by Fannie Flagg
In this case, it was true. He had been unwanted and had been told so many times by his mother. “If it weren’t for you, me and your daddy wouldn’t have to stay in this rotten town. We could be living in Las Vegas or somewhere where we could have a little fun.”
When Elner called Luther’s parents and asked if it would be all right to keep Luther a little while longer, his father had said, “Hell, yes. You can keep him as long as you want to.” And so she did.
—
IN AUGUST, WHEN HAZEL Goodnight arrived at Still Meadows, everyone there was anxious to hear about the tornado. “Oh, it was awful,” she said. “There was a lot of damage downtown—blew out a lot of windows. The hardware store and the Blue Ribbon Dry Cleaners both lost their signs. But at least they’re still standing. The worst-hit area was out past 289. It took out the entire trailer park.”
Ida Jenkins immediately said to her husband, “See? Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say the minute we let it be built, it would attract a tornado? And it did!”
Old Henry Knott, who had died in 1919, asked, “What’s a trailer park?”
“Oh, Daddy,” answered Ida. “You don’t even want to know. People are living in tin cans now.”
“Why?”
“You tell me. The world has lost all the graciousness and charm that we knew growing up. I’m just so glad I was raised where I was, when I was.” A curious sentiment coming from someone who grew up on a pig farm.
At first, Ander Swensen had been grateful that his son-in-law had agreed to move into the house with them. But now, having lived under the same roof with him for the past years, he wasn’t so sure.
Ander was a successful businessman, and had dealt with a lot of people in his day, but he had never encountered anyone quite like Michael Vincent before. No matter what time of night or day, Michael always looked as if he had just stepped out of an Arrow shirt ad. Every hair slicked down, and perfectly cut. The shoes always shined to a high gloss. Everything he wore was crisp and pressed. He even smelled good. And, oh, how he could charm the ladies.
And tonight was no exception. When the family came into the dining room for dinner, Ander watched as Michael pulled Beatrice’s chair back for her, did the same thing for Hanna Marie, and then seated himself between the two. And as usual he addressed his next sentence to Beatrice. “You’re looking beautiful this evening, Mother. That brooch is very attractive. It brings out the blue in your eyes.”
Beatrice fingered the jeweled horn of plenty pin she was wearing and said, “Why, thank you, Michael.”
Ander could see that on the surface everything about Michael looked good, but something was bothering him, and he was not quite sure what it was. For some time now he had been torn between being pleased his daughter was still so happy with her husband and wanting to dump a plate of mashed potatoes on the guy’s head. Something was not right. He didn’t know if Michael was just a little too slick for for his taste or what it was, but every time Michael called him Dad it irritated the hell out of him.
Tonight, after Bridget had served the soup, Michael smiled and said, “Dad,” taking Hanna Marie’s hand in his and looking right at her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take our two girls on a picnic this Sunday. Might I borrow the big car?”
Hanna Marie’s big brown eyes lit up as she looked hopefully over at her father, waiting for his answer. Ander had already made other plans for the family that Sunday. He could turn down any offer in business he didn’t like, but never Hanna Marie. She was still his baby, and anything she wanted she could have.
Later, after dessert, when the cook came back into the room, Michael said, “You can clear now. We’ll take our coffee in the living room.”
When Michael first started giving orders to the help, Ander didn’t like it, but he’d let it pass. Tonight, though, when Bridget reached for his plate, Ander put his hand up and said, “No, not yet, Bridget. I’m not finished.”
Michael quickly said, “Oh I’m sorry, Dad, I thought you were.”
Ander looked at him and in a tone that almost sounded like a warning said, “No, not yet, Michael. Not quite yet.”
Being deaf, Hanna Marie could not hear the slight change in her father’s voice, but she knew something had just happened. She felt it. She quickly looked over at her father and then back at Michael, who smiled at her as if nothing was wrong. The subtlety of the exchange went completely over Beatrice’s head. She still thought Michael was wonderful. But Michael got the point. He would have to be more careful from now on.
1976
Lucille Beemer said, “Gene, wake up. Somebody’s here to see you.”
Gene looked up to see a beautiful blond woman standing by his grave. He had no idea who she was, but, wow, she sure didn’t look like an Elmwood Springs lady. She was wearing a brown suede jacket, a black turtleneck, and black slacks, and looked like someone out of the movies. Just then, his aunt Elner walked up to her and started talking.
“I see you found him.”
“Yes.”
They both stood there for a moment. Then Aunt Elner said, “Do you remember coming out here to see him when you were little?”
The blond woman seemed surprised. “No….Was I here before?”
“Oh, yes, two or three times. We’d bring you out here on Memorial Day. You used to talk to your daddy and everything.”
“I did?”
Aunt Elner nodded. “I wish you could have known your daddy. He was such a sweet boy…and smart. Oh, my, I always thought when he grew up, he might have been a writer.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes, even when he was in grammar school, I’d come over to the house, and he would be up in his room, just typewriting away…tap tap tap tippy tat. You used to play with that old typewriter when you were little.”
“Huh, I don’t remember. Who else is buried out here?” she asked, putting her hands in her jacket pockets.
“Everybody. Your great-grandparents, your grandmother and granddaddy, and me someday.” Then Elner looked at her with concern. “Honey, do you have your plot yet?”
“No.”
“Well, I would advise you to get it. I know you’re young yet, but it’s nice to know where you’re going…sort of comforting.”
After they walked away, Gene was left in a little bit of a state of shock. That beautiful woman was his daughter. The last time he had seen her was almost thirty years ago. And now she was a grown woman, older than he had been when he died. He was sure she didn’t know it, but with that blond hair and blue eyes, his daughter looked a lot like the picture he’d seen of his grandmother Katrina.
Dena was going to be in town for only a few days, and so after they left the cemetery, Norma drove them out to the country, so Dena could see the old original Nordstrom farmhouse. As they pulled up, the first thing Dena noticed was the large field of flowers blooming on the side of the house. “Oh, wow. Look at all those sunflowers. I love sunflowers.”
Elner laughed. “Well, you should. You come by it naturally. Your great-grandmother planted those almost eighty years ago…and they just keep blooming year after year.”
“They do?”
“Oh, yes,” said Elner. “I remember Momma saying that Katrina Nordstrom always loved her sunflowers. I wish I’d known her, but she died when I was little. But everybody loved her, I can tell you that. I just wish she could see you and how pretty you are. She sure would be proud.”
—
THEY COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN it, but Katrina had seen her and was talking to Gene about her at that very moment. “Oh, Gene, she’s grown up into such a beautiful young woman.”
Gene said, “Hasn’t she? I think she looks just like you.”
Birdie Swensen, who had been listening, piped up. “Gene’s right, Katrina. She is the spitting image of you when you were that age…only taller.”
“Oh, thank you. But I was never that pretty.”
“Yes, you were!” said Birdie.
“But I wore glasses.”
—
WHEN DENA LEFT TO go back to New York, she was sorry she had not come back to Elmwood Springs sooner. Living in a big city as she had for so many years now, she had almost forgotten where she had come from. She got on the plane with a jar of fig preserves and a four-leaf clover that her great-aunt Elner had found and given her.
1978
Tot Whooten seemed to be getting over her upset about her husband, James, running off with eighteen-year-old Jackie Sue Potts.
This morning, Norma was at her weekly standing appointment with Tot, having her hair done. In between taking drags off her cigarette, Tot was telling Norma about her new philosophy in life. “You know, Norma,” she said. “Everybody’s whining about how this is the new ‘Me’ generation, and how terrible it is, but it suits me just fine. And that’s who I’m gonna think about from now on, me. I’ve had a lifetime of thinking about everybody else, and what has it gotten me? Hell, I spent twenty years taking care of Momma, and she didn’t even know who I was. She called me Jeannette for the last five years of her life.”
“Who is Jeannette?”
“I have no idea. Now, I’m sorry she died, but it has sure freed up a lot of my time to do what I want for a change.”
—
ANOTHER THING THAT HAD cheered Tot up a bit was that the beauty business was good. Thanks to Farrah Fawcett and the television show Charlie’s Angels, big hair was in. Now, if your hair wasn’t stacked, packed, curled, feathered, teased, and sprayed high enough to hide a small child, you just weren’t in style. And today, Tot had teased and sprayed poor Norma’s hair until it looked at least a foot high.
Ever since Tot had seen the movie Saturday Night Fever, a big change had come over her. All of a sudden, she was wearing four-inch platform shoes and polyester pantsuits with bell-bottom pants and going out dancing at Disco City every weekend. She told Verbena, “You know that song ‘I Will Survive’? I think that gal wrote that song just for me. Like Mary Tyler Moore says, ‘I think I just might make it after all.’ ”
Tot had thrown herself into the seventies with a vengeance. In 1973, she had put up a Billie Jean King poster in the beauty shop. Now she had a lava lamp in her bedroom, a beanbag chair in the living room, and had even bought a mood ring. As she explained to Norma, “Every morning, when I wake up, I look at my ring, and if it tells me I’m in a bad mood, I just cancel my appointments that day. It saves a lot of wear and tear on me and my customers.”
Tot’s son, James Dwayne Whooten, Jr., had always hung out with the cool kids. His gang had started smoking pot and drinking beer in the seventh grade.
In high school, they didn’t play football or basketball or play in the band, like the jocks and nerds, and they sure didn’t study or make good grades.
They also didn’t date much, but it didn’t matter to them because hot damn, they were “cool to the max, man,” with their long, stringy hair and Grateful Dead T-shirts. And if you weren’t stoned by eight in the morning, you were “an uptight loser, man.” By the eleventh grade, most of his crowd had already dropped out of school or, like Dwayne Jr., been kicked out.
To make beer money, Dwayne Jr. would sweep up his mother’s beauty shop at night, and his friends, Weezer and Buck, worked at the car wash during the week. But on the weekends, they partied. And for most, the party never stopped.
At thirty-one, Dwayne Jr. now had three ex-wives and was living at his mother’s house, on probation, with two DUIs and two possession arrests. Weezer was still working at the car wash, and three of his other buddies were in jail for selling crack. His best friend, Buck, was up in Kansas City, sleeping on the streets at night, standing on the side of the highway from eleven to two every day, holding a homemade cardboard sign that read HOMELESS VET, PLEASE HELP. Which wasn’t true. He wasn’t a vet, but it was good for business. By two P.M., thanks to the nice people who would hand him a dollar bill and sometimes more, he usually had enough to buy drugs to get him through the night. He didn’t have to work for “the man” or pay rent. How cool was that?
One of the most endearing things about people is their little secret dreams. Edna Childress, married to Chief Ralph Childress of the Elmwood Springs Police Department, dreamed of one day going to the Mall of America and shopping. Cathy Calvert, over at the newspaper, dreamed of interviewing someone famous.
Luther Griggs, now seventeen, dreamed that Bobby Jo Stash, who worked at the Tastee-Freeze out at the mall, would talk to him. Ernest Koonitz, local boy and tuba major at the University of Missouri and now band director at the high school, also had a dream that one day, his band would be picked to march in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
Tot Whooten dreamed of the day when her two children, Dwayne Jr. and Darlene, would leave home for good and stop coming back.
Even Lester Shingle up at Still Meadows had dreams of his own. He had given up all hope for any kind of justice from the Elmwood Springs Police. It was clear that if someone had not been arrested for his murder by now, there was no case. And whoever it was, was sitting around down there in Elmwood Springs right now, thinking they had committed a perfect crime, probably eating ice cream, too. Oh, well…he had plenty of time. He had read a few Perry Mason books in his day, and he had come up with a plan. If the law couldn’t catch them, he would. He would wait until all four women were at Still Meadows and then confront them one by one, lay out his case point by point, interrogate them without mercy. Surely, one of them would break…or squeal the real killer’s name. Or maybe someone who had been at the bowling alley the night he was killed would suddenly remember something, some small detail, and he would catch them red-handed, expose them to the entire Still Meadows community. They may have gotten away with it down there in Elmwood Springs, but not here. He would see to that. In the meantime, he was tired. All the planning had worn him out. He figured he would sleep for a few years. He called out to his neighbor, “Hey, Jake…wake me up when any of the Goodnight women or Tot Whooten gets here.”
“Okay, will do.”
Lester drifted off, dreaming about his day in court to come, when vengeance would be his at last.
Sometimes in life, dreams do come true. In 1986, after years of trying, the Elmwood Springs High School band won a competition and became the only band in that part of the state to ever be invited to march in the big Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. It was a huge honor, and everyone in town was so excited they could hardly stand it.
Everybody agreed that their high school band was a step above all the others in the area. Their rendition of “Brazil” was thrilling, at least to the people in Elmwood Springs. How Brazilians would feel about it was anybody’s guess; however, it did get them to the state finals and on their way to national fame.
Norma and Macky’s daughter, Linda, had been a majorette, and Norma was still a band mother and in charge of fundraising. All over town, people worked to raise money to buy new band uniforms and majorette outfits and replace some of the old instruments. They had bake sales, chicken dinners, garage sales, book sales. On the weekend, the high school seniors set up a car wash service. Every day after school and on Saturdays, the band practiced marching up and down Main Street. They wanted to look and sound the very best they possibly could. Not knowing what was going on, the people up at Still Meadows were wondering why there was so much practicing.
Merle Wheeler, over at the dry cleaner, said, “I like a good band…but, Lord, I’m so tired of hearing ‘Brazil,’ I don’t know what to do.”
1986
Elner and her neighbors were watching the sunset over the back cornfield when she said, “I love a fall sunset. Sometimes they’re prettier than the summer ones.”
“They last longer. Then around Thanksgiving, the sun starts to go down fast,” said Verbena.
Tot said, “Hey. Isn’t it great the kids won that trip to New York?”
“They worked hard for i
t….They should be very proud of themselves.”
Merle said, “I won a prize once.”
“You did? What for?” asked Elner.
“I had the largest tomato in the county—weighed over twelve pounds. I think it was a mutant.”
Verbena said, “I wonder if Luther Griggs is a mutant? I never saw anybody grow up so fast in my life…or eat as much food in one sitting.”
Elner laughed. “He’s got a good appetite, all right.”
Luther had barely graduated from high school. He had made all Ds in every subject but shop, where he excelled and had made all As. And by some rare genetic fluke, it turned out that Luther was some kind of mechanical genius where cars were concerned. He was car crazy and could fix anything with a motor. A lot of boys his age had pictures of girls on their bedroom walls; Luther had pictures of cars and trucks and tanks. He had been working at the local gas station after school since he was twelve, and by age seventeen, was already in charge of auto repair.
Elner was so proud of him, which pleased him. She was the only person in his entire life that he felt cared about him. Who would have guessed that the little scrawny boy who had been as feral as a cat would have grown into a big, burly 230 pounder?
Elner took almost no credit. “He just needed somebody to pay a little attention to him.”
After a particularly nice Sunday evening at home, Norma woke up and saw a note Macky had left for her on his pillow.
“Good morning, you good-looking, sexy wench, you. Talk to you later. Have a good day.”
Norma smiled. It was amazing that after so many years of marriage Macky still thought she was sexy. She had always assumed when they hit a certain age their romantic life would be over.
Later Norma was in the kitchen having her coffee. When the phone rang, she picked it up and said in her best low voice, “Well, good morning, you great big, sexy, handsome hunk of man, you.”