by Sandra Kring
“You should call Mitzy when we get to Timber Falls,” Oma says once she settles down and gets done dabbing her eyes.
“Who’s Mitzy?” I ask.
Oma glances over her left shoulder to look at me. “Your mother’s best friend throughout childhood.” Oma looks over at Mom. “You even kept in touch through most of college, didn’t you?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in years, Ma,” Mom says, her voice reserved again.
“Well, you should. Old friends are such a blessing. Marie started to tell me something about her, but the battery on her phone was dying, so I told her I’d call her when I get settled in and we’ll catch up.”
“Ma, I won’t be there long enough to see anybody. I plan to just drop you off and turn around.”
“Oh, Tess, don’t be silly now. A round trip in one day is too much.”
“We’re going and coming back in one day?” Milo asks, his skin tone already looking a little green from his queasiness.
“If I get too tired, I’ll stop and get us a room on the way back.”
“You don’t have money to throw away on a motel room, and besides, even if you did, do you know how many dead skin cells and traces of bodily fluids are soaked into those mattresses? It’s unsanitary!”
Mom sighs but says nothing.
Oma has a Dasani water bottle that she filled with water run through a Brita pitcher, and Mom has a travel mug filled with coffee. They both take a sip of their drinks, and for a time there’s no sound but for the hum of the tires on the road and the scratching of Milo’s pencil.
I’ve never been able to talk openly about the grandfather I never knew, but I feel it must be okay now since we’re on our way to see him. “Is Grandpa Sam paralyzed on the left side? Is he going to speak with his words all jumbled?” I’d done research online to learn about strokes so I’d know what to expect.
“Actually, no,” Oma says. “Neither of his strokes were the usual kind. They were in his frontal lobe, Aunt Jeana said.”
“I know about strokes in the frontal lobe!” I say, too loudly, judging by the way Milo flinches. “That part of the brain serves as the doorway to our emotions. Our social conscience is located there, and that portion of the brain also tells us when to stop doing an activity.” And maybe just to be a little mean—or because I’m still annoyed that Milo won’t play in the car with me like a normal sibling—I add, “Gee, Milo. Maybe you had a stroke. Mom should mention your symptoms to the doc on your next visit.”
“Lucy,” Mom warns, and Oma (who obviously absorbed only the first part of what I said or she’d have snapped my name too) says, “Well, isn’t that interesting. It shouldn’t surprise me, though.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, your grandfather spent his entire life trying to shut the door on his emotions. I guess he finally succeeded. So sad.” Oma turns her head to look at Mom. “And isn’t it ironic, Tess, that he should lose his social conscience too, when once that’s all he had? You remember how he fretted about what others thought of him?” Mom gives a little grunt, then sips her coffee.
“Do I look like him?” I ask.
Mom’s body presses against her seat hard enough to jiggle it. “Let’s change the subject, shall we?”
“Oma started it!” I say.
Milo glances over at me. “No she didn’t. You’re the one who brought up Grandpa first.” I keep my hand low so Mom can’t see it in her rearview mirror, and I reach across the seat and give Milo’s scrawny leg a hard pinch. “Ouch!” he says, and Mom tells me to keep my hands to myself.
Oma is oblivious to all of this. “Yes, I do believe you resemble him some. Through the eyes.”
“Mine are the same shape as Mom’s, but lighter blue.”
“Yes, and she got the shape of her eyes from her father. Sam’s are lighter than hers, and more gray than blue. He has flecks of yellow in them, though, like your mother has.” I ask Oma to borrow her compact so I can check for yellow flecks in mine. I hope I don’t find any, though, because once I read a book on Chinese face reading, and it said that yellow shards in the iris point to a vengeful temper.
While I’m looking, Mom and Milo get into a debate about the genetic likelihood of children getting one parent’s eye color as opposed to the other’s. I find no flecks of yellow and hand Oma back her mirror. I don’t listen to Milo and Mom but only stare out the window, waiting for another family to pull up alongside us.
After a time, the high-rises give way to suburban clusters and, finally, to open fields. Milo gets excited when he sees three high-tech windmills spinning against the sky, and he starts rattling away about renewable resources versus fossil fuels. He sounds like a PBS program. A dull one, at that. I like facts. I love them, actually. But only if they’re about something interesting. Mom joins in on the debate, but she’s left to discuss it alone once Milo decides he needs to calculate something or other, no doubt it having to do with a windmill’s rotations.
“What’s our new house look like?” I ask.
“What did you say?” Mom asks, her eyes in the rearview mirror scrunching into cat’s eyes. “Why did you call it our new house? Who said it’s ours?”
“Oma,” I say defensively.
Mom’s head snaps toward Oma, even though she’s in the middle of changing lanes to pass a semi. “I did not say I was taking that house!”
“And I didn’t tell Lucy that you were,” Oma says calmly.
“Grandpa Sam gave us his house?” Milo asks.
“No, he did not! He wouldn’t give me a damn drink if I was dehydrating on the Sahara and he came by on a camel weighted one inch off the ground with bottled water!”
Oma doesn’t comment. She reaches into the tote bag stuffed with treats for the road and pulls out a box of organic granola bars and asks who would like one. After she hands Milo and me one each, she reaches back in her tote bag and takes out a CD and pops it in, and the whole car fills up with the mournful but soothing calls of humpback whales.
As we cross the border into Wisconsin, Milo checks his calculations and utters a “Yes! Within 3.5 seconds! Right on schedule,” and Mom says, “Oh, goody,” under her breath in a tone that can only be called sarcastic.
“Did you know that every pod of whales has their own song?” I say to no one in particular. “And that even if one gets separated from the pod, they never forget that song, no matter how long they’ve been away from the others or how many miles apart they are?” Nobody says anything until Milo asks if he can listen to his Feynman lectures now. Mom tells him he can.
chapter
FOUR
AS MUCH as I’ve always longed to be among trees, I begin to feel smothered the farther up into Wisconsin we get. The trees, already beginning to color, edge closer to the highway, then crowd together so tightly that only slivers of flickering sunlight can squeeze between them.
Mom is unsettled too, but I suspect it has nothing to do with the encroaching forest. The top of her head, visible over the seat, is pressed tightly against it again, as if she’s bracing herself.
Oma does not look unsettled but contemplative. Her head slowly cocks from side to side as we pass houses with lawns as big as parks. Places she probably remembers passing during her days as Grandpa Sam’s wife.
Oma married my grandpa in 1970. She was twenty-four. He was forty and recently divorced. It’s the kind of “love story,” I overheard Mom say once to Oma, that gets men locked up nowadays and earns them a spot on Wisconsin’s list of sexual predators. Grandpa Sam and Oma met when Oma went to stay at a friend’s cabin in Timber Falls for one week. It was love at first sight, Oma said, and they were married three months later. Right after the wedding, they moved to Chicago so Grandpa could make better money and realize his dream of building the biggest and best sawmill in the Midwest. Oma worked in a factory, and every penny she earned she put into their savings for that sawmill. They stayed in Chicago for four years, then Grandpa decided that city life wasn’t for him. So they
headed back and bought the house that Grandpa lives in now. Our house. And a year later, my mom and Uncle Clay were born.
Oma rests her head closer to the side window and peers up. Her whole body perks when she sees something. She taps the window glass. “Oh, look, children! An eagle!”
I have to almost lay my head on Milo’s lap to see him, but there he is, soaring above the treetops on Oma’s side of the road, heading in the same direction we are. There is a slight upward curve to the tip of his wings, which are spread wide as though he’s claiming the whole sky. He’s beautiful, with his regal head capped in white feathers. “Wow! He’s gigantic! His wingspan must be a good six feet!” I say.
Milo glances out. “I’d say closer to seven,” he says, then quickly turns his attention back to his notepad.
Not to be outdone by Milo, I add, “The eagle’s scientific name is Haliaeetus leucocephalus.” Milo doesn’t even glance at me when he corrects my pronunciation.
“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” Oma says, her voice all dreamy with wonder. “Did you know, Lucy, that the Ojibwa people believe that if you offer an eagle tobacco, he will carry your prayers to heaven?” Her head is still leaned back, her face bent toward the sky.
“Really?” I ask, scooting forward as far as my seat belt will allow me to.
“Tess, stop the car! Now!”
Mom is mid-sentence, trying to snag Milo into a new discussion. She stops talking and looks over at Oma, who is digging in her purse.
“Just stop the car! Hurry!” Oma says as she pulls a Virginia Slims from its pack.
“Jesus, you can’t wait fifteen minutes to have a smoke? We’re almost there!” Mom steers the car to the gravel along-side the pavement, and Milo groans and grabs his belly when it jostles.
“Come on, Lucy!” Oma says, springing open her door while the car is still rocking from the stop.
“Open your door, Mom!”
“Hurry, Lucy,” Oma says, as she waits outside with one hand on the door.
I don’t wait for Mom to decide to open her door so I can get out. I scoot myself into the front seat and dive out Oma’s door.
Oma and I hurry to stand in the tall grass along the ditch. Oma points to the bird, who has lit at the very tip of what I recall from our early studies of tree species is a northern pine, set off the road some thirty yards behind us. The eagle glances down at us, then turns his curved beak elsewhere.
Oma breaks the cigarette into her palm, then gives me a pinch of tobacco. She whispers so as not to scare him away—or because this is supposed to be a sacred moment. “Now say a prayer, then toss the tobacco into the air as your offering,” she says.
Oma holds her tobacco up high, closes her eyes, and starts muttering her prayer. I’m not sure if she’s praying to God, though, because she’s calling Him “Creator Spirit,” and about seven other names. I close my eyes too and say my prayer in my mind. Please, God, if You exist, please help me find my real dad. And if You can’t do that, please bring Peter back to be my dad. And if You can’t do either of those things, then would You at least crack the door to Grandpa’s emotions open a little, so that when he gets to know me he can feel fondness for me? Also, can you make my ankles stronger so I can be a figure skater, even if I don’t have Scott Hamilton’s genes to give me a boost?
When I’m done, I open my eyes and see that Oma is still softly muttering her prayer, both hands lifted toward the eagle. She barely finishes her “We thank you for all things. Amen,” when Mom honks the horn, causing Oma, me, and the bird to startle. The eagle opens his wings and springs from the branch, lifting above the treetops. Quickly, I open my fingers, and the breeze takes the tobacco flakes and scatters them to the ground.
As we hurry back to the car, Mom opens her door and cranks her head around. “Damn it, Mother. What did I tell you about filling Lucy’s head with that crazy hocus pocus, New Age crap?” She opens the door wider and leans her chest against the steering wheel and tells me to get in.
“There’s nothing New Age about it, Miss Smarty Pants,” Oma says, and I giggle. “Native Americans have been sending their prayers up with Eagle for centuries.”
As soon as I get settled in my seat, I look for the eagle. When I spot him, he’s only a speck swirling in the sky.
“Put on your seat belt and find something to read,” Mom tells me.
But I can’t read, of course. I’m too excited. So is Milo, but only because when we come up alongside a wooden sign saying, Welcome to Timber Falls, the stopwatch that Peter gave him says he’s only off on his estimated time of arrival by four seconds and who knows how many fractions of a second, even though we made one uncalculated stop to pee, one so Oma could smoke, one so Oma and I could pray, and yet another so Milo could vomit.
I stare out the window, my face so close to the glass that I can feel my breath against my lips. The stores lining the streets are small, the tallest of them only two stories high. Behind the storefronts’ masks of fresh paint and pretty stenciled lettering, the sides of the buildings are shabby, their rear ends sagging.
There are fewer people milling around Main Street than what I’d see out in front of our apartment building on sweltering summer days. As I gawk, Oma does too. She says things like, “Oh, look. The Rexall drugstore is still here,” and, “Oh, my, now, does any town this size need both a Hardee’s and a McDonald’s?” And Mom says, “What an oppressive dump.”
When we get almost to the north end of the main street, the road veers off to the east, and at the bend there’s a landscaped yard and a big, beautiful, Victorian-style house. “Look at that!” I say. “I wish that was the house we were going to inherit from Grandpa Sam.”
“We’re not going to inherit anything from your grandfather!” Mom snaps.
Milo winces because, once again, the volume in our voices is cranked up enough to put his ears on overload.
“Oh, look, Tess,” Oma says as she points to the house I’ve just singled out. “They’ve turned the Millard mansion into a historical landmark. Harlan must have passed on, then.” Oma turns to me. “Joseph Millard built that home, along with most of the town. He was a timber baron and the founder of Timber Falls. Your grandfather went to school with his great-grandson, Harlan.”
“Harlan and Samuel,” Mom huffs. “Wisconsin’s own Hatfields and McCoys. Legends in their own mind.”
“Who are the Hatfields and the McCoys?” I ask, but Oma ignores that question and addresses Mom’s grumble.
“Your father and Harlan sure did carry that ruckus into their generation, now, didn’t they?” Then she looks over her shoulder into the backseat. “Harlan and your grandfather didn’t get along. Something about Harlan’s family and ours and land that our family believed was taken out from under our noses by the Millards during a bout of bad luck.”
“Dad wanted that stupid mill just so he could become a somebody and keep Harlan from gloating about our family’s downfall. And that’s what made him turn into such an asshole, when—” Mom stops. “Oh, let’s change the subject,” she says as we swing around the bend. I turn around in my seat to catch a last glimpse of the remarkable house.
Oma’s still cranked around to watch the house pass. “Harlan must have given the house to the city. He never married and didn’t have any children, so I suppose …”
“He was probably gay,” Mom says, but Oma shakes her head. “Oh, Tess, you know that’s not true. He was in love with Maude Tuttle.”
Oma points ahead to a house we’re approaching. It’s large, three stories, painted pale yellow with white trim, and though not as grand as the Millard manor house, it’s easily the second most extravagant house I’ve seen in this town so far. “That’s Maude Tuttle’s house right there,” she tells me. “It used to be … well … a house of ill repute.”
“What’s that?” I ask, and Mom scowls at Oma.
Oma giggles. “Good heavens, when I first moved here, they were still doing raids on that place when a complaint came in, though halfheartedly, s
ince on any given night you could bet that one of Timber Falls’s most elite would be found there.
“Well, anyway,” Oma says, stifling her laughter. “The only woman Harlan ever loved lived there. Maude Tuttle. I wonder if she’s still alive. Hmmm. Anyway, what a beautiful woman. She’d cut you like broken glass if you looked at her twice, but she was absolutely gorgeous. Had she been in her prime today, she’d be the hottest plus-size model this country’s ever seen. Harlan loved her dearly.”
“Why didn’t they get married, then?” I ask.
Oma starts giggling again. “Oh, he couldn’t marry a girl like Maude Tuttle; he had his family name to protect.”
“Crissakes, as if they were the royal family,” Mom says.
“She loved him, though—or at least what he did for her. Enough that after he became her only … well … boyfriend she dyed her pretty blond hair red, because Harlan liked redheads.” Oma leans across the console and whispers (but loud enough for me to hear, because what I wasn’t given in ankle strength, the acuteness of my hearing makes up for), “Women said that the hair on her head wasn’t the only hair she dyed red for him either,” and Mom says, “Too much information.”
Oma tips back upright in her seat. “She stayed loyal to him, though, and I’d like to believe that it was because of love rather than that he bought her out of the business and set her up pretty for the rest of her life. Harlan was one good-looking man in his day. Marie said once that Harlan was good-looking enough to make even Mother Teresa tingle in her naughty places.”
“Mother! I hardly think this story should be part of the kids’ educational tour of Timber Falls. For God’s sakes, keep your voice down when you talk like that.”
Oma taps Mom on the arm. “Oh, Tess. Loosen up. Sex is a natural part of life, and the children are already pubescent. Why, soon Lucy will begin her moon time, and—”