Serendipity Green

by Rob Levandoski

  “Thanks to New Worlders like you,” someone in the audience calls out. Clap-a-clap-clap.

  Carl Clegg, a hog farmer from Bartholomew Township, complains that his wife once saw a “boy no older than thirteen checking out a how-to book on homosexualism.”

  “We don’t have how-to books on homosexuality,” board member Margaret Bale answers.

  “Queer,” someone shouts. Clap-a-clap-clap.

  Darren Frost, in whose house EDIT was born, rises with a stack of pornographic pictures he’s downloaded from the library’s computers. “Men having sex with men,” he says, passing the pictures out. “Women having sex with women. People having sex with animals. Naked little girls and boys not even developed yet having sex. Too bad you don’t have color printers in the libraries, then you could really see how disgusting they are.” Clap-a-clap-clap.

  After all the members of EDIT who want to speak, speak, and Darren Frost’s pictures are gathered up and slapped down like God’s gavel on the table, the president of the library board, smiling comfortably, introduces the library director, Dr. Venus Willendorf.

  Dr. Willendorf unfolds her arms and stands up. As is always the case when she publicly presents herself like this, every woman in the room immediately feels as barren as Abraham’s Sarah while every man immediately feels the need to father a thousand children. This is because Dr. Venus Willendorf’s breasts have the dimension of ostrich eggs, and her narrow waist attaches these magnificent orbs to a high and wide set of hips that frame a lush and protruding lap. So men and women alike start to breath uneasily as she rises, knowing that her mind is just as fertile as her breasts and hips; that when her lake-blue eyes are finished washing over them, she will slowly part her heavily lipsticked lips, and drown them with her estrogen-enriched confidence.

  And so Dr. Venus Willendorf begins: “What children read or look at—whether in a book or on a computer screen, whether at home or at the library—is ultimately the responsibility of their parents.”

  EDIT boos en masse.

  “Librarians are neither censors, baby-sitters, nor surrogate parents.”

  EDIT boos en masse.

  “Despite its obvious potential for abuse and misuse by some, the Internet is an important new learning tool. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, ‘The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.’”

  EDIT boos en masse.

  “Not counting the three successive nights your Mr. Frost spent surfing for his pictures, there have only been five reported incidents of anyone, adults or children, using the library’s computers to view pornography. We need to keep our cool and not throw the baby out with the bath water.”

  EDIT boos en masse.

  “Finally …”

  EDIT applauds en masse.

  “… while the Wyssock County Public Library District cannot in good conscience stop offering materials that some might from time to time find objectionable, we have heard your concerns, loud and clear, and we will study ways to discourage children from viewing adult-oriented material, without infringing on parental rights or responsibilities.” Dr. Willendorf sits down and folds her arms over those breasts.

  EDIT boos en masse. Hisses en masse, too.

  “Please!” begs the president of the library board, holding up his hands in a half surrender, comfortable smile still spread across his face. “I hope you weren’t expecting us to march over to the computer terminals with baseball bats right this minute!”

  The president’s attempt at humor falls flat and, en masse, EDIT demands that the library board do exactly that. “I’ll supply the bats,” Darren Frost, president of the Little League, offers. The meeting ends.

  As EDIT retreats down the rows of folding chairs borrowed from Barrow Brothers and the Moose Club, the library board president goes straight for Katherine Hardihood. The library board president is D. William Aitchbone. “It’s going to be hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube on this one, isn’t it?” he says.

  “I just hope the board doesn’t fold,” she answers.

  Aitchbone chuckles, knowing exactly what she means. “Now Katherine, I may wear a politician’s hat on the village council, but I wear a librarian’s hat here.”

  Katherine Hardihood twists the white knit cap in her hands, wanting to pull it straight down over Bill Aitchbone’s head, until only his Adam’s apple is showing. “I hope so.”

  He changes the subject—to the subject he cares about most. “So, what do you think about my privatization plan, Katherine? I saw you at the council meeting.”

  “Of course you saw me. Other than Sam Guss, who else goes to those boring meetings?”

  “It would be good if Howie Dornick went once and a while.”

  Katherine Hardihood pulls the knit cap over her own head. “I’m sure he hears what goes on.”

  “Let’s hope he does more than hear,” D. William Aitchbone says. “Let’s hope he listens.”

  “Whether he listens or not is up to him.”

  “He needs a good friend right now, Katherine. Someone to help him do the right thing.”

  Katherine Hardihood puts on her mittens, wishing they were brass knuckles. She turns to leave. D. William Aitchbone puts his hand on her shoulder and swivels her about, just the way he had swiveled Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne that night by the gazebo when the February snow was blowing horizontally. “I’m ready to stand up to these EDIT people, whatever it costs politically. Between you and me, they’re a bunch of nutballs. But they do have a right to have some input.”

  “Input, Bill?”

  “Maybe put one of them on the board. There’ll be an empty seat in the fall. Reverend Biscobee’s a good man. Be good to have someone from the clergy on the board. What do you think, Katherine?”

  What Katherine Hardihood thinks—what Katherine Hardihood knows—is that D. William Aitchbone is threatening her with her job, just as he is threatening Howie Dornick with his, just to get a coat of paint on that little two-story frame house on South Mill, just down the street from his impressive Queen Anne. “I’m just a branch librarian, Bill. Who sits on the board is up to somebody’s else.”

  “But you know I count on you. You’re one smart lady.”

  When Katherine gets home from the library board meeting she takes another package of rhubarb from the freezer.

  Howie Dornick goes to the door. “Katherine? Not another rhubarb pie?”

  “You enjoyed the last one so much, I figured, ‘Jiminy Cricket, what the heck!’”

  He leads her into the kitchen, feeling like a turd because he threw half of the last rhubarb pie away. “I’ve still got coffee in my Thermos, if you’d like some?”

  “Coffee’d be nice.”

  He pours two cups. She finds the silverware drawer on the second try and slices the pie. He takes two of his mother’s best plates from the cupboard. Each taking their own plate and cup, they shuffle to the living room. They eat as many forkfuls of pie as they can without talking. The silence gets to Howie Dornick first. “I suppose you want to talk about me painting my house again?”

  “He’s really turning the screws, Howard.”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna paint it.”

  “He’s holding me personally responsible,” she says. She tells him of D. William Aitchbone’s threat to put the Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee on the library board.

  Howie Dornick feels a double turd now. “I didn’t even know Bill Aitchbone was president of the library board.”

  “He’s president of everything.”

  “Including my ass.”

  “He’s president of everybody’s ass.”

  Both having used the word ass, they go back to eating pie until their embarrassment passes.

  “He’s intent on being the next mayor,” Katherine says when she has no more pie to eat. “That means Squaw Days has to be perfect.”

  “You wouldn’t quit your job just because Ray Biscobee got on the board, would you?”

  “Jiminy Cricket! No! And Bill Aitchbone
knows I wouldn’t. He knows I’d stay at the library even if Ray Biscobee got every book taken off the shelves but the Bible. Just like he knows I’ll stay on the Squaw Days Committee no matter how much of a mockery they make of it.”

  “I’ve always thought Squaw Days was kind of fun,” Howie Dornick admits. “I know what you mean, though. Celebrating an Indian woman and her papoose getting clubbed to death by two white men is kind of weird. And there is lots of clean-up afterwards.”

  Neither have anymore pie to eat. But they do have stale instant coffee to sip. And so they sip. As unappetizing as they are too each other, they are nevertheless a lonely man and a lonely woman, of approximately the same age, sitting alone together, in March, the month when more than the ground thaws. “I didn’t come here to make you feel guilty, Howard. I just want you to understand how adamant Bill Aitchbone is about this. That’s all.”

  Howie Dornick, of course, is feeling guilty, though not about Katherine Hardihood’s predicament. He is feeling guilty about his half birth and about his attachment to his mother after all these years. He rubs his eyes until a universe of miniature stars explode on his eyelids. “I can’t afford to buy any paint. Not on what the village pays me. It’s all I can do to eat and pay my utilities.”

  Katherine has spent her life learning facts and gathering them into truths. So she knows that Howie Dornick’s refusal to paint his house has nothing to do with how little money the village pays him, just as she knows that D. William Aitchbone’s obsession with Howie’s unpainted house has nothing to do with Squaw Days being perfect, or even with his need to be mayor. This is all about Artie Brown’s wayward sperm. Just as Howie Dornick is the illegitimate son of Artie Brown and Patsy Dornick, D. William Aitchbone’s wife, Karen, is the legitimate daughter of Artie Brown and Melody Ring. Even though his wife’s birth has been sanctified by both God and the Wyssock County Recorder’s Office, the existence of Howie Dornick taints her. Taints their marriage. Taints him. The raw gray clapboards on this little two-story frame are not Howie Dornick’s shame. They are D. William Aitchbone’s shame and D. William Aitchbone’s illegitimacy. “If it’s just the money—”

  Howie begins waving his arms, as if a swarm of wasps just flew out of the cracks in the ceiling plaster. “I’m not taking any of your money, Katherine. You don’t make much more than I do.”

  Actually, Katherine Hardihood knows for a fact that she makes quite a bit more than he does. “I hate Bill Aitchbone as much as you, Howard. And I’d say stand up to him regardless of how much funny business he pulls, except—” She searches the bottom of her cup for a time-delaying swallow. There is only a single thick drop. She lifts the cup to her lips and waits for the drop to trickle onto her tongue. “—except that your house is an eyesore, Howard, and everyone in Tuttwyler, including me, wishes for godsakes you’d paint it.”

  Howie Dornick’s arms are now wrapped tightly around his waist, as if those invisible wasps have found their way down his throat and are now building a hive inside his belly. “I ain’t gonna paint it.”

  Katherine Hardihood finds herself on his side of the sofa, her arms around his shoulders, her pencil-point librarian’s chin dug into his maintenance engineer’s clavicle. “Oh, Howie. Let’s have some more pie.”

  7

  Red.

  Yellow.

  Green.

  The cars on Tocqueville stop. The cars on South Mill go.

  D. William Aitchbone drives through the intersection. He’s spent the day expediting divorces in New Waterbury again. March is getting on. Days are stretching out. Temperatures are rising. It hasn’t snowed in three days. That morning he saw the heads of his wife’s daffodils poking through the mulch. That morning he received the news from the Sparrow Hill Nursing Home that his uncle Andy has suffered another stroke. It was his third in two years and likely to be his last.

  Andy was the last Aitchbone to make a living farming. Because he never married—strange since he was as manly as any Aitchbone male—his four-hundred acre farm on Three Fish Creek will go entirely to his nephew, one D. William Aitchbone, who is now driving past his wife and children and his impressive soapy white, green-shuttered Queen Anne, for a strategy session with himself at the Daydream Beanery. Then he will go to the March meeting of the Squaw Days Committee.

  D. William Aitchbone hands his Coffee Club card to the counter girl with the blackcherry lips. All of the little boxes are punched. She makes him the free cappuccino he has coming. He pays for a raisin scone. “They say it’s going to hit fifty tomorrow,” the counter girl says.

  Despite the dulcimer music and the anticipation of his uncle Andy’s death, Aitchbone’s strategy session goes well. At 7:25 he heads for the library, his Burberry open and flapping.

  Everyone is there, even Kevin Hassock, who has just been served with divorce papers.

  Aitchbone acknowledges him with a commiserating, “Kevin.”

  Kevin Hassock, eyes fixed on his shoes, nods back. “Bill.”

  “Oh, Bill,” Delores Poltruski says, “thank you so much for getting that box elder limb cut down. The Knights of Columbus are simply walking on water.”

  “The real thanks goes to Mayor Sadlebyrne,” D. William Aitchbone says, making sure there is a smidgen of humility in his voice. “I’m not sure how you did it, Woody, but thanks for getting Howie Dornick off his duff.”

  After the mayor nods, D. William Aitchbone initiates a round of applause. Only Katherine Hardihood doesn’t join in.

  “Now if we can just get Howie to paint his house,” Delores Poltruski says.

  “Amen,” Dick Mueller says.

  “If I were a betting man, I’d bet this will be the year Howie paints it,” D. William Aitchbone says. His courtroom smile flies around the table and lands on Katherine Hardihood’s sour face like a bat on a barn beam. And so the meeting begins:

  Dick Mueller reports that the Chirping Chipmunks unicycle troupe from Akron will indeed participate in the parade. “They’ll be happy to come back as long as we don’t put them behind the mounted color guard from the sheriff’s department again.”

  Dick Mueller’s discussion of the parade is a terrible temptation for D. William Aitchbone. Sweet Jesus, how he wants to tell them about his coup. But even though Victoria Bonobo has talked to her brother, and her brother has talked directly to the Vice President, and even though the VP says he’ll be happy to ride in the Squaw Days parade if he can squeeze it in his schedule, he knows it would be imprudent to spill the beans just yet. “Sounds like the parade is shaping up, Dick. My only recommendation is that you stay fluid. You never know who might come in at the last minute, or who might have to cancel.”

  “No problem,” Dick Mueller says, knowing only too well that the chairman is right. Two years earlier the parade order had to be changed at the last minute when two members of the Tuttwyler Senior Squares square-dancing troupe were sidelined, Calvin Dubin with a bad case of the shingles and Margaret Snyder with pinkeye.

  Delores Poltruski reports that there will be at least three more crafts exhibitors than last year, proof, she says, that Squaw Days is growing by leaps and bounds.

  If only she knew how big those leaps and bounds were, Aitchbone thinks, picturing himself seated next to the VP in one of Bud Love’s classic Chevrolet convertibles, waving and waving and waving.

  Paula Varney reports that financial contributions from the merchants are coming in slow but sure, and that the sidewalk sale will be bigger than ever. “Wal-mart is not only going to put out their leftover summer things, but some of their back-to-school clothes,” she says. “I bet before it’s all over, Kmart does the same.”

  “I bet they do, too,” Delores Poltruski says.

  Donald Grinspoon reports that the tobacco-spitting competition will be moved from Sunday to Saturday, even though the pie-eating contest also is held that day. “Reverend Biscobee has some real concerns about the use of tobacco being glorified on the Sabbath,” he says. “I figured, why ruffle anybody’s feathers?�
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  “I think you’re right on target,” D. William Aitchbone says, wondering if the VP could be talked into judging one, or both, of those events. Footage like that would surely give Squaw Days some national coverage.

  “The fireworks will still be on Friday night, won’t they?” Dick Mueller asks the former mayor.

  “Oh, sure,” Donald Grinspoon assures him. “Fireworks and Friday night go together like Limburger cheese and onions.”

  When Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne reports he’ll be sending village employees a memo by the end of April regarding their assignments for the festival, the former mayor can’t hold his tongue. “I’d get it out by the middle of April, if I were you. People plan their vacations early. I remember one year half the fire department was off walleye fishing during Squaw Days. If there’d been a fire, God only knows what would’ve happened.”

  The new mayor’s Democratic pride gets the better of his manners. “I think the end of April is soon enough.”

  “I don’t know,” the old Republican answers. “You’re cutting it close.”

  Aitchbone enjoys their joust. It is, after all, so meaningless. When the VP’s visit is confirmed—probably in another month or two—there’ll be Secret Service, White House advisers, and field people from the Republican National Committee running over Tuttwyler like ants at a picnic. He offers a compromise: “Maybe you could send out a memo in the middle of April telling everyone not to make any vacation plans until they get your end-of-April memo.” The resulting laugh breaches the partisan divide. D. William Aitchbone now turns to Kevin Hassock. “How are the rides shaping up?”

  Kevin Hassock tries, but is unable to make eye contact with the man overseeing the destruction of his eleven-year marriage. “Everything’s hunky-dory.”

  Now it is Katherine Hardihood’s turn to report. “The gazebo band started rehearsals last Tuesday and the Re-Enactment people start rehearsing Monday,” she says. “Al Warner found six new arrowheads in his soybean field for the historic display. So everything’s hunky-dory with me, too.”