by Ann Tatlock
Nevertheless, I was hard put to enjoy my brief ride in it that afternoon. The leather seats were so hot I felt like a strip of bacon in a skillet. My dress scarcely acted as a buffer between my skin and the seat, and I wondered that I didn't start to sizzle and spit out grease. We drove with the windows down, our only hope for some small bit of relief, but the inrush of air was not only hard to breathe but made annoying whips out of my hair that stung my cheeks and forced me to travel with my eyes shut. Papa generally whistled while he drove, but that day even he lacked the gumption. His gentle stream of notes wouldn't stand a chance in the face of the hot wind blowing over us. Lacking Papa's usual entertainment, I listened subconsciously to the music of my own mind.
By the time we turned off the main street out of town and bumped along a rutted dirt road that crossed the railroad tracks and led on down to the river, Papa's shirt and my dress were glued with sweat to the simmering leather interior. The wheels of our car kicked up a great cloud of dust that tumbled along like an angry storm in our wake, and soon we felt gritty all over from the powdery dirt. The suggestion of earth was on our tongues like the aftertaste of unwashed vegetables. I longed for water but said nothing. We passed through a wooded area, then came to a clearing where I saw the first of the shacks on the edge of Soo City. Papa pulled the Buick into the shade of a tall maple and turned off the engine. I breathed a sigh of relief and pushed my tousled hair back from my sweaty forehead. "All ashore," Papa said. "You can help me first of all by carrying one of the bags."
He had brought along two medical bags. One, he explained, for his medical supplies, the other--a larger bag--for cans of food and a few other items. He gave me the bag with the medical supplies, saying it was lighter.
As I followed him toward the encampment, I noticed a hand-painted sign on a square of wood nailed to a tree. "Welcome to Soo City," it read. Then beneath that in smaller letters: "The Soo Line brings us, And the Soo Line takes us away. Blessed be the name of the Soo."
I gasped at what appeared to be obvious blasphemy and looked up to Papa for an explanation, but he strode face forward toward the shacks without glancing up at the sign. I figured he had seen it so many times before he didn't even notice it now.
"First, we'll check on that pretty little baby," Papa said as we reached the first pitiful dwellings. "Her house is down this way a bit."
I thought Papa awfully generous in equating any of these shacks with what we thought of as a house. The fact is, we were walking amid the contents of the city dump, all rearranged to resemble a town. As Papa had said after his first visit to Soo City, the place was a sea of flimsy structures made of cardboard, two-by-fours and other scraps of wood, flattened tin cans and sheets of corrugated tin, even old rusty signs that had once been tossed onto the junk heap. One outer wall of a shack advertised the joys of drinking Coca Cola by featuring the smiling faces of a family sitting in a shiny new convertible. The wall of another shack showed a clean-shaven, obviously well-to-do businessman smoking a certain brand of cigarette. The pictures seemed terribly strange in the middle of these surroundings and served to magnify the wretchedness of the little makeshift town.
All the dwellings had windows cut into them, and though none of the windows had glass, most of them were rigged with some sort of shutters so they could be closed up in bad weather. I was surprised to see that a few odd windows were adorned with curtains--nothing fancy, just old sheets and scraps of material--but curtains nevertheless. I saw it as a desperate bid toward normalcy. A number of the houses also had round tin chimneys poking out of the roofs, indicating that there was some means of cooking inside.
Scattered amid these ramshackle structures were several old tents held up with mismatched pieces of rope and even string. One tent was simply a couple of old blankets sewn together and tossed over a line. Here and there a few Tin Lizzies and dilapidated pickup trucks were parked with flattened tires and rusted exteriors. They were more for shelter, I supposed, than transportation.
Also, as Papa had described it, the camp was laid out in streets, dry dirt streets that like the road leading into the camp spit up little clouds of dust when you walked on them. There was one main street that ran parallel to the river, with smaller streets crossing it. The smaller streets started at the river and stopped about three hundred yards away, near the railroad tracks. Whoever painted the Soo City sign had painted street signs as well, giving them names like Hoover Avenue (the main street), Prosperity Place, and Recovery Way. The streets, I noticed, were clean and free of clutter, and outside the front doors of some of the shacks whisk marks in the dirt gave evidence that the ground had been swept. Here was the city dump, all right, but the inhabitants at least made an effort to keep it orderly.
As we made our way down Hoover Avenue, the place was eerily quiet, the ambiance that of an inhabited ghost town. A few lean chickens strutted dispassionately between the shacks. Here and there a stray dog sauntered along the dusty roads, sniffing at open doorways, looking for a handout from the one group of people least able to oblige. Squirrels scrambled over tin roofs that threw the sun blindingly back at itself, and birds of various kinds pecked vainly at the ground, looking for seeds. Soo City seemed unable to offer up sustenance to any living thing. Not to animals and not to people.
Men sat cross-legged on the ground in groups of twos and threes around small fires. They stared glassy-eyed at the tin cans they had set to heat in the flames. The gray smoke drifted straight upward into the windless air. Occasionally a rumble of conversation reached us, punctuated by laughter, but it was the laughter of the lost: crisp, sarcastic, and trailing off into sighs.
Soo City lacked the bustle of a thriving community, though it was dotted with people going about their daily business. One young fellow, wearing overalls and grease-stained to his elbows, worked under the hood of one of the pickup trucks. Another older man fumbled with a propane stove, trying to get it to work. Still another was using a rock as a hammer to nail a piece of cardboard over a hole in a wall. Other men, less motivated or perhaps enervated by the heat, simply sat on the threshold of their shacks smoking cigarettes, their movements deliberate and weary. Some read newspapers. One man slept directly on the ground with a folded paper over his face. No one smiled, except briefly when they called out their greetings to Papa and me.
"Afternoon, Doc! Got yourself a helper today?"
"Afternoon, men. I'd like you to meet my daughter, Ginny."
"Virginia," I whispered to Papa, and though I knew he had heard, he didn't correct himself. I smiled shyly at the strangers while caps were removed and the men muttered variations of "Glad to know you, miss" and "Howdy do?"
"Anyone got any complaints?" Papa asked.
"Not today, Doc. 'Preciate you asking."
"Let me know if you do."
We walked on. In the next moment the eerie quiet was abruptly punctuated by the rumbling of an approaching train. It had probably left the station only moments before and was just now picking up speed. I heard it--and felt it--before I saw it. The train seemed to be coming out of nowhere, pressing down on us like an unexpected storm, sending its weighty vibrations through the dry ground. As the rumbling grew louder and the train drew nearer, the earth trembled beneath our feet. Shacks shivered; curtains swayed. The train whistle split the air with its cry, leaving me startled and half deaf, and suddenly there it was, this iron monster rolling its tons of dead weight toward the camp. I was certain that it was bearing down on us and that before we could make a move to save ourselves, Papa and I and the entire camp would be flattened as though by a steamroller. But at the last moment the train followed the curve of the tracks and only skirted the town rather than running through it. As its many freight cars rolled by, the entire camp was absorbed by its passing. There was no more eating, no more doing, no more conversation, even no more thoughts. The train absorbed everything, overwhelmed everything so that it alone existed. The thunderous weight, the groaning and screeching of wheels against track, the sudden f
urious wind coughed up by the motion of the rushing cars, the throbbing that seeped right through the bottom of your feet so that your insides rattled. The black leviathan blew its whistle again, though it scarcely needed to warn us of its presence, and belched billows of black smoke into the air. Finally the caboose appeared, rolled by, and passed on with one final ear-shattering squeal of protest, as though casting censure toward the people who had illegally hopped its back and stolen its name. At last the rear end of the caboose disappeared, and while the rumbling became a distant storm again before dying out altogether, the soot from the train's smokestack settled over the town like one last lingering insult.
"How often does the train go by?" I asked Papa.
"About every hour or so."
"Day and night?"
"Not so often at night, maybe every few hours."
"What if it jumps the tracks, Papa?" It seemed to me the small inward curve of the wheels wasn't nearly enough to keep that huge train running on those two smooth rails. Soo City had escaped disaster this time, but one false move and someday that overgrown serpent would be dragging its belly right through the middle of the camp.
"It's always possible, I guess," Papa said, "but we just have to hope it doesn't happen around here."
Even so, even if that train stayed where it belonged, I didn't like it. "Doesn't the noise bother these people?" I asked.
"I guess they get used to it."
"I never would."
"You would if you lived here."
I was glad I didn't live there.
The first woman I saw was washing her family's clothes in an old tin basin. She was a plump woman, with matted hair held firmly in a grip of bobby pins and a web of varicose veins on the back of her thick legs. Her gray dress was soaked through with perspiration. She was turned away from us, so I couldn't see her face, though I could well imagine the weariness etched upon it. We passed close enough for me to notice that the water in the tub was gray and without suds. Apparently she had no soap to use. When she finished washing a piece of clothing, she didn't need to rinse it. She just wrung it out with her hands and threw it over a line of rope strung up between the roof of her own shack and that of her neighbor's. She had no clothespins to hold the clothes on the line. The shirts and pants and dresses that dripped there in the sun were faded and worn, and I supposed they weren't much cleaner now than when the woman had started. And surely they didn't smell like Mother's clean laundry when I hung it up on the line on Monday mornings.
Only slowly--I think it was after I saw those pitiful clothes hanging there like so many weathered scarecrows--did I become conscious of the song that insisted on replaying itself like a broken record in my brain.
So long, sad times.
Go 'long, bad times.
We are rid of you at last....
The woman threw another pile of clothes into the dirty water, stuck her arms in up to the elbows, and went on scrubbing.
Howdy, gay times.
Cloudy, gray times.
You are now a thing of the past....
Walking toward us down Hoover Avenue was a young man about the age of my cousin Jimmy Jr. He must have been young because his skin was smooth and firm and the whiskers on his face were soft like down rather than stiff, but his eyes were middle-aged, and the slump of his shoulders was decidedly old.
'Cause happy days are here again!
He passed us without seeing us, and I pulled my eyes away from his face only to have my gaze shift to another face--an older man smoking in a doorway--that really wasn't a human face at all but a portrait of despair.
The skies above are clear again.
Let us sing a song of cheer again....
He lifted a cigarette to his lips, inhaled deeply, then let his hand fall again to his knee. It hung there, sagging at the wrist, fingers dangling downward like the udder of a cow ready to produce but with no one to milk it. A full and idle hand.
Happy days are here again!
Oh, Papa! But before I could cry out, we had reached the house where the baby had been born, and Papa was giving me last-minute instructions. "Now, be polite and friendly, just as though we were visiting the Mobleys," he said, referring to our next-door neighbors. He knocked gently on the piece of knotty wood that served as a door. After a moment it opened a crack and a face peered out timidly from the darkness inside. The apprehensive eyes brightened when the woman recognized Papa.
"Dr. Eide! How kind," she said, throwing the door open wide. "Come to see Caroline, have you? Come in. Come in."
Papa had to duck his head to get into the dim little shelter. I followed, and once inside thought immediately of a playhouse I used to have in the backyard, long since toppled in a violent windstorm. Charlotte and I had fixed that place up with a throw rug and a table and chairs. We'd hung curtains in the windows and tacked pictures from magazines on the walls. We often had tea parties there, with Charlotte pretending to be the guest, and I the hostess. We'd sit at the table sipping imaginary tea and flashing imaginary diamonds and nasally uttering such inanities as, "Darling, you look simply divine" and "Charmed, I'm sure."
But this woman wasn't pretending, and she didn't even appear to have any chipped cups and saucers like the ones Grandmother Foster had given me to play with. Curtains of a sort did frame the shack's two windows, but the dirt floor had no rug, and the only things hanging on the walls were a few items of clothing suspended from nails. A table and two cane-bottom chairs were pushed up against one wall. A mattress covered with sheets--apparently the only bed in the house--lay on the ground by the opposite wall. Here and there a few packing crates held household items like dishes and cooking utensils. The woman must have done her cooking outside over an open fire because there wasn't a kerosene or propane stove inside.
The most pitiful thing in the shack was the woman herself. I wanted to be polite but couldn't help staring at her. She was thin and pale, and though rather tall, she couldn't have weighed more than ninety or, at most, a hundred pounds. Her sleeveless cotton dress, ringed with sweat along the collar, revealed arms not much thicker than my own. Her oval face was so gaunt as to be almost skeletal, and her large eyes sat deep in their sockets. Her thin fine hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a careless knot. Because of her complete lack of color, she reminded me of an artist's preliminary sketch that hadn't yet been painted. She might have been pretty once, but now she just looked hungry and tired.
"Mrs. Everhart," Papa was saying, "this is my daughter Gin--um, Virginia. She's helping me out on my rounds today."
"Well, now, isn't that fine?" Mrs. Everhart exclaimed, sending a smile in my direction. I noticed that she still had strong white teeth. She held out one slender hand to me. "Pleased to know you, Virginia."
"How do you do?" I responded automatically. Her hand felt light as air in my own, almost as though she weren't really there at all.
"Tom has taken the boys into town with him," the woman said to Papa, "so Caroline and I are spending a quiet afternoon together." Papa nodded and followed the woman's gesture toward a packing crate in one corner of the room. From the crate we heard a soft cry and then the cooing of a baby. The woman continued. "I do believe she knows you're here, Doctor. She's happy to see you again."
With a smile Papa set the large medical bag down on the floor, rolled up his sleeves, and gently lifted the tiny newborn out of the packing crate. The child was naked save for a diaper fashioned from what once might have been a pillowcase. "Well now, Miss Caroline," Papa crooned, "let's just see how we're doing today. Ginny, hand me my other bag, will you?"
While Papa briefly examined the child--listening to her heart with his stethoscope and so forth--Mrs. Everhart invited me to sit at the table. As I settled myself in one of the cane-bottom chairs, I wondered where it had come from. Was it something the Everharts had taken away with them when they left their home--wherever that was--dragging it all the way to Soo City so they'd have something to sit on when they arrived? Or had they found t
his chair, these few bits of furniture, somewhere around the city? In the junkyard, or maybe just on some sidewalk in the residential district, which seemed to be where the furniture of so many displaced people ended up these days. I was curious, but I didn't want to ask. Primly folding my hands in my lap, I wished I could be doing something to help Papa rather than just sitting.
Mrs. Everhart sat in the chair opposite me and asked kindly, "Would you like some water, Virginia? I'm sure you must be thirsty, the heat being what it is." I almost accepted the offer until I remembered where the water came from--the river. Or, if she was lucky, her husband had hauled a bucket from the comfort station a mile away. Neither prospect seemed particularly inviting.
"No, thank you, ma'am. I'm not thirsty, really," I declined politely, though in fact I could still feel the grit of the road on my teeth, and I was longing for a tall glass of Mother's lemonade.