I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  “So what you’re saying,” he asked her one afternoon, clearly trying to put ideas into her head, “is that people who aren’t married, maybe even someone our age, can do it and still go to heaven.”

  Even Scotty Blake didn’t use the word sex in mixed company, employing the word it instead.

  Doreena had been backed into a theological corner and knew it. “Yes,” she said, “but true Christians wouldn’t do that.”

  “But if they had a moment of weakness and did it, God would forgive them. Right?”

  “If they’d prayed the sinner’s prayer, God would forgive them,” Doreena said.

  “Well, praise the Lord!” Scotty said. “Let’s pray.”

  And right there, amidst the fog of diesel fumes, Scotty Blake found the Lord. Unfortunately, he proved to be an indifferent disciple, rigorously testing the limits of God’s forgiveness, and after a while even Doreena Waltrip gave up on him.

  It was Scotty Blake, who, after we carriers were banned from the Five and Dime, told us about the Police Gazette, sold at the Rexall drugstore, which showed pictures of crime victims in various states of undress. This made for fascinating reading. Crimes were a rarity in our town, especially those involving scantily clad women. For that matter, scantily clad women were also uncommon. Ours was a discreet populace, a God-fearing people who shunned nudity unless we were bathing or Dr. Kirtley had to check us for hernias. Rumors of nudity were circulated and dwelled upon, but never proven.

  Scotty Blake used this adolescent lust to his advantage when Mr. Strunk, facing a carrier shortage, offered us five dollars for every new carrier we recruited. Scotty concocted stories of lonely housewives, dressed in skimpy negligees, answering the door on collection day and inviting the paper-boy inside, resulting in an influx of new carriers and earning Scotty fifty dollars and the Carrier of the Year Award.

  It seems odd now to think that a good portion of my puberty was spent meditating on naked women. I can only attribute such perversity to a massive surge of hormones, an evolutionary leftover, nature’s way of continuing the species. Of course, now I know that nudity and lust are sins, causing all manner of problems, chief among them acne and blindness.

  Chapter 6

  Vacations

  As bug spray salesmen go, my father was unsurpassed. Several times a year he’d come home lugging a prize from a sales contest—a television, transistor radio, clock, set of steak knives, or coffee mug. One memorable spring he won a family camping package—tent, sleeping bags, Coleman cookstove, and a Ray-O-Vac flashlight—so for several summers we vacationed at Lane’s Camping Retreat near Spencer, Indiana. My dad had discovered the campground on his bug route and had bartered with the owner for a week of camping in exchange for five cases of mosquito repellant.

  During the heat of the day, we’d pile in the car and drive to Spencer, to the Moss and Money Drug Store where we would sit at the soda fountain and eat ice cream. My dad would pay the bill in bottles of aftershave, which his company had recently added to its line of merchandise. The aftershave was a by-product of the manufacture of piney woods–scented bug spray. “For years, we just threw it away,” he told me. “Then we noticed it smelled nice, so we put it in glass bottles and sold it as aftershave. Plus, it keeps the bugs away. Can’t beat that with a stick.”

  With the expansion of its product line, my father’s company was prospering, and the next summer we were given an all-expenses paid trip to Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, near the headwaters of the great Turtle River on the shores of Fence Lake. The camp was owned by the bug spray company my father worked for and consisted of a dozen small cabins huddled beside the lake, a picnic table outside each one, speckled with the remnants of fish cleaning—blood and guts and scales.

  The cabin had two bedrooms. My parents took one and put us five children in the other. David, then ten, had to sleep in a baby’s crib. Naturally, my brothers and I ridiculed him mercilessly and the experience warped him for life.

  The cabin reeked of fish past and was decorated in a fish motif—fish pictures, fish mounted on the walls, fish plates, fish blankets, fish salt-and-pepper shakers. We were up to our gills in fish. My father loved to fish and spent most of the week in the boat, catching thousands of fish, which he cleaned on the picnic table and fried in a cast-iron skillet three times a day.

  Midway through the week, we drove into Lac du Flambeau, where my parents bought each of us kids a pair of genuine moccasins, hand stitched by Chippewa Indians. I purchased a Boy Scout knife that had a can opener, screwdriver, bottle opener, leather punch, and knife blade. I’d begged for a knife for years, but my mother had refused, predicting all manner of catastrophes that would befall me if I owned one—inadvertent amputations, death by blood-letting, and the severing of the optic nerve. But this time my mother, her brain function impaired by close confinement with five loud children, gave her assent. “Just don’t get blood on your new moccasins,” she warned. Blood on clothing was a passionate concern of hers. I could sever an aorta, my blood fountaining in the air, splashing on my clothes, and my mother would have been screaming, “Use cold water, not hot. Cold water!”

  The knife came in a pouch that I wore on my belt. To this day, I recall the delicious heft of that knife, how the feel of it at my side emboldened me. I dreamed of being attacked by a bear in the Wisconsin woods and killing it with my knife, then skinning it with the can opener blade, draping its pelt across my shoulders, and returning home to great acclaim for my courage. But the bears didn’t cooperate, and I settled for spending the rest of the vacation next to the soda machine at the lodge, removing the caps from bottles of pop.

  Underneath the camp’s bucolic veneer, tension was building. It was 1972 and rumors of a federal ban on DDT were sweeping the bug spray camp. At night, the men would gather at the lodge to play poker and curse the Environmental Protection Agency. Loyal Republicans, ardent supporters of Richard Nixon, and here he was acting like a communist and banning DDT. What a betrayal!

  “You get a few birds being born with three wings, so they’re gonna outlaw DDT. Whadda they gonna do when kids start dropping dead from the typhoid?” Big Ed Danowski asked. “They think the Black Plague was bad, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Big Ed Danowski, his wife, and their son, Little Ed, hailed from Racine, Wisconsin, and were staying in the cabin next to ours. Big Ed was a legend in the bug spray business, selling mosquito repellant across the upper Great Lakes region. He could see his bug spray empire crashing to the ground.

  We children were oblivious to this pending disaster and passed most of our time making fun of one another and swimming. The camp had an activities director named Art, who’d been hired to oversee the children, but spent most of his time with the mothers. He wore tight shorts and a muscle shirt and taught the women how to shoot bows and arrows by standing behind them, his arms around their bodies, his strong hands encompassing theirs, waves of piney-woods aftershave rolling off his body. One afternoon it rained, so we stayed indoors and Art gave a lecture on Indian lore and revealed that he was one-quarter Chippewa, which caused the women to swoon.

  While Art was doing all he could to take our minds off the looming DDT fiasco, the men were fishing and bad-mouthing him behind his back. They detested Art.

  On the last morning of our Wisconsin vacation, Art dug a deep hole behind the lodge, lit a fire in it, then set a cast-iron pot of beans in the hole and covered it with earth. It was, he informed us, an old Indian trick. That night my brothers Glenn and Doug gorged themselves on undercooked beans and suffered gas the entire trip home. Thirteen hours in a closed-up car, running on fumes, thanks to Art. By the time we reached Danville, the pine tree air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror had exhausted itself, wilting to a dead brown and shedding its cardboard needles.

  Like most vacations, the years imparted a certain charm to that one, and now we look back on our week with Art with great fondness. My father’s company survived the ban on DDT and even flourished, branching i
nto shaving cream, window cleaner, and furniture polish, although we remember the glory days of DDT, when Big Ed Danowski and other men of vision moved from one triumph to another.

  We continued to prosper and my father hinted at the possibility of international travel the following summer. By international travel, we assumed he meant London or Paris and for several winter months we talked of little else. Dad held his cards close to his chest, not revealing the destination, only promising it would be the finest vacation we’d ever taken. One evening in June, after school had let out for the summer, he assembled our family in the dining room and unveiled his plans. He rolled out a map of Ontario on the table and pointed to the town of Madoc, on the rugged shores of Lake Weslemkoon. (Weslemkoon, we later learned, was an Indian word that translated roughly to “black flies the size of eagles.”)

  “We’re going fishing!” he exclaimed.

  “Fishing?” my mother said, visions of Paris dying in her head.

  “Wait, it gets better.” My father paused for effect. “We’re staying on an island in a cabin. We’ll be the only ones on the whole island. It’s wilderness country up there.” He turned to my mother. “The closest town is thirty miles away, so you’ll need to make sure we take everything we need.”

  “What about toilets?” my brother Glenn asked. Since the days of Adam, members of my family have been stricken with spastic colons. Proximity to restrooms has been a prominent consideration in our travels for as long as I can remember.

  “Not to worry,” my father said. “There’s a two-holer behind the cabin.”

  It was 710 miles from Danville to the grocery store in Madoc—a long, quiet ride that we spent contemplating having to poop into an open pit.

  The Madoc grocery store was owned by a Chinese man named Richard who didn’t speak English. He was, however, fluent in French, an ironic reminder of our dashed vacation dreams. We arranged our supplies in the car, then drove north on a gravel road thirty miles to the Lake Weslemkoon marina, where we donned life jackets and were conveyed to the island in a wooden boat captained by a grizzled veteran of many crossings. Rendered mute by our circumstances, we clutched the gunwales while great clouds of black flies and mosquitoes swarmed around us.

  My father’s valor stands out in my memory. Perched in the prow of the boat, the wind in his face, his eyes scanning the horizon, he was Admiral Nelson sailing toward Trafalgar. “Land ho,” he cried out, when the island appeared off our starboard side. “Brace yourself for the landing!”

  The boatman pulled alongside the dock, helped us lift out the supplies, then said, “Be back for you next Friday. No way to get in touch with anybody, so be careful. Couple summers back, we dropped off a man who lopped his foot off with an ax.” He took the pipe from his mouth and pointed it toward the cabin, smiling at the memory. “Bled to death on the front porch. Very first day. Hadn’t even unpacked his bags. No tellin’ how long it took him to die. Well, enjoy yourselves.”

  My mother promptly confiscated my pocketknife.

  The cabin, though rustic, was also lacking in amenities, including electricity, a shortcoming the cabin’s owners had failed to mention. Several of the interior walls were blackened by past fires, begun, we speculated, by kerosene lanterns hanging on the walls. The cabin was nearly fifty years old, the logs cracked and paper dry, on the verge of spontaneous combustion. A dead animal smell pervaded the place.

  We raised the screenless windows to air the place out; mosquitoes and black flies buzzed into the cabin. “Would you look at the size of those flies!” my father said, beside himself with joy. He opened a case of bug spray, and began dousing the cabin, moving from room to room, leaving a fog of poison in his wake. My father was a consummate killer of insects, able to pluck from his stores of pesticides the one spray that would ensure a bug’s hasty demise. Ants, roaches, termites, gnats, or mosquitoes—each pest was especially vulnerable to a particular toxin, and my father knew it, how best to apply it, and in what amount. Indeed, he was consumed with the topic of bug eradication, and while reading advice columns in the Great Hoosier Daily, would comment that what newspapers needed was a daily column on insect extermination. My father took his bugs seriously.

  Chick soon tracked down the source of the dead animal smell—a family of mice, clustered in the fireplace, huddled around the charcoal remnants of a fire. They appeared to have frozen to death. Their tails had cracked off, their eyes rolled back in their mouse heads, their front legs crossed about their chests in a vain effort to preserve their body heat. They looked like Ned Beatty in Deliverance, shriveled and stricken, their retreat to the wilderness gone awry. We were not encouraged.

  By then it was supper time, we were hungry with few prospects for nourishment. We had beef jerky, apples, and Tang, the drink of astronauts!* It is possible, but not pleasant, to live for years on beef jerky, apples, and Tang. Dinner was a quiet affair. We gummed our jerky, reducing it to wads small enough to swallow, pausing every now and then to wash it down with Tang.

  Most of our time was spent fishing, there being precious little else to do. Lake Weslemkoon, it turns out, enjoyed some fame as a bass lake. The week we were there, my father caught bass as big as dolphins, pulling in one in after another, a veritable orgy of angling. He left the cabin early each morning and wasn’t seen again until late in the day, staggering home under a load of bass, which my mother fried over a fire.

  By the third day, we had lost all semblance of civility. The lake was too cold to swim in, and lacking running water, we reeked of wood smoke and fish. We hadn’t brushed our teeth in days; our breath smelled like dead mice. We ate with our fingers, grubbing through piles of fish bones, picking them clean, snarling and snapping at anyone who approached our food. Wanting to steer clear of the outhouse, my brothers and I had been peeing in the lake, only to discover, near the end of our time there, that the water for our Tang had come straight from our pee place.

  We didn’t go anywhere for several years, then memories of past agonies faded and we decided to give it another go. Once again, fishing was our vacation theme. We drove 408 mind-numbing miles to the Lake of the Ozarks near Osage Beach, Missouri. My mother navigated, reading the directions aloud to my father. Like the cabins at Lac du Flambeau, these were owned by the bug spray company that employed my father. I now believe the Ozark camp was an experimental proving ground for their bug poisons. The cabin we were assigned was infested with every insect known to man—African fire ants, cockroaches, centipedes, millipedes, water bugs, beetles, and some type of great fanged spider I’d never seen, and haven’t seen since.

  We pulled up to the cabin, which looked like something out of Appalachia. Sagging and leaning, collapsing into itself, I half expected to see a gaggle of slack-jawed, cross-eyed Snuffy Smiths peering out the windows, their fingers caressing the triggers of their shotguns.

  “Oh, dear,” my mother said. “Surely this is a mistake.”

  Dad studied the directions. “Nope. We’re at the right place. Say, would you look at that lake!”

  We stayed an entire week, seven days too long. Doug was stricken with an ear infection so severe the contagion leaked into his brain and he spent the week in a fevered daze, out of his gourd, pus oozing from every orifice.

  The opportunities for nonfishing recreation were few. There was a recreation center, which had a pool table with ripped felt, plus an air hockey machine that stole our quarters without giving us a game. On the fifth day, my ordinarily rational mother lost fifty cents in the air hockey machine. With a quiet, controlled fury she began pounding the machine until the security guard—a densely-pimpled young man—threatened to arrest her. David and I watched from behind the pool table, yelling at the guard, our family’s descent into Jerry Springer madness full and complete.

  That night we attended a carnival where Chick befriended the Tilt-A-Whirl man and went for a loop with him on the Ferris wheel. We stood beneath the Ferris wheel, craning our necks, peering to the top. Our cultural sensibilities had become
so warped in the space of a week that the prospect of marriage between my sister and the Tilt-A-Whirl man seemed a grand idea.

  “Chick always did want to travel,” my father said cheerfully. “If she marries a carnival man, she can see the world.”

  My mother nodded in agreement, smiling at her daughter’s immense good fortune, imagining the joy of Jethro Bodine grandchildren.

  We children clustered about them, eating deep-fried Twinkies, our teeth green with Lime Ade.

  Providentially, a family emergency—an inadvertent family pregnancy—caused us to be summoned home before all our senses were dulled.

  That fall my brother Glenn would go to college, and our family vacations drew to an end. The birds launched from the nest one by one, headed to the horizons, and were never able to be gathered for one last trip. But every now and then, an unbidden memory of those sylvan days comes to mind, a snapshot pasted in the album of memory—woods running down to the lake that was as wet in my recollections as it was in real life.

  Chapter 7

  My Family Tree, Imagined and Otherwise

  My mother’s people were Belgian glassworkers who washed up on America’s shores in the early 1900s, when the Old Country, thick with kaisers and kings and their attendant tiffs, was proving to be an inhospitable land. My father’s people had arrived centuries before, four Quaker brothers who’d landed in North Carolina in the late 1600s. By 1913 our branch had taken up with the Baptists, settled in southern Illinois, and were working the coal mines. My grandfather Gulley, watching his father and uncles emerge from the earth coughing up tarry sputum and dying young, took up sales.