Rose & Poe

by Jack Todd

  In Tacoma, she hiked to six different motels before she found one that was hiring maids. The manager, a lean man named Hank with tattoos all over both arms, had just fired his maid for drinking a fifth of whiskey that belonged to one of the guests and passing out in the room she was supposed to be cleaning. Rose said she wasn’t a drinker, although she did like a bottle of beer or three on a Saturday night. She needed a job and a room. Hank said she could stay for free in the unit closest to the highway, where she’d have to put up with the noise of passing trucks all night long. She said trucks wouldn’t bother her, they couldn’t make as much racket as the birds in the cedars back home. They shook hands on it and he drove her to the bus station to get her suitcase. Rose toyed with the radio in his car until she found a country station and sang along with Tammy Wynette on “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.” Hank thumped the steering wheel in delight. “Damn! Looks like I’ll be haulin out the mandolin tonight.”

  She was in her room less than an hour when Hank, freshened up and reeking of Aqua Velva and Wildroot Cream Oil, came knocking with a six-pack of Olympia Beer and a mandolin. She drank the beer with him and sang Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn songs and “Wabash Cannonball” the way Roy Acuff did it, and when the beer was gone, she let him have what he came for, with the roar of passing trucks drowning out the squeak of the bedsprings. After he went back to his room, Rose wrote him up in her little book:

  Hank Spurgeon, from Spokane. Runs the motel where I stay in Tacoma. Hank is a Roy Acuff nut and he plays some mandalin. We hit it off just fine.

  ~

  “Tell him your mama is here”

  Rose wanted to drive out to the base right away and search for Poe, but Hank persuaded her it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack, even for a man as large as Poe, and they would have a hard time even talking their way through the front gate. There were nearly a hundred thousand men at the sprawling base, and the trainees were often out on the firing range or on long marches. Hank had spent six years in the army and mustered out as a staff sergeant. He knew how things worked. He said the best thing to do was to sit tight and let Poe know where she was, then wait for him to get in touch.

  “I could write him a letter,” Rose said, “but Poe don’t read.”

  “He’ll find somebody to read it to him. The army is good that way.”

  “And I don’t have a proper address.”

  “Don’t need that either. If you’ve got a boy in the service, they’ll get it to him.”

  Rose sat down and composed her letter, four painstaking sentences that took her half an hour to write, printed in pencil in large block letters in a Big Chief writing tablet Hank had scrounged up, the kind they used in grade schools. She wrote it once, asked Hank to correct her spelling, and then copied it out again before she mailed it.

  DEAR POE —

  I AM HERE AT A PLACE CALLED THE RAINIER VIEW MOTEL. I HOPE YOU ARE DOING FINE. IF YOU GET THIS CALL ME. HANK WHO RUNS THE PLACE IS A GOOD MAN, HE WILL PUT YOU IN TOUCH WITH ME.

  YOUR LOVING MAMA,

  ROSE

  Hank wrote the motel phone number under Rose’s letter and added that he could call collect if he didn’t have a quarter. She sent another letter every day until Rose’s first Sunday morning at the motel, two weeks into Poe’s basic training, when the phone at the front desk rang at seven o’clock. Rose was sweeping out the office when Hank answered and called her over.

  “It’s your boy,” he said.

  She took the phone with tears in her eyes. “Poe?”

  “Hi, Mama. It’s me, Poe.”

  “I know, honey. It’s real good to hear your voice. How’re you doin?”

  “I’m doin okay, Mama. Except sometimes I get mixed up in drill and the sergeant gets mad at me. He says I got two left feet.”

  “I expect you do. I guess you got somebody to read my letters, then?”

  “Uh-huh. My friend Bill. He’s a real nice guy. He’s got the top bunk and I got the bottom bunk. He helps me get everything squared away in my footlocker, so’s I don’t get in trouble. He made the call for me, too.”

  “That’s good, Poe. That’s real good that you made a friend like Bill. Are you gettin enough to eat?”

  “They feed us pretty good, only you got to gobble it down quick. They don’t give you a whole lot of time. I was eatin too slow at breakfast time and the sergeant, he kicked the whole doggone tray right in my face. I didn’t get no breakfast that day.”

  “Well, I want you to know I’m right here. In case things don’t go right. I got a job and a place to stay, and I’m gonna set right here until they turn you loose.”

  “They haven’t said nothin about lettin me go.”

  “I know, baby. But sooner or later, they got to. You ain’t suited for the army.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what the drill sergeant says. He says the draft board messed up. They ain’t even got clothes to fit me and I got to wear my boots from back home.”

  “They’ll figure it out. That’s why I’m here. Soon as they let you go, Mama’s going to take you back home. This sergeant fella? You tell him your mama is out here, alright? You show him that telephone number, and you tell him to give me a call. What’s his name, anyway?”

  “Sergeant James. There’s other sergeants, but he’s the boss sergeant. He says I’m not supposed to call him sir. He sings when we’re out marchin, and we sing back. Makes it go real easy.”

  “I’ll bet it does. Nothing like music to make the hard miles easy, now is there? Well, I expect your time is about up. I better say goodbye now.”

  “Okay, Mama. We get to call every Sunday, so I’ll call you next Sunday, alright?”

  “Yes, you do that. I’ll be waitin right here for you to call.”

  After she hung up, Rose burst into tears and sobbed her way through half a box of Kleenex while Hank tried to console her.

  “I never been away from him before,” she said. “Not for more than the space of a day, and then he was close by. I ain’t used to this.”

  “I imagine it’s hard on a woman,” Hank said. “But if he’s as you say he is, they’ll turn him loose sooner or later.”

  “What if they don’t, though? What if they send him to that war? Poe is big as a moose, only he ain’t as fast and he don’t know how to hide. They’ll kill him sure.”

  “No, they won’t. He won’t go to no war, they’ll turn him loose. You’ll see. I know how the army works. It takes them hell’s own amount of time, but they generally figure out the right thing after a while. I had a boy in my platoon in basic, kid named Kedore. Couldn’t figure out a thing. Every time we buffed the floor in the barracks, he’d come in from a march on a rainy day and track mud right across the middle of the floor. We’d all yell at him and he’d stand there tracking more mud and bawling like a baby with a wet diaper, ’cause we was yellin at the poor devil. They finally sent him home.”

  “My Poe won’t bawl like a baby.”

  “I ain’t sayin he will. Only that if you’re a square peg and the army is a round hole, they figure it out, sooner or later.”

  ~

  “This gun won’t shoot!”

  While Rose waited at the motel, Poe slogged through the cold rain with the rest of the draftees. On long marches when weaker soldiers couldn’t take it, Poe would carry an extra pack or two slung over his wide shoulders, marching mile after mile under the hundred-foot Douglas fir trees that dripped rain down their necks, diving off to the side of the road when a tank came barreling through, listening to the sergeants bellow at every mistake, all of it a rain-smeared, exhausting blur.

  Four weeks into basic, Poe still didn’t have a helmet because the supply sergeant couldn’t find one to fit his head. He wore the biggest field jacket the army had, but it was three inches too short in the arms and he couldn’t begin to close it across his chest, so he had to leave it unzipped on the coldest days
, and his high-water fatigue pants stopped short of the top of his boots. He didn’t look or act like a soldier, but he didn’t fare as badly as the sergeant thought he would. He was unfailingly cheerful, tireless, willing, and as strong as any two recruits. In combat, he would be the guy toting the M60 machine gun, provided he could be taught how to assemble and clean it.

  It took a nearly fatal incident for the army to admit that the draft board had made a terrible mistake. They were on the rifle range, squinting at targets through the driving rain, when Poe’s rifle wouldn’t fire. He swiveled the muzzle into the drill sergeant’s belly and pulled the trigger again and again, saying: “This gun won’t shoot. How come it won’t shoot?”

  The sergeant wrenched the rifle out of Poe’s hands and ejected the magazine. It hadn’t fired because the safety was still on. Two tours of duty in the war, and this was the closest he had come to getting killed in the line of duty. That evening, the sergeant spoke to his company commander, who booted it upstairs to the battalion commander, who paid a visit to the regimental commander, who spoke to the base commander, who had to call someone at the Pentagon. It took three days for the word to come down: Poe was to be given an immediate honorable discharge, with the paperwork to be expedited before someone got killed. When the discharge came through, the sergeant called Rose. Hank drove her out to the base to meet Poe at the gate. Poe was grinning and singing as he waited, rocking back and forth from foot to foot.

  They spent three more nights at the motel before Rose decided it was time they were getting home. Hank was sorry to see her go. He offered her a job at a good wage, with better living quarters for herself and Poe, free of charge. He even mumbled something about how maybe they could get married and buy a little house. Rose said she was awful sorry, but she wasn’t the marrying kind, and anyhow they had to get back home. She printed out her address on the Big Chief writing tablet and told Hank to be sure to look her up if he was ever in the neighborhood.

  They left Seattle at mid-morning the next day, mother and son each taking up a pair of seats on a nearly empty bus, sometimes reaching across the aisle to hold hands as the miles flew by. Poe liked the bus stations where they ate at lunch counters. Rose laughed when a trucker who sat next to them in Spokane said to a poky waitress, “Do y’all need help to catch that chicken out back? ’Cause I got a rope in the truck. I expect I could get a half hitch on a pullet, if it would get them two drumsticks here before nightfall.” Rose explained the joke to Poe and he laughed, too.

  This time, Rose got to see Wyoming. They were in Billings at five fifteen in the morning, but it was full light by the time they arrived in Sheridan at seven thirty, with the Bighorn Mountains in the rearview mirror. They arrived in Plattsburgh, New York, in time for a Saturday night supper and a beer before the last leg home. Rose decided they could afford to spend the night in a motel, so they each had a hot bath and a good night’s sleep and left early the next morning on a milk-run bus bound for Bunker’s Corner. Rose thought of using the pay phone at the bus station to call Joey for a lift home, but she decided the walk would do them good after all those long hours on the bus. On the way to the little yellow house, they passed the cemetery where Huguette was buried. They’d been through the routine so many times that Poe knew what to do without being told. He held her bag while Rose marched straight to Huguette’s grave, tugged down her panties, and peed on the old woman’s grave until her eyes watered.

  ~ III ~

  Fabula animi

  Out of habit, Miranda looks into her father’s study to ask if he wants to come along on her afternoon hike. As always, Thorne refuses. He knows how quickly she walks and he doesn’t want to be a burden. He watches Miranda set out with that long, confident stride, wishes that his aging legs worked half as well as hers do, and when she is out of sight returns to brooding on the encroaching shadows of his life.

  After half an hour spent staring blankly out the window, Thorne decides that he wants to go for a hike after all. He changes into his hiking boots, fills an old army surplus canteen with water, jams a battered straw hat on his head, and takes up his walking stick.

  The staff is a marvel, a sinuous four-foot branch of red pine that had once tripped him up as he walked not far from the house. He had picked it up, tried its heft in his hands, gazed up at the pine that had so fortuitously dropped it at his feet, and knew that he had at last found the wood he sought. After a lifetime of carving, this would be his masterwork, his summing up of the story of man’s soul. He would call it his fabula animi and work into it all that he knew.

  As a young man in Ireland, Thorne had shipped out to sea on an ocean-going freighter and never looked back. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, he had come across a seaman carving a scene of the nativity in a hunk of basswood. The seaman loaned him some tools, showed him the basics, and by the end of the voyage, Thorne was himself turning out passable carvings, but he had never attempted anything as ambitious as the fabula animi.

  Thorne used a knot at the top of the cane to carve a swirl representing the birth of the universe from the point of singularity in the Big Bang into the opposing faces of God as Alpha and Omega. On one side of the staff, the head of the deity was represented as man, with woman on the opposite side above the inscription, Deus absconditus, a reference to the hidden god, unknowable to man. From there he descended to a carving of Adam and Eve giving birth to Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, then to Abraham preparing to kill his son Isaac as a token of his complete devotion to God, and then to Jesus on the cross.

  After Christ, he carved Muhammed the Prophet pointing to the existence of one true God, then Buddha bringing enlightenment through meditation, and the symbol of Tao, the way, along with the symbols for Yang and Yin, the opposing poles of life, followed by the net by which all beings are caught, with no escape from life and death. Next he carved a Native American story of the beginning of life through the symbol of a howling coyote, along with Prometheus bringing fire to man and suffering the punishment of Zeus, tied to a rock to have his liver pecked out for eternity. Prometheus endured, however, in the form of man returning his fire to the heavens in the form of a rocket bound for outer space.

  Thorne had used all his skill to carve an hourglass symbolizing the passage of time, and a pair of dice imposed over a dragonfly to signify man’s dangerous bent for gambling with nature. Near the base of the staff was a naked man puzzling over the quantum theory, intertwined strands of DNA, and farther down the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the cosmic result of man’s tendency to play God. Thorne had turned a final knot at the base of the staff into a wood carving of the Enola Gay dropping a single bomb on Hiroshima as the plane banked away from a mushroom cloud. The staff had taken two full months to carve, and before he was a third of the way through the work, Thorne knew that he possessed something of great power.

  On stormy days when there is lightning in the air, the stick begins to vibrate in his hands and he hears a recurring bass note, so low that it is almost undetectable to the human ear, a steady, low thrum that seemed to echo the stars. It frightens him a little, this red-pine staff, but he is proud of it. When he leaves the house, he swings the stick jauntily. He has forgotten Poe until the giant calls after him in that odd, high-pitched voice. “Hey, Mister Sir Mister. It’s a beautiful day, ain’t it?”

  Thorne flutters his free hand in Poe’s direction, not wanting to be drawn into a long conversation about the perfections of the wall. The poor devil would say it was a beautiful day if it were raining pitchforks, but it isn’t Thorne’s idea of a beautiful day. It’s terribly hot for this far north this late in August, nearly a hundred degrees and humid, and as he strides along, the warm, dusty scent of pine trees fills his nostrils and his boots kick up dust. It’s forest-fire weather. What they need is a good, soaking rain, but there is nothing in the forecast. Thorne has become obsessed with the weather in his old age, and he checks the forecast a dozen times a day. There is nothing ahead for the ne
xt two weeks but more of the same hot, dry weather they’ve had most of the summer.

  A raven shrieks from a blue spruce, a tiny red squirrel chitters furiously. Thorne swings the walking stick as he hikes. It’s beautifully weighted. It isn’t just for show, this wonderful piece of carved wood. It really does help a man his age travel over rough ground. He’s getting into a rhythm, enjoying the sweat and the dust and the solitude, when he tops a rise and sees them standing under a rocky outcrop a quarter mile or more away: Miranda, with a man.

  Thorne halts. He waves, but they don’t wave back. He leans the walking stick against a hackberry tree and takes a long pull from the canteen, trying to decide what he should do. He doesn’t recall whether Miranda told him she was going hiking with someone, but it’s quite possible she did and he has simply forgotten. Should he come strolling up and offer a big, cheery hello or veer off in a different direction and pretend he hasn’t seen them? Hadn’t Airmail said something about Miranda and a man? He can’t recall. He decides he will simply blunder on up to them as if by accident, and then she’ll have to introduce him. But as he starts after her, Miranda turns abruptly and hikes off in the opposite direction, leaving her friend hurrying to catch up. Even at that distance, Thorne can tell the man isn’t much of a hiker. He thinks of trying to catch up to them, but Miranda is moving much too fast, with the man almost jogging to keep up with her. Soon they’re around a bend onto the west slope of Manitou Mountain and out of sight.

  Something about the man bothers him. Something familiar in his stance, his build, the way he walks. He feels an instinctive dislike for the stranger, but he can’t say why. It is probable, he decides, that he is feeling nothing more than the jealousy every man feels toward the rival who usurps his place in his daughter’s life.