I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  “My mom got up early Christmas morning and made us Eggs Benedict Florentine,” I said.

  Mildred frowned. “You were under quarantine? That’s a terrible way to spend Christmas.” She humped her chair a scootch farther away from me.

  “No, she made eggs,” I yelled.

  “Yes,” Mildred said, “it was in your legs. Are you better now?”

  “Much,” I said.

  Despite these occasional detours into choppy waters, Mildred and I would go on to form a long partnership.

  After the tour of her yard, we moved to the porch to negotiate a price. I was inexperienced in such matters and accepted the first offer she made—twenty dollars a mowing. This was huge money. Twice as much as I was making delivering newspapers. That afternoon, I gave my two-week notice at the newspaper office and became Mildred Harvey’s official yard boy.

  With that much money at stake, I entertained the notion of quitting school and mowing full time. There were three men in our town who did yard work for a living: the previously mentioned Ralph and Lenny Huber, and a Mr. Kruller, who lived in a small yellow house next to the cemetery and wore dresses in the evenings.

  Mr. Kruller was a perfect size 10. Women would have killed for his hips, which curved nicely without being too fleshy. He attributed his figure to lawn mowing, pushing the mower back and forth, day after summer day, the muscles firming, the pounds melting away. He never married, despite several proposals, one from Lenny Huber.

  Mildred Harvey didn’t appear to be giving her figure a second thought. She was generously proportioned, in a matronly sort of way, like Aunt Bee of Mayberry. Stepping into her house was akin to visiting my grandmother. Heavy drapes, lace tabletops, dark Victorian furniture like those on The Addams Family. Dust motes floated through the air, ignited by the odd shaft of window light.

  Landing Mildred Harvey as a client vaulted me into the stratosphere of the Quaker widows’ circuit. Within a few weeks, I was swamped by Quaker women needing help. The benefits were excellent—homemade cookies out the wazoo and the inside track to their granddaughters—but the pay was lousy. Mildred’s largesse was an anomaly. Quakers were big on simplicity and doing without, extending that philosophy to their hired help, lest someone like Mr. Kruller be tempted by wealth and take up bad habits, such as cross-dressing.

  Before long I was up to my ears in employment—pulling weeds, painting porches, washing cars, and clipping hedges. Every house had a hedge to clip. The common hedge shapes were the standard box cut, the pretentious rounded cut, and my personal favorite, though the most difficult shape to achieve, the rolling wave trim.

  Mildred Harvey’s hedge was a standard box cut, her being a Quaker, not given to extravagance. The hedge was a deep source of pride to her. For the first three years of my employment I was not permitted anywhere near it. As Mildred aged, the task became too burdensome and she turned it over to me, overseeing the operation from the shade of a maple tree. The hedge clippers were old, dull, and weighed about a hundred pounds. Mildred Harvey had forearms like Popeye from wielding the hedge clippers over the years.

  “What we really need are electric hedge clippers,” I said. “They have them at Baker’s Hardware for twenty-five dollars.”

  By then, Mildred had softened on the motorized assistance issue and the two of us piled in her 1969 Buick Skylark and drove the five blocks to Baker’s Hardware. Had I known what a harrowing experience that short drive would be, I would have trailed her on my bicycle. Her vision was failing, her motor skills in decline. She didn’t so much steer, as point her car in the general direction she wished to go, sideswiping cars, streetlamps, and the occasional pedestrian. Mildred was oblivious to the destruction left in her path, cheerfully providing color commentary on each house, its past occupants, and their scandals. She was customarily circumspect, but when seated behind the wheel of a car, another, much more colorful, personality emerged.

  When we arrived at the hardware store, the only space available required parallel parking. Though I didn’t have my driver’s license, I knew that to be the most intricate of all parking maneuvers. I closed my eyes and tightened my sphincter. By ricocheting her Skylark between the two cars, bouncing off the front car into the other, a two-ton pinball, Mildred eventually settled her Buick into the parking slot.

  She turned off the car. “Here we are!” she said brightly. She leaped from the car with a vigor I’d never witnessed and hurried into Baker’s, pulling me along in her wake.

  Les Worrell was standing behind the hardware counter. “Hello, Mildred Harvey,” he said. He wasn’t a Quaker, but was familiar with their customs. “How may I help you?”

  “We’re here to purchase some electric hedge clippers,” she said.

  Lester led the way to the back corner where the lawn care equipment was displayed and pointed to the electric hedge clippers, pride etched in his features. “They’re really something,” he said. “Just plug them in and go.”

  We studied the clippers carefully, Mildred Harvey and I, standing side by side, hefting each one, pretending to cut with it, getting the feel of it.

  “I like the green one,” she said finally. “I’ve always been partial to green.”

  “We’ve had a lot of luck with the green ones,” Lester said.

  “Green’s my favorite color,” I added.

  Les reached up and pulled the hedge clippers down from the shelf. He rang it up, then carried it like a newborn child out to Mildred’s car, placed it in her trunk, and wished us luck.

  A new convert to mechanical gadgetry, Mildred was not well versed in its use and insisted on storing the new clippers in her kitchen, based on the premise that they resembled her electric knife. I clipped the hedge once a month. Mildred would plan it a week in advance, phoning me on a Monday to suggest we trim the hedge the following Saturday. I would arrive at her home around ten, after the dew had lifted. She would retrieve the clippers from her pantry while I carried her rocker down from the porch and sat it under the maple tree.

  We would string out the electrical cord, snake it past her rocker, through the kitchen window, and plug it in next to her coffee pot, where it could be dislodged with a quick yank. Despite her enchantment with the electric hedge clippers, she lived in mortal fear I would sever the cord and electrocute myself. Or worse, that I would hit a patch of moist hedge, short out the clippers and be shocked to death. She would run her hand over the hedge, satisfy herself that it was dry, check the sky for an errant rain cloud, then settle back into her chair, one hand gripped around the cord, ready to pull it from the wall in the event of trouble, then yell at me to turn on the clippers.

  Every now and then, I would twitch and flop about, pretending I was in the throes of electrical shock, that thousands of volts were coursing through my body. Mildred would yank the cord; the clippers would fall dead; I would lie still on the ground, then stagger to my feet, dazed but determined to finish the job. It was always good for a tip.

  With the motorized assistance issue resolved, Mildred and I settled into a deep friendship. I would stop by her home each day after school to see if she needed me. When weather permitted, we would sit on her porch, discussing future projects and joint ventures.

  One summer day she announced, “I’d like for us to clean the chicken coop.”

  Mildred had butchered her last chicken years before, but had never gotten around to cleaning the coop. I’d peered into it a time or two, enough to know it was piled high with chicken dung, as if the chickens had been mainlining Ex-Lax. Poop on the beams, poop on the windows and, Great God Almighty, poop on the ceiling! A white, calcified crust of chicken poop covered every square inch of the coop.

  It took me two days to scoop the poop. Mildred sat in her rocking chair underneath the maple tree urging me on. On the third day, I woke up coughing and hacking, blowing great gobs of chicken-white mucus into my handkerchief. My eyes were matted with chicken crud, my brain mad with a histoplasmatic fever. I could barely raise myself out of bed. By
nighttime I was delirious and giving serious thought to dying. I probably would have expired, except that Mildred Harvey learned of my predicament, fried up a chicken—the antidote to a virus being its inert form—waddled down to our home and stood over me while I consumed the entire chicken. The next morning I was revived, and that afternoon returned to Mildred’s to report for duty.

  “I think today we’ll clean the barn,” she said. I was growing weary of her inclusive pronouns since I was the one doing all the work. But I carried her rocker out to the barn and began pulling out one artifact after another, piling them on the lawn. There were cobweb threads everywhere, swaying slightly in the breeze, the musty sweetness of bygone manure lying gently upon the place.

  Mildred recited the history of each relic as I drug it from the barn. Apple crates from when they’d grown apples in their backyard orchard. A worn saddle—her father’s—now cracked and dry-rotted. The fireplace mantle from her grandparents’ farmhouse west of town. It wasn’t a barn cleaning as much as it was a thumbing through the family photo album.

  “That old porch swing used to be on my parents’ porch. Amos proposed to me when we were sitting on it.” Mildred twisted her wedding ring on her finger, studying it.

  Sitting by the barn that day, Mildred told me how she and her husband had met, how he’d worked at the bank, how they’d walked to the Quaker meetinghouse on Sabbath mornings with their children. I would meet Amos the next winter, when our youth group went to the nursing home on the highway outside of town to sing Christmas carols.

  He was in the nursing home the whole time I worked for Mildred Harvey. He passed after I moved away. I came back to attend his calling at Baker’s Funeral Home. Amos was reclining in the casket, Mildred was seated in a chair beside him. They each seemed relieved, as if they’d just arrived home from a long, grueling trip, which, in a way, I suppose they had.

  Chapter 17

  The Faith of My Father

  In addition to bug spray, my father had other passions, most notably his unswerving devotion to the Weber grill, which eventually took on religious dimensions.

  “Best grill ever made,” he told me when I so much as glanced in the grill’s direction. “They oughta give the guy who invented it the Nobel Prize.”

  Dad acquired his first Weber by trading three cases of bug spray for it. He barbecued steaks on the grill every Saturday night, with no regard for the weather. Two feet of snow could cover the land, the wind howling from the north at gale force, and my father could be found standing beside his Weber, whistling cheerfully and turning steaks.

  The first Saturday of each month he and I would drive to Kroger, proceed to the charcoal aisle, and load bags of Kingsford into our cart, more than was sufficient for our needs, but my father was a Kingsford evangelist, distributing it among our neighbors and friends.

  “What about lighter fluid?” I would ask.

  He would look at me, shocked that any son of his would stoop to such sacrilege.

  “No fluid of any sort! It ruins the flavor.” He was death on gas grills for the same reason. Gas grills were an indication of moral laxity according to my father. A genial sort, he took most differences in stride and seldom held a grudge. But if anyone within earshot began extolling the virtues of gas grills, my father would load his verbal gun and blast away.

  “I’d sooner eat raw meat than cook it on a gas grill,” he’d say. “I’d rather die of trichinosis than eat that cancerous slop. There oughta be a law against it.”

  When my uncle Larry bought a gas grill, my father drove thirty miles into the city and pleaded with him to sell it. “You’re killing your family,” he told him. “Think of your children.”

  Dad preached the merits of the Weber grill with a fervor normally reserved for religion, buttonholing total strangers to boast of its qualities. He would visit Baker’s Hardware Store and stand next to the Weber grill display, waylaying passersby, asking for a moment of their time to discuss their grilling future.

  Yes, my father was a Weberite, and his high holy day Thanksgiving. He would awaken at five AM and begin sorting through a bag of Kingsford to select the prime briquettes. He would light the fire early, bringing the coals to a low, red heat, liberally sprinkling hickory woodchips on the embers.

  “It’s all in the hickory wood,” he told me. “And not just any hickory wood. It’s got to be from a tree at least a hundred years old, growing on a south-facing slope.”

  He had found just such a tree, but had kept its location a secret, a Weber apostle secreting away his Holy Grail.

  But long before the fire had been lit, the turkey had been prepared with a priestly devotion. My father had several doctrines about turkey grilling that he adhered to without deviation, basting the bird with a mysterious concoction the day before Thanksgiving, rubbing its pink carcass with exotic spices, then laying his hands on it, beseeching the Lord to watch over it.

  He took the turkey’s weight, which he recorded on the wall inside our barn, along with the date, cooking times, and atmospheric conditions. November 27, 1975, 23 lbs, start 6:59, end 12:37, barometric pressure 29.5 and holding, weather dry, turkey moist.

  He cooked the turkey slowly, with never more than twenty briquettes in the Weber, supplementing them from a bucket of spare coals, every now and then misting them down to prevent flare-ups.

  He would carry the turkey into the house like a priest bearing the Eucharist, then trim it with a knife he’d sharpened on a whetstone the night before.

  “A lot of people,” he would say, slicing into the turkey with a surgeon-like precision, “use an electric knife. Bad mistake. That machinery taste bleeds right into the meat.”

  The turkey cut, my father would bear it to the table. We would bow our heads, and my mother would offer a Catholic prayer. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  The Catholic prayer was a compromise. My parents were not given to table blessings, but the relatives who joined us for Thanksgiving were big on prayer, offering lengthy supplications over the turkey. They were Baptists and believed prayer should be spontaneous and from the heart, an opportunity to demonstrate their passion for the Lord. They would punctuate every sentence with the word just. “Lord, we just want to thank you Lord for just being there for us and just loving us and just caring for us the way you do. And Lord, we just ask you to just bless this food and just use it to strengthen our bodies so we can just serve you. And Lord, we just thank you for your son Jesus and for what he did for us, and we just thank you for your Word. Lord, we just love you and just want to make you happy and we just can’t wait until you just come back here in your glory and take us all to heaven…”

  By the time the praying wound to end, the gravy had scummed over and the mashed potatoes were cold lumps.

  My Catholic mother could have the food blessed and the gravy circulating around the table within fifteen seconds, which distressed one of my more zealous cousins, who would add an altar call to my mother’s prayer. “And Lord, while we have your attention, we just want to thank you for this cranberry sauce, which is red, reminding us of the blood you shed for us on the cross to pardon our sins if we’ll just accept you as our personal Lord and Savior…”

  No sooner would the prayer end than my father would begin his lamentation, apologizing for the turkey, which, though exquisite, never seemed to meet his strict criteria. One year it was too dry, the next year too moist. One year undercooked, the next year overcooked. One year over-seasoned, the next year bland. He would take a bite, spit the turkey into his napkin with a guttural hauk!, pronounce it unfit for human consumption, then lift the platter of turkey from the table so he could feed it to the dogs, not stopping until we’d assured him the turkey was fine, that it was the best he’d ever cooked.

  The problem with grilling as your religion is that nothing ever reaches divine perfection, though my father’s turkey came close.

  Like any denomination, w
e Weberites had our favorite pews. The adults ate at the fancy table in the dining room, in the lap of Thanksgiving luxury. My brother David, who had something of a reputation for holiday decoration, had adorned the table with autumn ornaments—leaves, gourds, and small pumpkins. We children ate in the kitchen at a card table dubbed the no-frills table, promoted to the adult table only when an adult relative died and a vacancy opened.*

  Nevertheless, that Weberite turkey had the power to transform even the humble circumstances of that card table in the kitchen, scrunched between the refrigerator and the stove.

  It was, and we knew it, a holy moment when my father would carry that golden turkey in from the barn, steam rising in the November air.

  “I don’t know, I might have overcooked it this year. It might be too dry,” my father would say, even as the bird glistened with juices.

  I would close my eyes, willing that moment to last forever, the scent of turkey rising around me, the excited chatter of my family, my cousin trying to pray us into heaven, not realizing we were already there.

  Chapter 18

  Bill and Bunny

  My father was the only bug spray salesman in town, indeed only one of three in the entire state, which gave the job a certain panache. Tim Hadley’s dad was a school janitor, a noteworthy job, since it allowed us access to the Coke machine in the basement workshop. Peanut’s father lived up in the city, working a mysterious job no one knew anything about, not even Peanut. Bill Eddy’s dad was a school guidance counselor, but on nights and weekends made wooden doodads, which he sold at craft fairs across Indiana.

  Like all fathers everywhere, they tended to be grouchy, except for Ralph Hadley, who went about his custodial duties with unwavering cheerfulness. During the flu season, with six to eight vomitings per hour, Mr. Hadley could be seen patrolling the school hallway, a mop in one hand, a bag of sawdust in the other, whistling contentedly. There was no shaking the man.