This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  The farm boy waited at the raised window overlooking Third Street until Chester came out of the boardinghouse and walked off under the green canopy of drooping willows toward downtown. Alvin watched a squirrel leap into the walnut tree from the rooftop next door and scramble down the trunk. He listened to one of the painters laughing downstairs. A pair of motorcars rattled past, one in either direction. Although Alvin felt tired enough to lie back down on the bed, he went to wash his face instead and use the toilet. He took the Illinois wristwatch out of his trouser pocket and saw that it was almost noon, so he decided to go back downstairs and wait for Clare on the shady veranda in the fresh air. He saw Percy Webster entering a bedroom at the front end of the upper hall as he locked his own door. Virgil Platt had quit his Bible recitations, but Alvin heard the floorboards creak as the old man continued to pace restlessly about his room. The farm boy took the rear staircase down to the lobby.

  The door to the back porch was tied open to a draft against the painters’ turpentine. Alvin glanced inside the kitchen and found it empty and looked into the dining room and saw Mrs. Burritt at the table with a cup of tea and a small book. Then he heard the painters carrying another ladder up the main staircase and Clare speaking to the postman. He had butterflies in his stomach when he walked into the lobby and saw her at the front desk. She was dressed in a pink apron frock with a cherry blossom print and dainty gold earrings. She looked swell. The postman left a brown package on the desk with Clare and went back outdoors. Upstairs, the painters struggled to maneuver the tall ladder across the second floor landing.

  Alvin approached the desk. “Hello.”

  She raised her eyes, yet barely smiled. “Oh, hello there.”

  “I ain’t seen you this morning.”

  “Mother kept me home to help with the wash,” she said, hardly looking at him.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Clare took the package off the desk and put it into the office. When she came back out again, she told Alvin, “I’m afraid I also ate too much cotton candy last night. I had the awfulest indigestion before breakfast.”

  The office telephone rang and Clare went to answer it, closing the door behind her. Alvin heard Mrs. Burritt’s voice in the parlor. Then the dog next door began barking as a pack of boys ran past on the sidewalk out front. When Clare hung up the telephone and came out, the farm boy asked, “Did you see that little girl home all right last night?”

  Clare sat herself on a stool behind the desk. “Well, now that was the strangest thing. Do you know she never said a word to me about where she lived? Not one peep. Instead, she made me bring her to my house and fix her a cup of hot cocoa and a plate of sugar cookies.”

  “Is that so?”

  “And the little dear insisted on sleeping in bed with me. I was so confused. She wouldn’t tell me her name or where she lived or her mother’s name or anything about herself at all. But when I woke up in the morning, she was gone.”

  “Just like that?”

  Her face brightened somewhat. “Yes, isn’t it peculiar?”

  “You bet it is.” Alvin hated youngsters, particularly ones who did nothing but moan and blubber for their mommas. Everyone in the family thought he’d have a big family one day, but Alvin didn’t pay them any mind because he knew he would probably be dead before he ever got married.

  “Well, that’s not all. After breakfast, Mother came into the kitchen claiming that some of her silverware was missing and that she was sure the child was a thief. I said, ‘Mother, you’re absurd,’ but she told Father and he’s already informed the police. Then there was that beating with poor Mr. Bowen and the clown on Cobb Street last night, you know.”

  “Yeah, I heard about it.”

  “Well, it’s all quite a mystery, don’t you agree? First the child and where she came from, and then that circus clown attacking poor Mr. Bowen?”

  “It sure is.” He wondered if Spud told her about Chester. Wouldn’t that be a surprise?

  Clare lowered her eyes. “I can’t go with you on a picnic today. I’m sorry.”

  “Huh?” The farm boy felt another swarm of butterflies fill up his gut. “How come?”

  “Father says that since Mr. Bowen was attacked by circus people, he swears to tan me with a willow switch if I have anything more to do with their crowd so long as they’re here in Icaria. So that’s why I can’t go to the circus tonight and I can’t have a picnic with you.”

  “Well, I ain’t in the circus.”

  “Pardon?” Clare’s eyes narrowed.

  What else could he do now but tell her the truth? “Fact is, I ain’t never been in a circus, neither. That was just a made-up story.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Alvin shrugged. “It’s how come you ain’t seen my act last night, ’cause I ain’t got one. I had to buy a ticket to get in just like everybody else.”

  Clare’s expression darkened. “You mean, you lied to me?”

  “No, I let my friend do the fibbing. I just didn’t set him straight, is all.”

  “Is he in the circus?”

  “Nope.”

  Her voice quivered, grew angry. “That’s so deceitful.”

  “I know it,” the farm boy admitted, suddenly realizing his confession might have been a mistake. Aunt Marie had always told him that honesty in love was the best tactic, but maybe she was wrong.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, how about that picnic?”

  Clare rushed into the office and slammed the door behind her.

  Alvin gave her a minute or so, then rang the desk bell, hoping she would change her mind.

  She yelled at him to go away.

  Dejected and feverish, he went out onto the veranda. Avoiding the clutter of boxes and wicker and potted plants, he walked to the side porch and watched a woman in a calico skirt and cotton shawl carry a basketful of green apples up the street. Next door, a man in a white jacket and trousers lounged in a hammock chair smoking a pipe. One of the painters came out with a bucket of dirty gray water and poured it into the mulberry bushes beneath the veranda, then went back indoors again. Alvin heard the telephone ring. He considered trying to explain to Clare about the dwarf and Chester and how they had come to the circus. All he wanted to do was go on a picnic with her and tell her how pretty she was and let her know he’d write letters to her even if he got sent back to the sanitarium. He had worked it all out before breakfast. If she asked, he’d tell her everything. Of course, the trouble now was that she was too cross at him to listen.

  Looking up, he saw Rascal scurry along the narrow alley beside the boardinghouse toward the rear garden. Alvin shouted after him, then hustled down the front steps and across the lawn and followed the dwarf’s path through the scraggly ironweed and wilting sunflowers into the backyard where he found Rascal on his knees behind a damp patch of rhubarb by the rear garden fence.

  “What’re you doing there?” the farm boy asked, tiptoeing past a summer growth of sweetpea and moss roses. The tool shed in the back corner of the yard was open. The dwarf stirred cow dung into the soil with a trowel next to a squat terra-cotta pedestal. Bees swarmed in the gooseberry nearby.

  Without interrupting his labor, Rascal replied, “I’m planting red tulips as a declaration of my love for sweet Josephine, and blue hyacinths as a foreswearing of constancy.”

  “Do you remember this ain’t your yard?”

  “I’ve already obtained permission from Mr. Farrell this morning. In fact, he was pleased to grant me the favor.”

  “You seen Spud?” Alvin liked that name. He thought maybe one day he’d go by Spud Pendergast.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, what’s the big idea? We ain’t stayin’ past tonight.”

  “Home is where we hang our hat, don’t you agree?”

  The farm boy walked over to the back fence. Across the road in a poultry yard, chickens squawked at a small brown terrier chasing about in the dirt. After studying the surroundings to be sur
e no one was listening, Alvin told the dwarf, “Chester’s got a plan doped out for tonight. He was just upstairs.”

  Rascal planted his autumn flowers and took up a tin watering pot and sprinkled the black soil. After that, he washed off his hands with the garden hose and wiped them dry on his shirt and got up. “Isn’t it pitiable?”

  “How’s that?”

  “To be at once a tee-total failure and utterly malign.”

  The dwarf stared at his planting ground with undisguised satisfaction. He emptied the watering pot, then collected the trowel and a muddy tan-fork and dropped them both into it.

  “You ought to watch out what you say.”

  “I’m not at all worried.”

  “What’re you so high-hatted about?” asked Alvin, irritation rising with his fever. What made the dwarf think he was all that brave? He hadn’t stood up since Hadleyville. He was nobody’s hero.

  “Consider whether thou art not, thyself, the cause of thy misfortunes; if so, be more prudent for the future.”

  Alvin smiled. “Yes, we have no bananas.”

  He chuckled at his own joke.

  The dwarf glared back at him. “This is quite serious! I’ve had a reading this morning and discovered how close is the link between jeopardy and fortune. Indeed, our very fates are defined through the subtlest of actions by ourselves and those with whom we’ve chosen to associate.”

  “Aw, go on.”

  “Associate not thyself with wicked companions, and thy journey will be accomplished in safety.”

  Alvin raised an eyebrow. “You seen a fortune teller today?”

  The dwarf nodded gravely. “The preternaturally gifted Madame Zelincka, as peculiarly constituted an individual as I’ve ever encountered. She’s invited us to a sitting in her parlor this evening. I assured her we’d both attend.”

  “Well, I ain’t a-going. That’s nothing but a humbug.”

  Rascal smiled. “Despair not; thy love will meet its due return.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You see, I took the liberty of inquiring on your behalf. Through Madame Zelincka’s reading, those incorporeal intelligences on the other side of the veil communicated a message of joy and confidence to your sorrowing soul. She counsels patience.”

  “She knew about Clare?” the farm boy asked, somewhat incredulously. Aunt Hattie swore by palmistry and spiritistic divinations, while Uncle Henry always maintained it was bunk.

  The dwarf nodded. “Madame Zelincka interprets emanations from all brains, near and far. In fact, she says I may be able to speak with my mother this evening if the atmospheric conditions in her spirit-room remain constant. I’m very excited. Madame Zelincka met my mother several years ago during a mesmeric trance and says she is more than willing to remove the veil between our world and the ethereal plane to reunite a loving son with his mother. She’s obviously quite experienced with spirit-communions.”

  “You mean, conjuring ghosts?”

  “Spiritual intercourse,” the dwarf corrected. “My friend, such manifestations have not been banished by the electric light. There’s an unseen world that surrounds us, awaiting a purifying flood of influence from the spirits, radiant fore-gleams of our future informed by our past. Even Buster Brown says ghosts can’t do us any harm. Nobody can do you as much harm as yourself. All that glitters is not gold and all that’s mysterious is not ghosts in this world of wonders. I’ve decided I’m going to be good and find out all about it on the other side of Jordan.”

  The farm boy watched a scrawny goat chewing on tufts of grass in a pen next to the poultry yard. He shook his head. “That’s a lot of hooey. If you ask me, there ain’t no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Oh? How would you know that?”

  “Well, I ain’t never seen one,” Alvin replied, giving the garden fence a shake. He guessed if there were any real ghosts, he and the dwarf would’ve been paid a visit by at least one of those unfortunate souls Chester had murdered this summer. Down the road, the postman emerged from an old framehouse. Alvin watched a woman in curlpapers wave to him from the second-story window.

  “Have you ever seen the Queen of England?”

  “No, but I seen pictures.”

  “Well, Madame Zelincka has a grand collection of spirit photographs atop the secretary in her office. I’m sure she’ll be happy to show them to you this evening.”

  Fatigued enough for a nap, Alvin shrugged. “What’s the use?”

  Taking up the tin watering pot, the dwarf looked him straight in the eye. “Listen here: in Hadleyville last March I hired a tarot reading in my bedroom that predicted, ‘If thou goest to a far country, thy lot will be to undergo many perils.’ Isn’t that remarkable? Actually, I thought I’d never leave that house alive, yet look how distant I’ve traveled since then, how many miles from that grave Auntie named my home. Has this all been hallucination? Although there are mechanisms in place at the circus tonight that will free us from the quagmire we’ve blundered into, what about tomorrow? What then? I’ve never been more determined in my life to see beyond the horizon. This evening, Madame Zelincka has promised to offer those of us seated in her spirit circle a vision of Jordan and immortal truth. When I hear my dear mother’s voice, I’ll be assured that there are, indeed, other lives and other purposes than this.”

  The farm boy swatted at a passing bee. “Talking ghosts?”

  Walking over to the tool shed, the dwarf replied: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  At twilight on Beecher Street, dried summer leaves blew uphill along the old plank sidewalk. Lamps glowed behind curtained windows of the tall elegant homes obscured under magnolia and sugar maples and flowering oak. Cats hid in poison moonseed and peeked out through iron gates. Bluestreaking meteors raced across the cold black sky. Near the top of the street, the dwarf climbed the narrow stairs of a dark Victorian and rang the brass doorbell. Alvin waited by a garden urn on the brick walkway below. A shadow clouded the stained glass side panel as a young man in denim and suspenders came to answer the door. Summoned by the dwarf, the farm boy followed up the wooden steps and past the young man into the house.

  Effluvium of incense and amber-lit gasoliers filled the entry hall. Turkish carpet runners of indigo and crimson ran the length of the house and up a dark-wood staircase to the second floor. All the walls were decorated in olivegreen anaglypta and Morris floral patterns, and the ceiling overhead was painted with golden sunbursts and wild roses. The scratchy phonograph recording of a nocturne by Chopin played in the front parlor to the left where the dwarf hurried straight off upon entering the house. Welcomed by the young man, Madame Zelincka’s son Albert, the farm boy was shown through a knotted rope portière into a formal parlor illuminated by electric tulip sconces and oil table lamps. Seated next to the phonograph cabinet on a rosewood chesterfield in the bay window were an earnest little man and his wife, both in elegant evening dress as if out for a night at the opera. Across the room, the dwarf occupied a velvet easy-chair by the fireplace whose mantelpiece of carved marble resembled the entablature of a Greek temple. Behind him, the double doors leading to another room were closed. Mahogany bookshelves and potted palms flanked the arching doorframe.

  “So, this is Alvin,” said the woman, her blue silver-beaded gown sparkling in the reflected light. “What a fine-looking boy.” She offered a warm smile. “Dear, my name is Edith, and this is my husband, Oscar Elliotsen.”

  Oscar rose from his seat to greet the farm boy. His oiled-hair and thin-waxed moustache glistened as he crossed the carpet to shake hands. “Good to know you, son.”

  “Yes, sir.” Alvin felt himself blush. They were treating him like a king. How come?

  “I heard quite a lot about you this morning,” his wife added, leaning over to remove the needle from the phonograph as her husband returned to the chesterfield. “It’s so extraordinary.”

  “Thanks.”

  Wondering what all Rascal had told them, Alv
in took off his cap and sat down on a rose tufted sofa near the dwarf. It had been a long hike from Third Street and he was glad to be off his feet. Fresh gardenias in a crystal vase on the side table beside him gave off a delightful scent. He decided this was one of the swellest houses he had ever been in. But who were these people?

  “Although my dear friend here is a confirmed materialist,” the dwarf remarked, putting his feet upon a stitched hassock, “I’m convinced he is more than fit for our kindred purposes.”

  Edith smiled at Alvin. “Well, doesn’t that sound familiar? Oscar was quite the skeptic himself, weren’t you, dear?” She patted him on the knee. “Why, for years he was utterly persuaded that spiritism was jugglery of the commonest sort.”

  “Pure imposture,” her husband confirmed, crossing his arms. “Pabulum for crack-brained lunatics.”

  Edith added, “He believed that claims of spiritualist miracles were less violations of the laws of God and nature than fraudulent trickery.”

  Oscar nodded, sternly. “Ingenious deception.”

  “Well, ain’t it the truth?” the farm boy blurted, maybe not so facetiously. He still considered this whole business of setting up a pow-wow with the spirit world a lot of hooey.

  Edith gasped. “My heavens, no! Those of us still in the flesh may well be persuaded that our side of the veil is all there is, that our lasting purpose is merely seed for soil, yet how can that be when a living gate such as Madame Zelincka informs us how strong our ethereal link is to those who’ve already passed over?”

  “Our departed loved ones grieve for us in the idyllic realm,” the dwarf explained, “longing to demonstrate the divine knowledge that death is not the end—”

  “That light of perfect understanding,” Edith interjected.

  “Whose message,” the dwarf continued, “brings comfort to the living and joy to the disincarnate spirit, finally unburdened of all regret and sorrow.”

  “Mental telegraphy is no humbug,” said Oscar, straightening up. He gave Alvin a fearsome look. “Why, Thomas Edison himself knew more about etheric forces than all the sensitives in America. Indeed, I’ve been told he performed experiments at Menlo Park which proved that electricity is itself simply the manifestation of disembodied spirits.”