Harvestman Lodge

by Cameron Judd

  Eli walked in. Not an overly large office, but plenty big enough for one. There was a large faux-maple desk, and in the corner a tilt-top layout table. Four chairs in the room, counting the desk chair.

  “This’ll suit, you reckon?” Jimbo asked.

  Eli swept his eyes around the place one more time. “Jimbo, I’ve been working in a shoe store in Knoxville, and had nowhere to write my book except the kitchen table in my apartment. An office is a luxury. Pretty much any office. This is fine. Yeah, I like it.”

  “You wrote a book. Yeah, I heard that. Huh! I’d sooner take a beating than try to write a book,” Jimbo said, faking a shudder. “I’d rather go back into the state pen than have to put that many words on paper.”

  State pen … go back? A dozen questions leaped to Eli’s mind. Courtesy demanded he not ask them.

  Jimbo read his thoughts and grinned. “Don’t you worry, young man, my killing days are long past me.”

  Killing. “You joking with me, Jimbo?”

  Jimbo chuckled. “If I hollered boo right now you’d jump right through that wall.”

  “I might.”

  “Don’t you be worrying about none of this. I kilt three men in my life. Two of them in Korea, so that don’t count. The other one we ain’t going to talk about. All I’ll say is he was about to kill me when I killed him first. But I couldn’t get off for self-defense. I had the wrong skin color for that, y’see, and he had the right one. I ain’t killed no man since, nor had no ambition to.”

  “I’ll take you at your word.” Something to ask Jake Lundy about.

  “Your bathroom’s there,” Jimbo said, pointing toward a nearby door. Eli checked it out. Toilet, sink, and to his surprise, a cubicle tub-style shower with a basic white plastic curtain hanging on rings.

  “Stone tile on the floor,” Jimbo said, tapping his workboot on the tile. “None of that imitation stuff. Good tile like this is will hold up forever, just about.”

  “It’s great,” Eli said, trying the sink. The faucets turned on and off easily, no drips. He flipped a wall switch. The ventilation fan worked.

  “Your water heater is in the closet on the other side of this wall,” Jimbo said. “It’s a little one, but it’ll give you what you need.”

  “I like it, Jimbo. If I sleep through my alarm, I can still get to work on time and take my shower right here at the office.”

  The old man grinned and offered a handshake. “That’s good, young man,” he said. “You’ll do fine here. And if anything quits working or starts dripping or whatever, you got old Jimbo here to take care of you.”

  Eli grinned back and shook Jimbo’s hand and felt he’d made his first real friend in this town.

  DRIVING AWAY FROM THE STATE’S ugliest and strangest office complex, Eli stopped at a phone booth on Railroad Street and called Allison with his news, wondering why he even bothered. The chance to be whatever they might have become together was certainly gone, as Allison was always ready to tell him whenever they talked.

  And yet the talking went on.

  He tried to keep the conversation focused on the new job. “My office building is a mulligan stew,” he said. “Just a bunch of separate structures boxed in together without any real obvious design. There’s a story behind that I’ll tell you sometime. My office itself, though, isn’t bad. About the size of a dormitory room, bathroom off to the side. The bathroom even has a shower in it … which will be handy, I guess, if I somehow manage to work up a raging sweat one day typing stories about the heritage of Kincheloe County and Tylerville.”

  “Will you have an assistant, a secretary?”

  “No. Just me alone in that office with my word processor. There’s no full front-end system here yet, just individual terminals that save to floppy disks. You take the floppies in to the paper for editing and transfer into the typesetting system. And of course I’ve got an office phone. I’ll give you the direct-dial number as soon as I know it. They are also going to tie me in to the newspaper’s main switchboard so that Ruby, the lady who answers the phones at the paper, can transfer calls to me when she needs to.”

  “Ruby. Some little part-time floozy coed from the nearest college, I suppose?”

  Eli laughed. “Not even close. Think big hair, suicide blonde. Saddle-leather skin. Nearly old enough to be my mother. Nice lady, but if she so much as batted her eyes at me, I’d run like a cheetah.”

  “Oh, I know how good you are at running.”

  Here we go again.

  “Please, Allie. Let’s not, not this time. Just be happy for me, okay? I’ve finally got a job in my field of training. It doesn’t pay a fortune, but living costs are cheaper here, I’m used to being underpaid, and at least I’ll be doing the kind of work that interests me and that I was educated for. I’ll not have to sell shoes anymore.”

  “I’m glad for you, really, Eli. It’s just that … well, what you did hurt, you know. For God’s sake, it was the day before the wedding! The day before!”

  “Believe me, I remember. I handled it as badly as anything could be handled, and I’ve admitted it a thousand times already. But would it have been better to go through with something we both knew was a mistake? To create a marriage just to see it fall apart later?”

  She voiced a word-like noise, impossible to understand. She had started to cry.

  He went on: “I just wish I had come to see the truth about our situation … the truth about us … faster than I did. I would have spared you the humiliation of calling off your wedding just as it was supposed to happen. I can’t believe I did that to you. I’m so sorry.”

  What he really couldn’t believe was that he was having to talk through all this yet another time. How many times had they slogged through this swamp? Why wade it again now?

  A sob through the earpiece made Eli wince. “Do you want me to call you back later?” he asked.

  She sniffed loudly. “No. No, I’m fine … I just wasn’t prepared to think about all that today.”

  “And I didn’t mean for it to come up. Honest.” And it wasn’t me who brought it up, he thought, but did not say.

  A pause, and a feeling she was trying to find a way past this difficult conversational drift. “So … about the size of a dorm room?”

  “That’s right. A very simple and basic office, but it’s fine for what I’ll be doing.”

  “Eli, I’m glad things worked out … but is this job what you really need? You’ve signed up for a one-time special project at a small-town paper, the pay is nothing to brag about, your office is in a building that you say looks like shoeboxes glued to hatboxes, and you believe you’re likely to be made to do work outside your job description. And you’ll be living in a little town where there’s nothing to do, and most likely every small-town Sally there will be chasing after the new single man in town.”

  Eli laughed. “You’re jealous! I never would have believed it!”

  “You’re not mine to be jealous over anymore. And just who am I supposed to be jealous of?”

  “Those ‘small-town Sallys’ you just mentioned, I guess. The ones who’ll apparently be chasing me, along with bleach-bottle Ruby, all over the hinterlands of Kincheloe County.”

  “Eli, I could never be jealous of any bimbo trapped in Hicktown, U.S.A., running after a guy who will only abandon her at the altar if she does manage to catch him.”

  That one arrived like an unexpected slap, and stung. “We need to end this conversation, Allie. We’re going downhill here.”

  “For once we’re in agreement. Congratulations on your job and good luck with it.”

  “Thanks. And goodb –” She was gone before he could complete the word. He hung up the phone a little too hard, and left the phone booth so vigorously the folding door rattled.

  Chapter Four

  SATURDAY CAME, AND WITH it a return to Tylerville to find a place to live.

  Eli found a two-day-old edition of the Clarion lying on a bench outside a barbershop, and scanned the classifieds. He found
three promising listings and made calls. The first two had already been taken since the ad was published, but the third remained available. He met the landlord, a middle-aged fellow named Bill Cruller, at Cruller’s home, and followed the man’s battered pickup truck out to the rental site.

  “It’s the upper part you’d rent,” Cruller said, gesturing toward the two-level building. The lower portion featured huge plate glass windows, like an old-style auto showroom. The upper rental level, accessible by an exterior flight of stairs protected by an awning, had a smaller footprint than the bottom level it sat upon.

  “Been a lot of different businesses operate in that lower level,” Cruller said as they walked toward the stairs. “One fellow sold cars, another had a motorcycle dealership, then another man sold mountain bikes and hiking gear and such. There was a day care for kids in there for a short time, and a video store. Other things were there … a fabric store, then a temporary church, holy-roller variety, and a religious bookstore … and, well … uh, something not so religious. Dancing girls and all, back in the ‘70s. Your indecent variety. So this has been a busy place sometimes, and sat empty a few times.”

  “So the upstairs used to be … “

  “Office space. Then about three years ago my brother Tom and me bought this place and decided to turn the upstairs into an apartment and use the bottom for storage of some antique farm equipment we had. We’ve sold all that stuff since. A young married couple were in the apartment a while, then they bought that house over there on the corner and we lost them. We rented out to a couple of young ladies going to Bowington College, then a pair of old retired folks, them being the last in there before now. The man died, and his widow went to Arkansas to live with family. So now the place is empty and here I am, hoping you’ll want to rent it.”

  There was nothing fancy about the apartment, no ornate tile in kitchen or bath, no shining stainless steel appliances. Worn wood flooring with rugs, not carpet. Appliances a decade old, enamel chipped on stove and sink.

  Roomy, though. Plenty of windows to let in light, and a washing machine and dryer in an oversized closet off the kitchen. It reminded Eli of his first home in childhood, an apartment his parents had rented on the cheap on a shaded avenue in Strawberry Plains.

  “Want to talk it over?” Cruller asked.

  Within fifteen minutes, Cruller had a new renter and Eli Scudder a new place to live.

  WITH THE BURDEN OF FINDING a residence so quickly lifted, Eli was in the mood to do a bit of exploration. He filled the tank of the Rambler at a convenience market, bought a candy bar, then took off down a random street with no destination or plan other than to see whatever he could of the town and county he soon would profile in the upcoming magazine.

  He wound through a couple of typical neighborhoods full of post-war bungalows and 1960s ranch-style dwellings and split-levels. Swingsets and plastic kiddy pools and flower beds and doghouses in the backyards. On some lots, ornamental trees were whitewashed around their trunks up to a height of about four feet, a look that took Eli back to the humble streets of his childhood.

  Those memories prompted Eli to drive out into the countryside to see if anything would revive recollections of his childhood visits to Kincheloe County. Somewhere out there was the former home of his mother’s parents, now dead for years. He had no memory of the name of the road it stood beside. Nor did he remember any landmarks of that area except two: a sign made in the shape of a huge bottle cap and touting a regional soft drink, and a church with two side-by-side steeples on its rooftop. There was a story about those twin steeples, something his grandfather had told him. Forgotten now, along with so much else.

  If he could find the church, he might be able to explore its immediate area and find his grandparents’ old homeplace too. So Eli kept an eye out for a double steeple as he drove around, making turns onto new roads upon impulse, deliberately letting himself get lost. He saw plenty of churches, none with a double steeple.

  He turned a corner, drove a quarter-mile, and there it was: not a two-steeple church, but the old bottle-cap-shaped soft drink sign, old, wind-warped and badly rusted. For a few seconds Eli made a leap back to young boyhood and his grandfather’s beloved Chevrolet pickup, in which he’d taken Eli on many trips past this distinctive sign on their way to get ice cream sandwiches at … at … what was the place?

  Eli struggled to remember. Edna’s, Ellie’s … something like that. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be far away. He and his grandfather had always passed that memorably shaped advertising sign on their way to … Essie’s. That was the name! It had just come back to him.

  Essie … a quiet old woman in a faded dress and old-fashioned bonnet. Gray hair pinned up beneath the bonnet with bobby pins. Odd, Eli thought, that he’d even remember her.

  The road took a sweeping turn, and Eli’s reviving memories told him he would find Essie’s just around the bend. Not that it was likely it would still be the same … Essie was old when Eli was just a boy; she must have died years ago. If the store existed, it would surely be much changed.

  Eli drove around the bend and knew he was at the right spot.

  The store should be just to his right. It wasn’t. Only an empty lot, old gravel and broken concrete, weeds growing up through crumbled pavement. Eli parked and walked to where the store’s front door must have been and crossed into what had been the store interior.

  Two minutes later he was standing with shoes and socks in hand and eyes closed.

  “Funny thing is, I know just what you’re doing.”

  The voice came from behind Eli and startled him. He opened his eyes, turned, and saw a man standing on the far edge of the old concrete slab. The man, thirty-five or forty, with hair beginning to mix salt with the pepper, had walked down a paved driveway that led up the nearby hillside to a metal-roofed, kit-styled log home Eli had failed to notice when he first pulled up.

  “How are you?” the smiling stranger said, stepping forward and stretching out his hand. “Micah Ledford. That’s my place back up the hill.”

  Eli walked over and met the man, wincing as his bare foot stepped on a sharp gravel. Up the indicated hill he noticed an attractive log home, kit variety, with a green metal roof.

  “Eli Scudder,” he said, putting out his hand to shake Ledford’s. “About to move to Kincheloe County.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve been here before,” Ledford said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because you’re barefoot, and because of where you’re standing. Yeah, you’ve been here before.”

  “Years and years ago, yes.”

  “Best feeling in the world for a boy on a hot summer day … bare feet, box fan blowing from the back of the store where it was always cooler, and that one special spot on the floor where it was worn down so smooth – I suppose from so many barefoot boys and girls standing there while Granny passed ice cream over the counter.”

  Eli grinned. “I know exactly what you mean. Something about that one spot, it was the coolest part of the concrete, and smooth as glass … whenever my granddad brought me here I made sure I was barefoot and sought that spot out … wait. You said ‘granny.’ Essie was your grandmother?”

  “Yes sir. Essie Ledford. One of God only knows how many Ledfords in this county.”

  “You know, Micah, I walked over there and took off my shoes and socks just to see … sounds silly to say it … I guess just to see how it would feel after so many years. I didn’t actually expect to find the ‘standing spot’ still there. You’d think a smooth spot on a concrete slab would have weathered away after all these years, especially with the building gone.”

  “It’s had a little help surviving, to be honest. Living up on the hill, it’s a short walk down here. A little cleaning and polishing every now and then, and that spot feels as smooth against my bare feet as it did when I was eight years old. Sometimes when I get a little sentimental and think of my old granny, I’ll slip down here and stand on that spot and remember her. It�
�s good to know that some things last. And you must have grown up around here, if you visited Granny Essie’s store.”

  “No. I’m from Knox County. My mother’s folks, named Keller, lived in Kincheloe County on Harmony Road, though. We visited and Grandpa brought me to Essie’s when we were here.”

  “Keller … Harmony Road. Yeah, I think I might remember your grandfather. Will Keller, maybe?”

  “That was him.”

  “Good man, as I recall. I was just a boy back when I knew him. I helped Granny in the store here sometimes, just sweeping and errands and carrying groceries for old folks who came in.”

  Eli chuckled. “Lord a’mercy, as my granddad would have said, I think I might even remember you! I remember a boy carrying a country ham out of the cooler to the truck for Grandpa one time … older than me, dark hair, badly sunburned face at the time.”

  “Yeah, that probably was me. I’ve always been prone to sunburn easy. So I guess this isn’t really our first meeting. Is it all right to ask what brings you to back to Kincheloe County after so many years?”

  “Going to work for the local paper on a special publication project for the city-county bicentennial.”

  “Now, that interests me! I’m a bit of a history buff, you see. Hey, you had lunch yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Come up to the house and I’ll ask Nancy to throw together some sandwiches for us. Got some good chips and cold beer, if you’re interested. Or soft drinks if you prefer.”

  “Beer sounds good.”

  “You can leave your car parked right where it is. I own the lot. Granny Essie left it all to me in her will, her children being all gone, and me the only grandson.”

  “What happened to the store building?”

  “Damaged by a fire. I had to have it torn down. It had been closed for years by that time, and Granny was dead, but still, it felt like I was betraying her when the place came down. She loved that little store.” He shook his head wistfully. “I miss that old woman to this day.”