I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  The house was not air-conditioned—few of the neighborhood homes were—and so the porch was the center of our lives through the summer. Peanut would arrive each morning after breakfast and sit on our porch swing until we came out.

  One morning, I found him studying a small, rounded hole in our front door glass. The origin of the hole was a mystery, although my siblings and I had considered numerous possibilities in the months we had lived there. When I wondered aloud how it could have been made, Peanut peered at it intently, then announced, “Civil War musket ball.”

  That a Civil War battle hadn’t been fought within a hundred miles of Danville, Indiana, didn’t alter his opinion. Once Peanut made up his mind about something, the facts could not dissuade him, and he was so persuasive my brothers and I spent the day digging great holes in the yard in search of military relics. We unearthed a long piece of rusted metal that appeared to me to be a discarded lawn mower blade, although Peanut told me I was mistaken and identified it as a sword. “Union Army, I believe. Quite possibly General Grant’s.”

  Besides history, Peanut and I shared other interests, chief among them money and our lack of it. He and I were too young to be employed, so we had to be entrepreneurial and make our own way. For several days we wandered about town picking up empty soda bottles, for which we were reimbursed five cents each at the Kroger store. After two days of work, we had earned a dollar, which we spent on Mexican jumping beans. We charged neighborhood kids a nickel to see them and earned another dollar.

  Flush with capital, Peanut suggested we start a newspaper. There were two newspapers in our town, one owned by a Republican and the other by a Democrat. This left the vast Independent market underserved, and Peanut and I resolved to remedy that. My brother David joined us in our venture. He and Peanut went on assignment, interviewing various neighbors and running down hot tips. I was in charge of editing, layout, and production. We named our paper the Broadway Blab. It was four pages, and when there weren’t enough true stories to fill it, we resorted to rumor and innuendo, which caused the circulation to skyrocket to its peak of twenty-five homes. We wrote the paper in longhand and soon were too busy writing to go in search of news and had to invent it out of whole cloth. In our fourth week, we wrote an exposé on Quaker widows, alienated our base, and had to cease operations.

  My economic well-being in jeopardy, I asked my parents for an allowance.

  “Sure,” my father said. “Tell you what we’ll do. If you mow the yard, make your bed, keep your bedroom clean, sweep out the barn, carry out the trash, and do the supper dishes, we’ll give you a place to sleep, clothes to wear, and food to eat.”

  This was my father’s customary response to my requests for an allowance.

  “James Martin gets an allowance,” I pointed out. “Two dollars a week.”

  James Martin lived up the street and bought his clothes at Beecham’s Menswear on the square, instead of at yard sales like the rest of us. He hailed from serious money.

  “We’re not the Martins,” my father said.

  That was abundantly clear.

  The next week, I walked past the Martin’s house and saw three men, dressed in white uniforms, painting their house. James was playing in his side yard.

  “Who are those guys?” I asked.

  “My dad hired them to paint our house,” he said.

  I stood on the sidewalk, grappling with that foreign idea. Hiring someone to work on your house! That’s when I knew the Martins were class.

  When our house had been built in 1913, a number of handymen would hire themselves out for a modest sum, but by 1970 their ranks had dwindled to one Hiram Bybee, who’d been bitten on the chin by a bat, gone mad in the head, and was wildly unpredictable. So the home repairs fell to my father, who, though not accomplished with tools, was well thought of and able to persuade friends and neighbors to help, usually by plying them with beer. Within a few years, our home was wallpapered, the kitchen renovated, porch roofed, barn painted, fence erected, and roof leaks plugged.

  Three of the more colorful volunteers were the Lofton brothers—Mitch, Ronnie, and Jake—whom my father had met in his line of work, selling bug spray to grocery stores throughout Indiana. I would stand off to the side, watching the men work, fetching tools and beer, whatever they required. The beer tended to animate the Lofton brothers, and as the day progressed their inhibitions would lessen, as did the quality of their work. Shingles went on upside down, fences ran crooked, entire sections of barn were left un-painted. Any woman walking past was scrutinized, possible liaisons suggested. I found our encounters with the Lofton brothers thrilling, every bit as interesting as the Buckhorn Bar, but it distressed my brother David, who would stalk through the house, a pubescent Jeremiah, a weeping prophet, predicting their damnation.

  Even with such able assistance, the house was a jealous mistress, demanding every spare moment of Dad’s time. He worked long hours selling bug spray, so many of the regular chores fell to my siblings and me, and we quickly became adept at avoiding them. Indeed, if we had devoted as much thought and energy to work as we did to evading it, our house would have been a showcase. Because we didn’t, it was a curiosity, a reference point against which others could measure their decline.

  The situation came to a head each October, when the numerous trees on our three-acre lawn shed staggering amounts of leaves. Before my father left for work, he would say, “I want those leaves raked by the time I get home.” It was an absurd request, biblical in proportion, similar to Pharaoh’s order that the Israelites make bricks without straw. Our rakes were gap-toothed, missing most of the tines. The few remaining prongs were bent at odd angles. My dad would compound matters by purchasing one new rake each fall, which my brothers and I would fight over like refugees scrapping for a crust of bread.

  Our friends deserted us in droves during October, lest they be drawn into our misery. Even Peanut, who was usually unflagging in his support, forsook us in October to play with James Martin, whose father had a leaf sweeper he pulled behind a riding mower. One October, while the Martins were gone, my brother Glenn made off with their sweeper. Lacking a riding mower, we hitched it to our brother Doug, who pulled it back and forth across the yard, leaving clean green stripes in his wake. We had all the leaves picked up and the sweeper returned before anyone was the wiser. We would have gotten away with it, except Suds Norton ratted us out and we had to apologize to the Martins and act like we were sorry, even though we weren’t.

  For as long as my siblings and I lived at home, my father refused to buy a riding lawn mower. My brothers and I mowed the lawn with a push mower whose right front tire would work loose and fall off.* Dad refused to upgrade, believing irrational hardship strengthened one’s moral fiber. He had a number of interesting theories about character development, most of them involving tedious labor and pointless suffering.

  This perspective was not unique to my father. Other men of his generation, born in the thick of the Great Depression, seemed positively giddy about adversity. They were especially fond of war, and regularly suggested it as the cure for what ailed us. Since Vietnam was stumbling to an end with no other war on the horizon, home maintenance became the front on which I was tested and found wanting.

  This battle took the following, predictable patterns:

  Me: Say, Dad, I was at Norton’s the other day, and noticed their rakes had tines on them. Maybe we could get one of those.

  Dad: Why, when I was your age, we didn’t even have rakes. We had to pick up leaves with our bare hands.

  Or—

  Me: Boy, I sure wish our lawn mower had four wheels.

  Dad: Why, when I was little, our lawn mower only had two wheels. Maybe if you’d been to war, you’d have a little more gumption.

  It soon became apparent that I had a gumption deficit. Roydeena Feltner was in my grade and lived three blocks west of us. Every morning, on my way to school, she punched me in the shoulder and called me a pansy. I began taking my dog Zipper to school w
ith me, for protection. But Roydeena gave her a Milk-Bone, then slugged me. When I hit Roydeena back, Zipper bit me.

  Nevertheless, I liked to imagine I had gumption. One day, when I was around eleven, my father pulled in the driveway bearing a large carton of orange backpacks adorned with pictures of bugs breathing their last after being doused with bug spray. Dad, by virtue of his vocation, could always be depended upon to furnish us with the most curious items having to do with bugs—bug backpacks, bug telephones, bug radios, bug shirts, bug hats, and bug wristwatches.

  The bug backpack was my favorite. I would fill it with camping gear, then strike out into the wild behind our house with Peanut in tow. We’d hike to the camping tree, build a fire, open a can of Dinty Moore beef stew with the lumberjack on the label, cook it over the coals, then eat it straight from the can. Gumption food.

  Hiking back, I pretended we were returning home from the Civil War, that we’d been gone four years fighting the cursed Rebels, and that the rest of my family, without me there to protect them, had been attacked and killed by Indians, leaving me to figure out the meaning of it all and carry on without them. But my family was always fine and going about their business. Indeed, they seemed unaware I’d even been gone from home, let alone to war.

  “Your father wants you to mow the lawn,” my mother said, by way of greeting.

  The task of mowing fell to me and my brother Doug. The rest of us kids first noticed his obsessive-compulsiveness when he was ten years old and began vacuuming the living room carpet without being told. We knew then he had a serious problem—none of us ever did anything without being asked to. But Doug seemed to enjoy the work, guiding the vacuum cleaner back and forth across the room in precise lines, demanding that everyone walk with the nap and not against it.

  He was equally neurotic about the lawn, so when it was my turn to mow, I would careen across the yard, pushing the mower in a crooked, noodley line, which he could not tolerate. He would burst from the house, waving his arms, shouting at me to stop, and then wrest the mower from me and take over, mowing my section and his in clean right angles to the street. We had the neatest lawn in town and people used to drive by just to see it.

  David, the youngest, was the last of the siblings to leave home. The day after he moved, my father drove to Sears and bought a riding mower, a stunning violation of his gumption-development theory. If I still published the Broadway Blab, I would expose that and other lies I was told were necessary for my well-being. Instead, I pass these untruths down to my sons, in hopes they will one day be examples of self-sufficiency and gumption, like their father and grandfather before them.

  Chapter 5

  Big Business

  My dreams for success came to a head in the fifth grade, when a Mrs. Louise Moffat visited our school, gave a rousing oration on the benefits of free enterprise, then urged my classmates and me to consider a lucrative career in newspaper delivery. Her speech was a masterpiece of psychological manipulation, appealing to our desire for money while taking full advantage of our ignorance. She promised obscene riches for little effort—“Make ten, twenty, yes, even thirty dollars a week for minutes of fun each day!” This seemed vastly superior to working for my dad, who didn’t pay me anything, so I enrolled on the spot, and was given the assignment of delivering the Indianapolis News to twenty-six households on the south side of town.

  This was back in the days before child labor laws, when employers could exploit children for financial gain, making all sorts of promises they had no intention of keeping, driving children to wrack and ruin, while the parents united in telling their kids it was for their own good.

  I was required to deliver the newspaper wearing a yoked bag over my shoulders, emblazoned with the phrase the Indianapolis News on one side and the Great Hoosier Daily on the other. The bag could only be rented, not purchased, and so I labored in a state of indentured servitude, up to my eyeballs in hock for bag rental, paying tenfold more than its value. The real profit for the Indianapolis News lay not in selling newspapers, but in renting bags to its carriers.

  What the job lacked in financial gain, it made up for in camaraderie. Bill Eddy and Bunny Runyan had also fallen prey to Louise Moffat’s pitch and joined me in the venture. Bunny Runyan was the only kid I ever knew to make money delivering newspapers. He carried a thick wad of bills in his front pocket. We never figured out how he did it, and he never told. Bunny became Louise Moffat’s poster boy of newspaper success. Whenever we complained about being cheated, she would point to Bunny’s financial success, which always reduced us to grudging silence. I now believe Louise Moffat was salting the mine, slipping Bunny an extra twenty bucks a week in order to seduce the rest of us with prospects of prosperity.

  Louise Moffat played us like a cheap violin. Whenever we were on the verge of uprising, she would announce a free trip to the Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati to those carriers who signed up five new customers in the next week. We would temporarily forget all our hardships and respond with a frenzy, striking out in search of new subscribers to the Great Hoosier Daily.

  I was so easily manipulated, I would probably still be delivering newspapers if Peanut hadn’t broken the spell Louise Moffat had over me. I’d spent an entire Saturday trying to drum up new customers, had failed miserably, and was thoroughly dejected.

  “All you have to do is make up five names and addresses,” Peanut said. “She probably never checks on them, so long as their bill gets paid. Then when you get back from Kings Island, tell her they all moved away. It’s simple.”

  I did the arithmetic in my head. The newspaper cost sixty cents a week, which meant that for a modest investment of three dollars, I could visit Kings Island. Not wanting to keep this fine secret to myself, I told all the other carriers and we banded together to stick it to Louise Moffat and the Great Hoosier Daily, with the exception of Doreena Waltrip, the only girl carrier, who said God would strike us dead and send us to hell for cheating. It turns out she was mistaken; we didn’t go to hell, we went to Kings Island.

  The week after we returned, a number of cancellations were reported. A scandal ensued, Mrs. Moffat was transferred, and a Mr. Strunk took her place. He promptly did away with such pleasantries as trips, increased our bag rental, and set out to bring us under his cigarette-yellowed thumb. Though the carriers had won the battle, the newspaper had won the war, and we resigned ourselves to further depravations, except for Doreena Waltrip, who was given the paper route where the big tippers lived.

  Collection day was Thursday. Most of my customers were elderly women on Social Security who paid me in pennies they’d found under the cushions of their couches. They would count them out, one by one, into my hand, then recount them, just to be sure they hadn’t given me too much. By the end of the day, I wanted to rip their blue hair out by the roots.

  The upside of the job was the girlie calendar in the back room of Mooney’s TV and Radio. The first day of the month, the calendar was turned to a new girlie and a swarm of deviants would gather at the rear window to watch her unveiling. Everyone else had to view the calendar from twenty feet away through a grimy window, but every Thursday, on collection day, I would enter the back room, where Mr. Mooney was fixing TVs, and sneak glances at that month’s featured attraction.

  The calendar relied heavily on the male imagination. Vital parts weren’t bared, so much as hinted at, but this was typical of sex education in my adolescence—short on specifics and long on speculation. I was eleven when I first heard the word vagina, and even then I thought it had something to do with chest pain. Until then, reproductive organs had been referred to as privates, plumbing, down there, and winkie.

  Scotty Blake, another carrier, was eleven, smoked, and knew everything there was to know about women. His mother was a nurse and had taught him all the words, which he passed on to the rest of us. Today, he’d probably be arrested, but back then he entertained large audiences of boys with his insights on the feminine mystique. Kids like Scotty would eve
ntually cause parents to homeschool their children.

  The newspaper station was near the bus stop, in the basement beneath Dr. Heimansohn’s dental office. The bus from Indianapolis would idle at the corner, diesel fumes belching out and spilling into the basement, gassing the carriers like rats. We would swarm up the stairs, haul the stacks of newspapers from the cargo space underneath the bus, carry them down to the basement, fold them, then go on our way, dubious ambassadors for the Great Hoosier Daily.

  Mr. Strunk was a stickler for public opinion, insisting we be neatly groomed, punctual, and polite. Delivering papers was like going to church every day. It had been our custom to play pinball at the Danner’s Five and Dime while waiting for the bus to bring the papers out from the city, but Mr. Strunk brought that sordid custom to a screeching halt. “You are not hoodlums. You represent the finest newspaper in the finest state in the finest country in the world. Act like it!”

  Fascism holds a certain appeal for the morally rigid, and Doreena Waltrip swooned at Mr. Strunk’s every utterance. Doreena attended a fundamentalist church in our town and devoted much of her time to getting Scotty Blake right with the Lord. Initially, he resisted, which heightened her determination.

  She had his name placed in her church’s newsletter, in the Needs Saving column. Scotty was resistant to salvation, but as Doreena began to bud into womanhood, his interest in spiritual matters deepened, and he had further discussions with her, listening carefully while she fleshed out the finer points of faith. He seemed particularly intrigued with Doreena’s belief that once you were saved you could pretty much do anything you wanted and God still had to let you into heaven.