I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  We moved in on a Saturday in February of 1970. A Red Ball moving van arrived at our old house to load up our earthly belongings, which took roughly ten minutes. Once loaded, the moving van struck out across town, east on Main Street past Danner’s Five and Dime, to Tennessee Street, then to Broadway, through a tunnel of trees, and around three corners to our new home. Our family led the procession in our Plymouth Valiant, which had been washed and waxed for the occasion.

  The day resides in my memory as the finest of days. It was unseasonably warm, the sky was brilliant, joy and expectancy filled the air. Bluebirds were nearly extinct then, but in my recollections they were thick about us, flitting from tree to tree, heralding our arrival.

  Our bicycles had been the last objects loaded on the moving van and so were the first removed. My brothers and I set out to investigate our new surroundings, looping the block, stopping at the Baker Funeral Home to peer through the garage windows to see if there were any dead bodies lying about, but we only saw Rawleigh Baker, the mortician, very much alive, wearing a suit and waxing his hearse.

  Our immediate neighbors held little promise for fun and excitement. To our south was Mrs. Draper, a Quaker widow. Catty-corner from us was Mrs. Bryant, another Quaker widow. There were a number of Quaker widows in our neighborhood, who, as near as I could tell, passed their time making quilts they sent out west to cold Indians.

  Up the street lived Mr. and Mrs. Norton and their six children, one of whom we called Suds for reasons I no longer remember. Mrs. Norton would sit on the top step of their porch, smoking cigarettes, while her six sticky, feral kids draped themselves across her. The other adults I knew guarded their language when children were present, but Mrs. Norton was a veritable fountain of profanity, and an endless source of fascination to the neighborhood children.

  We would sit on her porch, imploring Mrs. Norton for puffs on her cigarette. “What the hell you thinkin’?” she’d say. “You’re not old enough. You gotta be at least fifteen.”

  She would draw deeply from her cigarette, then let the smoke seep out in dribbles while watching the pickup trucks roll past on their way to the dump, which lay a mile south of town so the rich people didn’t have to smell their trash.

  On Saturday mornings, Mr. Norton would join us on the front step. He never said much. He would sit and listen to his wife, baring his tarry teeth occasionally to grin, then take a deep drag from his cigarette. His hair was neatly combed to a high-rolling pompadour up front and fairly glistened with pomade, which I was afraid would ignite from the cigarette heat. Between the two of them, their home was such a fog even their dog had a smoker’s hack. Quite naturally, I was enthralled by the Nortons, they representing everything my mother had ever warned me about.

  One fall day, Suds filched a Camel from his father, and he and I smoked it in the woods behind my house, underneath our camping tree. He was a year older than I was, ten, and a veteran smoker. The tips of his fingers were beginning to yellow, and he could blow smoke rings better than Jackie Gleason.

  “Don’t swallow the smoke,” Suds said, passing me the cigarette. “Just suck it in and blow it out.”

  I smoked half the cigarette, vomited, then lay on my back drawing in fresh air while Suds finished the Camel and made up euphemisms for puking—selling the Buick, ralphing, praying to the porcelain goddess, the Technicolor yawn, driving the bus, and blowing chow. He would cackle after each one. Suds had a mind for metaphors like no one I’d ever known.

  The next day, during a game of football, Suds sat on my arm and broke it, and even though I got to wear a cast and it made me a hero at school, I decided the time had come to find more refined company.

  I settled on Peanut, so named because of his resemblance to that legume. He was short, curvy, and smooth, and even at the age of nine, nearly bald. Peanut lived around the corner from us. His mother had died when he was little, and his father, unable to care for him, had sent him to Danville to live with relatives. Peanut divided his time between his uncle’s house and his grandparents’ across town. They were deaf. When their doorbell rang, their lights and television would flicker, announcing company. This was a great attraction to us, and Peanut and I would ring their doorbell several times a day, until his grandfather would come outside and yell at us in sign language.

  If Peanut was embarrassed by his nickname, he never let on, and after a while seemed to forget his real name.

  When he and I went to register for school, Mrs. Warnock, the school secretary, asked him his name.

  “Peanut,” he answered.

  “I mean your real name,” Mrs. Warnock said.

  “That is my real name,” he said.

  “What did your parents name you?” she persisted.

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Jeff.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “P-e-a-n-u-t,” he said.

  Behind his home was a brick shed, which Peanut told us had been the slaves’ quarters when the house was a plantation. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had prohibited slavery in Indiana and the house had been built in 1858, but for a kid, Peanut had unusual credibility and we believed him.

  Peanut had a cousin named Karen, who I kissed in a game of spin the bottle in the brick shed. When I let it be known we had been romantically involved, she punched me in the nose, and for many years afterward I associated romance with pain.

  When we were ten, Peanut and I took part in the Danville Optimist Bicycle Safety Rodeo. I won second-place prize—fifteen dollars and a Salisbury steak dinner at the Westwood Inn, and Peanut won third—ten dollars and a macaroni hotdish. Betty Weesner took our picture for the Republican newspaper. Ricky White won first place, and several years later leveraged that victory into an appointment to West Point and got his picture hung on the wall at Dave’s All-American Pizza and Eatery.

  My family had lived in town for thirteen years and had never gotten our picture in the Republican, not even a mention in the social column, which you could get just by having your aunt visit or driving to the city for the state fair. But within a year of moving to the rich end of town, we hit the papers and our standing began to build, a portent of the many glories that would eventually come our way. If my mother could have foretold this, I’m sure her initial misgivings about the kitchen ceiling would have dissipated. Instead, she spent the next thirty-four years staring at the water stain, sighing, then looking at Dad and saying, “So when was it you were thinking of fixing that leak?”

  Chapter 3

  Dreams of Greatness

  Danville was (and is) the county seat of Hendricks County. There is a bronze disc in the sidewalk in front of Lawrence’s Drugstore, on the east side of the town square, marking the exact center of the county. The spring of my fourth-grade year, Mrs. Conley marched our class two-by-two up Washington Street, where each of us took a turn standing on the disc while she imparted the salient facts concerning our county—founded in 1824, named for then-governor of Indiana, William Hendricks, chief exports included corn, cattle, and mice.

  It was an invigorating experience, standing in the exact middle of our county. For a moment, I believed I was in charge of the whole shebang—that I was the governor, the commies had nuked us, and since I was standing on the magic spot, it fell to me to raise our state from the ashes. Then Roydeena Feltner punched me in the shoulder, twice, and told me to move my butt off of there, that it was her turn to stand on the disc.

  Mrs. Conley believed in hands-on education and regularly shepherded us about town, pointing out various curiosities—the hackberry tree on the courthouse lawn planted by Union soldiers in 1861; the home of Ira Chase, governor of Indiana from 1891 to 1893, who was content to live with his blind wife in their small home at the corner of Kentucky and Mill streets, wanting nothing to do with the governor’s mansion in the city. He rode the train into the city each morning and returned home on the evening train. The governor and his wife had one son, who died when his mother, unable to see the directions, accidentally
gave him a fatal dose of medicine. Mrs. Conley wept when she told the story, standing on the sidewalk outside their home, tears glistening on her cheeks like diamonds.

  As fascinating as that was, my interest lay in our mouse exports. On the northwest side of town was a long, low building where multitudes of mice were raised in rodent luxury before being trucked to the Eli Lilly factory where they gave their lives for the betterment of our health and welfare. In the winter, when the winds bore down from the northwest, the sweetly pungent odor of mouse droppings settled like a blanket over our town. When the weather fronts had shifted to the south, Mrs. Conley walked us across town to the mousery, explaining the important role the mice played in the eradication of disease and infections, suggesting that if the mousery had been here in the 1890s, the governor’s son wouldn’t have died. It was a source of unfathomable pride to know our town’s mice played a vital role in the elimination of fearsome poxes and blights.

  “A lot of our young people go away to college and never return. But this proves,” she said, gesturing toward the mousery, “that there are lucrative business opportunities beneficial to mankind right here in Danville.”

  I would stand on the sidewalk beside Mrs. Conley, whose enthusiasm for mice was contagious. Listening to her discuss the virtues of mice, I dreamed of skipping college altogether and getting hired at the mousery as a turd scooper, then working my way up through the various departments—feeding, insemination, incubation—and on into the gloried reaches of upper management, then starting my own mouse factory and shipping Danville mice all over the world.

  It almost happened to Frankie Cunningham, who after high school was hired on to clean the cages at the mousery. By his mid-twenties he was working in the front office as the public relations man. He fielded all the complaints about the mouse smell, able to calm the most irate citizens with his deft humor and cool composure. He was a walking encyclopedia when it came to mice and would leap to their defense when anyone questioned their virtues. I recall when someone within earshot of Frankie made a passing comment about mice, fleas, and the Black Plague.

  “With all due respect,” Frankie said, ever the diplomat, “the fleas that started the Black Plague were found on black rats, not mice. They’re of the same subfamily, murinae, but not the same genus, Rattus rattus as opposed to Mus musculus.”

  I never knew what the mousery paid Frankie, but he was worth every penny.

  Curiously, after years of association with mice, Frankie began to resemble one—white-haired, long whiskers that stood out in straight lines from his face, and two-prominent front teeth that were slightly overbitten. He was heavy on the bottom and his head tapered to a pink point. His looks worked against him; he appeared mistrustful, like a sly rodent. He died a bitter and broken man, infected, ironically, with the hantavirus, after being bitten by a Guatemalan deer mouse.

  “Done in by the Peromyscus guatemalensis,” were his last gasping words.

  In addition to selling mice by the millions to Eli Lilly, the mousery also sold them singly to children as pets or snake food. After they got their dime, the people at the mousery seemed coldly indifferent to the mouse’s plight. Peanut had a black rat snake he’d caught in the woods behind his house. Each Monday after school, we’d ride our bicycles to the mousery and buy a mouse, which Peanut would carry home in his shirt pocket, its pointy head poking out the top of his pocket, its whiskers plastered back by the wind, grinning, thinking it had broken free, unaware of its fate.

  We would drop the mouse into the snake’s cage, where it would cower in a corner, its cheerful countenance replaced with one of stark terror. The snake toyed with the mouse, chitchatting with it for several days until it relaxed and reclined in its chair, drinking a Manhattan. The snake would seize hold of it, piercing its neck with its fangs, then swallow it, the mouse’s pink little hind legs sticking out of the snake’s mouth, kicking frantically.

  Because of the ready supply of snake food, serpents were common in our town. Most of the boys had one, and some more than one. They would bring them to Show-and-Tell Day at school, snakes draped around shoulders and sprouting from heads like Medusa’s—black rats, corn snakes, king snakes, garden snakes, and hognose snakes lamenting their poor reputation, putting everyone at ease before sinking their fangs in an unsuspecting child’s neck, dragging him to the furnace room in the basement and swallowing him whole.

  Even so, Mrs. Conley thought the occasional ingestion of a child was a small price to pay, and remained a stout advocate of the mousery, devoting an entire week of our fourth-grade year to extolling its vital role in humanity’s advancement. “Never have so many mice suffered so much for so many,” she said. She had her students write letters to the state legislature each fall requesting the Mus musculus be named the official state mouse, to no avail. We had a state flag, state motto, state flower, state bird, state tree, state stone, state river, state song, state mineral, and even an official state insect—the lightning bug—but no state mouse. It grieved Mrs. Conley to no end. She’d petitioned the school board to change our school’s mascot from the Warriors to the Mice, which they declined to do, since Mrs. Kisner, the art teacher, had only recently painted a warrior on the gym floor and was in no mood to replace it with a mouse.

  Mrs. Conley was a lonely woman, a visionary in a town of near-sighted people. I wanted to be like her, forward thinking and a leader of people. Each day I would ride my bicycle past Lawrence’s Drugstore, dismount, and stand on the bronze disc at the county’s center. If my dreams of mousery greatness didn’t materialize, my plan B was becoming the governor, riding the train into the city each day as Ira Chase had done, making the Mus musculus the official state mouse, then running for the presidency and winning, which Mrs. Conley said could happen to anyone.

  “Anyone can be president,” she would tell us. I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Conley was wildly optimistic or delusional, but it was plain as the nose on your face that not everyone in our class was presidential material. Jerry Sipes was the missing link, a knuckle-dragging mouth breather, strong evidence that the theory of evolution needed further refining. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances that might cause a majority of Americans to think Jerry Sipes was the answer to their problems.* Nevertheless, Mrs. Conley persisted in her fantasy. “If you work hard, tell the truth, and get A’s on your report card, you too can be president of the United States of America,” she said.

  Her last requirement eliminated the possibility for me. I was a solid C student in the fourth grade, a middle-of-the-roader, a moderate man, not given to extremes, in search of the middle ground. Plus, I lied a lot. The lying wasn’t my fault—the adults in my life left me little choice, peppering me with questions that, had I answered truthfully, would have landed me in hot water.

  Adults were always extolling the virtues of honesty, then getting upset when you told the truth.

  When Mrs. Conley asked me if I had been the one who’d written the word phart on the blackboard, I knew if I told her the truth she’d be disappointed, so I spared her the anguish and lied.

  Father McLaughlin asked me every Sunday if I believed Jesus was born of a virgin. I knew if I told the truth, that I had serious doubts, he’d faint dead away, so I said, “You betcha!” and we were both better off.

  When Mrs. Conley taught Indiana history, she concluded each lesson by saying, “Now don’t you all agree Indiana is the finest state in the nation?” We would nod our heads in agreement, like the little brownnosers we were, even though I preferred Wisconsin. Adults didn’t want the truth, so much as they wanted their prejudices confirmed.

  Mrs. Conley’s class was at the top of the stairs, so when Mrs. Warnock in the office rang the recess bell, we were the first in line for the prime playground equipment. Miss Stump’s class was the last out, and they were stuck with broken swings that pinched their butts and the Slide from Hell. The Slide from Hell rose one hundred feet from the ground. The first week of school, an unsuspecting child, new to our town, would climb t
o the top, look down, be overcome with vertigo, and plummet to his death. The Slide from Hell was left on the playground as an object lesson about the vicissitudes of life.

  Miss Stump, as her name suggested, was squat, round, and unyielding. She drew recess duty while the other teachers smoked cigarettes in the teachers’ lounge. She stood watch by the bicycle rack under the maple tree, seething with resentment, scanning the playground for infractions. She would blast her whistle, point to the offending party, and bellow at him to straighten up or else. The or else was never defined, though we suspected it had something to do with the creative application of pain, which would be repeated when we got home.*

  Mrs. Conley and Miss Stump exhibited the typical views concerning children in those days. Mrs. Conley believed we were destined for greatness, that nothing was beyond our reach. Miss Stump believed prison was too good a fate for us. It was disconcerting to realize Miss Stump had taught more years than Mrs. Conley, indicating that longer exposure to children caused one’s opinion of them to lessen.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t let this dampen my zeal for life. I knew it was only a matter of time before I would follow in Frankie Cunningham’s footsteps and be a leader. First governor, then president by popular demand. Mrs. Conley would be dead by then, but she would look down from heaven and not be surprised by my success. She would be disappointed to know I’d lied about writing the word phart on the blackboard—people in heaven knowing everything—but she would have forgiven me, pardon and mercy being required in heaven.

  I imagined these future glories and more, standing on the disc at the center of our county, dreaming my wild dreams.

  Chapter 4

  My Pointless Suffering

  According to Mrs. Draper, the Quaker widow next door, my parents were the fifth owners of the Broadway Street house, all of whom had left their mark on it, so it was a curious mix of a place. In addition to that, our relatives showered us with their cast-off furniture and the rooms were soon full, but dissimilar. The front parlors were Victorian, the dining room Colonial, and the living room Daniel Boone-ish with a little ’70s decor thrown in for good measure. In all the years my parents lived there, they were never able to synthesize the house into an agreeable whole. Each room had its charms, but none of them harmonized with the others. It was like living in a furniture store, where within a few yards one could find a variety of styles.