I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  “Nonsense! You’ll love it!” he said, clapping me on the back. “It’s a great American adventure! Think of Lewis and Clark! Think of Daniel Boone!” I was a dab under six feet tall and weighed 105 pounds. When the backpack was strapped to my body, my knees snapped, I collapsed in a heap, and thought of dying.

  The next four days were so wretched I began to miss the alewives. Though I did not think it geographically possible, the entire thirty-five miles were uphill. It was the first week of August and egg-frying hot. On our way up the mountain, we passed camels who’d died along the trail. I drank all my water the first day and was reduced to sucking moisture from leaves I later learned were poison sumac.

  On the second day, I fell behind the group, came to a fork in the trail and, consistent with my life’s experience, took the wrong path. Within a few hours the trail petered out, and I stumbled into a clearing, hopelessly lost. Oddly, I felt quite cheerful, sensing the end was near, that I would soon be dead, my misery brought to a close. I had packed two pounds of M&M’s in anticipation of this very scenario, telling myself that gorging on chocolate would ease an otherwise painful death. I was propped against a tree, halfway through the second pound of M&M’s and fast descending into a sugary coma, when I heard Neil Fleck call my name. I was deeply annoyed. There were twenty miles left to hike and I was hoping to die in that sylvan glade, the beasts of the field in attendance, waiting for me to expire so they could eat me.

  Instead, Neil Fleck placed his canteen to my sumac-poisoned lips, wiped my forehead with his handkerchief, eventually helped me to my feet, and escorted me back to the others, who clapped when they saw me, the boys slapping me on the back and the girls hugging me, in a sisterly sort of way.

  The rest of the day was an exquisite joy, with two girls, one on either side of me, helping me along. After a few hours I was recovered, but kept silent about my improvement, enjoying the girls’ close proximity. I moaned occasionally and let my eyes roll back so as to appear delirious, mumbling incoherently. Later, around the campfire I regaled my guardian angels with stories of my four-hour absence, slightly exaggerating the perils I had faced. “Timber rattlers as thick as my leg,” I told them. “Falling out of trees and landing on my head.”

  One of the girls was Julianne, who, when I had asked her for a date the week before, had told me she was thinking of becoming a nun. But my brush with danger had apparently caused thoughts of celibacy to flee her mind. She scooted closer to me. “That must have been horrible,” she said, laying her hand atop mine.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” I said, leaning into her, settling my head against her generous Catholic bosom. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll rest.”

  Julianne and I shared the last of my M&M’s that evening. I gave her the green ones, which Peanut had told me were an aphrodisiac, but they had a soporific effect on her and she went to sleep. When she awoke the next morning she had committed herself anew to chastity and thought of me once again as a brother.

  The last day of our hike it rained buckets, great sheets of water pouring over us. I was the last one in the van and for eleven hours was squeezed beside Neil Fleck, who sang the whole way home from a book of patriotic songs, pausing occasionally to point out a natural wonder or a strip mall. “Would you look at that! What a great country this is!”

  Great, indeed.

  The last day of camp we were driven to a hotel in Gary, Indiana—not yet the murder capital of the nation but well on its way—where we ate chicken in cream gravy and hard green beans. Neil Fleck gave a speech urging us to dedicate ourselves to the nation’s betterment, and Julianne talked about how she loved each of us, then she began to cry, and just so she wouldn’t feel bad, we cried with her, weeping that the summer had come to an end, pledging to remain dear friends for as long as we lived.

  Chapter 20

  My Grocery Days

  Some of the first white people to settle in Danville were Quakers, who in obedience to the Scriptures were fruitful and multiplied. They worshipped in homes initially, but by the time my family arrived in 1957, had multiplied themselves into a handsome brick meetinghouse two blocks southwest of the courthouse. In defiance of Quaker custom, they’d added a steeple and bell, which was tolled every Sunday morning by a man we called Bambi, who was what people back then called slow. According to Peanut, Bambi’s mother and father were brother and sister. I later learned that wasn’t true, but Peanut spoke with such authority I believed it for years.

  Bambi had cobbled together a patchwork of jobs. On Friday and Saturday nights he ushered at the Royal Theater, patrolling the dark rows, cooling the ardor of more passionate theatergoers, and cracking boisterous patrons on the kneecap with his Ray-O-Vac flashlight. On Sunday mornings, at precisely 10:25 AM, he entered the bell tower of the meetinghouse, seized the bell rope, and rang the bell three times—once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost. At least that was the stated purpose for ringing it three times. The real reason is that half the Quakers were deaf. After the first toll, they looked at one another, puzzled, and said, “What was that?” When the bell sounded again, they asked, “Do you mean that?” After the third strike, they said, “I think it’s the bell. It must be time for church to start.”

  The meetinghouse was five blocks up Broadway from our house, so I could hear the bell calling the town’s sinners to worship. I would glance at the clock over the television to make sure it was keeping time, then settle in to watch the Reverend Ernest Angley, live from the Ernest Angley Grace Cathedral in Akron, Ohio. Ernest Angley spoke in a nasal monotone and sported a wig that lay on his head like a piece of plastic. He worked miracles right and left—reconstructing ear canals, opening clogged arteries, restoring damaged nerves, regenerating severed limbs as if people were lizards and could sprout new appendages. As fascinating as the miracles were, it was the wig that grabbed my attention. It was cemented to Ernest’s head, never moving, never graying, not one fake hair out of place, the thick, lush mane of a teenager at the peak of hair production, attached to Ernest Angley’s liver-spotted head.

  I watched Ernest Angley every Sunday morning for two years, mesmerized. Then I practiced faith healing with my brother Doug, each of us curing the other of various maladies. Watching Ernest Angley was infinitely superior to anything in the Catholic Church, and a habit I intend to return to in my final years, when I am most in need of a miracle, of having an aorta unclogged or my hearing restored.

  When I was sixteen, an event occurred that altered the course of my life. My Quaker neighbors, the Comers, volunteered to lead their church’s youth group. One Sunday evening, I watched from my porch as carloads of Quaker girls descended on their home, and I felt the Lord urging me toward the Quakers. So I forsook the Reverend Ernest Angley and for the next three years attended the Danville Friends Meeting, where I was often the only male in the youth group. Wanting to keep the odds in my favor, I never invited any of my friends to attend, despite the Comers’ urgings to go forth into all the world and make disciples.

  “Dreadful,” was my typical response when asked by my friends how youth group was going. “I don’t know why I attend.” Then on Sunday evenings, I would recline happily in a beanbag chair in the Comers’ living room, eating brownies, surrounded by Quaker girls, each of them cute as a pixie.

  After a few evenings with the youth group, I began attending worship on Sunday mornings. The pastor of the Quaker church was an eccentric, excitable man named Ed whose chief qualification for ministry was marrying the daughter of the search committee chairman. Ed had been raised Baptist, had no formal theological training, and was not constrained by that in any way. He was like a parrot dropped in among a flock of crows. I looked forward to Sunday mornings, to hearing what he would say from the pulpit. Carefully nuanced theology was not Pastor Ed’s strong suit. But what he lacked in spiritual prowess, he made up in drama.

  “Did you know,” he thundered one Sunday morning, “that in the Bible, women of ill repute wore b
lue dresses! And that is true to this day!” He went on and on, a one-man committee against blue dresses.

  I glanced down the row at a woman who that morning had selected from her modest Quaker wardrobe a bright blue dress. She was scrunched down, her head barely visible above the back of the pew. Her husband was patting her hand, his threadbare scalp turning red.

  The pulpit emboldened Pastor Ed; outside of it, he was a lamb, a consummate politician, phoning the shut-ins each morning to make sure they hadn’t died in their sleep. Whenever a whiff of rumor circulated about his being asked to move on, the Quaker widows would come to his rescue, hobbling into the meetinghouse on their walkers, determined to save him. So he stayed on, all through my high school years, charming some and infuriating others.

  I liked Ed, mostly because of his ability to make an otherwise dull venture such as church interesting. Where once I had dreaded church, I looked forward to Pastor Ed’s latest revelation. Each Sunday, he targeted a different adversary, another enemy of the Lord—blue-dressed women one week, Masons the next, and Catholics the week after that. I returned week after week, the Quaker hook setting deeper in my mouth, until I was reeled in and Pastor Ed landed me on the dock, displaying me to the gathered Quakers, proud of his catch, a Catholic boy saved from Romanism and brought into the Lord’s True Church.

  Quakers had a reputation for fair dealing and attracted a good number of the town’s business people, one of whom was Orville Johnston. Orville and his wife, Esther, owned the IGA grocery store on the west edge of town, across from St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Ours was a Kroger family, Kroger buying more bug spray from my father than IGA, but on Sunday mornings my mother would stop by the IGA after church to buy Saps doughnuts with rainbow sprinkles. The doughnuts were displayed in a revolving case, next to the lunch meat. The meat man would come out from behind the counter and count our doughnuts into a box. This imparted a meaty flavor to the doughnuts, which for years I assumed was their natural flavor.

  I had inadvertently made a favorable impression on Orville Johnston, and one Sunday after church he asked me to drop by his store that week. He was circumspect, it being the Sabbath, an improper time to discuss the affairs of business. When I stopped by the next day, he summoned me into his office. It was early winter, well past Labor Day, but Orville was wearing white shoes, as if he had just stepped off The Lawrence Welk show. Esther was seated behind the desk, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, entering figures into a ledger.

  The office was tiny, so Orville and I stood while he interviewed me, him pausing occasionally to wait on a customer.

  “We need a stock boy,” he said. “It’s an important job. You’re on the front line of customer ser vice. You must always be polite to the customers, look your best, get along well with your coworkers, and work hard. Can you do that?”

  I had serious doubts, but needed a job, so I nodded my head and stuck out my hand. “I’m your man,” I said, shaking Orville’s hand.

  “When can you start?” Orville asked.

  My father had told me Orville would ask this as a test of my willingness to work. “I’ve come prepared to work, sir,” I said, feeling a bit like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver.

  “Then the job’s yours,” Orville said, clapping me on the back. “You can start by racking bottles.”

  This was back in the days when pop came in glass bottles, which could be returned to the grocer for a nickel. This was a chief source of revenue for the children of my generation, a revenue stream with which I was well acquainted.

  The bottles were stacked in the back room, next to the walk-in freezer. The empty bottles were arranged in rows according to their brand. The soda men came each week to collect the bottles, but it was startling how many bottles could accumulate in seven days. In any given week, the grocery store collected thousands of bottles, all of them gunky and sticky with the hardened dregs of soda congealed in the bottom. It was not uncommon to find a mouse set in the cola like an insect trapped in ancient amber.

  Racking bottles was a spiteful task, one the other stock boys had became adept at avoiding. Esther would click the intercom button twice, then blow into the microphone. The other stock boys would scatter to the winds, knowing we were about to be summoned to rack bottles. They each had an escape route—Tony Lobbia would hurry out the front door to gather carts from the parking lot, Tim Spotila would flee to the bathroom, and Lance Oppy would seize the nearest jar of pickles, hurl it to the floor, then yell, “Cleanup on aisle three. I’ll get it.” This left Steve Dickey and me to rack the bottles, holding our breath, tossing cases of bottles into the room, the air thick with a sugary humidity, mice hurling themselves at the bottles to get at the soda.

  Other than that, it was a grand job for a teenage boy. Orville was generous, paying fifty cents above minimum wage, and incurably cheerful, sallying through the store calling out encouragement to his employees. I once knocked over a display of sweet pickles, breaking dozens of jars, and Orville clapped me on the back, smiled, and said, “Could’ve been worse. Could’ve lopped off a finger on the meat saw.” Orville lived in mortal fear that someone would fall into the saw and be dismembered, ending up in the hamburger. Whenever the saw kicked on, the lights would dim, Orville would flinch, listen for blood-curdling screams, then slowly relax when none came.

  In addition to the meat saw, he also feared gypsies, regularly warning us to keep an eye out for them, lest they overrun us. I had never seen a gypsy except on Bonanza, when Little Joe fell in love with a gypsy girl. The Bonanza gypsies wore bright clothing, rode in horse-drawn wagons, played tambourines and guitars, sang a lot, and looked like Larry Storch on F Troop. I was reasonably certain I could pick one out in a crowd, but Orville wasn’t so sure.

  “They’ll sweep in here a dozen at a time, rob you blind before you know it, then be gone like that,” he said with a snap of his fingers.

  Gypsies sounded fascinating to me, and for years I prayed for them to descend on us, but they never did. There was, however, a kleptomaniac who showed up every Friday at lunchtime. A well-liked woman in our town, she was fond of lunch meat, and would stuff her pockets with bologna, pimento loaf, and salami, then cruise past the potato chip aisle and stock up on Fritos. Orville would follow behind her discreetly, keeping track of her plunder, then present a bill to her husband. It never occurred to Orville to phone the police or make a scene, preferring to protect the woman’s reputation and not embarrass her publicly. Orville was pure class.

  Orville loved a good sale and was adept at luring customers to his store with the promise of a bargain. Several times a year he held an unlabeled can sale, piling hundreds of cans whose labels had fallen off in a large bin and selling them five for a dollar. My mother would stock up during these sales. For the next month our dinners would be a grand adventure, a stew of unmatched foods—chicken noodle soup and prunes with condensed milk and peanuts. The four basic food groups in one fell swoop!

  But Orville was at his best on Mondays, when the delivery truck came out from the city to replenish the shelves. He was a grand conductor, with a pointed finger or arched eyebrow directing a case of fruit cocktail here, a box of cookies there, a harmonious symphony of food distribution and display. And the pickles! Pickles were everywhere, omnipresent. We sold more pickles than any IGA on God’s green earth—dill, kosher dill, pickled dill, garlic dill, sweet, half sour, bread and butter, candied, three types of pickled pepper pickles, Polish pickles, German pickles, and gherkins, to name only a few. We had a twenty foot run of pickles, four shelves high. Pickle aficionados from across the nation came to view our pickle selection while Orville looked on with a deep pickle pride.

  The pickle boxes alone yielded a mountain of cardboard, which was burned in the store’s incinerator. Orville loathed the incinerator, fearing it would spark a conflagration that would level the west end of town. After Orville and Esther had left for the day, Tony Lobbia and I would stoke the incinerator to a red-hot heat, causing everything within
twenty feet to spontaneously combust. We would rush toward the flames, hurling pickle boxes into the blaze, the heat singeing our eyebrows. In the wintertime, Tony and I would come in frozen from gathering the carts and stand before the incinerator, the heat washing over us in waves, us turning and roasting like the rotisserie chickens in the meat department. It boggles the mind to think a handful of teenage boys were left in charge of a building well-stocked with charcoal lighter, matches, and other incendiary devices, but that was a different era.

  After a little while, Orville began wooing me toward a career in the grocery business, bringing his college textbooks from home, pressing them on me, promising an exciting career in food sales was mine for the asking.

  My father warned me against it. “It doesn’t pay well, and the hours are long,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

  So I became a minister instead.

  I didn’t tell Orville of my intended career change, hoping to string him along and get a promotion, maybe to head stock boy. But he gave that job to Tim Spotila. The rest of us, naturally, turned on Tim, accused him of being a suck-up, and left broken pickle jars for him to clean up.

  Orville eventually sold the store, and I haven’t had a decent pickle since. It’s funny how life turns out. If I had kept my job with Orville, he might have sold the store to me and I’d have been the Pickle King of central Indiana, a not altogether unpleasant fate.

  Chapter 21

  Driving

  My sixteenth fall I went to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to take the test for my driver’s license. Indiana being a one-party state, the BMV was under the firm control of the Republicans, who’d hired their extended families to manage the license branches, creating an atmosphere of entitlement and inefficiency. The bureau was administered like a banana republic, where privileges were extended or withheld by whim. I passed the test with flying colors, my father being a Republican, and began my search for suitable transportation.