Sticks and Stones - Lynn Hall (smarten punctuation)

by Lynn Hall

  Another small barrier of strangeness between the two dissolved.

  “I thought about that,” Ward said. “I don’t want anything that wouldn’t be in keeping with the place. No lilacs or tulips, stuff you see in everybody’s front yard.” They walked on. “Here’s my well, and there’s a cistern pump over on the other side. Outhouse”—he motioned toward an unpainted wood structure with two doors labeled “Boys” and “Girls”—“the woodshed, which I’ll use for a chicken house, and that’s about it.”

  They had come full circle around the school. Back inside, they went to work on the next desk. About half of the rows of desks had already been removed. In the cleared corner of the room was a jumble of cardboard cartons, Air Force bags, a rollaway bed, and a card table with a typewriter on it.

  As he fought against the years of paint and rust that held the screws immovable, Tom said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but—is that all you’re going to do down here? Just live? I’m not knocking it, believe me. I’d give my left leg for a place like this.”

  So much silence hung between them that Tom thought there would be no answer.

  Finally Ward sat back and looked at Tom through a frame of curved black iron and varnished wood. “Okay, you asked and I’ll tell you, because I have a feeling about you. I think you might be the one person in this town who wouldn’t laugh to himself about it, and use it against me later. I’m writing a book.”

  The delight that shone in Tom’s face was as genuine as his words. “That’s tremendous. That’s really great, Ward. I’m proud to know you.” Their eyes met through the desk legs, and suddenly they were grinning at each other.

  Tom said, “I won’t mention it to anybody. I know what you mean about people using it against you. I get a little of that, myself, about the piano. I’d really like to know what kind of book it is, but don’t talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  They were working again. As they worked their way, screw by screw, down the length of the aisle, and as Ward talked and Tom listened, the fragile strands of companionship became an almost tangible thing between them.

  Ward said, “I can’t talk about the story because it’s not finished yet and it’s still vulnerable. But it’s a novel, a short one by today’s standards.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Yes, I think so. Yes. It is. Chances are it won’t be published. It’s a terribly hard business to break into when you’re unknown. But I know it’s good.”

  “Is that going to be your profession, then, writing?”

  “It is my profession. This one may not get published, or the next or the next, but it’s just a matter of time. Ever since I was a little kid, I knew this was what I was going to do, live back here in the schoohouse and write books. I was an English major in college.”

  “You’ve done your stint for Uncle Sam, I take it,” Tom said, nodding toward the Air Force flight bags. “How long were you in?”

  “Just a year.” Ward’s voice took on a curtness that surprised Tom. “I got a medical discharge. Asthma. How about you? Do you know what you want to do with your life yet? You said you had one more year of high school, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure yet, but it’s between music and architecture. I’d like to be an architect if I could build old buildings. Like this one.”

  They laughed together, warm easy laughter that filled a hollow that had been inside Tom ever since he’d said good-bye to Phil and his other friends in Wheaton last winter.

  It was nearly suppertime before he made himself leave the Sweet Ridge School and go into town for the shipment of collectors’ plates from Norway.

  8

  Amber was sitting by the dining-room window when Tom’s bus coasted down the hill toward home. She had just finished supper—in fact she was still munching on a carrot stick—and was talking on the phone to Meredith Trost.

  “He just went by,” she said in a stage whisper. “I wonder where he’s been. Can you imagine somebody like that right here in Buck Creek? Right in our own class?”

  In her stolid way, Meredith said, “I still think you’re jumping to conclusions. Just because Floyd Schleffe says something, that doesn’t make it true. You know how he lies.”

  “Yes, but this is true; I happen to know.”

  “Oh, that’s silly.”

  Amber began to grow angry. She gestured with her carrot stick. “It is not silly. Look at the way he’s always playing that opera music or whatever it is. That’s not normal. And didn’t you ever notice what a mother’s boy he is? They say that’s one way you can really tell about people like that. Their mothers always dominate them.”

  There was a maddening note of laughter in Meredith’s voice. “Amber, you’re always looking for something bad to say about people.”

  Amber felt her temper begin to slip. She was incapable of laughing at herself, or of allowing anyone else to. She felt threatened, and she fought back.

  “You didn’t give me a chance to tell you the best part. I happen to know that the reason Tom moved here was that he got in trouble over this very same thing in his other school, and there was a scandal, and his mother had to get him away from there.”

  She waited triumphantly while Meredith thought about it.

  Finally Meredith said, “Well, I don’t know. It might be true, but on the other hand it might not, and it’s a terrible thing to go around saying about somebody if you’re not sure whether it’s true or not.”

  Amber thought about trying for a stronger argument, but decided to quit while she was more or less ahead. “Do you want to come over and stay all night? We can go down to the hotel and see what’s going on. Want to?”

  “Can’t tonight. My dumb brother’s got the car, so I’m stranded.”

  When the conversation had dwindled and died, Amber decided to wander down the hill anyway, in case something might be happening. She made a brief check of hair and lipstick, took a moment to admire the effect of white shorts against her brown legs, and at the last minute decided to wear shoes. Barefoot would have been better; she got an odd sort of pleasure out of the mock abandonment of going barefoot where more inhibited people wore shoes. But this was Friday night, and shoes were her concession to the greater formality of Friday nights at the Buck Creek Hotel bar.

  The place was alive with people when Amber got there. Most of the tables were filled with dinner customers, many of whom wore swimsuits with perhaps a cotton shirt around their shoulders to shield them from the air conditioning. They called and laughed from table to table with the loud breathlessness of people fresh from fast, noisy motorboats. Sunburns and wind-whipped hair were commonplace.

  Amber twisted among the tables to the bar at the back, snagging a bag of potato chips from the rack as she went. She hoisted herself onto a bar stool with the pleasantly bitter sense of wantonness she always got from sitting at the bar. A sign on the wall opposite her said “No minors served,” and another said “No children allowed at the bar,” but it was generally accepted that these warnings were only for occasions when the younger children of Buck Creek, many of whose mothers were waitresses here, crowded the paying customers away from the bar. In Buck Creek the ages of all the teenagers were common knowledge so there was never any danger of minors being served illegally, and the management didn’t care where the kids sat to drink their pop.

  Beulah was tending bar again tonight. A few men from the mine were still lingering over their afterwork beers, but it was too early yet for the main Friday night bar crowd. Beulah took a few minutes away from her men customers to ask Amber what was new, how had the world been treating her, and was it hot enough for her.

  Amber answered with as much gaiety as she could produce, which wasn’t much under the best of circumstances and was not convincing at all tonight because Meredith’s attitude still rankled.

  When Floyd had told her about Tom a few hours ago, her first reaction had been doubt, too. It was the sort of thing you
just wouldn’t expect to hear about someone you knew. But almost immediately she had seen the logic in it. So many things about Tom that had formerly made her feel in awe of him, such as his knowledge of the kind of music no one else in Amber’s life knew or cared to know about, were suddenly, beautifully explained. Tom was not above her; he was a freak, off to the side of the real world someplace by himself. Out of the running.

  This time the love had failed through absolutely no shortcomings of Amber Showalter’s. This time the failure was someone else’s.

  The more she thought about it, the more she needed to solidify this wonderful reprieve. It needed to be talked about. When the miners left and Beulah was temporarily idle, Amber said, “Hey, Beulah, guess what I just heard.” A new strength rang in her voice.

  Beulah Bjornstadt was one of a vast family of Bjornstadt cousins and in-laws throughout the northeast corner of Iowa. Most were farmers. Beulah’s parents had farmed south of Buck Creek until a few years ago, when they retired and moved to town. Ever since her high-school days Beulah had worked at least part time in the hotel. At first it had just been something to do, summers and weekends, to earn money for clothes and to meet people, particularly male people. After her graduation it seemed easier to go on waiting tables at the hotel than to try anything different. Besides, she reasoned, marriage was soon going to come along and her worries would be over.

  Now, at forty-one, Beulah realized that nothing was going to come along for her. Nothing good, nothing very bad, obviously nothing exciting. She was a little too thick in the legs and waist. Her hair was too auburn, too long, too curly; her makeup too theatrical. Years ago she had had occasional affairs with men from the barges or, more rarely, with weekend fishermen or hunters. The memory of these encounters was distilled by the passage of time, so that she thought of them as tender and beautiful. But they were not enough. They were not nearly enough.

  She knew she had lost the small amount of physical attractiveness that youth had lent her. She knew no man would seriously consider her with all the slim young kids around, Amber and the others, and yet her hunger for love was as strong as ever. Sometimes stronger. It had never been satisfied, and now it refused to die just because she had lost the power to attract men to feed it.

  Her defense was joviality. She became a buddy, a dealer in dirty stories and whatever gossip might be in the air. The men enjoyed laughing it up with old Beulah down at the bar; the women liked her because she was no threat to the fidelity of their husbands. Small children liked her because she was consistently good-natured.

  But it was the teenagers she courted. She worshipped their music, used their expressions, followed their romances—Robert, Amber, Meredith, Tom, Peggy, all of them. In their various ways they liked Beulah, or tolerated her or played along with her or used her for their own small vanities. Robert flirted and got larger servings or second drinks or an occasional beer under the counter. Floyd talked to her, and if she wasn’t too busy, he was rewarded with a bit of attention. Amber and Meredith used her as a sounding board for their talk about boys, and she slipped quarters to them for the jukebox. Tom was always pleasantly polite, but because he needed nothing from her, he got nothing. Tom was not one of her favorites.

  All of the young people sensed that they possessed something Beulah longed to have, and so, in varying degrees according to the meanness of their natures, they flaunted their youth in front of her. With Beulah as an audience, they became more sparkling, more leggy and sprawling, more barefoot-abandoned. They jangled and chewed more loudly and danced more freely in the tiny space between the jukebox and the potato-chip rack.

  Sometimes a hint of their scorn showed through, and Beulah smarted from it. This was one of those nights.

  Amber had wandered away, leaving an impression in Beulah’s mind of ridiculously slim white-clad hips. She had also left a most interesting story about Tom Naylor, a story that didn’t surprise Beulah very much, but had a great deal of value for passing-on purposes.

  An hour or so after Amber left, Robert Short came in for a pack of cigarettes. He was dressed for a date, and his smooth young manliness caught at something in Beulah. He was in a good humor, as he usually was.

  “I’m buying these for my dad,” he said as he held up the pack. There was laughter in his eyes.

  “Like heck you are,” she retorted. “It’s a wonder I don’t get in trouble, selling you those things.”

  “Ah now, sweetheart, you know I’m too young to smoke.” He pocketed his change and sauntered out, pausing by the door to light up.

  Beulah turned back to her bar customers with a sudden wave of dislike for Robert and all of his kind. His joking remark had landed in her like a personal insult.

  “He don’t need to be so damn arrogant about his age,” she muttered. “Everybody’s every age, sometime. If they live long enough.”

  But the glow was off of her evening. She tried to revive her good humor by thinking about what Amber had told her about the Naylor boy, and eventually it worked.

  A little after nine, four men came laughing into the bar. They were not her usual beer customers. These were bourbon-and-branch-water boys, better dressed and more expensively barbered than most of the men she waited on. Only one of them was familiar to her—Ray Harmon, P.E. teacher and football coach at Great River High School. He kept his water-skiing boat docked in Buck Creek during the summer months, so he was a fairly steady customer.

  As he ordered a round of drinks, Harmon introduced Beulah and the other men, whom he explained away as relatives who came every August to mooch on his hospitality. It was obvious that this was not their first bar stop of the evening.

  The other customers around the bar demanded little of Beulah’s attention. They were primarily interested in one another. Between refilling drinks and rinsing glasses, she drifted more and more often into the Harmon group’s conversation. After two more rounds of bourbon she was promoted to the rank of lifelong buddy, and the exchange of dirty jokes began.

  “Say, that reminds me,” Beulah said suddenly, hitching herself closer to Ray Harmon. He was a handsome man, and getting handsomer every minute. “You teach at the high school, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Tom Naylor one of your students?”

  “Naylor? Yep. What about him?”

  Spots of color brightened Beulah’s cheeks beneath her makeup. This tanned, hard, handsome man was giving her all of his attention, and she was determined to make it last as long as possible. As she began lining up in her mind all the details Amber had given her, her pleasure at the telling of the story was heightened by a sense of vengeance toward all the slim and arrogant children.

  Her voice was low but vibrant. “Well, the way I hear it …”

  9

  During the next week Tom spent almost every evening at the Sweet Ridge schoolhouse. He’d drive out after an early supper and find Ward already at work on whatever that evening’s project might be. Together in the late summer evenings they worked at turning the little school into a home.

  All of the desks were eventually taken out and sold to an antique auctioneer, along with the blackboards that had covered the back wall, the ugly yellow oak teacher’s desk, and several boxes of blackboard erasers and aged copies of Streets and Roads.

  The main room looked much larger, now that it was cleared of desks. The end opposite the door was raised one step from the rest of the room, to give the teacher’s desk a more imposing height and to provide a stage for programs. This raised area Ward designated as the bedroom. On either side of the little square entrance hall were alcoves about six by nine feet. One held a rust-stained double sink that bore the marks of fifty years of paste and paint projects and supplied only cold water brought up by a hand pump. The sink, and the cheaply built but plentiful cupboards around it, made this alcove the obvious place for Ward’s kitchen. The other alcove he curtained off for a closet and general storage room.

  Working with a happy sense of companionship and
of pride at meeting challenges with ingenuity, Tom and Ward gradually overcame the worst of the jobs. While Tom nailed can lids over all the mouse and rat holes he could find inside the building, Ward climbed to the roof and bat-proofed the chimney and belfry with wire screening. They patched and hung the screen doors and a couple of window screens so that the fragrant air could blow through the building and carry away twenty years’ worth of rodent-scented mustiness. They scrubbed and scraped and polished; they replaced broken windowpanes and cupboard hinges.

  One evening they took the Volkswagen bus and toured all the town dumps within a twenty-mile radius. Tired, scratched, but elated, they came home with a pre-electricity icebox, an iron bedstead for which Ward was sure his mother would donate an old cotton mattress, and a sagging but repairable sofa. Another evening was spent cleaning and disinfecting their finds and in taking apart the sofa to re-tie the broken springs.

  On Friday afternoon Tom left for Sweet Ridge before supper. He detoured through town and bought steaks, charcoal, and all of the salad ingredients he could think of. On an impulse he went back to the gourmet shelf and got a bottle of button mushrooms for the steaks. Floyd Schleffe’s mother was ahead of him in the checkout line when he got back. He greeted her politely but with the stiffness of guilt, remembering Floyd’s face in the hotel bar on the night he’d gone there with Ward. He was relieved at the preoccupied way Mrs. Schleffe returned his greeting, but it made him wonder whether Floyd had mentioned the incident to her. She was ordinarily much more talkative.

  When he drove into the Sweet Ridge clearing, Tom was surprised to find the Jeep gone. He set the groceries inside, away from the sun, and then, feeling a little like an intruder, he went outside again and walked down through the birch grove to the river. The bank was steep and muddy here, and the river not particularly interesting, so he climbed back up to the clearing and explored a short stretch of the road beyond until he heard the Jeep roaring out of the woods behind him.

  As Ward jumped down from the Jeep, Tom called, “Hi. I invited myself for supper; I hope that’s all right with you. I brought food.”