sleep all right, poor tired thing?”

  Nervously I met that with “Like a petrified log.”

  There may have been a surprising amount of truth in that, because sunshine was streaming through the window at quite a steep angle. I checked the clock over the stove and was shocked to see it was nearly nine. On the ranch, breakfast was at six prompt, and no small portion of my shock, beyond sleeping in halfway to noon, was that she and Herman started the day so late and casually. Their plates, one littered with dark crusts of toast, still were on the table. I was no whiz about schedules, but I doubted that time zones alone accounted for such a difference.

  “Now then,” Aunt Kate said with no urgency, licking her finger and turning a page of the newspaper, “what in the realm of possibility can we get you for breakfast, mmm?”

  I answered with more manners than good sense. “Oh, just whatever you’ve got.”

  Aunt Kate barely had to budge to honor that, reaching to the counter for a cereal box I had not seen in time. Puffed rice, the closest thing to eating air. Swallowing on that fact, if not much else, I found a bowl in the cupboard as she directed and a milk bottle in the refrigerator and spied the sugar bowl and did what I could to turn the puffed stuff into a soup of milk and sugar. A parent would have jumped right on me for that, but she paid no attention.

  Evidently the kind of person who did not have much to say in the morning—although that was not what it had sounded like from the stairwell—she kept on drinking coffee and going through the paper, occasionally letting out a high-pitched hum of interest or exasperation at some item, as I spooned down the puffed-up cereal. The scatterings of crust on what must have been Herman’s plate seemed like a fuller meal than mine.

  Finally I saw no choice but to ask, polite or not. “Suppose I could have a piece of toast, please?”

  That drew me a bit of a look, but I was pointed to where the bread was kept and warned about the setting on the toaster. “He likes it incinerated,” Aunt Kate made plain as she pushed off to answer the phone ringing in the living room.

  “This is she.” I learned a new diction while attending to my toast. That voice of hers turned melodious even in talking on the phone, rising and falling with the conversation. “Yes. Yes. You’re very kind to call. That’s good to know.” Wouldn’t it be something if people sounded like that all the time, halfway to music? “I see. No, no, you needn’t bother, I can tell him.” Her tone sharpened. “She did? Oh, all right, if you insist.” Industriously buttering my toast, I about dropped the knife when I heard:

  “Donny, come to the phone.”

  • • •

  LIKE THE FIRST time of handling the reins of a horse or the gearshift of a car, things only grown-ups touched previous to then, I can still feel that oblong plastic pink receiver as I tentatively brought it close to my mouth.

  “Hello? This is . . . he.”

  “I am Sister Carma Jean,” the voice sounding exactly like you would imagine a nun’s came as crisp as if it were in the room, instead of fifteen hundred miles away at Columbus Hospital. I was dazed, unsure, afraid of what I might hear next.

  “Last thing when I was at her bedside, your grandmother wished me to tell you yourself”—echo of last wish in that; I clung harder to the receiver—“she has come through the operation as well as can be expected.”

  I breathed again, some.

  “Of course, there are complications with that kind of surgery,” the Sister of Charity spoke more softly now, “so her recuperation will take some time.” Complications. Those sounded bad, and right away I was scared again. “But we have her here in the pavilion,” the voice on the line barely came through to me, “where she is receiving the best of care. You mustn’t worry.” As if I could just make up my mind not to.

  Aunt Kate hovered by the bay window pinching dead leaves off the potted plants while I strained to believe what was being recited by the holy sister in Great Falls. “She says to tell you,” the nun could be heard gamely testing out Gram’s words, “you are not to be red in the head about things, the summer will be over before you know it.”

  “Can I—” My throat tight, I had trouble getting the sentence out, but was desperate to. “Can I please talk to her?”

  “I’m sorry, but she’s resting now.” That sounded so protective I didn’t know whether it was good or bad. “Is there something you would like for me to tell her?”

  I swear, Aunt Kate was putting together everything said, just from hearing my side of the conversation, as snoopy as if she were the third party on the line. Why couldn’t she go back in the kitchen, or better yet, off to the bathroom, so I could freely report something like I’m stuck in an attic, and Aunt Kitty who isn’t Kate Smith and Herman who isn’t Uncle Dutch turn out to be the kind of people who fight over the complexion of a piece of toast.

  “I guess not,” I quavered, squeezing the phone. Then erased that in the next breath. “No, wait, there is, too. Tell her”—I could feel the look from across the room—“the dog bus worked out okay.” Mentally adding, But Manito Woc or however you say it is even a tougher proposition than either you or I ever imagined, Gram. So please get well really, really fast.

  • • •

  AS SOON AS I clunked the phone into its cradle, Aunt Kate squared around to me from patrolling the potted plants and trilled as if warming up her voice, “Wasn’t that good news. Mostly.”

  “I guess.”

  That word complications rang in my ears, and no doubt hers, as we faced each other’s company for an unknown length of time ahead.

  “Well, now, we must keep you entertained, mustn’t we. I know you like to be busy, so I set up the card table and got out a jigsaw puzzle. Those are always fun, aren’t they.”

  Maybe I was not the absolute shrewdest judge of character, but I had a pretty good hunch that habit of agreeing with herself covered up her desperation at not knowing what to do with a kid. This household didn’t have so much as a dog or cat, not even a goldfish. By all evidence so far, Aunt Kate was only used to taking care of herself and the constant war with Herman, as it gave every appearance of being.

  R
ight now she was at her most smiling and dimpled as she led me over to the card table, stuck as far out of the way as possible in the corner of the living room, and the puzzle box front and center on it. MOUNT RUSHMORE—KNOW YOUR PRESIDENTS, and in smaller type, 1,000 Pieces. Worse yet, it was one I had already done in my jigsaw period, when Gram was trying to keep me occupied. “Yeah, swell,” I managed to remark.

  Ready to leave me to the mountain of puzzle pieces and my cold toast, Aunt Kate headed for the basement to see if the laundry was finished yet. “Oh, just so you know,” she sang out as she started down the cellar stairs, “I put your snap-button shirt in with our washing, but the other was torn so badly I threw it away. It wasn’t worth mending.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I called back. Catching up to the fact I hadn’t bothered to remove my stash from the ruined shirt the night before, what with everything else going on, I inquired for the sake of keeping current, “Where did you put my money?”

  The footsteps on the stairs halting, her voice came muffled. “What money is that?”

  “It was safety-pinned to the back of the good pocket, Gram did that so a pickpocket couldn’t steal it and—”

  For someone of her heft, she came up out of those cellar stairs in a terrific burst of speed, turned the hall corner at full tilt, and barreled through the kitchen and out to the garbage can at the top of the driveway, flannel robe billowing behind her, me at her heels. Her backside was too broad for me to see past as she flung open the lid of the can and looked in, and I was afraid to anyway.

  “Too late,” she moaned, “it’s been picked up.”

  “C-can’t we get it back?” Frantically I ran down the driveway, followed by Aunt Kate at a heavy gallop. Pulling up short at the curb, I shot a look one way along the street and she the other, then our heads swung in the opposite directions, staring past each other. No garbage truck. We listened hard. Nothing to be heard except her puffing and blowing.

  “Maybe we could go to the dump,” I stammered, “and head it off.”

  “Impossible,” she said in a way that could have meant either the dump or me. With that, we trudged back up the driveway, the slap-slap of her fuzzy slippers matching the thuds of my heart.

  Outside the kitchen door, she rounded on me furiously. “Why didn’t you tell me it was pinned there?”

  “I—I didn’t know you were going to do the wash so soon,” I blurted, which was not the real answer to the real question.

  That was coming now, as she drilled her gaze into me and started in. “More than that, why didn’t you—”

  But before she could rightfully jump all over me for forgetting to rescue the money myself before dropping the shirt in the laundry chute, she stopped and pinched between her eyes in that way that signaled she needed an aspirin. After a moment, eyes still tight shut, she asked as if she could not face any more of this, “How much was it?”

  “Th-thirty dollars, all I had,” I said, as if it were an absolute fortune, which to me it was. As I’ve said, no small sum in those days, to someone like her either, according to the excruciating groan she let out.

  “See,” I tried to explain, “I was supposed to buy my school clothes with it, and whatever comic books I wanted, and go to a show once in a while if you said it was okay, and—” I looked at her angry, flushed face, twice the size of my merely red one, and abjectly tailed off—“wasn’t supposed to be a nuisance to you about money.”

  “That didn’t quite work out, did it,” she fried my hide some more as she stomped back into the kitchen, still mad as could be. I shrank behind her, keeping a cautious distance. “Now this,” she declaimed, “on top of everything else,” which seemed to mean me generally. “And I have all these things to do,” she further declared, just as if she had not been sitting around drinking coffee and reading the newspaper half the morning.

  I babbled another apology to try to make amends, although I wasn’t getting anything of the sort from her for failing to go through my pocket before junking my shirt and costing me every cent I possessed, was I?

  “Why don’t you start on your puzzle,” she said darkly, heading for the basement again.

  “Maybe later.” By now I felt the right to sulk. Even if I had been in the wrong about not retreiving the money from that shirt, I didn’t think I was the only one, and I was not going to let myself be sent to the permanent dunce corner, which the card table with Mount Rushmore in a thousand pieces amounted to. It occurred to me that, with this woman as mad at me as a spitting cat, it would really help to have someone on my side, or at least another target to draw her fire. “Where’d Herman go?” I wondered, hoping he might show up any moment to get me off the hook.

  No such luck. Gone to “work,” where else, she forgot about the basement long enough to circle back and huff, the quotation marks speaking loudest. When I asked what his job was, she sorted me out on that in a hurry.

  “Job?” She drew the word out mockingly as she clattered stray breakfast dishes into the sink in passing. “That will be the day. The old pooter”—that bit of Gram’s language out of her startled me—“is out in that greenhouse of his again.” My mention of him did change matters, though, because at the cellar stairs she whipped around to me, with a different look in her doll eyes.

  “You can go help him, dearie, wouldn’t that be nice?” she suggested, suspiciously sweet all of a sudden. “Make yourself useful as well as ornamental.” Gesturing around as if chores were swarmng at her and I was in the way, she exclaimed that life was simply too, too busy. “After I deal with the laundry, I have to get ready.” She didn’t bother to say for what, and from the set of her chins, I could tell she did not want to hear anything more out of me but footsteps as I hustled my fanny to that greenhouse.

  “Maybe I’ll go say hi,” I mumbled, and trooped out to the backyard, where the odd shed of glass gleamed in the sun. Already at that time of the morning, the Wisconsin air felt heavy to me, as if it could be squeezed out like a sponge, and I plucked at my one wearable shirt of the moment and unbuttoned my sleeves and rolled them back onto my forearms for a bit of ventilation as I crossed the lawn, Herman’s big footprints ahead of me fading with the last of the dew.

  I had been curious about the mystifying structure when the DeSoto’s headlights reflected off it the night before, which now seemed a lifetime ago. Halfway hidden in a corner of the hedge at the rear of the yard, the greenhouse, as I now knew it, seemed like it ought to be transparent but somehow could not actually be seen through, whatever the trick of its construction was.

  It did not reveal much more about itself in broad daylight as I approached past a neatly marked-out vegetable patch, the small glass panels that were the walls and roof of the shed frame splotchy as if needing a good washing. Funny way to grow things, the soot smears or whatever they were blocking out full light that way, I thought. Weird old Wisconsin, one more time.

  “Knock knock,” I called in, not knowing how to do otherwise when everything was breakable.

  “Hallo” issued from I didn’t know where in the low jungle of plants, until Herman leaned into sight amid the greenery, where he was perched on a low stool while spooning something into a potted tomato as if feeding a baby. “Come, come,” he encouraged me in, “meet everybody.”

  There certainly was a crowd of plants when I ducked in, all right, and according to their names written on markers like Popsicle sticks in the clay pots, several kinds you could not grow in Montana in a hundred years, green peppers and honeydew melons and such. I also spotted, at the other end of edibility, a miniature field of cabbage seedlings, sauerkraut makings.

  Properly impressed with his green thumb, I stood back and watched Herman fuss over his crop, pot by leafy pot. Pausing to tap the ash off a smelly cigar that undoubtedly would not have been allowed into the house, he made a face that had nothing to do with the haze of smoke that had me blinking to keep my eyes from waterin
g. “You have escaped with your scalp, yah? I heard the Kate on the warpath again.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s sort of pee oh’d at me,” I owned up to, making plain that the feeling was mutual.

  Herman listened with sympathy, as best I could tell behind his heavy glasses and the reeking cigar, while I spilled out the story of the torn shirt and the fatally safety-pinned bills. He tut-tutted over that, saying throwing money in the garbage was not good at all. But he didn’t lend me any encouragement as to how I was supposed to get through the summer flat broke.

  “The purse is the Kate’s department,” he said with a resigned puff of smoke. Reflecting further, he expressed effectively: “She is tight as a wad.”

  I must have looked even more worried, if possible, for he added, as if it would buck up my spirits, “Sometimes she barks worse than she bites. Sometimes.”

  By way of Gram, that was the kind of statement I had learned to put in the category of free advice and worth just what it cost. At the moment there was nothing I could do about an aunt who either barked or bit, so I took a look around to see what “helping” Herman in the greenhouse might consist of. Except for possibly scrubbing the blotchy windows, nothing suggested itself, inasmuch as he had turned the glass shed into a greatly more cozy place than, say, my rat hole of an attic. Long wooden shelves along either side handily held not only the miniature forest of plants he had started in pots, but garden trowels and snippers and other tools and a colorful array of fertilizer boxes and so on, a coffee thermos, a cigar box, and a stack of books by Karl May, who evidently had more Deadly Dust up his sleeve after that Montana buffalo hunt. Stashed in a corner was an old gray duffel of the seabag sort, doubtless holding more treasures the Kate had banned from the house.