Mother kept the radio on even when the minister called. He perched on the side of her bed and patted her hand and listened to her shows with her. The church sent a stale chocolate cake and a box of old clothes. Once when Francis clomped home after school the minister rushed out of Mother’s room pale and distraught and said, “Oh! It’s you! Good! You’re home!” and jumped around buttoning his collar.
The next day Francis listened through the furnace vent, how the minister told her to lie still and close her eyes for the healing ministry and murmured about the efficacy of skin contact. On the radio, people jumped around on the Jubilee and hooted and told jokes and the Norsky Orchestra played and a man whistled like birds and tapped out tunes on his teeth. “Touch her, Lord, and make her whole,” the minister moaned. “Her body is open unto Thee. Our sister places her trust in Thee. Lord, she is entirely Thine. Touch her now, touch her and heal her.” There was rustling and murmuring. Francis crept away downstairs and dropped a casserole dish on the floor. The man came to the head of the stairs. “Are you all right?” he said. He was very tall up there and dark with the light behind him. Francis whispered: “Go away.”
He told Emma on Saturday that he was afraid of the minister and she said, “Don’t be silly.” He thought of writing to Dad Benson about it. Mother wrote in to the radio all the time. She wrote a get-well letter to Dad and another one to Dad’s sister Hannah, who was down sick with a brain inflammation brought on by worry. The name Hannah proved to Mother that the Bensons were Danes too, or at worst, Norwegians. She wrote to Hannah that she herself knew how hard it was to be sick and urged her to have faith in God, though faith had not worked thus far in her own case. She stayed in bed. Christmas passed, a dark gloomy day. Lily Dale sang “Beautiful Jesus” with a choir and the Bensons welcomed carollers to their kitchen and gave them cocoa, but Francis and Mother spent a quiet tearful day. She tried to go to the kitchen and cook a goose and she fell down the stairs and had to be helped to the couch. The doctor came and scolded her for feeling so sorry for herself, and that threw her into a state of collapse.
“Benny, you come back here,” she screamed. “You can’t get out of it as easy as that! Benny! I want you back now!”
There were more presents than ever, all from Art and Clare and Emma and Charles, and none that he wanted except the lampshade from Art with a Hawaiian girl on it. When you turned out the light, her clothes disappeared and her body glowed in the dark.
Jodie wrote that she sure loved her new school in Brainerd and she got all As except for one B + and she got a red Schwinn bike for Christmas and would come visit in the spring. She didn’t come with Emma on the food visits—she was too busy with her schoolwork, Emma said, and it was better for her not to get upset. “Jodie is more high-strung than you are,” said Emma. “She has an artistic temperament.” Emma was Daddy’s older sister. She was beautiful in a fussy sort of way and was proud of her singing, which was ridiculous. When she sang, she whinnied like a horse. The tragedy was hard on her nerves, which were bad to begin with. She was so broken inside, she said, that she could never sing or play the piano again, and Francis hoped she would be true to her word.
His only hope was Art. From those few words, “You ought to come with us to Minneapolis,” spoken between blue clouds of cigar, Francis imagined a happy life in the future, riding the trolleys, going to the ballpark, listening to the radio. Uncle Art was a big man at WLT, The Friendly Home in the Air. He knew all the stars. He sent Francis a copy of the WLT Family Album. It showed Bud & Bessie and Leo and Dad Benson and Little Becky visiting an orphanage and giving a wheelchair to a crippled boy, and it made Francis feel that if he could make it to Minneapolis, he would be all right.
CHAPTER 15
Showman
Francis wrote Little Becky a second letter:
Dear Becky,
I know you miss your dad because you talk about him sometimes, well I do too and my dad is deceased (dead). Would you correspond with me? Or if you are too busy (which surely may be the case), just send me a card with your name on it. It surely would be a comfort. Could you sign it, “Your Own Personal Friend,” or “Your Friend” (if you prefer)? I would be very very very extremely grateful.
The kids in Mindren might see him in a new light if a radio star were his friend, but then weeks went by with no reply, and he could see that a letter from Little Becky would make no difference at all. None. These people were not Friendly Neighbor people. Obviously. One cold day, they had him pinned and were singing the song about Daddy and Darrell put his ugly dogface down next to Francis’s and said with his dog’s breath, “Sing it!” and Francis did, loud. This amazed them and they let him up. So he sang it again, louder. He stood, grinning, arms out, and sang all their verses including:My daddy got drunk on nigger gin,
Pickled his brains and cooked his skin,
So we had him cleaned and sliced.
Is he tasty? Jesus Christ,
He’s better than a meat loaf.
They all gawked like he had eaten a toad, it was THRILLING, and some girls tattled to Miss Theisen and reported that Francis used bad language and he was made to sit in the corner and face the blackboard, which made him a true hero, and afterward several boys became his best friend.
Francis was the only one who knew all the verses of the Daddy song and he sang it for them again. They nicknamed him Showman. He got to come in the boys’ clubhouse, a Chevy truck sitting on rusted rims by the railroad siding behind the lumberyard, and they all lay in the back of the truck and smoked and argued about ballplayers and looked at each other’s wieners and told dirty secrets. Darrell said his sister Sally had a lot of boyfriends and when one of them drove in the yard and honked, she would go out and pull up her skirt and lay in the back seat with him on top of her, his hairy butt bumping like a sonofagun, and her howling like a barnyard dog.
Francis made up a story about Jodie, that she liked to take off her clothes and do backflips and crabwalk up and down the stairs. She had tiny breasts with big brown nipples like Hershey’s chocolate kisses. She had thin curly hair between her legs.
Tell more, they said. So he said she had her a boyfriend in Brainerd named James. They went swimming stark naked in the crick and she held his wiener in her hand until it was big as a loaf of bread and then he poked her with it. Tell more. So she had a tiny baby that was born in the middle of the night with a big red mark on its head. They gave it to the fat hairy junkman as he rode along on the junkwagon behind Big Ben clop-clop-clopping down the alley early in the morning. He was singing Bring me your iron, your copper and iron, bring me your stee-el and Jodie dashed out and handed up the new baby.
She gave the baby to the Jew? Yes, the baby went to Jake the Jew, went to the junkyard, and the Jew sold him to other Jews in Minneapolis. He was mailed there in a box. Sold him for fifty dollars and the postage cost 35 cents and the Jew packed a sugar teat for him to suck on. Now Jodie’s baby was a Jew. His name was Isaac and his mother and daddy were rich, lived in a house with twenty-seven rooms and seven servants and Isaac had his room, his own car and chauffeur to drive him around to the zoo, to movies, to the ballpark. He was the boy who got to throw out a new ball when the Millers hit a homer. He had seventy pairs of shoes and two hundred pairs of pants and three hundred shirts and six dozen sweaters. Argyll socks and saddle shoes. Leather jackets. Caps and hats, a closetful. And though Isaac was only a kid, he got to sleep every night with a beautiful Spanish woman, her dark hot skin lay next to him, her big ripe breasts, her long legs wrapped around him, holding his little pecker in her hand, singing Bing Crosby songs.
“How do you know?” Because it’s true, that’s how.
“What if they find out he’s not a Jew? They’ll kill him.”
“It’s worth that chance,” said Francis, “to live in Minneapolis.”
He tried to write Daddy a letter to explain why he had said these dreadful things, but then he thought, “You died. What do you care? You’re not my dad anymore. You’r
e only a body in the ground. You’re lying in a box with the rain leaking in and you’re rotten to the bone and worms are crawling in your ears and eating your brains. Maggots in your nose. Your eyeballs are gone. You got enough problems without thinking about me.”
That summer Mother wanted to go to a sanitarium in Fargo where there was a specialist who treated nervous breakdowns with electrical waves. The nervous system, she explained to Francis, works on electricity, and her currents were irregular and needed to be regulated by the use of a Tremular Calibrator, a large machine like a culvert in which she would lie for four hours a day wrapped in a protective magnetic field and slowly come to feel more and more like herself. The ordinary treatment was for a month but because she had deteriorated so badly, she would need six weeks. The thought of being well again made her happy for one whole evening. She got out of bed and brushed her hair and talked about how, when she came back, they would go to Minneapolis and see the sights. “We’ll sing the night away! Champagne and oysters!” she said. “We’ll dance on the restaurant tables!”
Francis was sent off to Camp Wigwam, north of Minot. Daddy had been a member of the Brotherhood of Buffaloes and they gave Francis two weeks free of charge at their camp, and Emma paid for four more. The camp was run by six Buffaloes who stayed in a tarpaper shack by the lake and played poker, seldom coming out into sunshine except to tell kids to shut up. It was wonderful. The boys and girls slept on straw beds in old boxcars in the woods, and Francis met a girl named Annie and she slept next to him. The children took off their clothes and played Indian all day. They wore a little breechcloth, or then sometimes they didn’t. Francis knew about Indian ways from Boys’ Life so he was the chief, married to Annie, whose Indian name was White Clouds and who was the doctor who examined the Indians when their bodies bothered them. The two weeks when Annie was there were pure shining happiness untroubled by the weary dogfaced world except when the Buffaloes came out and made them play softball or go swimming in the murky water. Francis hated softball. The ball burned his hands. You had to stand around in the sun and be bitten by flies while the other team beat the crap out of you and hooted and sneered. He was terrified of the lake, weedy, teeming with turtles and gator gars, and the moment the Buffaloes went back to their poker game, he led the Indians out of the water and back into the woods. They danced in the grass, naked, and they sang songs that he made up—O woods and trees,
O skies and clouds,
O blue and green,
O shining sun
And they lay in rows on the grass and Annie came along and touched them and they got over their smallpox. Then he and she retired to their home in a pool of tall grass in a clump of bramble bushes and lay down next to each other and hugged and talked. This seemed to him the happiest conclusion that he possibly could come to. He put his arms around her. She touched him. She said, what is this? He flung his leg over her and they lay a while longer, him running his hand along her skinny back, feeling her spine, her ribs, her wings, the golden down, kissing her. “Lie on top of me,” he said. She stretched out on him, her lips touching his, her belly, her knees, her toes. Then a twig cracked and he looked up and a woman with long black hair peered down at him as if she were going to stamp on them like bugs. “Stand up,” she said.
She wore a long dress and carried a switch; she said, “You’re going straight to hell, sonny boy, and when you get there, you won’t have this anymore”—and she whipped at his pecker twice—“it’ll burn off in the fire.” She told them to come with her and when they picked up their clothes to get dressed, she flung the clothes into a tree. “What you need clothes for? You already showed everybody your bare ass.” She led them along a winding dirt path that went up over the rise and skirted the slough and around up to the county road where a green Model A Ford was parked, covered with dust. She told them to get in. The backseat was torn out, replaced with boards specked with white droppings and feathers and blood. They drove a little way to a road that went far back into the cottonwood trees, to a little white tumbledown house. She locked them in the cellar, in the dark, on a cold dirt floor, naked, with no blanket. “You can study each other down there,” she said. “Sit down there and fool with each other all you like. When you’re ready to accept Jesus, knock on the floorboards and you can come right up.” They found three old potato sacks to put over them and he put his arms around Annie and they sat, shivering, looking up at the crack of light around the trapdoor.
“Will she hurt us do you think?” He said he didn’t think so. She said she had to whiz. She went into the corner and a moment later he heard her water falling on the dirt. So delicate and musical. When she tiptoed back and stood by him, he took her in his arms again.
“We could go up and accept Jesus,” he said.
“Jesus doesn’t go for liars.”
“She’s got nothing to do with Jesus. So how can it be a lie?”
Annie didn’t have an answer for that. She looked him in the face. “You are my best friend, Franny,” she said after awhile. “I would lie for you anytime.”
He banged on the door. A chair scraped overhead and the woman scuffed across the floor and opened the trap—“Took you long enough,” she said. She hoisted them up and made them kneel right there and accept Jesus, and that seemed to satisfy her. “Now you are newborn children in Christ, fully redeemed and members of the Kingdom,” she announced. She gave them clean sacks to wear and fixed them pancakes for breakfast. “You see, the pleasures of the flesh are the works of the devil, but the joys of the spirit are lasting and true for they come of the Lord. I am so thankful to be the vessel of your redemption. Praise God,” she said, and she kissed them both goodbye and gave them each a Bible verse torn from a calendar.
They hiked back to Camp Wigwam, where the Buffaloes were getting ready to organize a party to search for them. “Oh boy, what a sight for sore eyes,” said one Buffalo, with a mosquito net pinned to his hat. “You damn kids had us worried sick. What are you doing running around in sacks?” He looked away in disgust and went back into the shack and opened a beer.
That night, Annie cried herself to sleep and the next night she wouldn’t sleep next to him. She said she was afraid and that nice people didn’t do that.
“But you are indispensable,” he cried. “Please. Be magnanimous. ”
His words did not touch her. She moved to a boxcar where only girls stayed, and she went swimming, and when Francis walked out to her, she swam into deep water, out to the diving dock. He walked in up to his waist, the point of fear, and beyond, to his armpits, and sweetly, despite terrible trembling, he called her name, Annie, Annie, but she turned her back, and he didn’t dare swim to her. She went home when the two weeks were up. The rest of the summer was endless. Francis was so bored, he sat all afternoon on the Buffaloes’ porch and read their newspaper. He walked to the southeastern corner of Camp Wigwam, where the fence met a tree that they called The Woodtick Tree, and he climbed up it, despite the ticks, and could see a brilliant light far away, the reflection of the sun on a distant silo roof, and thought, “Minneapolis.”
CHAPTER 16
Radio Sex
Mother came back from Fargo exhausted. “Nothing goes right for me,” she said. The treatments had failed and the failure discouraged her. She was discouraged by how discouraged she was. “Other people are braver than me, Francis. I’m not the only one who ever lost a husband. Other women keep going and I don’t know why I can’t. You’ve got yourself a rotten mother, that’s all. I’m so sorry.” She cried whenever she looked at him now. “You ought to have a happy home like other kids and look at you. You got an old hag of a mother who sits here bawling like a calf. A big baby. That’s all I am.” Her day was regulated by the radio. It was the only life she had. She woke early for the Shepherd Boys Quartet singing gospel songs on The Rise and Shine Show and she went to bed after The Calhoun Club Ballroom and the sweet music of Tommy Leonard and His Lake Serenaders and the dancers slipping quietly around the breezy terrace overl
ooking Excelsior Boulevard. And in between she followed all her shows faithfully, listening, writing in. She told Dad to beware those man-hunting women and she commended Tiny for always being cheerful (and got back a postcard: “Yo sho’ keeps a-makin’ me Happy!”). She wrote letters to Little Benny (“I have a boy not much older than you, and when I hear you sing, I like to imagine it’s him singing to me”) and she became a member of The WLT Tip Top Club—“Whenever you feel blue, think of something nice to do. Don’t let it get you down; wear a smile, not a frown. And you’ll be feeling tip-top too!” She wrote in regularly to Smilin’ Bud Swenson and once received $3 for her poem, “Trees,” which was read on the show.
When I see a tree, it inspires me
For a tree from a tiny seed grew.
If something so small can grow that tall,
Then there’s hope for me and you.
She subscribed to the Tip Top philosophy, to concentrate on the good things and forget the bad, to smile and look forward to tomorrow and do good for others, but, as she explained to Francis, it didn’t work for her because she was too weak. She couldn’t bear to face the neighbors because they all talked about her and how messy her house was. She couldn’t move to Minneapolis because it cost too much and what would she do there? She could only listen to the radio.
That Christmas, 1940, Little Buddy sang “Christmas in the Depot,” about a boy named Little Jim whose daddy had been a railroad engineer and died in a crash—Mother reached over and turned up the radio, and Francis got up off the floor where he was studying Art’s special Geographic and sat by her on the couch and held her hand—and now Little Jim was lost in the crowded train station on Christmas Eve trying to get back to his dying mother on the Evening Mall— “All board,” cried the voice on the platform,
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