Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  We didn’t talk at all. The only sound in the room came from the radio as the announcer called the game. Mr. Vernon eventually finished the paper and picked up a copy of Popular Mechanics that was lying on the table next to his chair. Mrs. Vernon rocked gently up and back while she knitted. I leafed through the magazines. At one point, when Mr. Vernon got out of his chair to turn up the volume on the radio, I asked, just to be friendly, who the Cubs were playing.

  “Pirates,” he grunted.

  In fact, I found I didn’t mind sitting there. The wood bookshelves gave the parlor a warm, busy look, and the yellow light from the Declaration of Independence lampshade had a cozy effect at night. I started to think that staying with the Vernons for a few days might not be a bad thing after all. I love Bunny more than anything, but having a little vacation from her would probably be good for me, I thought. In some ways, we may be too close to each other. Even she used to say I should get out more, get to know more people. Leafing through Life, I came upon a story about a girl who was supposed to be a typical teenager, and she wasn’t anything like me. According to the article, she spent all her spare time talking to her friends on the telephone. That’s what made her typical. The magazine was filled with pictures of her with a phone pressed up to her ear. In one long sequence, her side of the conversation had been copied down. She was wearing shorty pajamas and lolling around the easy chair in her family’s living room. The pictures were almost sexy—shorty pajamas don’t hide much. Meanwhile, she was winding the phone cord around her legs and threading it through her toes, twisting herself into all sorts of contortions and all the time keeping the phone clamped to her ear. Her conversation, which was printed in italics, was hard to understand. She talked in half sentences and skipped from thought to thought. She kept saying, “Oh, ish,” and calling people she didn’t like “ishy,” words I’d never heard before. The article said the conversation had lasted for over an hour.

  I felt a little funny reading about her. Not that I would have wanted to act like that, but her life seemed so different from mine. Half the time, our phone was disconnected because Bunny had forgotten to pay the bill. And, anyway, I didn’t have any friends to talk to that way. I mean, I had friends, but they didn’t have enough interesting things to say to go on for an hour while I lounged around in a chair and fiddled with the phone cord. Bunny was the only one I could talk to like that. Sometimes, when she came home from work and I was still awake, we’d start talking and stay up until two or three in the morning, even on school nights. We’d just chatter away. The time would disappear. We’d talk about everything. Nothing, really, but everything. Just talk.

  I was thinking about that, not paying any attention to what was going on around me, when I started to sense that something was happening in the parlor. I looked around. It all seemed the same: Mr. Vernon was still in his chair and Mrs. Vernon was concentrating on her knitting. But something was happening. Mr. Vernon had set down his magazine and was gripping the arms of his chair. Mrs. Vernon was rocking faster, and every now and then, she’d glance anxiously at her husband. I couldn’t figure it out: Not a word had been said between them, and yet she looked as if she were about to cry and he looked ready to explode. And then he did explode.

  “Damn it!” he yelled, pounding the arms of the chair. Thunderclouds of dust rose in the air.

  “Ohhhh,” moaned Mrs. Vernon.

  He jumped up, ran to the radio, and flicked it off angrily. That was it: the game. Something had happened in the game.

  He glared at the curvy, gray Philco for a few seconds and then stomped to the window. Staring into the night, he ran his fingers through his hair, trying hard to settle himself down. After a bit, he came back, looking cooler, and turned on the radio again. A huge, scratchy crowd roar burst out of the speaker. The announcer broke in: “Well, that loads the bases, and Roberto Clemente is stepping to the plate.” The announcer sounded depressed.

  “Shaaaaa,” hissed Mr. Vernon. He turned off the radio again. Mrs. Vernon didn’t take her eyes off him. She let her knitting drop to her lap.

  I couldn’t understand why this was happening. They were only listening to a baseball game. I wondered if someone had been hurt or if one side had cheated. Was there something wrong with the man at bat? With all the tension in the room, I almost started to feel that I was somehow at fault. “Is Clemente a good player?” I asked Mrs. Vernon, trying to break the mood.

  She stopped rocking for a moment. “He’s a Pirate, dear,” she explained, and she gave me a look that said I should never ask another question at a time like this.

  Mr. Vernon paced in front of the silenced radio. Finally, he reached out and turned it on again. “Here’s the pitch!” called the announcer. A smack like a cherry bomb going off came over the radio. The crowd started hollering, drowning out the commentary. When the announcer came back, he was screaming: “He’s rounding third … here’s the throw … he’s saaaafe!”

  For a few seconds, the parlor was very calm. All the energy was confined to the radio, which just sat there, like a small, gray animal, spitting out its scratchy roar. Suddenly, Mr. Vernon leaned back and lifted his chin. “Arggggg!” he screamed. The noise came from deep within him and overwhelmed the sound of the crowd. But when he ran out of breath, the crowd was still there. So he took a short, fierce swing and smacked the radio with his open hand, knocking it to the floor with a crash. That shut it up instantly, but the blow jarred loose the back cover, and inside I could see the little orange lights of the tubes fading only gradually, as if the old Philco were fighting against giving it up. Meanwhile, Mr. Vernon looked frantically around the room for something else to get mad with. I was afraid he might do something to me. Instead, he grabbed his copy of Popular Mechanics and heaved it against the wall. The magazine hit flat open and fluttered to the ground like a wounded bird.

  “I think I’ll go to bed now,” I told Mrs. Vernon.

  “Sweet dreams, dear,” she said, trying to give me a smile but not having much luck at it.

  I couldn’t fall asleep again that night. The scene in the parlor had upset me and, besides, I had too many other things to think about. Too much had happened, just today, on top of everything else. The news from the lawyer sounded good, but I was a little wary. Bunny had a tendency to be over-optimistic. She wanted something to happen—and therefore it would. Still, having a lawyer had to help, I thought. Maybe he could make it all go away. I knew I was lucky that it had happened during the summer, when school was out. If I’d been in school, with everybody knowing, everybody asking questions—well, it would have been impossible. I just couldn’t have managed. Some people obviously knew already—there’d been that incident with Dwayne and the hoods. The hoods probably learned about it from the cops. The hoods are always talking to the cops. But the hoods don’t really matter, I told myself. I didn’t care what they thought, and, anyway, I hardly knew them. They didn’t really belong in Katydid, I realized. A lot of them moved into town with their parents for a few years and then just disappeared. They dropped out of school and went into the army or something. They just stuck around long enough to cause trouble. A couple of them had even teased me in the past, making remarks about how tall I was. Bunny’s right, I told myself, don’t think about it. Still, it was hard. It’s an awful thing when people talk about you. Sometimes I heard people say things about Bunny. They didn’t know I was there or didn’t know who I was—or sometimes they just didn’t seem to realize that what they were saying was hurtful. They almost expected me to agree with them. Were they cruel, or stupid? I thought of Edith, the old woman in the Buffalo Tavern. The bald man hadn’t even been quiet about it, he’d talked as if she weren’t there or couldn’t possibly hear. Maybe she couldn’t—she never flinched when he called her disgusting. I shuddered at remembering it. That must be about the worst thing a woman can be called. Disgusting. The word almost had an odor to it. She did seem to be in pretty bad shape, though. How did she get that way? I tried to imagine her as a young wom
an. Even now, she had a pleasant, round face, almost childish—she might actually have been pretty once. Didn’t she have a family that cared about her? What had happened?

  For a couple of hours, I flopped around on Sissy’s bed, trying out my stomach, then my back, seeing how it felt under the sheet, then on top. Some hot rods chased each other up and down Oak Street for a time. Somebody walked by singing “Que Sera, Sera” to himself. At midnight, the whistle blew over at the KTD.

  A little later, I heard a sharp pinging sound at the window. I sat up. The sound came again. Something had hit the screen. I climbed down the bed to look out.

  The moon had set, and the street lamps on Oak stretched a few long, faint slivers of light over the lawn. The Potter house across the way was dark, and there didn’t seem to be any light coming from the Vernons’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Vernon must have gone to bed. Looking down through the leaves of the big oak, I stared at a silent black carpet of lawn. Suddenly, a tall figure stepped away from the tree. In my surprise, I thought it was Tom, come back from Sherwood to reassure me.

  “Hey,” said the figure, in a loud whisper. It wasn’t Tom, but the voice was familiar.

  “Who’s there?” I asked softly.

  “Elro.” A pause. “Elro Judy.”

  “Elro?” I didn’t understand.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Sissy’s old room,” I said, as if to explain to myself why he was here.

  “I know.”

  “What do you want?” I had a sudden, frantic thought that he didn’t know Sissy was dead, and I’d have to give him the tragic news.

  He stepped farther out from the shadow of the tree. He had on dark pants and a dark work shirt. “Why don’t you come down?” he hissed. “I’ve got some beer.” He waved his hand, and I saw the glint of a bottle.

  “No.”

  “Awww, come on. I’ll show you some fun—show you how it is with a man.”

  I pulled sharply back from the window, afraid for an instant that his filthy hands could reach up to the second story and touch me. So he knew, too. Probably everyone knew.

  He came forward, up to the side of the house, directly under the window. “Pssst,” he hissed. “Hey! Martha.” He was getting clumsy at keeping his voice down. The Vernons’ bedroom was at the other end of the house, but someone was sure to hear him. From my angle on the bed, I could see the top of his head moving. He seemed to be working at something. Scratching noises came from below. Was he trying to climb up the wall?

  As quietly as possible, I unlocked the screen and leaned out. The night air felt cool. Elro was standing right below me.

  “Please go away,” I whispered.

  He shook his head. “I heard you were lookin’ for action, and I figured, hey, I got plenty of action right here.” He made a vague gesture with his hand and then snorted, holding in a laugh. He swigged the beer again.

  “Please,” I begged.

  Cocking his head, he studied me for a few seconds. “You know, I always did think you were kinda cute—ever since sixth grade. I like big girls.”

  “Please.”

  With his empty hand, he reached in his pocket. “Look, I got money,” he said, thrusting a fist of crumpled bills toward me. “I’m workin’ the night shift at the KTD this summer.” Standing with his arm upstretched, he swayed slightly, obviously drunk. He was hardly even trying to keep his voice down now. “Look!” he insisted, angrily. All there was to see was the tightly squeezed money. “Look!” he repeated, angrier and louder. “Look!”

  I felt dizzy and had to grab the top of the windowsill. Out of the daze, a memory floated back. On a summer’s night like this, years ago, an angry man was in Bunny’s yard, yelling at the house, howling at a window, threatening, cajoling, always calling for Bunny. Inside, we were huddled together on a sofa, and I was scared—scared of the man, but scared, too, that Bunny didn’t hate it as much as I wanted her to.

  A light flicked on over in the Porters’ house. Elro saw it and with two quick steps slipped behind the tree. I pulled back inside, then pressed against the edge of the window to look out. The light came from Grandma Porter’s room. I watched her old, shapeless body roll out of bed and pad slowly out the bedroom door. A minute or so later, she padded back and came to the window, staring at the yard. She had a ghostly shape and a ghostly color. Her gray-white hair, released from its daytime bun, was surprisingly long, and it fluffed down over her neck. She was wearing a pale nightgown that hung loosely from her shoulders, exposing her big, fleshy arms. The darkness all around made her seem even closer. She turned her head slightly as she scanned the yard. Was she the only one who had heard us? After several minutes, she climbed back into her bed and turned out the light.

  The yard now seemed even blacker. I searched the form of the oak’s trunk for a bulge that would be Elro, but saw nothing. Maybe he’d managed to slip away. I stayed at the window a while longer, not really thinking, not really knowing what to think. The cool air felt good on my face and carried a fresh, grassy night smell. I breathed deep. My gaze was lost somewhere in the branches of the oak. I concentrated on the sound of the KTD, letting the comforting hum fill my head.

  “Hey!” said Elro again. He’d stepped back under the window.

  “I’ll tell the Vernons,” I whispered. “They’ll call the police.”

  “Come on,” he said, ignoring my warning. He was swaying, and his words were more slurred. “I got my dad’s pickup.” He swung his arm wildly toward the street. “We’ll go to Wisconsin. You can escape.”

  “Shut up! Go away!” I drew back and relatched the screen.

  Elro stumbled to the tree, staring all the time at the window. When his back was against the trunk, he slid down, collapsing in an awkward clump at the base. He took another drink of beer and examined the bottle. Then he slapped his forehead with his open palm. He looked unhappy enough to cry.

  I pulled the curtains closed and lay back on the bed. Much later, about three, I heard the sound of an engine starting up on Oak Street. A vehicle drove away.

  EIGHT

  The telephone jangled me awake early the next morning. I sat up and looked out the window. Elro was gone, and he’d taken his empty beer bottles. All traces of his visit had disappeared. The sky was overcast and drizzly, but the small backyard seemed so empty and safe in the daylight that it was hard to believe he had ever been there at all.

  I assumed the call was from Mrs. O’Brien. Yesterday she’d announced we would go swimming this morning, but, given the weather, she was no doubt postponing the outing. Lying back in bed, I waited for Mrs. Vernon to come upstairs with the news. She didn’t, though, and soon there was another call and then another. The phone was on a table in the hall downstairs. From Sissy’s room, I couldn’t make out what was being said, but I could hear the urgency in Mrs. Vernon’s voice and then in her husband’s as the two of them responded to the callers. There was an urgency, too, in the Vernons’ footsteps as husband and wife moved about the house in their morning routine.

  I stayed in bed until just before eight, when I heard Mr. Vernon bang the screen door shut on his way to work. Then I washed, got dressed, and went downstairs. Mrs. Vernon was sitting at the kitchen table, stirring a cup of tea with one of her tiny, silver spoons. She brightened when she saw me and hopped up to start breakfast, but it was easy to see that something was wrong. Worry was weighing down her shoulders, slowing her actions as she moved around the kitchen. A few minutes later, after she had set a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of me, she explained. “There’s talk they’re going to shut down the KTD. The company that owns it lost some contracts. There were men here yesterday making arrangements. There’s a story in today’s Exponent.”

  “I might have seen those men,” I said, thinking of the pair in the Buffalo. “That’s terrible,” I added quickly. “Terrible news.”

  “I don’t know how this town will survive,” she went on. “Four hundred people work in that factory. Think of all those people out
of work.”

  The unhappy situation gave me an excuse not to eat breakfast, and I gently pushed my plate a few inches away. “What’ll they do?” I asked.

  Her lips tightened in a hard, flat smile. “I just don’t know.” She paused. “There’s been rumors of this for a couple of years now. Bartlett Industries, the company that owns the factory, is over in Cleveland, and it’s been on hard times for a while. I’d heard the rumors, but I never put any stock in them. The KTD seemed like too big a thing for them ever to close it.”

  “What’ll you do? I mean, Mr. Vernon—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about us,” she interrupted. “Walter is a foreman, and he’ll find work at another factory around here. They’re always trying to hire him away. No, it’s the other people I worry about, the people on the bottom rungs who don’t have something to fall back on. They’re the ones we have to feel sorry for. Them and Katydid itself. What’ll be left after the KTD goes?”

  I thought of the two-story factory building, red brick on red brick, stretching the length of a football field, and I tried to imagine it closed up and quiet, lying there along Prosperity Street like something that had died. I’d heard stories about the Okies and I’d read The Grapes of Wrath, and I could see hundreds of Katydid families packing their belongings in cardboard boxes, tying everything down on the tops of their cars, and moving out in a long procession.

  Suddenly, something occurred to me: With a crisis like this facing the town, how could anyone take the time to bother with me? Surely, they wouldn’t care about me, now that the whole town was at risk. They had other things to do, an emergency to deal with. I was nothing; surely they’d see that now.

  “They say we’ve got three months,” Mrs. Vernon said. “Think of it, three months, after some people have given that factory their life’s work. There ought to be a law. A company shouldn’t be able to take people like that, use up their best years, and then throw away what’s left, like it was nothing more than a cornhusk.” Her small, white teeth bit at her lower lip. Quickly, I had another thought, again totally selfish: No one will notice me. I’d been agonizing over what people would think, but now they’d have something real to worry about, something that really mattered. Three months was too long to wait: I wanted the KTD to close down immediately. “Can anything be done?” I asked.