by Ann Tatlock
"It wouldn't feel right, not coming round like always."
"Little bit a rain never hurt no one."
And so, huddled beneath the dripping papers, they sang. Dick Mason and Joe O'Hanlon and Oscar Salinsky and Bellowing Bob Sbarbaro. Alice Hunt and her friend, Mrs. Conley, their husbands and all their children. Steel O'Neil and Shoes and Longjohn and Sherman Browne. Mr. Lucky and T-Bone, who contributed an occasional yelp. And a number of faces that I didn't recognize--whiskered faces, dirt-smudged faces, gaunt faces, weary faces. But, to me, the faces of angels nevertheless. I decided then that these so-called good-for-nothing loafers, these Red vermin, these human parasites and pampered poverty rats--these very ones must have been the angels that climbed down the sunray ladder that afternoon to bring us the hope of heaven.
I still think so, because that evening, sometime during the second stanza of "O Holy Night," Papa opened his eyes.
Epilogue
I have always attributed Papa's recovery to the work of God, of course, but I've never questioned that He chose to send some of His healing grace through that unlikely group of musicians. Papa said he didn't hear the singing until after he woke up, but the funny thing was, as soon as he opened his eyes, he turned his head toward the window where the Soo City singers were gathered. Mother and I knew at once that the opening of his eyes wasn't just a reflex, but that Papa was aware, that he had made a connection with the waking world. And he was back with us.
From the day he opened his eyes, Papa's recovery was steady but slow. All through that long winter and the following spring, he struggled to regain speech, movement, and dexterity. At first he spoke as though his mouth were full of cotton, but that eventually improved. Some words gave him trouble for a long time, but one word he could pronounce without difficulty from the beginning was my name. I just about choked on my joy every time I heard him call me Ginny.
Sometime early on in Papa's convalescence, Mother and I confessed to him how frightened we had been when day after day went by and he didn't wake up. Mother, in an uncharacteristic attempt at humor, chided, "If you were going to wake up anyway, at least you could have done it sooner and saved us all a great deal of worry." To which Papa quipped, "Now, Lillian, you can't blame a doctor for grabbing a little extra sleep when he can. That was the first uninterrupted sleep I've had since I hung out my shingle."
I also confessed to Papa my fear that he would die while still angry with me. Papa thought about that for what seemed a long while. Finally, he took my hand and said, "Ginny, you were becoming a lovely young lady so fast I forgot that in some ways you were still a little girl. You were a little girl faced with a terrible decision the night of the fire, a decision that would have been hard for anyone to make. I know now why you chose not to tell me about the raid. If I'd been in your shoes, I'd have done the same thing for my own father."
"Then you're not angry with me anymore, Papa, about what happened that night?"
"Of course not, Ginny. I stopped being angry the minute I reached Soo City and saw the fire. Then I was angry at the people who pulled the raid, but not at you. I knew you were just trying to protect me."
"That's right, Papa! That's right! I was just trying to protect you."
"I'm so sorry you had to be afraid I'd die angry with you. But I'm glad I'm here to tell you that you mustn't ever think that way again. I've told you before, and I don't want you to forget, that there's nothing greater than my love for you. You understand that, don't you, Ginny?"
"Oh yes, Papa," I cried, throwing my arms around him, "but I'm awfully glad you're here to tell me again!"
Life began in earnest, then, to settle back into a normal routine. For me, that meant going to school, doing chores, visiting Charlotte, and spinning the globe (even though I no longer took the game seriously). One thing that didn't resume, however, was my laboring over the piano. While I was visiting Papa in the hospital, Mother realized I didn't have time to practice. She called Miss Cole to tell her that my lessons would have to be put on hold indefinitely--though no doubt all three of us knew they'd never start up again. I think I heard the echoes of Miss Cole's sigh of relief from all the way across town. Simon continued taking lessons and went on to become quite skilled, and later even Claudia and Molly showed more talent for the instrument than I ever had. Mother must have been satisfied that three of her four children exhibited talent because she never again suggested that I take music lessons, and I never did.
Papa continued to improve, though he was never able to walk again without leaning heavily on a cane. The bullet that shattered his thighbone left him with a nasty limp. And his hands were never quite as strong as they had once been, but since he wasn't a surgeon, that didn't seem to matter too much when it came to his work. He resumed his medical practice in the summer of 1933, and his first rounds included a trip to Soo City. By that time, the little community down by the river had been reestablished for some months. The charred remains of the burned-out camp had been dragged away, the ashes raked over, and new scraps of tin and wood--whatever one could lay a hand on--had been hauled to the riverside and fashioned into shanties. The town was built up roughly along the same dirt roads, except that the main street was renamed Roosevelt Boulevard--a designation that evoked greater hope than Hoover Avenue ever did. Those who made their homes in the camp were largely those who had been there before. They came back to Soo City simply because they still had nowhere else to go. Also, the Soo line kept bringing new residents while it continued to carry some of the transients away. Some time that spring the railroad brought back the missing banjo player, so the Soo City trio once again became a quartet.
I accompanied Papa the first time he went limping back into the camp. He was no doubt heard before he was seen. He approached Soo City whistling "Joy to the World"--slightly off-key, as usual, but loud and clear. You would have thought he was the King of England the way those people flocked to greet him. We'd no sooner passed the "Welcome to Soo City" sign (the original placard still hung from the same tree) when one person after another started hollering that Doc Eide was back. As word traveled quickly over the "Soo City telegraph," people rushed forward out of their shanties and down Roosevelt Boulevard to meet us. They were all there: the Everharts, the Hunts and the Conleys, Dick Mason and Sherman Browne, Steel O'Neil and Shoes and Longjohn, Joe and Oscar and Bellowing Bob and the recently returned banjo player, and Mr. Lucky and T-Bone. T-Bone barked and wagged his tail so wildly he could hardly keep his hind legs on the ground. And there were many others--some whose names I was never quite sure of, others whose names I've forgotten over the years. Papa hobbled forward, his left hand clutching the cane, his right hand extended, and in the next moment he was swallowed up by the crowd and hidden from my view. I stood there on the outskirts of it all, holding Papa's medical bag and feeling very proud. On that hot and dusty afternoon, I made a promise to myself that one day I would be just like Papa.
During the months Papa was recovering, Dr. Hal was the only wage earner among us. It was quite a responsibility for a man of twenty-seven to be the sole provider for twelve people, but somehow he did it, and we always had everything we needed.
I say twelve because late in that fall of 1932, we got Uncle Jim back as well as Cousin Jimmy. Before the jailed strikers could be brought to trial, the governor pardoned them and sent them home. Governor Borgmann was voted back into office in the next election; Sheriff Dysinger was not. I'm not sure whatever became of Clem Dysinger, because after he lost his place as sheriff, he moved his family away from Minnesota. I was glad to see him go and told Papa I hoped Ex-Sheriff Dysinger never showed his hound-dog face in our town again, even if it meant losing Danny for good. Furthermore, I added, I'd consider it just desserts if he couldn't find a job and ended up in a shantytown himself. Let him see what it felt like to go hungry and sleep on the ground while everyone with jobs was calling him a pampered poverty rat and a Red vermin.
Thinking Papa would agree with me, I was chagrined when my father frowned
and said, "Now, Ginny, two wrongs don't make a right, you know. Sheriff Dysinger shouldn't have raided Soo City the way he did, but we can't allow ourselves to go on feeling ill will toward him."
"But, Papa!" I protested. "He might have been the one to beat you senseless and leave you for dead!"
"Then he's the one we need to forgive, isn't he?" Papa asked quietly.
I narrowed my eyes and huffed a bit. "Have you forgiven him, Papa?" I asked.
Papa offered me a sheepish grin. "Well, Ginny, I'm trying. There are those moments when I still want to spit fire at the thought of him, but when they come I just have to forgive Clem all over again. Eventually I'll have the matter settled."
It went against the grain, the thought of forgiving a man who had brought so much harm to my father and my friends. But I'd already promised myself I was going to be like Papa, and this gave me the chance to get started. Papa explained that if we went on hating Clem Dysinger because he hated the people of Soo City, then we were all caught up in a cycle of hate that spun around and around and never accomplished anything. "Only forgiveness can break that cycle of destruction," Papa said. It took me a while of teeth-grinding contemplation and no little bit of brooding, but I finally told Papa that I, too, was willing to forgive Sheriff Dysinger for what he'd done.
So anyway, as I was saying, Uncle Jim came home, and not long afterward Jimmy Jr. found his way back to us on the Soo line. He had gone first to the Dubbins' old house and found it deserted, but he figured right away he would find his family living with us. He showed up on our doorstep half starved and bone thin, but it didn't take long before Mother's and Aunt Sally's cooking filled him out again. We were all so glad to have him back, especially Aunt Sally, that we didn't mind his being one more mouth to feed and one more body needing a place to sleep. He entertained us for months with his stories of riding the rails until Uncle Jim made him stop when Luke started talking about hopping a train and heading west.
Neither Uncle Jim nor Cousin Jimmy could find steady work for quite a while, but we told ourselves it would just be a matter of time before the new president got the clogged wheels of the economy oiled and moving again. Even before he was elected, President Roosevelt was talking about his New Deal, a "three-R" plan that would offer relief, recovery, and reform for the country. All sorts of agencies were formed under the New Deal, two of which helped our family directly. In 1935, my uncle got a job through the Works Progress Administration that earned him sixty-three dollars a month, and the following year Jimmy Jr. went off with the Civilian Conservation Corps and began mailing home fifty dollars a month. With Papa, Dr. Hal, Uncle Jim, and Jimmy Jr. all contributing to the household kitty, we felt downright rich again.
Of course, when Uncle Jim came home from jail, I once more ended up on the couch in Papa's study. I didn't have a room of my own again until 1937, when Uncle Jim could finally afford to move his family to a small house not far from ours. Even then I had my old room back for only my final summer at home before I left for nursing school--at which time Claudia took it over. It didn't matter. If the only thing the Depression took from me was one small room, then I was blessed.
Even though prosperity eventually returned to our country, we never quite made it back to those wild and carefree days of the Twenties. It was as though we had left the innocence of childhood behind and grown up into the responsibilities of adulthood. America became a superpower, a world leader, and discovered that life means facing things like cold wars and hot wars, civil rights battles and women's rights battles, a decline in values and an increase in apathy, and what the writers came to call angst. I grew up, too, and discovered how the overarching troubles of the world affect the individuals who live in it, and that sometimes the dreams of youth are flattened out and reshaped by the larger circumstances of life.
For me there were no European honeymoons, no gondola rides through Venice, no midnight walks beside the River Seine. I never knew what it was to sit on a hotel balcony staring up at a full moon with my newly wedded husband. Charlotte married, of course--three times, in fact--and sent me postcards from each of her African honeymoons. Those postcards were generally slow in reaching me, since they had to make their way into the jungle, up over mountains, or across deserts, depending on where in Central or South America I happened to be working at the time.
When I inevitably neared the half-century mark, I abandoned all hope of marriage and resigned myself to the ranks of Miss Cole and the other spinsters I had so pitied and secretly feared. But it wasn't with grief that I gave up my dream. Rather, I felt only a sense of wonder that the single life could be so fulfilling.
It was, of course, just when I accepted my solitary existence that I finally met my husband, a fellow medical missionary who--whether by sheer coincidence or by some divine whimsy, I've never known--was named Charles Chaplen. Spelled one letter different from the Charlie of the silver screen, but nevertheless pronounced the same. "Dear Charlotte," I wrote, "you'll never believe who I met wandering around the wilds of Guatemala...." She wrote back asking whether his feet stuck out like a ballerina's and if he could walk more than three steps without falling down. She later sent matching canes and bowler hats as a wedding gift when I told her Charlie Chaplen and I were engaged.
Charles proposed to me late one night while we were scrubbing for emergency surgery. When I said yes, we elected not to seal the engagement with a kiss, for fear of spreading germs. The next day he presented me with a silver ring he had bartered for in the marketplace in Guatemala City, using the Spanish he was only just learning (he was a newcomer to the mission field) and finding out later he'd ended up spending more than the original asking price. He slipped it on my finger while we sat in a leaky dugout canoe that threatened to capsize and toss us into the waters of Lake Amatitlán. It had been our intention to watch the sun set over the mountains from this romantic vantage point, but a storm blew in and left us soaked and shivering before we could paddle our rather dubious vessel back to shore. We were married in the chapel on the hospital compound, and contrary to our original plans for a brief escape, we spent our wedding night tending to the victims of a devastating fire in one of the nearby villages. Nevertheless, the sweetest words I ever heard were muttered in the midst of the chaos that night when Charles asked of one of the orderlies, "Manuel, get my wife some water, will you? She looks like she's about to faint." That was the first time Charles called me his wife.
It was not exactly what I had dreamed of as a child while spinning the globe with Charlotte, but I was far happier than I ever could have imagined all those years before. My husband and I, until our recent retirement, spent twenty years together immersed in poverty, hardship, filth, and disease--and, more importantly, in the incomparable joy that arose from the midst of it all each time we discovered we had offered a sliver of desperately needed hope that otherwise might not have been there.
And that is what I tell my grandnephews and grandnieces--all the grandchildren of Simon, Claudia, and Molly--when they ask me why I chose to spend my life as a missionary nurse working among "those uncivilized people in the jungles of Latin America." I remember Papa and give them the truest answer I know to give: "Because it made me happy."
The End
*****
A Room of My Own
Copyright © 2011, Ann Tatlock
Interior Design by Behind the Gift. • www.behindthegift.com
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-9822065-8-4
Print ISBN-10: 0-9822065-8-5
Cover art by Fred Butts, Copyright 2011
Originally published by Bethany House Publishers, a division of Baker Publishing Group.
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A Room of My Own
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Copyright © 2011 by Ann Tatlock. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
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Version 2011.8.30
I'll Watch the Moon, by Ann Tatlock
Award-winning novelist Ann Tatlock once again lovingly crafts a story that will touch readers' hearts while illuminating a powerful spiritual truth.
Set in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 1948 polio epidemic, this is the story of Nova Tierney, who desperately longs for a father. It also is the story of her mother, Catherine, angry at a God in whom she no longer believes, and Josef Karski, an Auschwitz survivor whose trusting spirit refuses to be subdued, even by his heart-wrenching past.