Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  Growing interested in spite of myself, I made the offer the lukewarm way—“Uhm, anything I can do?”—a person does just to be polite.

  “Yah, keep me company.” He dragged out a wooden fruit box from under the shelf for me to sit on. “Tell me about Montana,” he pronounced it pretty close to right. “Cowboy life.”

  • • •

  THAT GOT ME STARTED, almost as if I was back on the dog bus telling yarns free and easy. I regaled Herman with this, that, and the other about life on the Double W, from riding out with the actual cowboys to check on the cattle, to hunting magpies along the creek, making him exclaim I was a pistoleer, by which I figured he meant gunslinger. Puffing away on his stogie and babying his plants with spoonfuls of fertilizer and careful irrigation from a long-necked watering can—a couple of times I interrupted myself to go and fill it for him from the spigot at the back of the house—Herman listened to all of it as though I were a storyteller right up there with his idol who wrote the pile of books about cowboys and Indians.

  In the end, my storying naturally led around to the whole thing, Gram and me being chucked out of the cook shack and her into the charity ward and me onto the dog bus, when I could just as well have been earning wages in the hayfield the entire summer, and while I couldn’t quite bring myself to lay out my full fear about the poorfarm looming in her future if medical things did not go right, and orphanage starkly in mine, he grasped enough of the situation to tut-tut gravely again.

  “A fix, you are in,” he said with a frown that wrinkled much of his face. “The Kate didn’t tell me the all.”

  Somehow I felt better for having poured out that much of the tale, even if it went into squarehead ears, so to speak. At first I was suspicious that Herman resorted to a kind of Indian speakum in talking about anything western, but no, it became clear that was genuinely his lingo from the old country mixed in with the new. Whatever the travels of his tongue, I was finding this big husky open-faced man to be the one thing about Wisconsin that I felt vaguely comfortable with, despite his evident quirks and odd appearance. In most ways, he was homely as a pickle. That elongated face and the prominent teeth, taken together with the cockeyed gaze magnified by his glasses, gave him the look of someone loopy enough that you might not want to sit right down next to, although of course there I was, plotched beside him like just another potted plant. Together with everything else in the humid greenhouse, he himself seemed to have sprouted, his shoulders topping my head as he stretched from his stool here and there to reach into his menagerie of vegetation, his big knuckles working smoothly as machine parts in crimping a leaf off a tomato plant near its root—“Pinch their bottoms is good for them,” he told me with a naughty grin—or tying a lagging bean stalk to a support stick. The dappled light streaming through the glass ceiling and walls brought out the silver in his faded fair hair, which I suspected made him older than Aunt Kate, although there was no real telling. I’d have bet anything gray hair did not stand a chance on her; she would rather, as not much of a joke had it, dye by her own hand.

  About then, as I was yammering away with Herman, I noticed a strange smudge of some sort on the back of my hand. Dirt is to be expected in a greenhouse, so I went to brush it off, but when that didn’t get rid of it, I peered more closely. Then gasped. A ghostly scrap of face, an eye clear and direct, feminine eyebrow and ladylike cheekbone distinct in outline, had scarily materialized on my skin. Yanking my hand away as if burned, I sent Herman one hell of a look. Whatever this stunt was, I didn’t like having it pulled on me.

  “Surprises your daylights out, yah?” he said, unperturbed. “They do that.” He pointed upward with the cigar between his fingers. “Photo graphic plates,” he spoke it as three words.

  I tipped my head back and must have gaped, my eyes adjusting even if my brain was lagging. When looked at closely, reversed faces spookily gazed down from every glass pane, eyes and hair empty of color while the rest of the countenance was dark as night. Bygone people, for I could make out old styles of men’s collars and women’s hairdos—the lady who appeared on my hand again when I hesitantly put it out and held it at the right distance to bring her portrait pose into full miniature was done up in marcel curls, her probably black tresses tumbling ever so neatly down the sides of her head.

  Agog, I kept looking back and forth from her image there on me to the shadowy section of glass overhead, still not seeing how this worked. “These—these things were in cameras? How?”

  Patiently Herman explained, enlightening me that photographic plates made to fit in large box cameras that stood on tripods were the way pictures used to be developed, before there were film negatives. “Old-timey, but they last good and long,” he concluded. That was for sure. The gallery of little windows faithfully saved for posterity milk-complexioned women and bearded men and sometimes entire families down to babies in arms, everyone in their Sunday best, sitting for their portraits way back when and now turned into apparitions keeping company with the pair of us and the vegetable kingdom.

  “So, Donny,” the master of the house of glass went on with a squint that was all but a wink. “When Schildkraut’s Photography Shop went pthht,” he made the noise that meant kaput, “these are for the dump but I get there first. The Kate thinks I am crazy to do it, but glass is glass, why not make a greenhouse, hah?” He tapped his forehead, his eyebrows lifted toward the plates pintoed dark with people. “I give a little think whether to scrape people off. Nuh-uh, leave them like so. Makes it not too hot in here.” He had a point. Without those clever dabs of shade and a pair of hinged windows that let some air through, the greenhouse would have been an oven by the afternoon.

  Along with me, Herman gazed up at the ranks of panes of glass with their memories showing. Picking up a box lid large enough to catch more than a single phantom photo from overhead, he now showed me that the smoky blotches turning into recognizable pictures like the one on me were a trick of the brightening sunshine as the day went along, the rays hitting the photographic substance a certain way like a darkroom enlarger.

  I more or less grasped that, but still was spooked enough to ask in nearly a whisper:

  “Who are they?”

  “Manitowocers,” he said around the stub of his cigar, or maybe “Manito Walkers,” I couldn’t be sure which he meant. At the time, I assumed he merely meant those in the old days who had but to gallivant around town to think they were hearing their blest souls talk, according to the cross-stitched sampler hanging in the living room. I was disappointed the figures preserved in glass were as ordinary as that, but maybe that was Manitowoc for you, nothing to do but hoof around being airy.

  Just then, the back door of the house banged like a shot, making me nearly jump out of my skin, Herman reacting with a jolt, too, the ash spilling off his cigar. A dressed-up Aunt Kate was advancing on us with quick little steps, high heels tricky on the lawn. Again my heart twinged, that someone who was such a perfect mirror reflection of Kate Smith was not the real thing.

  I did not have time for much of that kind of regret, as she minced right up to the doorway of the greenhouse—plainly she was not setting foot in the place—and announced, “I’m off to canasta. You two are on your own if you think you can stand it.”

  At first I thought she was picking up and leaving for another town with one of those Wisconsin names, which raised my spirits no little bit, until Herman said without a trace of expression, “Cut the deck thin and win,” and I realized she was only off to a card game.

  Tugging at her lemon-colored outfit, which was as tight on her as fabric would allow, she addressed me on my fruit box as if having sudden second thoughts about dispatching me to the care of Herman and the greenhouse. “I hope he isn’t talking your ear off about cowboys and Indians, sweetie. He has them on the brain.”

  “Oh, no, he’s been introducing me to the vegetables, is all.”

  That drew me a swift look from her, but
her attention reverted to Herman. “Don’t forget, Brinker, you’ll need to fix lunch,” she told him as if he’d better put a string around his finger.

  “We will eat like kings,” he answered, puttering with a tomato plant.

  “Just so it isn’t like jokers wild,” she deadpanned, which I had to admit was pretty good. “Toodle-oo, you two,” she left us with. “I’ll be back when you see me coming,” another echo of Gram that surprised me.

  I watched her pick her way to the DeSoto and drive off speedily. Showing less interest in the tomato plant now, Herman peered at me through his specs. “She is off to her hen party. They will yack-yack for hours. Now then,” he luxuriously mimicked that word combination of hers that made less sense the more you thought about it, patting around on himself to find his matches and light up another cigar, as if in celebration of the Kate being gone. He gave me a man-to-man grin. “So how do you like Manito Woc?”

  There it was again. “How come you say it that way?”

  And again the bucktooth grin turned ever so slightly sly. “It is where Manito walks, you don’t think?”

  I shrugged, although I could feel something about this conversation creeping up on me. “Who’s Manito?”

  “To be right, it is Manitou,” he amended, spelling it. “You don’t know Manitou?” I couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or for real. “From Indian?”

  I was hooked. “Huh-uh. Tell me.”

  He blew a stream of smoke that curled in the heavy air. “Gitche Manitou is the Great Spirit.”

  “Gitchy,” I echoed but dubiously, wondering if my leg was being pulled.

  “Yah, like Gitche Gumee, from the poem?” He looked saddened when I had to tell him I was not up on Hiawatha.

  “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” he recited, his accent thumping like thunder. Again, I had to shrug. “By the shining Big-Sea Water,” he persisted. I shook my head, wishing he would try me on something like “A flea and a fly in a flue . . .”

  Despairing of my lack of literary education, he held up crossed fingers. “Longfellow and Karl May were like so. Poets of Gitche and Winnetou.”

  “Good for them,” I tried faking hearty agreement to clear dead poets out of the growing crowd of specters in the greenhouse, and get to what I saw as the point. “Then where are any Indians in Manitowoc?”

  “Gone.” He waved a hand as if tossing a good-bye. “That is why it is said the spirits walk, hah?”

  • • •

  SUPPOSEDLY IT TAKES one to know one, right? So, then and there, my own sometimes overly active mind, red in the head or however the condition of seeing things for more than they are can best be described, was forced to acknowledge that this odd bespectacled yah-saying garden putterer and henpecked husband, fully five times older than me, had a king hell bastard of an imagination. Possibly outdoing my own, which I know is saying a lot. Wherever Herman Brinker got it from, he’d held on to the rare quality that usually leaves a person after a certain number of years as a kid, to let what he had read possess him. I saw now why Aunt Kate was forever at him about taking to heart too much the stories of Karl May in what seemed to be, well, squarehead westerns. Not that I wanted to side with her, storyteller of a sort that I sometimes turned into. But from my experience of his mental workings so far, notions Herman had picked up out of books did not appear to be condensed from their imaginative extent any at all, let alone properly digested.

  • • •

  PUT IT WHATEVER WAY, this was getting too thick for me, people dead and gone but still strolling around in my cigar-smoking host’s telling of it, as well as shadows on glass flaring to life like lit matches, Manitowocers here, Manitou walkers there—a lot more than potted plants flourished in this greenhouse of his.

  I shifted uncomfortably on my fruit box. “Spirits like in ghosts, you mean? Herman, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re supposed to believe in those.”

  “We can believe in Indians, I betcha.” He had me there. I could see him thinking, cocking a look at the dappled shed’s glassy figures, and as it turned out, beyond. “So, paleface cow herders, you know much of. How about—?” He patted his hand on his mouth warwhoop style, mocking the Kate’s charge that he had cowboys and Indians on the brain.

  With an opening like that, how could I resist?

  “Well, sure, now that you mention it,” that set me off, “I’ve been around Indians a lot,” skipping the detail that the last time, I’d slept through most of a busload of them. Trying to sound really veteran, I tossed off, “I even went to school with Blackfoot kids most of one year at Heart Butte.”

  “Heart? Like gives us life, yah?”

  “Yeah—I mean, yes, same word anyhow.”

  Herman leaned way toward me, cigar forgotten for the moment. “Heart Bee-yoot. Bee-yoot-iffle name. Tell more.”

  I didn’t bother to say that was the only thing of any beauty at the remote and tough little Blackfoot reservation school where, around Dwayne Left Hand and Vern Rides Proud, I wisely kept my trap shut about my Red Chief nickname and endured being called Brookie for the freckles that reminded them of the speckles on eastern brook trout. That Heart Butte schoolyard with its rough teasing and impromptu fistfights was at least as educational as the schoolroom. But if Herman was gaga about things Indian, here was my perfect chance to confide the Red Chief nickname to him.

  He was impressed, more so than he really needed to be, I noted somewhat apprehensively when I was done. “Up there with Winnetou, you are,” he exclaimed, slapping his knee. “Young chiefs. No wonder you got the fancy moccasins.”

  “Yeah, but”—I stole an uneasy glance at the pile of Karl May books—“who’s this Winnetou anyway? What tribe he’s from, even?” If he was Blackfoot, my Red Chief tag might as well shrink back to Heart Butte invisibility in comparison.

  Herman puffed on his cigar, maybe seeking smoke signals, as he gave it a think about how best to answer. Finally he said, “An Apache knight, he was.”

  I tried to sort that out, never having heard of an Indian clanking around in a suit of armor, and said as much.

  Herman laughed. “Not iron clothes, hah. Leather leggings and a hunting shirt, he dressed in, and, best yet”—he nodded approvingly at me—“fancy moccasins.” Turning serious again, he went on. “Karl May calls him a knight because he was honorable. His word you could trust. He fought fair. Like a chief supposed to, yah.” He nodded at me gravely this time.

  “Uhm, Herman, you better know.” In all this Indian stuff, I didn’t want to end up chewing more than I could bite off. “I haven’t had much practice at any of that, see. I mean, with me, you can tell where the Red came from”—I flopped my hair—“but the Chief thinger is just from my dad. Sort of kidding, in a way, is all.”

  “Maybe not all.” He gave me one of his cockeyed glances through the thick glasses. “Maybe he thought the name fit more than”—he kept a straight face, but it still came out sly—“your scalp.”

  11.

  ONE THING ABOUT hanging around with Herman, time went by like a breeze. That noontime, with Aunt Kate gone to canasta, the house was without commotion as Herman assembled lunch, laying out the kind of store bread that came sliced and without taste, but announcing we would have plenty of sandwich meat, which to me meant good old baloney slathered with mayonnaise and had me licking my lips, after the menu in this household so far. I stayed out of the way by reading the funnies in the newspaper until he called me to the table. “Meal fit for an earl.”

  When I looked blank at that, he winked and said, “Earl of Sandwich, invented guess what.”

  Some sense of caution caused me to peek under the top slice of bread, revealing a gray slab pocked with gelatin and strange colonies of what might be meat or something else entirely. “Is this”—I couldn’t even ask without swallowing hard—“headcheese?”

  “Yah. A treat.” Herman took a horsebite mouthful. �
�The Kate won’t eat it,” he said, chewing. “She calls it disgusting, if you will imagine.”

  I was entirely with her on that, for I had seen the ingredients of headcheese, each more stomach-turning than the next, come off the hog carcass at butchering time when the animal’s head and feet and bloody tongue were chucked in a bucket for further chopping up. But at any mealtime, Gram’s voice was never far distant—If it’s put in front of you, it’s edible at some level—and by not looking at the jellied pork rubbish between the sandwich bread, I got it down.

  This Wisconsin incarceration evidently requiring digestive juices of various kinds, I stayed at the table stewing on matters, trying to assimilate what all had happened since my arrival into this unnerving household, while Herman pottered at washing up our few dishes. When he was done and hanging up the dish towel in a fussy way not even the Kate could criticize, I ventured: “Can I ask you a sort of personal thing?”

  “Shoot, podner,” he responded agreeably enough, pointing a finger and cocked thumb at me like a pistol, which I figured must be something he picked up from a Karl May western.

  “Right. How come you don’t go by the name ‘Dutch’ anymore?”

  He pursed his lips a couple of times as if tasting the inquiry, then came and sat at the table with me before answering, if that’s what it was. “Down with the ship, it went.”

  He appeared to be serious. Oh man, I thought to myself, first the Gitchy something or other, walking around dead, now this. Was this some squarehead joke?

  “Sounds funny, yah?” Herman conceded. “But when the Badger Voyager sinked, my name ‘Dutch’ was no more, after.” Again he made the pthht sound. He folded his big hands on the table as he looked straight across at me in that uneven gaze of his. “Onshore, ‘Herman’ got new life.”

  I still didn’t grasp that swap, and said so.