I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  My father was often magnanimous at my expense, volunteering me for one unpleasant task after another, most of them having to do with dead animals, clogged toilets, or snow. Unlike him, I had no qualms about taking money from widows. I’d been mowing their yards for several years and had taken a considerable sum of money from them without hesitation. Snow, apparently, was different. God sent it to test our neighborliness, to remind us of our mutual dependence. Snow was not to be capitalized upon for personal gain. Or so my father’s theory went.

  But Dad backed me when it mattered. When he returned home on the fifth day after the blizzard, he drove promptly to the Kroger and told the manager to find a new supplier of bug spray, that he no longer wished to do business with a man who “by God, attended church with us and knew us and should act like the Christian he claims to be!”

  When the town board elections were held the next year, my father ran on the good-neighbor platform, shaking every hand in town, passing out bug spray, working me like a borrowed mule from dawn to dusk, courting the widow vote. He was swept into office, appointed president of the town board, ably steering our town through its next great crisis—the Great Sewer Backup of 1981.

  It no longer snows like it once did. But in those days before global warming, great storms would roll in from the northwest, burying our town. Men would die walking to the barn to feed the livestock. We would find them in the spring, ten feet from the back door. Still, those were good days, if you survived them, which most of us did, giving us something to talk about in our later years.

  Chapter 23

  Leaving Home

  I graduated from high school in 1979, seated at graduation between Teri Griswold and Tim Hadley, my alphabetical compatriots since first grade. I was safely in the middle of the pack, grade-wise. Mike Fowler was our valedictorian and gave a speech about how we’d been the finest class to ever inhabit the halls of the Danville high school, that we were destined for greatness, that no obstacle was too high for us to overcome. I looked down the row at Jerry Sipes, seated between Bill Kirtley and Dee Kirts, not even bright enough to arrange himself alphabetically, and thought Mike Fowler was more optimistic than circumstances merited.

  Our principal, Mr. Max Gibbs, shared Mike’s high opinion of us, saying what an honor it had been to have us as students. He had done a remarkable job the past four years keeping his admiration a secret, but our class was in a charitable mood, willing to forgive and forget past animosities. Then he called our names, one by one, pausing for a moment before calling Jerry Sipes’s name, weighing whether to confer a diploma, then decided the prospect of having Jerry for another year was too great a burden to bear, so called his name.

  I had not distinguished myself and read my diploma several times before convincing myself it was authentic—no asterisks, no footnotes, no P.S. at the bottom noting the failing grade I’d received in geometry—just the usual high-sounding words, with my first name misspelled with two l’s, and Max Gibbs’s signature across the bottom, a heavy dot of ink in the M, as if he’d hesitated to mull it over before signing.

  Then, on cue, we turned the tassels on our caps from the right to the left, Father Roof from the Episcopal church prayed for our future—a tentative, wobbly prayer, every word underlined with doubt—then we marched from the gymnasium, up the hallway to the cafeteria, where Mrs. Blume yelled at Jerry Sipes one last time when he threw his mortarboard like a Frisbee. But even her screeching was tinged with an obvious affection for his zany antics, and when she cuffed him upside the head, it wasn’t nearly as hard as she had done in the past.

  My parents had invited the neighbors, Lee and Mary Lee Comer, over to the house for ice cream and cake, a round chocolate cake that had flopped in the heat, a fitting symbol of my tendency to collapse under pressure. I was presented with a suitcase, a subtle hint that it was time to leave home. My older siblings had gone to college, an undertaking I wished to avoid, hoping to put off further responsibilities as long as I could.

  The next week I was hired by the local electric company to operate computers after passing a test that revealed, in stunning contradiction to my grades, an aptitude for math and logic. I was paid what was then a staggering sum, eight hundred dollars a month, which I burned through like a drunkard in a liquor store.

  My father had wanted me to attend college and wasn’t taking my resistance to higher education well. College brochures began appearing next to my placemat on the kitchen table, under my pillow, on the toilet tank. The slightest reference to a college—the first notes of the Notre Dame fight song, an IU ball game—would fire his boosters and send him into orbit. “I wish I had gone to college. I wish someone had offered to send me to college. I’d have done it in a heartbeat, I tell you that right now.”

  My father’s own success was a strong argument against college. His bug spray job paid well, he’d been promoted into the furniture polish and car wax division, he was president of the town board, and we lived in one of the finer homes in town.

  “You didn’t go to college and you turned out all right,” I pointed out.

  “You think jobs like mine grow on trees,” he said. “You think you can just go out and start selling bug spray today. Times have changed. You need college. Big Ed Danowski’s son applied for a job at the company, and they told him to come back after college. Big Ed Danowski’s son!”

  Big Ed Danowski was a legend in the bug spray circles in which my father moved. This was sobering news.

  When September came and my friends left for college, Dad’s campaign to usher me into self-sufficiency increased. A wily negotiator, he took me out to dinner and gave a touching speech about how I’d become a man, a Protestant version Bar Mitzvah. “Of course,” he said, skillfully segueing into part b of his talk, “with the privileges of adulthood come the responsibilities. Your mother and I have decided to charge you rent.”

  Two hundred dollars a month, not to put too fine a point on it, one-fourth of my income, plus four hours of yard work each Saturday.

  In the end, it was the yard work that broke me. My dad had a tendency to overestimate my capacity for work, regularly assigning me Herculean tasks that a platoon of men couldn’t have completed in a week’s time. “First, I want you to mow the lawn (three acres with a push mower), then clean the gutters (the house was three stories high), and paint the barn,” he announced over breakfast on a typical Saturday morning. This, he reasoned, should take no more than three hours, four at the most.

  As the months passed, my duties expanded, the rent increased, and my father cut my rations. My free time was limited to a half hour each Sunday afternoon, in honor of the Sabbath. Rather than live in indentured servitude, I began plotting my escape, and on a Saturday afternoon, while my parents had gone to visit relatives, I struck off the shackles, packed my Volkswagen, and by way of an underground network established by sympathetic Quakers, fled to an apartment in the next town.*

  I would eventually return to my parents’ house to visit (the next day for Sunday dinner, in fact), but would never move back. I settled into an apartment owned by a mortician, and one summer day looked through the kitchen window and saw a lovely young lady, even lovelier than Miss Huddleston, walk by carrying a baseball mitt, a rather curious accessory.

  I went outside and approached her. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I asked smoothly.

  She studied me closely. “Kaelin’s Restaurant. Paoli, Indiana. You didn’t leave a tip.”

  “I was saving my money to take you on a date,” I said.

  That weekend we went to a revolving restaurant on top of a hotel in Indianapolis where I left a big tip. Two years later we were married and eventually moved to Danville, and now have two sons who do the things I used to do, which worries me sick and makes my parents laugh.

  Epilogue

  My parents remained in the family home until the spring of 2005, when the challenges of aging necessitated a move. It was a transition I had urged them to make, not considering the effort i
t would take to empty, sort, disperse, organize, and clean seven thousand square feet of house, barn, and their contents. But eight dumpsters and a moving truck later, on a bittersweet day, with their children and grandchildren toting, arranging, and cheering them on, they were transported to a one-level ranch house across town.

  A for-sale sign was never posted on their lawn. Like most transactions in a small town, word-of-mouth sufficed, and even before they’d moved, Lee and Mary Lee Comer’s son, Ben, who’d grown up next door, had expressed an interest in the house. My father couldn’t bear to sit through the negotiations, so I attended the parley at his request. Ben, my mother, and I sat at the kitchen table. No Realtors were present. Mom and Ben settled on an equitable amount in less than a minute, Mom threw in a riding lawnmower for the right to come back and sit on the front porch whenever they wished. Ben hugged Mom. Mom hugged Ben. Ben and I shook hands. Mom made us lunch. Done deal.

  A few months later, Ben, his wife, Meg, and their two boys, Sam and Jake, settled in, and now sleep in those old bedrooms under the eaves and sled on the hill in the winter and play pitch-and-catch in the front yard in the summer. In the evening, when the sun is soft in the western sky and the heat has broken, they sit at the top of the hill behind the house and watch the deer come out to feed, and the boys roll down the hill and run back up and do it all over again.

  I walk past every now and again, poking around the old haunts. The Quaker widows have passed on, but their descendants still populate the street, visiting back and forth, just like when I was a kid. I sometimes stand and watch the house and wish I had bought it and moved my family in, but my sons have rooted themselves in our house, just as I did on Broadway, and it wears well, like an old shirt fitting in all the right places. Though even now, thirty years after moving from that house, when I hear the word home, the house on Broadway still comes to mind.

  * * *

  In the past ten years, Phil has enjoyed speaking at conventions, colleges, libraries, and churches around the country. For a list of his upcoming appearances, or to schedule him for your event or organization, please visit www.PhilipGulley.org and click on the Events button.

  Phil continues to pastor at Fairfield Friends Meeting near Indianapolis. You may download his weekly messages at www.PhilipGulley.org. Click on the GraceTalk button and enjoy! For directions to Fairfield Friends Meeting, visit www. FairfieldFriends.org.

  To learn about Phil’s other nonfiction, The Porch Talk series, visit www.philipgulleybooks.com.

  To discover Phil’s wonderful fictional world of Harmony, Indiana, visit www.harmonyseries.com.

  Because of the volume of mail he receives, Phil is unable to respond to every written letter. But if you e-mail him at Phil@PhilipGulley.org, he’ll respond in a timely manner.

  Thank you.

  * * *

  About the Author

  PHILIP GULLEY is the bestselling author of Front Porch Tales and the acclaimed harmony series, as well as If Grace Is True and If God Is Love, coauthored with James mulholland. he and his wife, Joan, live in indiana with their sons, spencer and sam. Visit the author online at www.philipgulleybooks.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  I LOVE YOU, MISS HUDDLESTON: And Other Inappropriate Longings of My Indiana Childhood. Copyright © 2009 by Philip Gulley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-187207-5

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  * In all fairness, I thought the same thing of George W. Bush.

  * Ironically, Frank would graduate high school, attend college where he would study engineering, then work for a company involved in transportation safety.

  * Between the time I moved from home at the age of nineteen and when I married at the age of twenty-three, I ate Dinty Moore twice a day. High in beta-carotene, it gave me superb vision, moist mucus membranes, and orange palms.

  * I ate at the no-frills table until I was forty-five and my aunt Glenda passed away. The next year my parents moved to a house with a smaller dining room table and I was back at the no-frills table. People don’t die fast enough in my family.

  * Bill did become a plumber, a very good one, and is now the most popular man in our town. I became a minister and haven’t been invited to a party in years.

  * In retrospect, my depiction of those months might be exaggerated, but it seemed prison-like at the time.

  * Every morning, while our mothers were smoothing our cowlicks with mother-spit, our fathers would say, “If you get in trouble at school, you’ll get it twice as bad when you get home.” I got paddled three times as a child, three whacks per episode. My father owes me eighteen whacks, which he assures me he hasn’t forgotten.

  * My sister, Chick, being a girl, never mowed the lawn. It simply wasn’t done.

  * Beef jerky, for the uninformed, is a thin, overcooked piece of cow, possessing the texture and consistency of wood. Impervious to stomach acid, it passes through the digestive tract unchanged and has been known to obstruct bowels for weeks. It is also useful for patching shoes and tires, and in a pinch can be used for weather stripping.

  * We had two dogs, Zipper and Fanny, both of whom frequented the carnival and hung out near the trash cans, hoping to snag a half-eaten elephant ear. Fanny was a harlot and popped out puppies nine weeks after every carnival she ever attended.

  * Eventually, I earned a graduate degree in theology and learned there was only one God, who was utterly opposed to sex, unless the people having it were married and didn’t enjoy themselves.

  * I had a vested interest in Harve’s survival. In addition to working in the park, he was our town’s wart man. Growing up, I’d been plagued with warts, growing in thick profusion on my hands. I’d been to a doctor and had them burnt off, which only caused them to grow back thicker, like prairie grass after a fire. When I was fourteen, Harve bought my warts, giving me fifty cents for the whole lot of them. Within two weeks they were gone, and I’ve been wart-free ever since.

  * The Victory Bell was donated by the Scientific Club, Class of 1910, to be rung after sporting victories. It was seldom heard.

  * Quaker men, I would later learn after becoming one, are big believers in the redemptive powers of checkers. Our response to youthful transgression is invariably the same—“Hey, you young whippersnapper, bet you can’t beat me in a game of checkers.” Then, while seated across from the offender, w
e’ll inundate the delinquent with cracker-barrel moralisms until, bored out of his skull and ready to slash his wrists, he promises to walk the straight and narrow. It generally takes about ten minutes.