In God We Trust

by Jean Shepherd

  She banged the cabinet hollowly, hoping it would crack. Another enigmatic smile, and then the rug:

  “Say, that’s not a bad-looking rug you have there. Oriental, isn’t it?”

  “Now wait a minute. Look, here’s the place where the hole was burned, where Uncle Carl dropped his pipe and burnt the hole in there. Where the beer was spilled.”

  She moved the rickety, moth-eaten overstuffed davenport back to show him the place that she tried to hide from the rest of the world.

  “Oh well, they could fix that. A couple of dollars and they’ll reweave that like nothing. Oriental, isn’t it?”

  He plucked at the fringe, fingering it appreciatively like a connoisseur of fine linens and tapestries or an Armenian rug dealer coming across a rare find. My mother’s panic rose.

  “Say, that’s a nice picture up there. Look at that—a sailboat, isn’t it? That’s a lovely picture. It’s an original, isn’t it?”

  My mother fended off this blow:

  “Original my foot! Original Woolworth.”

  On it went, my mother systematically degrading our lives by simply telling the truth. She invented nothing. Before the Assessor came, we always pretended that the holes in the rug didn’t exist and the picture wasn’t an original Woolworth; the refrigerator not a crummy piece of tin that soured milk and curdled cream. Here she was, laying it down—the truth. And I am hearing it; a kid. Who loved his home and the things in it.

  “No, Ma! Ma, it’s our refrigerator! It has great ice cubes! And our great rug! I lay on it and follow the pattern with my eyes! It’s a beautiful rug! With gold fringe! Ma, it’s not a terrible rug!!”

  Finally the Assessor closed his book.

  “Well, that’s it. You’re not doing too bad.”

  His feet dragged over our threadbare carpet, the worn linoleum, and out into the cold for another two years. The Assessor had come and gone.

  A few hours later my father got the full report as he breezed in through the kitchen door, smelling of the outside and the office.

  “What’s new?”

  “The Assessor was here.”

  “WHAT!”

  He stopped in his tracks, his face suddenly white.

  “The Assessor was here.”

  The yellow light bulb grew dimmer. The refrigerator sighed deeply, going into action with a squeak of the pulley and thump of the compressor. The floor shook. Over the roar my father shouted:

  “Who was it?”

  “That tall thin man who lives in that brick house on the other side of the Schwartzes. Around the back, over the garage.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him around.”

  He slowly removed his overcoat and plumped down in the one kitchen chair that was not broken somewhere, somehow.

  “Did you get the radio in the coal bin before he got in?”

  “Yep.”

  “D’you think he saw it down there?”

  “I don’t know. He looked in the coal bin.” There was a terrible fear that somehow somebody would get the impression that we lived like human beings.

  “What’s for supper?”

  “Meat loaf.”

  Gradually the chill thawed. Finally it faded out completely as the months went by. Then, out of the blue, without so much as a murmur of thunder on the horizon, the hammer fell.

  It was a crackling sunny clear-eyed Friday afternoon. Our mosquito swarm of kids slowly worked its way toward home, kicking, hollering, throwing stuff, looking for junk, drifting like rain through the alleys, over fences, under porches, down innumerable shortcuts; Schwartz, Flick, Alex, Junior Kissel, me, and a covey of lesser satellites.

  At last we reached the block, ready to rush in to individual houses, grab some Graham crackers or fig newtons and out the back doors to begin whatever game was being played at that moment in time. Throwing rocks was an important way of getting home. Rocks were thrown at a regular established set of targets—Mrs. Schaeffer’s birdhouse, Pulaski’s Coca-Cola sign, and every telephone pole that got in our way. Our arms were sharp and rubbery and the rocks bounced and clanged. Every night the sparrows, robins, and wrens ducked and dodged, squawking raucously, urging us on, taunting, a barrel-rolling and skittering through the ambient air amid a hail of whizzing clinkers.

  Occasionally a lucky shot shattered an insulator high up amid the crisscrossing tangle of telephone wires and then a frenzied roar of flight up the alley, out of the danger zone. Particularly delectable were the posters that festooned fence posts, garages, and telephone poles. Fat-faced seekers of county office were constantly peppered with a steady barrage of anything that could be picked up and hurled.

  “Watch me get old Corngrass. In the ear!”

  ZZzzzziiiizzzzz … THWONK!

  “Wowie, what a lucky shot!”

  “Lucky! That’s the third night in a row I got him. Lucky! Watch THIS!”

  ZZZiiizzz K-THONK BONK!

  Another blow for Anarchy was struck. Old Corngrass had run for mayor for as long as anyone could remember, each year using the same stolid, toad-like portrait; hair precisely parted with a thin, naked line down the middle of his skull, rimless glasses gleaming dully before beady, staring eyes. He never made it, maybe because he was so easy to hit with rocks.

  Now we were on home turf.

  “Watch me get that red one.”

  ZZizzzz—the rock whistled past a new red cardboard poster, small, compact, with no picture.

  ZZzzziiizzz

  SSSSSiissss

  Whooosh

  Three projectiles simultaneously bracketed the target. All missed. We drifted idly toward the telephone pole, unaware of the disaster that was about to strike us all.

  Flick arched an apple core toward the sign. It splatted on the post a few inches high. Schwartz slanted a bottle cap upward, curving nicely, trailing after a passing bluejay who yawked distainfully and continued on.

  I don’t know who read it first. Maybe we all did; black print on red poster card.

  SHERIFFS SALE

  TO BE SOLD AT AUCTION. TOMORROW AT ELEVEN AM ON THE PREMISES AT 8745 CLEVELAND STREET THE GOODS AND TOTAL CHATTELS OF LUDLOW L. KISSEL OF THAT ADDRESS WILL BE AUCTIONED AT SHERIFF’S SALE. THE SUM REALIZED TO DEFRAY DEFAULTED PERSONAL PROPERTY TAXES. THE SALE WILL BE PUBLIC, COMMENCING AT ELEVEN AM. BY ORDER OF THE ASSESSOR’S OFFICE.

  BUREAU OF TAXATION,

  STATE OF INDIANA.

  That was all. It was enough. None of us had ever seen a sign like this before, but our instincts, deep and animal-like, told us that it was serious; a dangerous sign. Other dangerous signs showed up from time to time on front porches and screen doors. QUARANTINED—DIPHTHERIA. SCARLET FEVER. SMALLPOX. This wAS one of those, but different, somehow worse.

  The neighborhood was unusually quiet, we noticed for the first time. Flick dropped a rock at his feet with a hollow clunk. Junior Kissel, without a word, turned and ran, cutting across the street, up the sidewalk, disappearing toward his house. Halfway down the block another identical sign gleamed in the bright sunshine. Schwartz, in an odd scared voice, broke the silence:

  “What’s an auction?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of card game or something,” Flick answered.

  “Maybe it’s like on the radio. That Lucky Strike auctioneer.…” Schwartz said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  We broke up and headed for home, through the quiet hushed neighborhood. My mother was down in the basement, wringing out the wash in the gray, murky gloom, the concrete floor around her wet and flecked with patches of dank soapsuds. The old Thor washing machine muttered as it squeezed the clammy water from overalls, pillow cases, and housedresses. Her face was red from the steam and soap as she bent over the basket, twisting each garment for the final drops. Weak sunlight filtered in through the narrow basement, ground-level windows fading out in the perpetual dark of the basement.

  “Ma, what’s an auction?”

  She straightened up, never missing a beat as she snaked a long, hea
vy bedsheet through the rubber rollers.

  “What’s a what?”

  “What’s an auction?”

  “An auction?”

  “Yeah, what’s an auction?”

  “Why?”

  She was talking in her half-hearing, hardly listening, working, answering-silly-questions MOTHER voice.

  “Well, there’s a sign on the telephone pole that says they’re going to have an auction at Mr. Kissel’s house. The Sheriff is going to be there.”

  The sheet squished on for what seemed like a long time. Suddenly she reached over quickly, snapping off the washer with a movement she had used for years. The basement was deathly still. She turned and looked right at me. Her voice sounded strange.

  “What did you say? What was that? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s a sign on the telephone post that says they’re having an auction at Mr. Kissel’s house. With the Sheriff. And it says.…” Now I was scared.

  She rushed up the basement stairs, wiping her hands on her apron as she went.

  “Don’t leave the house until I come back.”

  She was gone, out the back door. I was alone in the kitchen now, looking out the window over at the Kissel’s house where she had gone. Another lady, tall, skinny Mrs. Anderson crossed the alley and disappeared into the house. No kids played in the yards. No radios were turned on as they always were. My kid brother came up through the back door into the kitchen where I stood on tiptoes, watching the Kissel house.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Mom said not to go out.”

  He said nothing more. Finally, after what seemed like hours, she came into the kitchen and without saying a word began making supper. That night we ate quickly. Almost immediately after the dishes were washed we were sent to bed, and for the first time in a long while did not cause the usual protesting uproar.

  Late that night I could hear my mother and father talking in low tones in the living room, through the closed door, until I fell asleep.

  Somehow the sun always shines on Saturdays in Indiana. Outside the bedroom window a yelling crowd of spatsies, the generic Kid name for sparrows, argued, swore, made clattering love. Out in the kitchen water ran and pots banged.

  At first when the full delicious impact swept over me that it was Saturday—no school today—blessed, fantastic Saturday and that this afternoon Flick and Junior and I would ride the range with Roy Rogers and Trigger at the Orpheum, I reached over in ecstasy, belting my brother in the ribs, ready for action. He groaned almost at the same time that I remembered something funny was going to happen today.

  I got up and padded into the kitchen where breakfast was already on the table. The Old Man, dressed in his Saturday clothes, was halfway through his eggs. Drifting through the kitchen window from somewhere outside came the roar of a truck motor backing and shifting. My mother, over near the sink, looked out.

  “They’re here.”

  My father dropped his fork, circled the table, and peered from the other window. I stood on tiptoes.

  At an angle, almost filling the whole of their sandy, weedy backyard stood a tall, gray official-looking truck, behind the Kissel’s house. Men in overalls moved in and out the back door, carrying boxes and barrels. Already piled high in the sunlight, warped, cracked, and stained with the chewing of the years, stood the Kissel furniture. The men struggled under loads of nondescript junk, back and forth, from the basement to the attic, from the garage to the kitchen.

  The sheriff drove up in a black Ford with a white star on the door and got out. He didn’t look like a movie sheriff at all, being fat and wearing a long, grayish overcoat. He really looked more like a dentist than a sheriff. He had two men with him; one a tall, thin, red-faced man with eyes that popped, who began making a list in a notebook. The other set up a kind of platform behind the back porch. It folded, and looked as though it had been used. One of the workmen brought out a microphone and hooked up a leatherette-covered speaker on the ground near the truck. We watched from behind the geraniums.

  From behind geraniums all over the neighborhood other eyes watched. Strange people began arriving in dented blue cars, panel trucks; some just wallking, carrying baskets and bags. They were the first Auction Followers we had ever seen. There is a race of Human Vulture that lives off the disaster and defeat of others, picking the bones clean. They perform a necessary function, just as any scavenger does. Those on the scene early were rummaging through the piles of coffee pots, old tires, potted ferns, and Mr. Kissel’s toolbox which he carried to the roundhouse on the few days he worked every month.

  “There’s Mr. Kissel’s bottle-capper,” I said, breaking the silence in the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” my father answered, continuing to stare into the bright sunshine.

  Mr. Kissel made Home Brew and when we played in Junior Kissel’s basement we always fooled around with his bottle-capper, capping bottles of water, pretending we were bootleggers. Now the bottle-capper lay in the yard next to Mrs. Kissel’s old Hoover vacuum cleaner.

  Old furniture under the light of a bright sky seems more tired and worn than anything else I know. In an eerie way more human, too. The crowd was getting bigger by the minute. Some carried lunches; others babies. They were excited and anxious for the action to begin. None of the neighbors showed up. At least they weren’t in the crowd that pushed and waited around the platform. They were strangers. It doesn’t pay for vultures to make friends.

  My kid brother wanted to go out and join in the fun, but the Old Man said:

  “We’ll go out and play Catch after the people go. You stay here until they leave.”

  He was a dedicated Catch player. Any time he announced that we were going to play Catch kids listened, and hunted for their mitts. His slider was the best I’ve ever seen outside of Comiskey Park.

  The sheriff got up on the platform to begin the proceedings, his voice echoing hollowly among the sagging garage doors, the drooping clothespoles, and the limp wetwash. The auctioneer began with a brass table lamp, the one we used to see through their dining-room window, with the green shade. It was quickly bought. The crowd moved in excitement as the auctioneer went into high gear. Mrs. Kissel’s enamel kitchen table went for seventy cents.

  Once my father turned to my mother and said:

  “I guess they’re not home. I don’t see them anywhere.”

  She didn’t answer, but I knew that Junior Kissel wasn’t around.

  Someone bought Grandpa Kissel’s World War I helmet which Mr. Kissel had hung on the inside of the basement door. It was a great thing to play with. I guess someone bought it for their kid. No one wanted the mattress, a lumpy, yellow-stained, blue-striped heirloom that had come down from Mrs. Kissel’s parents and had seen the raising of ten kids. It lay under the truck bed, shoved out of the way while the more valuable items were bartered off.

  Rusty saws, an old single-barreled 12-gauge shotgun that brought four dollars, a spectacular oil tablecloth with red ornamental lettering: A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR, with a gold picture of the Hall of Science. The bidding for this one was sharp and bitter.

  Finally it was over. It didn’t last long, maybe forty-five minutes or so, but when it was over the end was definite. The sheriff got up and announced that the auction was now officially completed. He mentioned an address where another was scheduled in a day or two, on the west side of town. The people got back into their cars, trucks, station wagons and left as quickly as they had come, loaded down with their loot.

  Without confusion or hesitation the men and the sheriff packed away their gear like a well-practiced team, and were gone. All that remained in the backyard was a jumble of lunch bags, pop bottles, chicken bones, crushed cartons, empty barrels, and the mattress.

  By now it was almost lunchtime and I was already getting hungry. My mother, watching the final truck disappear, said:

  “Oh well.”

  The Old Man went down into the basement to get
his glove for the game of Catch.

  Later that afternoon someone said that the Kissels had gone to Lowell, a town a few miles away, to spend the weekend with Mrs. Kisser’s brother-in-law and sister. They never came back. Somewhere along about the middle of the next week a FOR RENT sign appeared on the Kissels’ front door. Not long afterward a new family moved in. We never saw Junior Kissel again.

  XXIX THE POSSE RIDES AGAIN

  I glanced at my stainless-steel Rolex, noting that it was getting along toward 4:00, Shift-Change time. I could see that Flick was showing the tenseness of a man about to swing into action.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Flick said, “I keep up with the bills. I don’t owe nobody. Just a minute; I’ll be right back.”

  He moved on down the bar, checking his ammunition for the first wave of serious drinkers, which would arrive within the half hour. I looked again at my Rolex. For some reason I didn’t quite recognize it at first as belonging to my arm, and to be honest I wasn’t sure that it was even my arm. Somehow that sleeve and that watch all belonged in New York. Another world. Back there they probably would not even believe there was such a man as Flick. Or Stosh, or Kissel, or Yahkey. They’d probably figure I made ’em all up.

  I fleetingly thought, Maybe I should try to tell Flick about Les Misérables des Frites, and Henri, the lascivious headwaiter. How could I tell him about the expense account, and how hardly anybody I knew ever paid for anything, ever, and that the vast Gravy Train they were on considered cash itself to be vaguely insulting and out of date. I figured it was no use.

  In the booth, the three Sheet-Metal men began hollering at Flick, who looked up from his inventory and yelled back:

  “HOLD YER WATER, FER CHRISSAKE! I GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN FEED YOU BASTARDS ALL DAY!”

  The red-faced one wearing an orange safety helmet shouted:

  “TURN ONNA TV, FLICK! WHAT THE HELL YOU GOT IT FOR?”

  This exchange took place at full voice, since the jukebox was shaking the floor.

  “I’LL TURN IT ON WHEN I’M DAMN GOOD AND READY!”