A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

  It is a steamy journey into Skiles for the celebration, even in the early morning, and necessarily a hasty one, the team set to a cautious trot where the road is good, as we must convey the twins to their recitation by midforenoon, and Ma, finely dressed beside me in the buggy, urges still another hauling forth of my watch for the time; while in back the twins jokingly practice their parts in false acting voices they will not dare to use on stage. Otto has gone ahead, before dawn, as he has duties on the program, and the other boys, August, Cornelius, Harris, promise to come along as they finish their chores; Henry, less of a celebrator, saying he would see.

  Now, at the end of the day—and I am not likely to complete this chronicle tonight, but will take it up in the morning for completion—I look back at the events that need telling: there are triumphs; there are surprises; there are satisfactions; there are noisy thrills; there is a drab spectacle or two; there is knowledge imparted slyly; there is sport all around; and there is, of course, contention too, as there will often be when our bachelor neighbor Beidermann shows his face. All in all, even in discord, the Family Praeger participates and does itself proud, most notably through its two youngest members—the twins in their dual recitation, a piece learned during their three-month school term last winter, and their command on stage revealed it as time well spent, as is any time in a school classroom, as I have yet to convince such as Krupp or Schneider, who stubbornly refuse to hire more than a three-month teacher.

  We are only in time for the twins’ start, and as I tie the team under the box elders with a score of other animals, heads hanging and hides twitching against the flies, the boys race through the crowd to the stage, at the side of which, under a strip of bunting, stands their teacher, Semijahn, beckoning them to hasten and clucking out advice. Quickly to center stage, the boys strike their poses and launch into their dialogue, which is an imaginary one concocted by the clever Semijahn, purporting to take place between William Shakespeare and Gaius Julius Caesar. In it the twins conduct themselves with equal credit, although the preponderance of applause from the hundred-some attending is accorded the Roman; for Professor Semijahn has provided the greater eloquence for the tyrant’s utterance, however more suitable it would seem the other way around; but the Bard of Avon suffers an odd lapse of genius on the planks at Skiles: perhaps it is some dark revenge of the Professor’s.

  The lads receive a rosette and ribbon each from the stern Missus Lovejoy, the banker’s wife, and claps on the backs by sundry adults on stage, including old Taubensee, the mayor, who lets others do all the work but never fails to stroll up at the end as if it was all his doing; while the boys’ contemporaries hoot from the rear and run off.

  Their business over, the twins, relieved, head to the long benches of food in the big tents that Otto and August came in to help raise last week. Franklin Semijahn approaches Ma and me with handshakes and praise for the boys, at their easy skill in declaiming the complex dialogue. He turns aside with a laugh at my query as to how the poet came off second best in his invention.

  It is fiction, Mister Praeger, he says and claps me on the back. Dramatic illusion, eh? Heh, heh! But I will tell you, sir, your boys are excellent students. No one would hesitate to call them superior young men.

  To be sure, say I. But the Professor has no time to listen to my agreement, as he must hurry away to the day’s second main event, the debate, in which he is a participant.

  But his suggestion that the twins are fine lads is nothing we have not heard before. I know all my boys well, and the twins are not the only ones superior: there are five others who are so in their own ways, even if they are not revealed in fanciful orations upon a Fourth of July stage. . . .

  THE DEBATE WE forgather to hear is put forth thusly: Resolved: The Souls of Persons with Black Skins Are Denied Admission into Heaven, the pro stance adopted by our Professor Semijahn, the con being upheld by the store clerk, Klaus Meirs.

  The estimable Meirs has come to Skiles within the past year to keep store, on shares, for Trudell who, having had his fill of trading sugar and spice for eggs and tubs of butter, hard coin never to be seen, retreated to his wife’s folks in Ohio, vowing to return when real money could be made. Meirs arrived out of the blue to take over, perhaps a foolish venture, given Schwantz’s reputation for giving easy credit. He receives newspapers from both Bismarck and Saint Paul, which he makes available, hung on sticks, to loungers in his store who peruse them with such intensity that each issue is soon in rags; then Meirs holds the tatters at arm’s length and twits the readers: How’s this? I subscribed to have wallpaper for my bedroom and you have not left me scraps enough to wipe a baby’s bottom! He loses money every day.

  Now, while youngsters set their fireworks popping afield, their parents sweat in the sparse box elder shade, enrapt in the controversial to-and-fro on stage, and, it soon becomes clear, lend the greater part of their support to the clerk Meirs, for the good reason that his argument ingeniously holds up the Soul as in itself wholly lacking color, whatever the pigmentation of its temporary container—as he calls the skin—of the body it inhabits. There is no possible answer to his bold call for biblical citation or reference to tenets of known religious doctrines—he excepts Mormonism—that mention the Soul in any color, shade, hue, tincture or pigmentation. Yes, he exclaims, skin surely has properties we arbitrarily call color, but that color does not penetrate to the Soul.

  Thus he pins his glib opponent, and the Professor, for all that he argues strenuously, sweating from the brow, fails to produce evidence of how the Soul, itself uncolored, of any black-skinned departed, can possibly be identified with the skin from which it came and for that reason be turned away at the Gate.

  The Professor gives it his best try, surely, but even his three cousins in the audience grow lukewarm in their support of his claims that the business happens thusly: no Soul at death can emerge from any body without necessarily taking with it, in ephemeral form, the skin of the body it inhabits—what some people call Ghosts—and wearing it in all its color to Heaven’s Gate. But in his struggles to make this clear, the Professor sounds as if he is giving out a recipe for stuffing guts to make sausage; and well-spoken though he is, he delivers his argument in his flapping way, his mouth always open wider than needed to get the words out, as school teachers have a way of doing. When the audience moves in support of his opponent he takes it badly, glaring at us all, and I hope he will not curse us all for fools, as happened in a debate a few years ago with the new Methodist minister from nearby Zimmerman. But the Professor recovers his teacherly equanimity soon enough and, a bit stiffly, gives the clerk Meirs a good-natured pat on the back. He is a great one for slapping people on the back.

  . . .

  OUR MISTER BEIDERMANN IS AT THE PICNIC, come late, it seems. I glimpse him at a distance with a horse and buggy other than his own.

  That is Anna’s buggy, says Ma.

  You are wrong there, say I. It is Swede’s buggy. And if he was not dead he would be driving that black gelding and not Beidermann.

  Ma waves her hand impatiently and says nothing.

  It is odd to me, seeing Beidermann with horses other than his big team, those handsome Percherons being the way he makes his mark amongst us, who are owners of lesser beasts—small-sized, swaybacked, spiritless animals wearing patched harness—although today, these horses brought out to trudge in the dusty procession that Banker Lovejoy calls a gala parade, are groomed and slicked and wearing their Sunday best blankets or shimmering fly-nets to conceal sores and disfigurements. Beidermann’s champions from last year, in oiled harness and the tinkling bridle bells of woodland elves, are not to be seen amongst the bunting-draped wagons and teams hung with ribbons and colored paper twists braided into manes and tails and driven by embarrassed boys in top-hat finery, at their sides girls with painted faces holding from side to side boards adorned with store names—Trudell Mercantile, Schwantz’s Mercantile and Fuel, Dakota Saloon and Hotel, all done in grand looping style by the sig
n painter, Willy Kuhn. Except for the absence of Beidermann’s champions, it is the same as the past few years. There is the familiar sight of Krupp’s big gray jack, led by Krupp’s new hired man, who primps and preens his way past as if the folks must admire him, who they see for the first time, as much as the mule, which they have seen a dozen times. Indeed, it is an admirable animal, in size, color, conformation, and regal mulish bearing—but in nothing else. It is a worthless animal, although few know this, certainly not those who have passed out blue ribbons to it in parades past. The statuesque beast, for all its apparent muscle, is impossible to work, a biter, a kicker, and will not take a bit. Krupp tries to keep this hidden, but I know, August having witnessed Krupp’s adventures with the mule when newly acquired. By August’s testimony, the jack, for all its appearance of even temper, undergoes a hideous transformation if shown a harness close up, erupting into such a frenzy of bites and kicks, says August, as would imperil a stout barn wall. Krupp has not managed to teach the worthless beast to tolerate more than a light halter, sufficient to persuade it from one effortless competition to another, as in between it sucks up Krupp’s oats and hay at twice the rate of a working animal. Once the desperate Krupp allowed me, with a rueful humor not otherwise shown but required here to forestall open ridicule, that standing for show—as he so grandly put it—is in fact the jack’s assigned work. I told him, Then it is the ribbons you should feed that bastard, and not your good oats.

  But the big fellow does parade well, following without any show of nerves the band of a dozen out-of-step men tootling their little tin horns and banging their drums like boys at Christmas; whether the plaudits from the roadside are for them or Krupp’s mule, it is hard to say.

  I see Beidermann’s team is not here, then, I say to Ma.

  She says, Oh Lord! You do worry too much about him. About him and Anna too, I would say. They came on her buggy, without his team. Stop poking your nose in other people’s affairs, for Heaven’s sake! You are growing into a snoop, always snooping around him and Anna!

  By God, woman! I tell her, peeved. You are the one to talk! I have heard you gossip about those two—

  She throws up a hand to cut me off. Women’s gossip, she says primly, is not like men’s gossip—

  Men do not gossip, say I. They have no time to sit around and gossip—

  Hoo! she says. Hogwash, all hogwash, and before you get up on your hind legs and start preaching at me, go get yourself some eats. That potato salad in the blue bowl is mine, and—she rolls her eyes—you will surely want to sample Anna Jenssen’s cherry pie.

  Before I can say more, she turns and walks off through the grass to a wide cloth awning where Krupp’s old lady and some others are selling lemonade for the Methodists. The two skinny Jenssen girls are washing cups, and I stretch to see if the Widow herself is amongst the jumble of long skirts and bonnets behind the planks set on sawhorses to hold the tubs in which jugs of lemonade float half-tipped. She is not to be seen, but Ma catches me looking and throws up her hands to tell me I am hopeless.

  Schneider’s oldest boy is selling fireworks off his wagon, as he is the enterprising sort who would do so. He is within a year or two of Harris’s age; a big, red-haired bouncing fellow, where Harris’ feet never leave the ground, unless he is wrestling someone to the death. To attract attention to his wagon he whirls a silvery pinwheel over his head and whistles as if calling hogs while holding up a fistful of firecrackers in their colorful Chinese paper.

  What price are you asking? say I.

  He has a whole array, and holds up this, that and the other; and tosses off prices. This is a cent, this is two cents, this ladyfinger is two for a cent, this is two for a nickel; all these big ones are a dime apiece—they make one Hell of a noise, believe me.

  On both his arms the red hair is singed away. Around him, on the wagon bed, his colorful display is like a picture from an Oriental art book.

  He says, They all come from Saint Paul, and they cost a pretty penny too. You have to mail off your order before Easter and send all the money too, and then the company ships them on the railroad.

  I might buy a few, say I, if it does not break the bank.

  I take a double handful of the two-for-a-penny and, pocketing those, select two of the ten-cent size, which the Schneider boy gives me, saying, Yessir, you can blow up a bank with those, as I store them in my vest, and call the twins from the horseshoe pits. They have shot the fireworks Ma gave them, which she had somehow saved from last year; and I hand over my supply of the two-for-a-pennies as they whoop and dash in search of the boy with the punk. With two fat cylinders in my pocket I feel cunning indeed, although I have no intention for their use—unless, for a little fun, I light one under Krupp’s regal jack.

  Ma is at the vat of floating watermelons, slicing wedges for the children running up, as I remind her that speech-time is drawing near; and I stroll off through friends and neighbors, all with pleasant words for one another, to find a shady spot before the stage, empty except for the play of small children since the Black Souls debate. Upon it now, doing his annual stint, comes little Willy Kuhn, the sign-painter from Zimmerman who makes Skiles his second home as he courts—into the third year now—the hefty Vogel girl. Befitting his trade, he has an artistic or actorly bent, and yodels like an auctioneer for us all to step up, and slaps at the low-hanging bunting as he does a little side-step dance, daintily, onto the stage center, his foot-tall red, white, and blue hat wobbling so that he must hold it in place, yelling that this is the main event, step up, step up; for all that everyone interested in speeches is already in place. In case there is a straggler, Willy Kuhn waits a decent time, and then begins his introduction of the man—he says the same for every speaker—who needs no introduction; as always the first speaker, the banker Dewey Lovejoy.

  Over the top of his round spectacles the banker studies us severely, as if searching for anyone delinquent in his payments, and he clears his throat disgustingly several times before grumbling into his speech. First he mentions the hard times come to test honest folk, and he seems to include himself in those being tested, for all that he lives fat. Hard times, he says, must be met forthrightly, by honest folk, stoically, without whining or complaint, always making payments on time. No weaklings needed here, he says, patting his paunch. But we should not look just at ourselves, he cautions, as there is a great country abuilding. Banker Lovejoy would beg that we regard the thrust of history, with particular attention to how financial investments have influenced its path, as even our ancestors made their payments on time, a legacy not to be dishonored. The more he talks, the more it sounds as if higher interest rates on his loans are forthcoming.

  He is at least brief—having nothing in his head to say unless it promises money for his bank—unlike the windbag Puckett, fetched now to the stage by Willy Kuhn with an introduction that makes the wispy, bald little fellow sound like Moses on a special visitation to Dakota. As the assistant to the Territorial Congressional delegate, Bouchard Clausen, he is filled to overflowing with news of Clausen’s heroic efforts on our behalf in Washington. For all that any evidence of which he speaks remains unseen, and his vague talk of lower tariffs sounds nonsensical, coming as it does after Lovejoy’s equally vague talk of higher interest; but his words are attended to politely, as he is our official link to Eastern power.

  Well, I think he is honest, says Ma, having come up beside me.

  You need not worry about him, say I. He is small potatoes. Worry about that boss of his nobody has ever seen.

  Now, behind Willy Kuhn’s strident summons, Karl Deitrich, retired land agent and prominent war veteran, steps to the plank to deliver his annual rouser, distilled from his supposed experiences in the Union Army, although I would be unsurprised to learn that our Karl was a bugler boy and not the confidant of colonels as he makes himself out. Still, no one can deny he has a way, a loud and hearty way, of shouting forth his various slogans, that include FREEDOM! LIBERTY! A GREAT PEOPLE! A CHRISTIAN NATI
ON! &tc., &tc., which make no sense if used as normal people use words every day, but he drums up such a marvelous roar in his bass voice that it stirs the lot of us into a mighty cheer, and he is encouraged to go on: YEOMAN OF THE PLOW! HEARTY PIONEERS! &tc. . . .

  Regularly, three or four a minute, throughout the speeches, comes the pop of fireworks, sometimes followed by an angry shout. A few dogs which the owners have allowed to follow their wagons into town cower under them now. But not—I see, just beyond the livery barn—Beidermann’s rapacious hounds, their owner nowhere in sight. Far from cringing at the fireworks, his dogs lay unflinching, though panting heavily in the heat. Notable beasts they are, not only for their size but for their coloration, which is a patchwork of black and brown, the drab colors blending into each other across their backs and sides, so that they look made of mud and road dirt. They are tied with rope to the under-carriage of Swede’s buckboard, which brought Beidermann, the Widow, and her daughters into town, and in the small shade the seat casts they stretch on their bellies, long and limber forelegs laid neatly to the front, and dark tongues pulsing at full length. They need water, surely, although I am not the man to succor them, having been given opportunity to examine their angrily bared fangs at close range for no reason other than stepping off my rig too near Beidermann’s barn door. They are not bashful animals; they take what they want and all else tear up and let rot.

  Now the twins trot near, smudged of face and hand, fleeing some distant commotion, a fair quantity of fireworks still in their clutch, and when I point out Beidermann’s thirsty hounds, they run to fetch melted ice dipped from the lemonade tubs into a cake-tin snatched from beneath the bench.