by Chris Cander
“You paint, Miss Alta?”
She ducked her head and shrugged. “I try.”
“Now that’s just fine. You keep on doing that, hear? World needs some fine things like paintings and such.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kiser,” she said, and pulled the package into her arms as though it were a baby. “Oh, I meant to ask — how’s Mrs. Kiser doing? Is her leg better?”
“She’s doing fine, Miss Alta. Nice of you to ask.”
“I’d be happy to come around, see if I can help out in some way.”
“You got plenty to do yourself, I know, what with your daddy and brothers needing your attention all the time. But thank you all the same.”
“I’ll check on you, anyway,” she said, smiling, “even though I’ve already got my package.” She hugged it to her aspiring chest.
John watched her, the way she bounced just slightly onto her toes as she spoke, her happiness invading every part of her lissome body. She sounded kind and seemed interesting, and she was beautiful.
She reached through the bars and touched the postmaster on his forearm and smiled and said, “Thank you.” Then she turned, jubilant, clutching her package as she strode past John in only three long steps, and lifted it slightly toward him as their eyes met. She said, without stopping, “New paints!” With one final footfall, she shoved open the door with her elbow and stepped into the slant of afternoon sun.
John stood expressionless with his half-licked envelope held in midair, and blinked into the glint of light caused by the closing door.
“ ‘New paints’?” Alta said aloud to the asphalt. “ ‘New paints’?” Three years of silence and yearning, and that had been all she could think of to say.
August 11, 1929
It was hotter than usual, even for August, but it was a Sunday afternoon, and they had the day off from the mines, dinner to look forward to, cold Coca-Colas, and the Yankees playing the Indians. The men and boys, about twelve of them, leaned against the counter and sat on wooden crates inside the Welcome Store, straining their ears to hear the play-by-play through the static. Pepper Pollock had offered to set up his kit-built radio set, but everyone knew he hadn’t done a very good job on the tuning circuit, and besides, his mother was expecting her in-laws and didn’t want a bunch of louts hanging around her tidied living room. So his uncle Lenny, who owned the store and loved Pepper almost as much as he loved the Yanks, agreed to let everyone come down and listen to the game with him there.
Lenny was just certain Babe Ruth was going to hit his five-hundredth homer against the Indians that day, and since there was no way he could get to Cleveland, he wanted to witness it as close to live as he could. He tuned in to Charleston’s WCHS on the new RCA Radiola 60 Super-Heterodyne that he’d had in stock since March. It was something he made sure to mention to his customers, even if they were just stopping in for flour or razor blades or Drano or a box of shotgun shells. “It’s just like one a them de-luxe cabinet models, except it’s small enough you can set it right there on a shelf or a side table. Can even set up the speaker in a different room if you want to.” Lenny knew most of his customers couldn’t afford a luxury like that radio, even if it did have tone fidelity that was ideal for the kind of altitude interference they had in Verra. Today he was glad nobody had forked over the $147 asking price. As he passed around cold bottles from the icebox like a host, marking them down on people’s tabs, he even considered keeping it as part of the store’s ambiance.
A few girls drifted in; some were sweethearts and some just friends who aspired to be more. They joined the young men and twittered enthusiastically about the game, although the only thing they knew about batting involved their eyelashes. An older woman hobbled up to the counter with a dozen eggs, shaking her head at the sight of so many idle men.
John Esposito dropped his eyes under her glare. He’d been sitting on his parents’ front steps in his undershirt less than an hour ago, bits of shorn grass stuck to his arms and face, trying to cool off after trimming the lawn. Without even going inside for a glass of water, he’d pulled his copy of A Farewell to Arms off the rocking chair where he’d left it and opened it to chapter eleven: the priest is taking a glass of vermouth with Fred, who admits that he fears God but does not love him.
“You understand but you do not love God.”
“No.”
“You do not love Him at all?” he asked.
“I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes.”
“You should love Him.”
“I don’t love much.”
Just then, a voice had shouted at him from the street. “Johnny! We’re going down to the Welcome to listen to the Yanks clop the Indians. Come on!”
John shaded his eyes and blinked into the bright sunlight. Behind him, his father pushed open the screen door with a long, slow squeak. Ciro stood, barrel-chested in his overalls, a pipe dangling from the corner of his downturned mouth. “Go on, Giovanni. You just waste your afternoon with your nose in that book.” The stump waved at him.
“All right,” John said. He dog-eared the page and stood up. “Lemme get a shirt,” he called toward the street.
The score after the first inning was one to zero, Yankees. The announcer’s voice crackled over the Radiola: “Second inning and the bases are empty. Willis Hudlin checking his sign with Luke Sewell. The tall southpaw Babe Ruth ready to go to work again. Look at that! Ruth points his bat at right fielder Morgan. And the windup, and the pitch … He swings, a line shot, right field … The ball is going, going, going, right to the foul line of Cleveland’s League Park right-field wall … and it is a home run!”
Three hundred miles south of the field, as Babe Ruth took all four bases with superstitious care, the crowd in the Welcome Store released their collective breath into a roar. The girls cheered, and even John, who secretly preferred Hemingway to home runs, found himself swept up in the whirl of euphoria. Jars shook on the shelves as the men jumped up and down and yelled and slapped. The entire store and everything in it quivered. Everything, that is, but the quiet girl who had entered the store just as the Babe’s five-hundredth homer sailed over the right fielder’s extended glove and hit a fence in Ohio.
Myrthen Bergmann walked as if she were a ghost, nearly floating, silent. She inclined her delicate, brunette eighteen-year-old head, mostly covered by a crocheted lace chapel veil, and paid no attention to the men or the excitement. Her only interest was in heeding the call of the Holy Spirit. In the darkness following her sister’s death, Myrthen had found the light of truth from up above, yet kept her face bent mostly toward the ground.
Nonetheless, John, from his reluctant place on an upturned crate of Scott’s Emulsion vitamin-enriched cod liver oil, felt an immediate hush within the uproar. The sight of the translucent skin of her hands, the cant of her neck against the black lace. An immediate connection to something else, something other than the inconsequence of baseball and Coca-Colas, something reverent and observant and still. This was not a girl who would feign interest in baseball, nor bat her lashes. Here — he could tell just by the unambiguous and taciturn way she approached the counter and asked for “a pound of ground round, please” — was not someone shopping for a husband or even, most likely, a passing compliment.
And yet she clearly deserved one. Her head turned as she reached into her bag for the forty-three cents she owed, and he saw the blue eyes, the full lips, the slap-red of her high cheeks. The straight line of her nose that ended in a tiny, upturned bulb. He had never seen such modest, exquisite beauty, and without meaning to, he rose slightly from his crate to get a closer look. But she bent her head again, saying thank you to Lenny, who handed over the paper-wrapped meat. Then she started for the door.
As the announcer called the next play, “And Gehrig adds a circuit blow …,” John stood up abruptly and said, “Thanks, boys. Lenny.” He handed over his empty soda bottle. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Where you off to, Johnny?” Pepper asked.
�
�Goin’ on home now. Dinnertime.” But there was no mistaking the way he hurried toward the door. Pepper saw Myrthen stepping out into the afternoon and he laughed.
“Don’t bother with her,” Pepper said. “She won’t have anything to do with anybody — even you. Besides, there’s talk about her. Something funny, about what happened to her sister.”
John just shrugged and then nodded to Lenny, who tipped an invisible hat. “Thanks,” he said, and pulled open the door. He looked one way, then the other, and found her walking up the street. Picking up his pace after her, he tucked in his shirttails and combed his hair with his fingers. John jogged a few steps, then slowed, thinking, wondering, practicing. He wasn’t a cad, but it wasn’t his nature to be so uncertain in the approach of a girl. But she wasn’t the usual type of girl.
“Excuse me,” he said when he was a step behind her.
She didn’t pause or falter.
“Excuse me?” he tried again.
She either didn’t hear him or pretended not to. Her black mantilla fluttered against her shoulders in the summer breeze.
“Hey you!” he said, catching up. “I said, ‘Excuse me.’ ”
She looked at him from behind the slip of lace, her piercing eyes meeting his and making his heart leap. But there was no smile when she spoke, nor did she slow her step. “I’m in a hurry.”
“I can see that,” he said. “Let me walk you.”
“No, thank you.”
He glanced at her ring finger and saw that it was bare. “Where do you live?”
“Why does that matter?”
“I’ll see you home.”
“I can see myself.”
“I have no doubt about that,” he said. “Let me see you anyway.”
“There’s no need.”
“My name’s John. Giovanni Esposito. What’s yours?”
She looked at him again, narrowing her eyes and appraising him from his blue collared shirt down to the scuff of his short boots. Then she fixed her gaze onto the road ahead. “Myrthen Bergmann.”
“Myrthen,” he said slowly, as though he could taste the sounds. “You sure we haven’t met before?”
“I didn’t go to your school.”
The road inclined a few degrees, and both of them, intent on their pace, began to breathe heavier into the thick air. “You working?”
“I’m a secretary at St. Michael’s.”
“I do the first shift at Blackstone’s. Been down two years now.”
She looked at his hands, pumping by his sides. “I could have guessed it.”
He held them out in front of himself and looked at his fingers, coal-black at the cuticles. Embarrassed, he shoved them into the pockets of his dungarees. “It’s not all I do.”
“I can only imagine.”
They ascended the hill in silence, then, until they reached a small row of peeling clapboard company houses set off from the road. He stopped at the scrap edge of lawn, and she continued up the steps to hers without so much as a pause.
“Can I call on you?” he asked, loud enough for her parents, if they were inside, to hear.
She swung open the screen door, walked in, and let it slam behind her.
John stood with his hands lax at his sides and stared at the empty doorway. He thought of a shred of dialogue:
“You should love Him.”
“I don’t love much.”
Then, a minute later, the door creaked open again. Once again, his heart leapt. But it wasn’t Myrthen who stepped out onto the porch.
A dry sliver of a man, eighty years old or fifty. Hollow-cheeked and gray all over: eyes, skin, hair, clothes. But his beard was neat and his shoes, polished. The man came to the edge of the top step and clasped his hands together at his belt and squinted down at John. In a drowned voice, he said:
“Yes.” His German accent was thick. “You may call on her.”
Then Myrthen’s father smiled, all the way up to his temples, revealing a surprisingly straight and white set of teeth, and stepped back quietly into the tight gray shadows of his falling-down house.
September 14, 1929
“Come on, Alta. Listen to me. I been working with him now for three months, he’s a decent fellow, really,” her brother Marek said.
“He sounds dull.”
“He’s not dull, he’s … he takes his work seriously is all. The other guys respect him a whole lot.”
Alta sighed and plunged her hands into the sourdough. She pushed it forward with the heel of her hand, then folded the flattened edges toward the middle and pressed them down. Push, fold, press. Push, fold, press.
Marek sighed back at her. “He’s not bad-looking. He works hard. He’s quiet, like you. I know he ain’t seeing anybody else because he’s been taking some ribbing about being twenty and not having a steady girl.”
She stopped and looked at her sixteen-year-old brother, younger than she by only a year and two days, and far more adventurous. He’d started underground after school to save money to go to college. “Why are you working so hard to set me up with Walter Pulaski? You’ve only mentioned him about a hundred times in the past two weeks. I don’t need you playing Cupid for me.”
Marek reached over to pinch the dough. Then he grabbed a bit of flour and tossed it on the counter between her hands. He dusted his hands together and shoved them back into his trouser pockets. Alta absorbed this addition of flour into the dough without comment. They understood each other well.
“If I don’t, who will?” he asked. “Listen, you know Cyryl and Kasper are close to leaving home — I heard Kas say the other night he was thinking about asking for Juliet’s hand, and you know it’s only time before Cyryl asks for Margaret’s. Then it’s only gonna be Daddy and me until I get out of here, and I know how to cook as well as you. So what I’m sayin’ is, you’ve been taking care of us since Mama died, and if you don’t pick your head up out of the washbasin pretty soon, you’re gonna miss your chance to make a family of your own.”
“I have a family.”
“Alta, cut it out. You know what I mean. I’m not saying do something wild like run off to New York, which I know you wouldn’t do even if that old hag Maggie ever did invite you, I’m just saying find someone who’ll take care of you for a change,” he said. “You’re not getting any younger.”
Alta narrowed her eyes at him even while a smile played at her lips, and she grabbed a fistful of sourdough and threw it at him. It hit him square in the chest, and he caught it and staggered back, feigning the force of it. “Ah, you got me!” he said.
“Hardly,” she said. She opened her hand and waited for him to return the weapon, then she worked it back into the thickening mass. Push, fold, press. “Oh fine,” she said. “I’ll go to the stupid bazaar and meet Walter.”
“Atta girl.”
“But then you have to promise to leave me alone. If I don’t like him, then just leave me be about it, hear?
“Yessum.” Then he dipped his finger into the canister of flour and drew a white line underneath one of her eyes. “Go get your war paint on, we gotta leave in an hour.”
That afternoon was the eighteenth annual St. Michael’s bazaar, which was always held on the second Saturday in September. Women brought their canned and baked goods to sell at the Country Kitchen; crocheted afghans, baby blankets, handmade furniture, and rosaries went on sale at the Craft Booth. All the proceeds went to pay for repairs to the church and, this year, a new ambry, the case that contains and displays the holy oils.
When Alta and Marek crossed the bridge over New Creek and walked up the turning-leaf path into Whisper Hollow, they found a crowd gathered in the level clearing that separated St. Michael’s from the cemetery. Children played carnival games, and parents and older adults visited over plates of kielbasa and sauerkraut and rolls as dense as baseballs. A few parishioners walked around selling twenty-five-cent raffle tickets to win the “Mystery Nine Patch” quilt sewn by quilting bee volunteers.
With one hand in his
pocket, Marek shielded his eyes with the other and scanned the crowd. “I don’t see him.”
Alta stood next to him, a small basket of baked goods looped over one arm. “What’s he look like, exactly?”
“You ever heard Daddy describe a pillar of coal in a cut-out room?”
Alta shook her head.
“Big, strong, squared-off. Mostly quiet.”
“Sounds dashing.”
“He’s better-looking than coal, for sure. But maybe not exactly dashing.”
Alta shot him a look.
“Listen, a pillar’s what’s left after we mine out a room full of coal. It’s what holds up the mountain after it’s been hollowed out. Same could be said about old Walter.” Then he tipped his head toward the arc of afternoon sun. “What do you know,” he said, raising his hand. “There he is now. Hey, Walter!”
Alta sighed, but at the same time felt a kaleidoscope of butterflies take flight inside her belly. She’d never had a steady beau. She’d never even been kissed. The closest she’d come was when the pimple-faced cousin of their next-door neighbor, who was a year younger and a foot shorter, had walked her home every day after school. That was two springs ago. She didn’t feel a thing toward him but pity, yet she’d still allowed him the pleasure of her company for those fifteen minutes each day, since he enjoyed it so much. Thankfully, his family moved to Kentucky as soon as school was out for the summer.
Walter made his way toward them, leaning his bulk forward and moving steadily through the crowd as though hauling his own body, like a train of coal-filled cars. His arms and legs were long; his torso, stout. He was exactly as Marek had described, big and strong and square. And even from a distance, with his chin out and his eyes down, he looked quiet.