Gathering String

by Mimi Johnson

  She shrugged, “After a couple dozen, it’s probably getting hard on his budget.”

  Sam laughed. “Too bad you had to come all the way up here. I suppose you tried to call?” She nodded. “I’ve been on the line for awhile. But you could have left it at the front desk.”

  She gave no explanation, moving to the desk and pointing to two empty, small bottles of Johnny Walker, apparently from the mini bar. “Think this kind of thing might have something to do with that memory problem you mentioned?”

  He shrugged. “I finished writing for the night, and figured what the hell.” She frowned, holding up an open pack of cigarettes that rested near the bottles. “Hey, it’s been a shitty few weeks, OK?”

  “You really are a mess, Sam. I’m concerned. I wouldn’t have thought splitting with your wife would throw you like this. You two were always on the brink.”

  “It’s not Judith.” His voice was hushed. She turned back toward him. “It’s seeing you again.”

  Her mouth twisted. “Get off it. I thought you’d decided I had just been fucking with your tender feelings all along.”

  “Yeah,” he didn’t make a joke of it, like she thought he might. “But I always did want whatever you’d give me.”

  She was silent, seeming to judge his sincerity, and then abruptly said, “You were right this afternoon. It’s been talked to tatters, and I need to get home." She turned to put his cigarettes down. In the pile of change he’d emptied from his pocket, she saw the scratched and battered St. Francis de Sales medal she’d given him so long ago. Picking it up, she turned to find that he was coming toward her quickly, with the deliberate movement she remembered so well.

  “Sam …” It was a warning, as he took her by her shoulders.

  “I know, I know,” he sighed the words, cupping her face in his hands, holding firm enough to keep her from pulling away without a struggle. “I get it. Waterman’s out, Westphal’s in.” His thumb ran over the high arch of her cheek. “But do you realize this really might be it? I won’t be in New Hampshire. And if Erickson doesn’t win, nothing will bring me back out here. If you’re determined to stick it out with this guy …” His voice trailed off, and then he leaned close, whispering, “This time, let me say goodbye.”

  With the most tenderness she’d ever had from him, he lowered his face slowly, touching his lips to hers, the pressure of his mouth ever so slowly increasing. It was a long, gentle kiss, flavored faintly with whiskey and smoke. And she gave herself up to it, at first because she had to acknowledge that she had hurt him deeply, but then because it was, as it had always been, just so good between them. In a stumbling second, lost in the familiar warmth of his arms and the smell of his skin, she realized his snide remark of that morning was no very great exaggeration. When he pulled back, he pressed his mouth to her forehead. “That was probably the most sentimental pass you’ve ever made, Waterman.” She laughed softly, hoping to cover the shaking in her voice.

  She spoke into his shoulder, and felt the soft vibration of his chuckle under her cheek before he said, “I’ve always been a sucker for sentiment. Don’t you remember, Surfer Girl?” His hands slid to her back, and she felt him try to gently draw her even closer.

  She shook her head, pushing him back with the tips of her fingers. “This is as far as sentiment takes you,” she whispered, and then her voice hardened to an amused accusation. “You’re jacking with me again, aren’t you?”

  “An interesting choice of words, but no, no, I’m not.” He dropped his hands.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you’re capable of. You left that thing in the Jeep on purpose, didn’t you? Just to get me up here.”

  He held up his hands, like he was under arrest. “That’s right. I hid my razor in your car. Oh, and I also kept Steve Johnson on the line for hours, just so you’d get a busy signal whenever you tried to call. Simple stuff for a master manipulator like me. In fact, tomorrow I’m going to arrange for my flight to be diverted to Las Vegas where I’ll win a half million and a string of keno girls.”

  She couldn’t help laughing. He was such a piece of work. He looked down at her, his eyes shining. “At least you’re walking out with both of us laughing. Isn’t that an improvement?” She rolled her eyes with a shrug. “OK then, let’s not fuck it up.” He walked her to the door. With her head down, she stopped for just a second to press the religious medal into his hand. At the elevator, she glanced back, but the door was just clicking shut.

  The elevator whooshed open, and she stepped in, totally unaware it was going up instead of down, and ignoring the woman and little girl in swimming suits, dripping on the carpet.

  She wasn’t over Sam. All these years, and it was still there between them. No, she’d never really get over Sam. She touched her index finger to her own lips. And she knew what she had to do next would be the hardest thing she'd ever done.

  Sam had seen her start to turn back, but let the door swing shut anyway. Sitting back down at the desk, he knew he’d better call Johnson back pretty damn fast. But first, he flipped the medal in the air with a satisfied smile, catching it as it came down and mentally blessing the old gossip in Westphal’s office for telling him about the first time Tess had come to Lindsborg. It had been hard as hell, walking off that afternoon and letting her drive away. And it had been pure impulse, stashing his razor. It wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d just thrown the damn thing away rather than bring it back to him. But she hadn’t been able to resist, once he was the one who turned away. Now he would bide his time. It might take awhile. But he was going to New Hampshire, and he’d see her there. And he’d always been good at manufacturing ways to be alone with her.

  Chapter 22

  From grocery store to statehouse, ‘ornery’ Swede Erickson showed skeptics

  By Samuel J. Waterman

  @SamPolitifix

  Lindsborg, Iowa – Folks in this Iowa town used to think Swede Erickson was getting too big for his britches.

  They were sure their corner grocery didn’t need a salad bar or a deli or flavored coffees. With each innovation his store introduced, the people of Lindsborg issued the kind of challenge Swan August “Swede” Erickson loves:

  “It’ll never work.”

  Then they started paying Swede extra to chop their lettuce or slice their meat or brew their coffee. “I think the women of Lindsborg have forgotten how to make salads,” said Andrew Johnson, an initial skeptic. “They just pick up something to go at Swede’s store, along with a four-dollar latté.”

  The Corner Grocery Store here, and 52 others across the Midwest, provided a unique training ground for a possible president. But in the narrow aisles of his father’s grocery story, Erickson learned the lessons that generated an economic revival in this Midwestern state. Erickson, and his devoted following here, say the innovation, courage and persuasion that changed the shopping habits of this Scandinavian town will leave an indelible mark on the country when (people here don’t say “if”) Erickson is elected president.

  “You know that ornery look a toddler gets on his face when you tell him he can’t do something?” asks Augusta Erickson, the governor’s mother. “Swan never lost that. He loves to prove you’re wrong.”

  Roland Wright recalls that look when Erickson proposed consolidating Iowa’s 350 school districts into 200. “I thought he was a goner,” recalls Wright, a fellow Republican and Iowa’s Senate majority leader. Erickson shocked the state with his proposal less than a month after taking office.

  “I really liked the guy, but I was sure he was dooming himself to one ugly term,” Wright said. “There was no more explosive issue in Iowa than taking away small-town schools.”

  Erickson won on the rural vote, Wright noted. “He was turning around and punching his supporters in the gut. And they were ready to kick him right back, but a little lower than that.”

  The small-town governor knew, though, that schools were key to reviving Iowa’s stagnant economy.

  “This state
needed to draw young families with children here,” Erickson says. “If we’d listened to the old guys in the main street barber shop, whom I know personally and love dearly, we would have believed that consolidating schools would kill off the small towns. But those guys’ kids had grown up and moved away, and small towns were dying right around the schools they built in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

  The new governor proposed consolidating districts as part of a plan that would raise pay for teachers and create incentives for outstanding teachers. The plan also included stringent new curriculum and testing requirements, scholarships for Iowa students attending colleges in the state and grants for innovative programs.

  “The plan was full of land mines,” recalls Wright, whose Republicans held a slim 26-24 edge in the Senate.

  Even critics now concede the plan was exactly what Iowa needed. And Erickson was as crafty and persuasive as he was stubborn.

  Rather than letting the issue bog down in local bickering over which schools to close, Erickson spelled that out, school by school, in his proposal. “He knew exactly what he was doing,” says Carl Nordstrom, then president of the Lindsborg School Board. “Lindsborg was one of the high schools he proposed closing, which made us feel like he’d stabbed us in the back the minute he got to Des Moines.”

  Jack Westphal, publisher of the Lindsborg Journal, thought the man he regards almost as a second brother was committing political suicide. “I called Swede and told him he’d better not show up here, or they’d find some tar and feathers.”

  But Erickson came home to face the mob. Large-screen televisions in the cafeteria carried the action to people who couldn’t fit in the high school gym.

  Nordstrom stepped onto the stage in an empty gymnasium to tell a recent visitor what happened. “Swede stepped up to a podium right here, this man we adored. We’d been to his inaugural ball just three weeks earlier. We all booed. Someone threw a snowball. It missed him by about a foot and landed right over there. For three and a half minutes we booed and hissed and hooted. I have the tape. I timed it.”

  The videotape, embedded below, also records the spellbinding oratory that followed. Erickson delivered a preview of the dynamic style and smooth cadence that dazzled the nation 1½ years later when he delivered the keynote speech at the Republican National Convention.

  This was the toughest test of Erickson’s famed charm, and his voice was choked when the boos subsided enough that he could be heard. “No one loves Lindsborg more than I do, or is prouder than I am to be a graduate of Lindsborg High School,” he told the crowd, prompting another wave of jeers to start.

  Before the outburst could drown him out, Erickson’s voice boomed out, “You had your turn! Now hear me out! Someone who loves the small towns of this state has to do something to save them!”

  The room grew quiet. And Erickson made his sale: “We’re ‘Iowa stubborn,’ just like in ‘The Music Man.’ You remember, I played Professor Harold Hill when I was a senior, right on this stage, and you laughed. Iowa stubborn – there’s nothing we resist like change. But let me tell you, change happens, and it doesn’t ask permission, and it doesn’t take polls, and it doesn’t care if it’s popular or if you’re stubborn.”

  Erickson recalled that his graduating class had 78 seniors, nearly twice the current class. “When I graduated, you couldn’t find a parking place on the square,” Erickson said. “Now you can’t find a businessman who’s sure he’s going to be there next year.”

  The governor swore he wasn’t trying to kill Lindsborg, but to save it. “Let’s be stubborn! Let’s resist these changes that are destroying our town. If we want this great town to last for another generation, we have to draw another wave of immigrants like our grandparents who came over from Sweden.”

  Then Erickson paused and said, “Well, OK, mine came over from Sweden. Yours came from Norway, but that’s just a suburb of Sweden.”

  “You see,” says Nordstrom, pausing the tape, “he knew just the right moment to lighten things up. When we laughed, and we all did laugh, I knew he had us.”

  When the laughter stopped, Erickson continued, serious again: “Our forebears came here for the abundant land and the rich soil. But the new immigrants who will keep our grandparents’ dreams alive will come for quality jobs and quality schools.”

  Erickson won by his persuasive power and by respecting people’s fears. No town completely lost its schools and sports teams. If three or four districts consolidated in one, each town would keep an elementary school with at least kindergarten and first grade. The upper grades and sports teams were dispersed among the towns. Lindsborg got Calloway County Junior High and varsity girls basketball, while the high school and football team moved to Alston.

  That snowy January night, Erickson convinced his hometown that its future depended on giving up its high school. “Listen,” says Nordstrom as the video reaches the new governor’s impassioned closing. Nordstrom taps “start” on his iPhone’s stopwatch and hands it to the visitor. The ovation lasted four minutes, longer than the boos that greeted him.

  “When I sold it in Lindsborg, I knew I had it nailed,” Erickson says.

  After two vetoes and two special sessions, he pushed the plan through the Legislature. “That stubborn Swede just wouldn’t accept any sort of compromise,” says Daniel Livingston, then the House speaker and later the Democratic candidate Erickson whipped to win re-election.

  “The school issue showed all sides of Swede,” says Livingston, a grudging admirer and still a blistering critic. “He’s innovative, you have to give him that. He’s persuasive. And he’s one hell of a fighter.

  “But he’s about the most devious mother (expletive) you’ll ever meet. He got all kinds of credit, and even national attention, for being gutsy with that confrontation in Lindsborg. But he didn’t have the guts to tell them when he was trying to win their votes. You can’t craft a plan like that, naming the specific schools you’re going to close, in three weeks. That cowardly piece of (expletive) was planning that all along and knew he couldn’t get elected if he leveled with the voters. No telling what he’s planning to do if he becomes president. Let’s hope he’s right again.”

  ***

  Swan August Erickson is the first of two sons born to Carl and Augusta Erickson, who married at age 19, two weeks before Carl left to serve in Vietnam as an Army private.

  “Carl was just like Swede as a kid, outgoing, funny and boisterous,” says Olaf Swenson, a childhood friend of Carl’s. “But the guy who came home from the Hanoi Hilton was an entirely different man.”

  Augusta Erickson would not discuss her husband’s drinking. “Carl deserves to rest in peace,” she said.

  Erickson and his brother, Peter, would not discuss Carl’s drinking, except to acknowledge it. “My dad’s not running for president,” Swede said. “I am.”

  Inge Hergestad, Augusta’s longtime next-door neighbor, said on several occasions she provided shelter when Augusta and her sons fled Carl’s violent rages. Sometimes she saw fresh bruises. “I told Augusta she should leave him, but she said she vowed to stay with Carl for better or worse, and that what happened to him in Vietnam wasn’t his fault.”

  Despite his drinking, Carl Erickson was a moderately successful grocer. “This town was thriving then,” Swenson says. “You could make a good living selling groceries. And Carl was a smart enough fellow when he was sober, and real friendly.”

  Swede Erickson’s military experience was completely different from his father’s. After graduating from Lindsborg High School, Erickson enlisted in the Iowa National Guard. While he was still finishing his Iowa State business degree through evening classes, his unit was activated and sent to the Persian Gulf to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invaders. He came home with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

  Those military medals are well-worn Iowa political lore. Five Des Moines Record stories and a dozen Iowa sources interviewed recently repeated the same story: Corporal Erickson was driving alone in a Jeep in Kuwait wh
en he heard gunfire and pulled to a stop. Grabbing his submachine gun and a grenade launcher, Erickson climbed a sand dune and looked down on a firefight between U.S. and Iraqi troops. A half-dozen soldiers, two of them wounded, had taken cover around a Humvee, caught between two squads of Iraqi troops. Erickson, with an elevated position, fired a grenade into the middle of one of the Iraqi squads and then opened fire on the other group with his submachine gun. The swift, single-handed attack killed seven Iraqi soldiers, injured three others, and sent the other Iraqi troops fleeing. The stories always say Erickson was injured in the left shoulder by an Iraqi bullet.

  The story in Army records differs slightly from one told in Iowa. The official incident reports confirm the story of Erickson’s heroism in rescuing the other soldiers. And his shoulder injury did occur that same day. But it was about an hour later. The troops he had liberated took the injured Iraqis as prisoners, and Erickson continued on his way alone in his Jeep. Apparently disoriented, dazed or distracted by the recent battle, he crashed the Jeep, injuring his shoulder.

  Six months after Erickson returned from the Gulf, Carl Erickson checked into the Veterans Hospital in Knoxville, Iowa, in an unsuccessful effort to dry out. Swede came home to run the store. He finished his business degree by taking night classes. “My first day in charge, I started making plans for a deli,” Swede says. “Pop kept the store stuck in the 1950s. People shopped there because they liked Pop. I wanted them to come because it was a nice place to shop. The world was changing, and we had to change with it.”